A to Z blogging challenge: A is for Absent

Today is the first day of the A to Z blogging challenge.  This fun challenge invites people across the blogosphere, whatever their subject matter, to blog every day for 26 days (or fewer, if you just can't come up with something for the letter X).  

I have a lot of people absent from my life:  my father, my mother, my brother, the aunt who helped raise me, my grandparents (none of whom I knew), the grand-aunt who served as my grandmother by her and her husband's adoption of my mother within the family, my best friend in high school, my in-laws, favorite uncles and aunts, cousins, and more.  Our younger daughter, who is 53 years old, has cancer.  She is in remission for now, but it's probably inevitable that she will predecease me and my husband.  So many losses . . . so many memories.

In the Simon & Garfunkel song "Old Friends," songwriter Paul Simon reminds us:  ". . . Preserve your memories; they're all that's left you."

Photographs are a fine way to preserve our memories.   Like this one of me and our younger daughter giving our dog Diamond a bath back in the 1980s.  Unfortunately, our daughter's head is behind the dog!  Not only does this spark a great memory of our younger daughter and our wonderful dog, but also of the house where we lived at the time, a house we loved, and lost in the economic disaster that befell us in the 1980s.  Another loss . . .

In doing genealogy, we document and lend permanence to memories.  My father died when I had just turned seven years old, and it is through genealogy that I have come to know him better.  Researching his Navy career, and his activities after he got out of the Navy after World War II, has given me a great deal of knowledge about his life.  

Family stories give us access to memories, too -- the memories of other people that are given to us in stories.  In our retelling of them, we claim them as memories.  They're not direct memories of our own experience, but we remember our family by these stories.  They connect us to our ancestors.

Preserve your memories; they're all that's left you.

 

Famliy History Writing Challenge: "Do Day"

When I was young, my aunt was the Director of Health Information for the Florida State Board of Health (now called the Department of Health and Human Services).  She traveled around the state giving lectures and teaching the public about health.  As she worked all week, Saturday was her day to get her errands (banking, shopping, etc.) done.  I would accompany her on these errand runs, which she referred to as "Do Day."

We all called our aunt, Elizabeth Reed, "Sissy" because she was our mother's sister. "Sissy" had a great sense of humor, and we would have silly conversations and sing silly songs.  She taught me "The Midwives' Song," which sounds silly but has a serious message.  The song was a teaching tool to educate barely literate country midwives in the necessity of such steps as washing the hands.  "Sissy" had a 1955 Chevy, wonderful car which is now a classic.  It was on that car that I, in 1962, at 14, learned to drive.  It steered like a truck, and was a great builder of arm muscles!

We would go to her bank, the American National Bank on Hendricks Avenue in San Marco, a shopping district of the old style -- independent shops lined up along the street.  Not like a mall at all, and the sort of shopping district the 21st-century "town center" style of shopping area is designed to imitate.  San Marco's shopping area is still there, and definitely is more authentic than the artifice of the "town center" design.  In the bank, an employee minded a cart which carried orange juice and lemonade, which she served in small paper cups.  The lemonade was just the thing on a hot Florida summer day.

"Sissy" patronized other shops in San Marco, too.  There was the Silk Shop, a fabric store owned by the family of an elementary-school classmate of mine.  When you walked into the store, if your eyes were sensitive to the sizing in the fabrics, you would very soon have red, itchy eyes.  It affected me, as did the smell of the sizing.  All of that is just a memory now.

"Do Day" was a fun time, and a great way to spend time with my aunt.
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The Family History Writing Challenge

I have signed up for the Family History Writing Challenge.  I have not committed to a word count, because I will be writing what I can when I can, as a busy college student with an honors thesis to get finished within the next five weeks!

Today I am going to talk about my grandma.  She was not genealogically or biologically my grandmother, but my great-aunt.  However, my mother was ain intra-family adoption.  Her father, Benjamin Franklin Reed, died in a railroad accident in 1917, not long before my mother's first birthday.  The Reed family ended up pretty much taking my mother and my aunt away from their mother and adopting them into the family.  My aunt went to one great-uncle and his wife, and my mother to another.

But my grandma was my grandma.  I never knew any of my grandparents, as three of them died before I was born, and the last one died when I was just four years old.  My grandma, Mary LeSourd Reed, was a baseball fan.  She loved to watch baseball on television on a lovely spring day or a warm summer day, and I would go over to her house, just around the block from ours, to visit.  I got into the habit of watching baseball with her.

I formed an attachment to the Brooklyn Dodgers, possibly because of the superb pitching of Sandy Koufax and the great catching of Roy Campanella.  The Yankees could have Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris (both of whom I did admire for the superior athletes they were); the Dodgers were my guys.

My grandma had a "curse" that we would chant when the opposing batter came up to bat.  We would make clockwise circles with one haind, fingers extended, and chant, "Cat fuzz around that bat!"  That was great fun, and a bit of "witchery" that we shared with no one else.

When my mom gave my grandma a Dachshund for Christmas one year, the dog, Peanuts, became part of the baseball audience with us.  He would curl up beside the ottoman on which my grandma rested her feet, and remain, ever faithful and vigilant.  He was not bothered by our occasional shouts at the game, or our practice of our "dark art."  Talk of "cat fuzz" disturbed the dog not.

I still have a soft spot in my heart for baseball and the Dodgers, in spite of revelations about the economics of the game that make my blood boil, and other shortcomings which have come to light in recent years.  But there's nothing like a good game on a spring day to cheer me up.
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Deja vu all over again

I was walking across the UNF campus after having had lunch at the Boathouse, the eatery upstairs in the Student Union, when I spied a banner hanging from the second-floor walkway of the Brooks Health Sciences building.  The banner, in very large black letters, said, "STOP THE WAR."  I nearly stumbled, because suddenly I had the feeling that I had been transported back forty-seven years (oy!  It has been that long!) to my time at Florida State University, the first time I went to college.  That time, of course, the war we wanted stopped was in Vietnam.  But it certainly did feel like deja vu all over again.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Hurricane Memories

With the possibility of Hurricane Irene aiming at Florida, though recognizing that it is still early yet and she may change course, I am going to relate some family history regarding hurricanes.

My earliest memory of a hurricane is when my family lived in Jacksonville the first time, in 1951.  We lived on the south side, on Peachtree Street.  My memories of this hurricane are quite vague, as I was only three years old.  But I do recall there was a lot of rain and wind and we stayed inside the house. 

The next hurricane I experienced was Hurricane Dora in 1964.  I was in my senior year in high school, and my mother and I were sharing a house with a nurse my mother worked with.  There were several 60-foot-tall pine trees in the yard, and I remember looking out and seeing them swaying in the winds.  The thought that they could snap and come down on the house was worrisome. Fortunately, they proved flexible enough to bend but not break.

There was some humor, though.  At the height of the storm, when the wind was whipping through and the rain was falling in buckets, there was a commercial for an airline which had just begun serving Jacksonville's airport.  The commercial startled me, then made me laugh out loud, when it began with the phrase, "There's something new in the air over Jacksonville."  Timing is everything.

This was in September, just after the beginning of the school year.  In those days, we didn't go back to school until after Labor Day.  After the storm passed, I drove over to my high school to see if there had been any damage.  Other than a few trees down on the grounds, there did not seem to be any real damage.  We were out of school for a few days, though, because of the interruption of electric service to the area.  One of my classmates later told me her family had been without electricity for two weeks.

When Hurricane David came across us in 1979 I was a registered nurse working at a hospital in downtown Jacksonville.  I shared rides with another nurse, and that evening I was driving.  I picked my co-worker up and we drove into town.  With the winds at that time at 55 miles per hour, I decided not to go across the Mathews Bridge, which is very high and has a rather treacherous metal grille at the top.  Instead I went through the southside and went over the Main Street Bridge.  It has a grille, too, but it is much lower, and I thought the wind might be less.  Later that night we were told that we would all be doing a double shift, as the storm had worsened and the hospital nursing supervisor had called the next shift and told them to stay home rather than get out in it.  We had a "hot rack" room set up, where we could each take turns grabbing a nap during the 16-hour shift. 

For a time in 1999, we thought Hurricane Floyd was coming at us.  We boarded up the house, my husband having installed a system with which we could board up pretty quickly.  But Floyd passed us by and hit North Carolina (which is what Irene may do, too).  I discovered during our boarded-up period, a couple days and nights, that I sleep much better when it is pitch black dark, with no clock dials or moonlight or someone else's outside light filtering in.  So now I use a sleep mask.

In 2004, we got brushed by a few storms, as Florida got smacked and smacked again.  We suffered enough damage that we got payment from our insurance company to replace our roof, after it was all over.  It wasn't until November that the insurance adjuster got to us to assess the damage, and the roofing companies in Florida were so busy, we did not get ours done until February.  We called upon an established and well-known company in Jacksonville, recommended by friends who are very picky in such matters.  They did a great job.  I called that hurricane season the "Big Wind Tour" of 2004.

We have friends living in Lake Wales, and my husband got a big laugh when he saw a National Geographic cover with a satellite photo of Florida covered by the tracks of four of 2004's hurricanes -- all of them intersecting over Polk County, where Lake Wales is located.  My husband scanned the photo, placed a target at the intersection with the words "you are here," and sent it for her to use as wallpaper on her computer.

That's what's called Florida humor.

So we sit and watch once more, and prepare.  I bought more bottled water today, and tomorrow my husband and I are going to place new foam tape on the outside window sills preparatory to putting up the boards, if we need to.  We have a Coleman stove, flashlights and battery-powered lanterns, radios, and other supplies.  I'll make sure I have all my medications current, and we'll fill the cars' gas tanks.  And with any luck, Irene will turn and head out to sea, not bothering Florida or North Carolina or any other part of the inhabited land masses.
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All Hail John Gorrie!

Reading my blog feeds, I came across Karen Krugman's post at Genealogy Frame of Mind titled Heat and Ancestors (http://genealogyframeofmind.blogspot.com/2011/08/heat-ancestors.html -- see note at bottom). She's in Michigan talking about the heat.   We here in Florida are particularly qualified to comment on heat, and Karen inspired me to do so.

Karen mentions the layers of clothing our ancestors wore, and I have seen photographs of how ladies in Florida dressed in the middle and late 19th century and early 20th century.  If we were expected to dress that way nowadays, I would lead a rebellion that would make the Civil War look tame!  I have often wondered how people survived the summer in Florida wearing so many clothes, and made out of heavy materials, not the light synthetics we have these days (though 100% cotton is still best for hot weather).

Karen also mentions her grandparents having a "wall unit here and there" for air conditioning, but not central air.  In the 1950s, my widowed mother did not even have a window unit in the house, though my aunt and grandmother, who lived around the corner from us, did.  We had an attic fan, an industrial fan installed in the ceiling in the hallway outside the bedrooms.  It really did not do much to cool in the daytime when the temperature reached the 90s (F), but at least moving air was a benefit, especially if you were drinking ice water or iced tea.  We drank a lot of that to keep cool.  But at night, the attic fan did a great job of cooling.  It required that we sleep with our windows open, because it operated by drawing air in through the windows and exhausting it out through the attic, but in those days there was little if any crime in our neighborhood.  We thought nothing of leaving the windows open at night, or of leaving the house unlocked during the day.

In fact, my husband (whose family had window-unit air conditioning in their house in the '50s) and I did not have central air until after we were married.  Our first house did not have it, nor the house we lived in while he was on active duty in St. Petersburg, FL.  The house we built after we had come back to the Jacksonville area was the first to have a central air unit -- a heat pump, which is the most popular kind of air conditioning/heating in Florida.  We have one in our present house, too, and in fact just had a new unit installed last year to replace the one which had kept going, like the Energizer Bunny, for 17 years.

Yes, we here in Florida have a soft spot in our hearts for the memory of Dr. John Gorrie, who developed the basic principle behind refrigeration and air conditioning.  See more about this here at the website of the University of Florida. Gorrie is indeed "Our Hero," as the website characterizes him, as his work helps keep Florida cool. Thank you, John Gorrie!

(Note: I am sorry you have to cut and paste the link in the first paragraph; I tried for one solid hour to get a live link to work at that point in the paragraph, and Blogger stubbornly refused. I finally had to just give up.)

SNGF: Favorite Song of All Time?

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(Cue announcer . . .)

Live, from Genea-Musings! It's Saturday Night!

Yup, it's time once again for Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. Here's the deal tonight:

"Here is your assignment for the evening - if you wish to participate in the Fun (cue the Mission Impossible music):

1. What is your all-time favorite song? Yep, number 1. It's hard to choose sometimes. If you made your favorite all-time Top 40 music selections, what would be #1?

2. Tell us about it. Why is it a favorite? Do you have special memories attached to this song?

3. Write your own blog post about it, or make a comment on this post or on the Facebook entry."

Mine is: "The Wedding Song," sung by Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary. And, yes, sadly I do know that Mary Travers died recently. She's missed.

So why is it my favorite? For one thing, it's a lovely song. Nobody's shouting at me, screaming unintelligible lyrics at the top of a very strained-sounding voice. That is one aspect of popular music I cannot stand. For another, Paul plays a mean guitar, and it's beautiful. I love a good acoustic guitar. And for another, my husband and I were always fond of "Pizza, Pooh, and Magpie," as he and his sister affectionately called the group that was so much a part of our young lives.

And for another, one time many years ago, I was in training at the Coast Guard Reserve Training Center in Yorktown, Virginia, some 1500 miles away from home and husband. I was feeling right blue and lonely, and I went into the enlisted club to have a drink. And there on the small stage, really just a very slightly raised dais, was a guy with a guitar, singing "The Wedding Song." Perked me right up, and made me feel warm and fuzzy, thinking about how much my husband loves me and I him. It was the cure for the blues.

It wasn't difficult to pick that as my favorite; no other song has quite the kind of meaning for me. Then, too, I favor instrumental music, and tend to listen more to classical music than anything else. But this one, such a simple and beautiful song that speaks of very simple and beautiful meaning in life, is way above all others.