In this exotic slide, Tie o’ the Day is worn in by none other than my grandpa, Walt Wright. He was my first tie influence. We look like we were probably ready to head off to church. Note my red/orange shoes! I doubt our dog, Dum Dum, was going with us, but I’m sure Dum Dum tried to follow us. It’s just what Dum Dum did. She’s so light in this slide, she looks like a ghost. Well, we kinda all three look like ghosts. Apparently slides don’t hold up well when nobody knows where they are for decades. But that’s part of their charm too.
I’m overjoyed to share this. It is a slide, among many, I ran onto today—after 40 years of not really knowing there were missing slides of my childhood. My slide projector still works, with its 40-plus-year-old bulb. I am flabbergasted and astonished at my luck in finding these. Sorry that my walls are textured, so it makes the image look like a puzzle I put together. Be warned! You will be seeing more slides o’ my kidhood past in the near future. I’m sure tall tales and half-truths will abound. Like in my usual posts.
Rosy Bow Tie o’ the Day is a velvety wonder. Trust me—velvet works with redneck style. Think: Bright paintings of Elvis on black velvet. Personally, I’ve never owned a black velvet painting of any kind. However, I did once own a sculpted portrait of The Three Wise Men, constructed out of macaroni glued to an empty cardboard fabric bolt, then completely spray-painted gold. (My grandma, Zola, created it.)
Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to be a redneck. I am a highly educated redneck, it’s true. But I have never allowed my advanced education to lessen my redneck IQ. I have proudly had an old couch on my front porch at times—to provide plenty of cushioned room for any stray guests who might redneckly drop by without invitation or warning. (Yes, on the infamous Delta porch.) I have also had an old mattress on my front porch, reserved for my passel of mutts and any cats, goats, toads, or wandering fowl in the neighborhood. And as a redneck bonus, I can fix anything mechanical with duct tape and/or baling wire. My redneck dad taught me well.
It’s amazing what a gal can find when she throws on a wood Bow Tie o’ the Day to clean out a drawer of miscellany. Yup, this is my Senior Key necklace, and I present it here during Pandemic High School Graduation season. The “key” is now 40 years ancient, although it’s still in presentable shape. I didn’t consciously try to save it all this time. It just hasn’t gotten itself lost during my many moves. Here’s a brief history of where it has lived with me, in order: Delta, Ogden (3 different compartments), SLC (5 different apartments), Arlington, VA, Takoma Park, MD (1 apartment, 1 house), Delta again, Ogden again, Centerville. I know people who have moved plenty more miles than I have, but my moves still add up to a significant number of miles—across which this necklace has traveled in one piece. It has had only one owner. It has never been in a lost-and-found box.
If you’re anything like me, you have lots more stuff than you have room for, or need of. It would save time and space to not have to look after the props of our lives, yet we find it hard to let stuff go. Why do we keep things? They’re just things. They have no spirit in them. Are we afraid we’ll forget what’s happened in our lives if we get rid of them?
The memories in our brains are where the time lives. When we tell our stories, our experiences are alive again for ourselves and for whoever we’re sharing them with. We aren’t going to forget snippets of our lives if we don’t keep the props picked up along the way. But still, it so difficult to let material things go. And when we decide what stays and what goes, we each use a logic of our own—which would make no sense to someone who hasn’t lived your life, although it makes perfect sense to you. C’mon. You know you own some items whose significance you can’t begin to explain to people who don’t know you really, really, really well.
Some folks keep everything. They’re the ones who relate better to objects than to people. And sometimes we take better care of our trinkets than we do of the people we love. It shouldn’t be that way.
Dad’s actual cell phone—with its paint and scuffs—joins me and bees Bow Tie o’ the Day for this post.
Early in the 2000’s, Mom was fine with the kitchen wall home phone and an answering machine. Dad got a cell phone early on because he dragged his bees from here to California and all over creation, and he hunted coyotes who-knew-where before dawn daily. Bee yards and coyote dens rarely have phones or phone booths, so Dad packed his clunky cell phone in his Dodge truck in case of emergency—along with the other lifesaving travel essentials: water, toilet paper, and matches. He rarely made or received a call. Mom finally frequently called his cell from the home phone to check on him towards the end of his days here on the planet.
When Dad went to The Big Coyote Hunt in the Sky, in 2007, Mom naturally inherited his cell phone. With it, she also inherited his cell phone number, and she began the process of gradually becoming one with the cell phone, as we have all done with our own. The landline home phone number which had belonged to Mom and Dad for close to 70 years was only shut down a couple of years ago, but Mom had quit using it long before that actually happened.
He’s been gone close to 13 years now, but I’ve never taken Dad’s name off my cell phone’s contacts list. Nor have I added Mom’s name to my contacts. I call Mom by dialing for Dad. There is something eternally reassuring about calling Dad’s phone number and having Mom answer. Really, it’s just like it always was with our kitchen wall phone. Its number was perpetually listed under Dad’s name in the annual Delta phone book. But it was always Mom who answered the ring.
Bikini Bow Tie o’ the Day couldn’t get Mom to answer her cell phone. I even tried using the old wall phone from our old kitchen in my old kidhood house. Mom didn’t answer that phone either. For a few days last week, nobody could get in touch with Mom. As most of you know, Mom is on pandemic lockdown at Millard Care and Rehab, where she has resided for the last 18 months. No visitors are allowed, so the only way we can keep track of her and remind her we love her right now is by calling her cell phone.
At first, I thought Mom was maybe boycotting me for some reason, by not answering my calls. But over the course of a couple of days, I received many texts and calls alerting me to the fact that Mom wasn’t answering her phone for anyone. Aha! If Mom was boycotting, I wasn’t the only one being boycotted.
I’m the point-man for Mom’s phone issues because her line is on my account, and everybody in the family knows it. So if Mom’s unreachable for some reason, I get screamed at. Mom has occasionally had real phone troubles, but nothing major since she quit answering it with wet hands while washing dishes or cooking. She went through 3 phones in the 3 years before she went to live at MCR, where she is not allowed to do dishes or cook. Since taking up residence there, her phone problems have had to do with her accidentally turning down the volume, or otherwise touching a wrong key.
Normally, I would text my/my sister’s hubby, Gary, to drive the mile to the care center to see Mom and solve her phone issue, but that’s not currently a possibility, thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown. After calling Mom’s phone for the zillionth time, I figured she had most likely accidentally turned it off. I texted MCR and requested they check out Mom’s cell phone to make sure it was turned on. Someone at MCR solved the problem by simply turning Mom’s phone back on. Sure enough, Mom had somehow used one of her many superpowers to turn it off, but she apparently has lost the superpower that turns it back on. When you are approaching 90, you naturally lose a superpower here and there. And that’s ok. MCR can help you fix it.
BTW Mom is doing dandily. She did ask me to send her some spiced jelly beans though. I’ve been saving them to give her when I see her again, but I think I better mail them ASAP.
Remember when you were a kid and you got a cool new clothing item you’d been bugging your parents to buy you—like a swimming suit or moon boots or a holster for your cap gun? Remember when you finally got it, how hard you then worked trying to convince your parents you just positively had to sleep in whatever new thing it was? You pleaded. You begged. You played out all of your best kid-brain parent manipulations right up until bedtime, when your parents finally got so worn down and sick of your tricks that they gave you their ok to wear whatever you wanted to sleep in, if you would just get in bed and go the heck to sleep. “But don’t put any caps in your cap gun,” they said. Which, of course, you loaded up with a full roll immediately—even as you were swearing to your parents you would never be so stoopid as to sleep with caps in your cap gun. And remember when you just had to shoot a cap off every so often under the sheets so you could see the spark and smell the smoke? And then one spark got on your new swimming suit and melted a hole in it, while burning you at the same time. And remember how you tried to get out of bed to save yourself from what you thought was an impending house fire, but your bigly moon boots got tangled in your sheets mostly because you were wearing a pair of your dad’s old spurs on them? And then remember how you frantically rolled out of bed and onto the hard floor, because when you were a kid, carpet hadn’t been invented yet? And remember when your dad woke up because of the commotion you were making, and when he walked into your bedroom to check on you he didn’t say a word? He saw you weren’t injured and nothing was on fire, and he put all his effort into trying not to laugh at you in your predicament. He simply turned to go back to bed, holding the back of his garments shut as he chuckled in the kitchen. And remember how you deduced your dad had shared your little fiasco with your mother almost immediately, because five minutes after you were re-situated in your bed, you could hear both your mom and dad laughing. Remember when that happened? Or maybe it only happened to me. Probably more than once.
Anyhoo… I admit right here and now that I have used and abused amazon prime far too much since our lovely pandemic has kept us homebounder-than-usual. But guess what got delivered to me yesterday? My new pair of Hello Kitty sunglasses, which I soooo had to sleep in. Check out the bling on Hello Kitty’s Bow Tie o’ the Night. Best. $4. With. Free. Shipping. Spent. Ever.
Poor mini Bow Tie o’ the Day has to pose with my Sophomore yearbook photo, which just happens to highlight two of my worst features: bad hair and bad teeth. This is the most curl my hair ever held. My hair just wants to be straight. (Insert your own jokes here.) I’ve since handled my hair mostly by going with short cuts, in which the cut itself is the star.
The true culprit I hate in the picture is the sorry state of my teeth. I come from a long line of genetically bad teeth, so there was really not much I could do to keep my teeth white and shiny for the world to see. They were also prone to chipping. I chipped a tooth on a Rice Krispies square once. Oh, and by the way, my teeth hurt like you wouldn’t believe—all of them, all at once, down into the roots.
Like any teenager, I was self-conscious about every part of my body. Thanks to my teeth, I regularly got to hear not-so-nice comments about my hideous choppers. I didn’t really belong to a particular group in high school. I flitted and floated from one crew to another. I got along with just about everybody, which meant the cutting comments I heard about my teeth were coming from people I considered to be my friends.
Never smiling was not an option for me. Have you met me? I’m a smiler. Since those few who hassled me had their own imperfections, I could’ve thrown stinging comments back at them with the added jab of using vocabulary the dastardly hasslers would have to find a dictionary to look up. But I knew them and their families, and it wasn’t my style to handle things that way. I just kept on doing my own cheery thing. Besides, they were my friends. They were rude and stoopid friends, but still… I knew—or at least hoped—they’d grow out of it. Some did. Some didn’t. If you were ever a teenager, I’m sure you know what I mean, because every teenager gets teased about something. The sting goes deep, but it can make you a better person if you let it.
I knew I’d grow out of my teeth because soon my mouth would be mature enough for me to get caps, which I did just a few months after this pic was taken. Caps would be only a temporary and cosmetic solution, though, because they wouldn’t solve the tooth pain. Nope, I knew I was inevitably headed down the happy trail to dentures at a very early age, after my mouth matured for good.
While most teenagers can’t wait to be old enough to move out of their parents’ house, or go away to college, or get a real job, or go on a mission, I was twiddling my thumbs and killing time waiting for my mouth to be old enough to get all my teeth yanked out to make room for a set of white-toothed, painless dentures. I got my wish when I was in college and almost 19.
BTW Even though it’s been nearly 40 years since I heard the last of those hurtful comments, you’ve probably noticed I don’t show my teeth when I take selfies. Without even thinking about it, I still carry the stoopid past comments about my stoopid teeth despite having perfectly formed dentures. Closed-mouth smiles are just a habit of mine from way back.
TIE O’ THE DAY is honored to introduce Bow Tie o’ the Day-wearin’ Daisy Corona Debenham. Daisy is Lollie Lyman Debenham’s newest member of the family. Brinkley’s passing was a hard pill to swallow for Lollie and her family, but Daisy looks to me like she’s up to the job of restoring dog joy throughout the Debenham home and family. Daisy is a lucky pup to have them as her people.
For those of you tblog readers who don’t know Lollie, let me assure you she’s a gem. The word “scamp” comes to mind, so she’s a fellow scamp to me. She is also a fellow Delta Rabbit. We were in elementary school when I learned Lollie was named after her mother, like I was named after mine. Lollie was the only other girl I knew who was named thus. But we were never called by our mothers’ names. I was always mystified by that. I was never called Helen, and she was never called Laura. Trust me—Helen Sr. and Laura Sr. were incredibly strong, gifted women. I wear Mom’s name with pride and reverence, and I think Laura Joy does the same.
Another kidhood thing I remember about Lollie has to do with a birthday gift she gave me. A herd of kids came to my birthday party at my house. I’m guessing I had turned 6 or 7. There were a million kids, and I got a million presents. I’m sure all the gifts were fun and appropriate and probably girly. However, I can remember only the present I got from Lollie. It was a plastic turtle. And it wasn’t even wrapped. Oh, how I loved that turtle. I played with it in the canal and out at the reservoir. I tied a rope around its neck and “walked” it up and down the sidewalk on my block. Once, when a bunch of us wanted to play football and I couldn’t find our football, the turtle stood in. To heck with pigskin—we used plastic turtleskin to play our football game. I have no doubt it substituted for many types of balls, since we had a neighbor who made it her job to pilfer any unaccompanied ball she saw anywhere on our block. I’m certain I named my turtle, but I don’t recall its name. It was a darn groovy birthday gift. Thanks, Laura Joy.
Anyhoo… I told Lollie TIE O’ THE DAY would make Daisy a bigly star. So let it be written, so let it be done.
Here’s the TRIANGLE—aka DHS yearbook—staff from 1979. I remember feeling like a real rebel rabbit standing on seats in the auditorium for this shot to be captured. I have no explanation for my weird, hippy pose. I look like I’m about to draw my gun in a gunfight. Fortunately for us all, Bow Tie o’ the Day covers up a lot.
My Hogwarts School Bowtie o’ the Day and I cannot recall exactly what this fetching Delta High School gaggle o’ gals was up to. For this late 70’s yearbook picture, we were standing on the old DHS gym floor, while the photographer snapped us from the second floor. I have a vague memory of a DHS Rabbit “pep” organization called the Del-Teens, and I think that might be what this photo is capturing. Got some time to kill while hiding in your own home from COVID-19? Get off your isolating, social-distancing butt, and get out yer bigly Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass. Go forth, my Delta Rabbit pals, and see if you can name every dame pictured here.
