my land
Monday evening, April 13th
Dear Diary,
Yesterday we enjoyed the sanctus bells at church, which I hope will be a regular feature of the liturgy. Dr Dan told us that his Sunday School class made the gift of the bells. I have a potential gift to offer, a large wooden crucifix that was given to me at a surprise party by a group of special friends as we were leaving our parish in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania the summer of 1984. The walls here in 7H are filled with small crosses, art paintings from our life, and pictures of loved ones, and there's no place here to hang the crucifix. It may not suit the spirituality and taste but I may ask anyway. It just leans against the wall in my office study den. At 90 it's Time for me to be giving things away.
Today we drove out to Tyndall to patronize the Exchange and the Commissary, just a few things - - chocolate candy of various kinds to replenish the bowls that sit around here for visiting granddaughters and other guests to help themselves. Sweetwise, I did a bad thing this evening -> ate a handful of chocolate M&Ms after my supper of four of those fox crab legs that Sam's sells, doctored with a mayo/sour cream mix and lemon juice squeezed over. Barley tea on ice cubes, and my evening mouthful of heart pills. Oh, one slice of an interesting and quite delicious very dark brown wheat bread from TAFB, buttered then toasted - - sizzling toast, my aunt Evalyn called it.
All my cousins of my generation on our father's side of my family are dead. On my mother's side, the Gentry family, I don't know, four in our generation are dead that I know of, five if I go back into the middle 1940s when one little boy, Kenneth, died not long after birth. As aunts and uncles die, cousins slip away from one's everyday life and over Time are lost as one loses track of them and where they relocate to, and who they marry, and have children, and divorce or not. There were reunions at weddings and funerals, and eventually one ages out of traveling anywhere for anything.
Sometimes, in some families, there are resentments and angers among siblings from the childhoods of earlier generations, that carry over into future generations of cousins who might have been close except that their parents were forever estranged and one never got to know those cousins. It's a shame. My sister Gina was wonderful about reaching out to overcome those things and heal estrangements.
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Why did I go there? As I remembered the sizzling toast, my mind drifted farther and farther away.
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Saturday a close one sent me the 1930s era Used Cars ad by an Oldsmobile dealer in New York City. The car in the ad, an artist's drawing, is a 1937 Oldsmobile, the same make and year as Ralphie's father's car in A Christmas Story, the dark green 1937 Olds Six four door sedan that had the flat tire, at his mother's suggestion, Ralphie got out of the car and went to help he father change the tire, Ralphie lost a lug nut to roll away and disappear down a drain, and Ralphie uses the word that gets his mouth washed out with red Lifebouy soap.
The incident allowed Ralphie to have a deliciously self-pitying daydream in which he's a blind beggar, blinded by the poison in the soap he had to taste, and happily making his parents feel overwhelmed with guilt.
Ralphie was a victim, bullied by Scut Farkus, but Ralphie himself is a scheming kid, not at all innocent. I love the story, which streams for 24 hours every Christmas, and is a film for car nuts who love American cars of the 1930s.
As a miscreant child I sometimes had my mouth washed out with Lifebouy soap, and various other soaps, but at our house the big thing was a spoonful of castor oil or the terrible, relationship-destroying threat, "just wait till your father gets home, young man" - - which was much worse than being sent outside to pick a switch. Spending the day dreading my father coming home was far worse than the hand or belt on my behind.
Now I've evolved into a child psychologist, when I was happy thinking about the cars in Ralphie's story. His streets are full of cars of my memories from the middle and late 1930s, and at least one post-ww2 1947 or 1948 Chevrolet - - the police or fire chief car that came when Flick licked the frozen flagpole in response to a triple-dog dare. If you don't understand the seriousness of a double-dog dare and a triple-dog dare, you weren't a boy growing up in America when we knew it was perfect even though it never was.
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this land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York island ... this land was made for you and me
For life and memories, RSF&PTL
T90
