Month: November 2015

I looked at a classroom photo I found recently of my sixth grade class. It was the only class picture found in my box of old photos. I love digging around in there occasionally; I never know what I will find. The picture was a little bit torn and creased, the worse for wear sitting helter-skelter in a box, but there I was sitting at my desk, hands folded, two braids hanging down my chest, freckles across my nose, awkward smile, still a child, but sneaking peeks at life’s next adventure. I tried to remember what was happening and what it was like.

One thing I remember clearly is the day I got marched into the Principal’s office with an eraser on my head along with seven other girls. I think one other girl had an eraser on her head also. This is how it happened. Half of our class went to Music and the other half to PE. The girl’s PE teacher was absent and so there were the eight of us left in the classroom with no teacher. We decided to play eraser tag. Guess we were making a lot of noise and the school secretary below heard us and came up and marched us down to the Principal’s office. She made us keep the erasers on our heads to provide some visual evidence of our errant behavior I guess. We got a talking to. I don’t remember what he said. I just know that when I got home, he had called my mother. She didn’t elaborate just let me know. Today you practically have to commit a felony before a mother is called if they could even find her. In the 50’s, Moms were usually always home.

When we went to PE, we changed into a one-piece dark blue playsuit with our names embroidered on the front and put on sneakers and socks. We learned to play team sports, softball, volleyball, and girl’s basketball. I’ll bet all you guys and half of you gals don’t even know what girl’s basketball is. It was called six-on-six basketball. Their were three forwards from Team A and three guards from team B on the half court; and on the other half court three forwards from Team B and three guards from Team A. They were all not allowed to go past half court and were allowed only two dribbles before shooting or passing. It was really big in high schools in Iowa from the early1900’s to the 1970’s. I think our PE teacher was from Iowa. Could be. After several court cases from women’s libbers, it was fazed out.

After we played our game, we went back into the locker room, took a shower, dressed, put our stuff in a locker and went back to class. How we did all that in an hour I don’t know. I don’t suppose we dallied. That’s for sure.

Peter’s favorite comic strip is Big Nate, the trials and tribulations of a sixth grade boy. Nate is always in trouble at school. Mrs. Godfrey is his homeroom teacher. He hates her and she has it in for him. He is always in detention, is bigger than life, and is very optimistic about all his exploits. Boy-girl intrigue is starting up and causing problems among friends. Brings back memories of those years in middle school when you were cautiously anxious to stroll headlong into that teenage maelstrom. It is a fun read.

 

When I was a child we always had a big Thanksgiving Day turkey dinner. My father carved the turkey. The slices were nice and thin. He took a lot of pride in his work. My Mom put the wishbone on the widow sill to dry. Whoever found it the next day pulled it apart with the nearest person and made a wish.

When newly married, we were going away on Friday and decided not to do Thanksgiving. We woke up on Thanksgiving morning and said we have to do Thanksgiving. So I sent Peter out to bag a turkey. You can tell I was new at this. Nothing was open except a little Mom and Pop store he found somewhere; and they didn’t have turkeys. So Peter brought home a couple of Cornish Game Hens. I didn’t even know what they were much less how to cook them. I struggled through with The Joy of Cooking cookbook. We had sweet potatoes and canned peas and gave thanks. The forms were observed. I tell you there wasn’t much meat on those birds.

When I was in college, I lived in a Scholarship House. There were thirty of us and one of us prepared menus and bought food each week and another made up the work list for Saturday mornings when we cleaned the house. It was not a dorm or sorority experience, but it worked. Every Sunday we had a sit-down dinner at one o’clock. We often invited guests. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, we had a Thanksgiving dinner and invited some students from Thailand who lived across the street. They turned us down flat. They said they weren’t going to eat such an ugly bird. In retrospect we should have said, “When you’re a Pilgrim and you’re starving, you don’t care if it’s an ugly bird.” Turned out the dinner was not too bad considering it was mostly a learning experience for the cooks. The meals were never great. We were all new at this cooking thing. Three of us cooked each day. We were provided with the menu and the food but were on our own as to how to cook it. I was a picky eater when I got there, but by the end of four years, I ate just about anything.

There’s a You Tube of Sam Sifton’s Six Thanksgiving Rules to Live by. It has been around for a while. He is a food editor for the NY Times. I will paraphrase them for you:

1. You will have Turkey. No Beef Tenderloin, swordfish or goose. Turkey is why you are here.
2. There will be no appetizers or salad; there is plenty of food. The smells alone will be appetizing enough.
3. If your guests want to watch football, let them. Give them a drink.
4. There will be pie for dessert: pecan, mincemeat, or pumpkin. No chocolate. Chocolate is for nights of depression and anxiety.
5. Clean up after dinner. You have plenty of help. You don’t want to wake up the next morning with a hangover or a food hangover and have to face the mess.
6. Give thanks. That is why you are here.

Everyone wants to be with family at Thanksgiving. Everyone wants to be home. I love thanksgiving afternoons: generations of families out walking together, friends gathering for a meal together. Our church Rector and family cook a turkey and invite all to come and bring a dish.

One Thanksgiving I was making dinner and my son was helping. I asked him to open a couple of cans of creamed corn, put the contents in a bowl, dot it with butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper and put it in the oven. He said, “Mom, is that it? I’ve been bragging to my friends about your creamed corn.” We had a good laugh, which is nice when you’re struggling to get all that food on the table.

Nellie Bly Curry was born in Key West in 1870. In the latter part of the 19^th century, Miami was a small village and Key West was the richest city per capita in the United States. This was due to a large cigar making industry and a lucrative marine salvage business. Travel between the islands was by clipper ship. I have a portrait of my Aunt Nellie, when she about 30 we’d guess. She was a handsome and intelligent lady by all reports, but she never married.

The Key West Census of 1880 lists my Great Grandfather Richard Curry as Sheriff of Monroe County. He had a son and four younger daughters. My Aunt Nellie was next to the youngest and my grandmother, Grace, the youngest. Thomas Knowles, my grandfather, drowned in the 1906 hurricane. Grace was 36, with four small children, my father the youngest at six months. Grace remarried and kept her oldest and parceled her other children to her sisters to raise. My Aunt Emma and her husband Manuel Del Pino raised my father. For the longest time I never knew why all my father’s friends called him Pino. When Manuel died Aunt Nellie moved to live with Aunt Emma.

When my father came back from WWII and built our house, Nellie and Emma came to live with us. It was a three bedroom one bath house, my brother and I were in the front room, Mom and Dad in the middle and Aunt Emma and Aunt Nellie in the back room. Then when Aunt Emma died when I was six, I was moved in to sleep in My Aunt Nellie’s room. She had a big double bed and I had a small single one in the corner. Every night she combed out her hair and plaited it in a long braid down her back. By day she wore two plaits wrapped around the top of her head. She told me that she had never cut her hair. She always wore a dress and black sturdy lace-up shoes. She was 80 and I was five years old.

My memories of her are scattered. I remember one day. It must have recently rained as I was sitting outside the front gate making mud pies. Aunt Nellie came out to put breadcrumbs on the posts for the birds. A lady came by on a bicycle selling Benny Cakes and Coconut Candy from a large basket on the front of her bicycle. I think she came by often as she and Aunt Nellie chatted for a while.

Aunt Nellie had a large treadle sewing machine she operated with her feet. She kept it in our bedroom, no electricity required, just lots of human energy. She made all my and my brother’s clothes when we were very young and even some of my mother’s dresses. She taught my mother to crochet and using fabric scraps, to make circular rag rugs, which were scattered, around our home. She cooked our dinners for which my father rode his bike home from the Navy Yard to eat at noon with us. We had no car. My mother and Aunt Emma cleaned up and complained often that Nellie used every pot in the house. Aunt Nellie also made Queen of all Puddings, and custard in big brown custard cups and she collected guavas from a tree in the yard and made Guava Duff.

She made cushions for the big wicker chairs on the screened porch. She sewed leftover fabric into large squares and stuffed them with an inch thick stack of old newspapers. They made nice padded cushions that were heavy and stayed put. In her younger days she had worked at Applerouth’s children’s clothing store on Duval Street, and at Easter took me downtown to buy my Easter dress, hat and white shoes. Everyone was all decked out on Easter Sunday.

One day I must have talked back to Aunt Nellie and she told me that I was a sassy little girl. I said, “ I don’t care.” I was five. She said, “Do you know where Mr. I Don’t Care lives. Well, he lives in a big house all by himself. No one makes dinner for him, or takes care of him when he’s feeling sad or sick or reads to him at night; he is a lonely man with no friends or family.” I don’t remember answering her, but I thought about it and do remember what she said to this day.

The Secret Ballot is a voting method in which a voter’s choices in an election or a referendum are anonymous, forestalling any attempt to influence the voter by intimidation and potential vote buying. This definition is from Wikipedia, the fount of all defining knowledge.

All this talk on TV about the election in 2016 and Election Day this past Tuesday has got me thinking about the Secret Ballot. I capitalize it because it is that important. My father taught me something when I was about ten years old. I had just become aware that there were Democrats and Republicans and asked him which he was and who he was voting for. He said, “ That’s none of your business.” I was taken aback. Then he said “I tell you, you tell your friend, your friend tells his friend, his friend tells his father who tells my boss at work, who maybe disagrees with me, and my workplace becomes compromised. So that’s why we have a Secret Ballot. It was an important lesson and why I hold my Secret Ballot tight to my chest today.

How did we become such partisan people? I discuss issues with my friends and family, but it is not my point to persuade them to anything. I am interested in their views if they are different from mine. I certainly would not put a “Vote For” sign on my lawn or an electioneering bumper sticker on my car.

My first vote was in 1968. I had just turned twenty-two. Lyndon B. Johnson vs. Barry M. Goldwater. I was living at home, teaching school and paying my father for my car, which he had loaned me the money to buy. I voted Democrat. My father told me that he didn’t know a lot about politics, but he did know that when the Democrats were in power, he didn’t worry about his job. When the Republicans were in, it was a constant worry. He said, “ Most people vote their pocket books.” I even think my dyed in the wool Republican mother-in-law voted Democrat that year. Goldwater was too far out there for some. Now they’re all too far out there, right and left.

I asked Peter if he voted that year. He said he didn’t think so. He had to vote in New Hampshire, his home of record, which meant requesting an absentee ballot and he was doing a UNITAS cruise around South America operating with all the South American Navies at the time and dating all the ambassadors daughters and going to embassy parties and voting was not on his radar, as stressed out as he was by his social life.

We voted for the first time in a voting booth after Peter left the Navy. We were in Los Alamos. Peter and I went to the voting place. Neighbors and friends were there and everyone was meeting and greeting. No placards or politicking. They had to stay 200 feet from the polling place. Everyone exercised his or her Secret Ballot. Peter said this morning, ”I have no idea who you vote for. It could be Attila the Hun for all I know, and I know better than to ask.” It’s the American way. Compromise it we shouldn’t.