On white bread and white toilets

Whew. How are those connected? Odd reminiscences here. Cleaning my bathroom yesterday, I suddenly recalled how intrigued I was with white toilets as a child. (My bathroom has pink fixtures, coordinated with chocolate brown/pink tiles—not my choice.) My family’s bathroom had gray fixtures—at the time, non-white porcelain was pricey, and we couldn’t afford luxuries. As my uncle was a plumber, I’m guessing my parents got a pretty good deal on the tub, toilet and sink. Gray figured prominently in my mother’s bathroom decorating scheme (and I think, in retrospect, that it was a good color scheme, though never completed). When I was nine, we moved to a house that had white bathroom fixtures, which I liked. Now, for the bread. Decades before organic farming was in vogue, we baked our bread from wheat organically grown on our farm. Brown, real whole wheat bread, made with honey, not sugar. I grew up with it, I knew how to grind the flour (we had a small flour mill), mix and knead the ingredients, shape the loaves, bake and package for the freezer. We made twenty loaves at a time. Until fifth grade, I brought my brown-bread lunch sandwich to school. Whenever we visited someplace food was served, I was entranced by white bread (Wonder Bread—Builds Strong Bodies Twelve Ways!). It was so marvelously spongy, even though it didn’t spring back. I couldn’t get enough of it, despite my mother’s frowns when I chanced to look at her. “People will think we never feed you!” And then there were the light switches. My father was an electrician, and in building our house, he incorporated features that most people didn’t have. Each bedroom had light switches that controlled both the room and hallway lights—tap lightly to turn on, again to turn off. My parent’s bedroom also had switches for other house lights and the yard light. So the house we moved to when I was nine was also special to me because the light switches were “normal”—the kind you flicked up and down for on and off. Maybe the house made me feel like I finally belonged. (Even though we continued to make our own bread, I ate school lunches from fifth grade on. Quite the rebel.) Just because everybody else had these things: white bread, white toilets, regular light switches.

When I was a child, I thought as a child. Now I know why we didn’t belong—we truly didn’t—and the externals I focused on were only the tip of the iceberg. Story for another time.

Lessons in littering

A woman said to her young son, “I don’t want it. I don’t want it. Throw it on the floor.” (“Floor” in this case appeared to be her word for the sidewalk.) He hesitated, looked down, then dropped the empty candy box he’d been holding. The garbage can was about five steps away. At my bus stop, a woman and her children were waiting. She appeared to drop her transit card, so I picked it up and handed it to her. She said it was no good and dropped it again. Trash can was right behind her. Outside my office building is a smoking area. One woman threw her cigarette butt behind her, way into the corner, though she was near the ash receptacle. She looked like one of those people who would put up a sign in the office saying “Clean up after yourselves. I’m not your mother.” Perplexed? I am. I find it utterly bizarre, too, that these three instances featured women. If there was a stereotype, it’s been smashed. Women are always cleaning up after men? Maybe it’s a subtle revolution. Yoiks.

Right. Now I'm Proverbs

Thanks so much, Dash, for pointing me to Which Book of the Bible are you? At least you can't claim this one's rigged! (Unlike the Peanuts one.) You are Proverbs. Which book of the Bible are you? brought to you by Quizilla Gotta say, though, this doesn't strike me as wrong. Whatever that means.

And now I'm Rerun...

Courtesy of LutheranChik Not that I'm a huge Peanuts fan, but here I am: You are Rerun! Which Peanuts Character are You? brought to you by

Happy Birthday, Mom

Today would have been my mother’s 82nd birthday. She died 14 years ago, way too soon. And I thought today, as I often have, of things I wish I’d known about her before she died. After her death, I learned the following from the woman I studied piano with from 5th grade through high school. (She and my mom had gotten to be friends, but I didn’t know more than that.) My piano teacher lived miles out of town, and didn’t have a washer, much less a dryer—but she had a toddler, before disposable diapers. So Mom would drive over (we were a couple of miles on the other side of town), pick her up and bring her to the town’s laundromat. I guess that was during the school day. At the funeral, so many people I didn’t know came over to tell me how much they would miss Mom. She had been intensely involved in politics, Farm Bureau and the Solörlag (organization of descendants of immigrants from Solör, in Norway), and had served as the March of Dimes’ county chapter Executive Director. It was clear that she had touched people’s lives in many ways. I wish I had known. I wish she had known. She died horribly from cancer, which I didn’t know she had until ten days before she died. It had metastisized to her bones. Only Dad knew, and it was something they dealt with in the usual way—avoiding it until way too late. That colored everything so that it was hard to remember, let alone think about, the mother I loved. A Lutheran pastor my parents knew from the Solörlag delivered the eulogy at her funeral. He gave my mother back to me, retrieved her from the horrible, dark place of “why didn’t she tell us—tell me.” He recounted how she so loved unexpectedly meeting up with previously unknown relatives (it did happen rather often—at Mt. Rainier she struck up a conversation with another person only to discover the connection). The pastor imagined her in Heaven, joyfully going from one relative to the next, catching up. Yes. And when she laughed, it was with her whole being. Wiping tears from her eyes. At least I had that with her, but the circumstances of her death had obscured my memories of shared glee. I’ll forever be grateful to Pastor Grefsrud for this tremendous gift. Maybe this is something you had to be there to understand, but when I was young, Mom and I had blowing contests. We’d see who could “outblow” the other—in the face. Guess halitosis or spittle wasn’t an issue. She’d fake holding in a huge breath, with the funniest expression on her face, and I’d burst out laughing—and lose the contest. I can’t recall ever winning, but the laughter was payoff for winner and loser alike. And her love of meeting relatives rubbed off on me in at least a small way. After the funeral, a number of us gathered at her sister’s home, and I kept on feeling the impulse to call and tell her all about it. So many people she would have loved to talk to. I still miss you, Mom.