Guess Who?

Yup, that’s me, just hours after I was born. I look confused and disoriented. “What the hay is going on?”

It’s my birthday today.

Actually it’s Mom’s birth day, after all she did most of the work. She always told Erva and me she remembered the days we were born as clearly as if the events happened yesterday.

My birthday story is this. Mom was prepared to have me. She’d already had one baby so she knew what to expect. When Erva was born all the people attending Mom in the delivery room were women. It was a very calm experience. When I was born all the people attending Mom in the delivery room were…men! Mom said there was a completely different attitude about how to get things done. Erva was born pretty much drug free. When it was my time to arrive, first thing Mom knew they’d given her a spinal. She said she felt like a fish flopping around on a table. Those men would tell her to push, but she couldn’t feel anything. “How could I push when I was basically paralyzed from the waist down?” she said. So, because she couldn’t push they had to use…yup…forceps. I am a forceps baby. So out I come and the doctor hands me over to the male nurse and he says, “Here’s a cute one.” And before Mom gets to see or hold me I’m handed around to all the men and goo-gooed over. If all of that wasn’t bad enough, Mom was given shots to stop the flow of milk so she couldn’t breast-feed me, something she wanted and intended to do, something that she was able to do for Erva.

Apparently I didn’t like baby bottles. By the time I was old enough to hold them I would drink what I wanted and then throw the offending object out of the crib. Now remember all baby bottles were glass back then. It seems I managed to break quite a few. Mom decided to teach me drink out of a glass to see if I liked that any better. I did. So I learned to drink out of a glass when I was pretty young.

And that’s it, the story of my birth.

Tomorrow I’m going home to the islands. I’ll be gone for two months. I don’t know when or if I’ll get the opportunity to blog anything. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read my meanderings. If I don’t “see” you off and on in the next two months, I’ll definitely, “see you in September.”

Thrift Shop Finds

Occasionally I like to go “thrift-shopping.” Particularly if I’m looking for something specific, like of late, silk shirts for my sweetie.

When I go thrift-shopping I sometimes find something interesting, something unexpected. This has been the case the last two time I’ve gone hunting for silk shirts (I’ve found two so far.)

These precious pieces of vintage tatting were had for a song.

This edging appears to have been cut from a piece of linen. It is 12 inches wide and 4 inches deep. There are some stains (possibly roach poo) and some breaks. All the rings are there and most of the picots. If anyone has any idea on how to get clean it and or make repairs, I'd appreaciate it.

But the real find was this beautiful tatted baby's cap. It has not stains, no breaks and is modeled most nicely by a doll my mother made.

Dad

Tomorrow is Father’s Day.

I haven’t written much about Dad. That’s because unlike Mom who is someone a person can more easily understand, whose personality you can grasp, whose mind you can wrap your mind around, Dad remains an enigma.

Whatever I may write about him will be true and yet nothing I write will ever do him justice.

To say he was a genius is to put it mildly, and to say more than that would seem boastful and immodest, traits Dad did not possess.

Dad was a loyal, faithful, dedicated, and loving, husband and father. He took pleasure in squiring his three women around. He enjoyed our company as much as we enjoyed his. He was available.

And yet, and yet, there was a part of himself that he held to himself. There was a gulf between himself and people which no one, not even his wife, was ever able to bridge. He knew things which were secret and which he took with him to the grave. By secrets I mean, national secrets, top-secret secrets. How he came to be in a position to know these things, he who had basically only a high school education, is a fodder for other stories.

Dad was a scientist, a mechanic, a mathematician, an electronics engineer, a musician, a fisherman, a lover of the English language, a punster, a ham radio operator, an inventor, a welder and a motorcycle rider; to name just a few of the things he enjoyed doing. He could also do carpentry and plumbing, not his favorite things. Anything he chose to learn to do he learned to do with excellence. There was no mediocrity in his life.

Only twice in my life did I ever here him cuss, and then it was an under-his-breath, “damn!” He felt using profanity was a sign of a person’s lack of command of the English language. He had this incredible ability to say terribly cutting remarks to a person’s face and have them think he was complimenting them. Many were the times my sister and I cringed when a sarcastic remark leveled a person to the soles of his/her feet and he/she remained blithely unaware.

My father, John Stanford Denham, was the oldest of three boys. His two younger brothers were paternal twins just 11 month younger than himself.

This is a picture of them in their play-clothes. Dad is in the middle, Munro on the left, and Emerson on the right. They were probably about five and four, which means it was probably taken sometime between 1921 and 1922.

Here they are a few years later all dressed up. Dad already looks like he knows something nobody else does.

When Dad was ten, perhaps about the time this picture was taken, his father abandoned his wife and three sons. Dad’s mother was a concert pianist. To make money when the Depression hit she played piano in honky-tonks, a scandalous thing for a well-bred Victorian lady to do. At the age of twelve, to help the family out, Dad got a job. The problem was he needed transportation to get to and from work. So, he and his brothers started scavenging parts in junk yards and the three of them built, from the ground up, a model-T Ford. They never could license it because there was no way to prove ownership. But it served their purposes and they mostly drove it off the main roads so they wouldn’t get caught. Dad also learned to hunt and got quite good with a 22 rifle. So between his job and hunting he was able to help his mother and brothers survive. Understand that during those hard years, he still went to school full time. He also contracted a severe case of hepatitis which he got from a dirty needle that was used to inoculate him against some other illness. And he got very ill with scarlet fever.

It is probably because his father abandoned him that Dad was so loyal to his own wife and children. My sister and I were blessed to have a father who absolutely did not care that we were girls. It never occurred to him that because we were females we couldn’t do what he could do. His philosophy was simple. If we wanted to learn something, he would teach us, and he was a patient teacher. If we weren’t interested that was okay too. Long before either of us learned to drive, Dad made sure we knew how to change a flat tire, check the water, oil, spark-plugs and distributor cap and even make minor mechanical repairs.

Some of our best times together as a family were had in our little 12 foot run-about. It had an 18 horse Johnson on it. For many years it was the fastest boat for its size between the two islands of St. John and St. Thomas. We called it the F. D. O. which stood for, Father’s Day Off. Dad worked so hard it was a rare Saturday or Sunday that he’d have off. If the weather was right, if the ocean was friendly, we’d drop whatever we were doing and go out in the F. D. O. We got so good at getting ready we could be out of the house in about half an hour. Mom would pack the coolers with food and drink. Erva and I would gather towels, sunscreen, snorkeling gear and anything else needed for a day on the water and Dad would get together the fishing poles, the gas tanks and anything related to the boat. We had many adventures and I have lots of fish stories about the “ones that DIDN’T get away.”

Below is my favorite picture of Dad and me. It was taken at the end of the work day, about 5:30 PM. Even though he shaved every morning, by the end of the day he’d have a dark “5 o’clock shadow.” Dad is in his khaki work clothes which are dirty and greasy. We owned and operated a Mobile gas station so he smelled of grease and Lava soap most of the time, an odor, which if I close my eyes I can still smell. It is a comforting odor. This picture was taken from a charter sail boat called The Maverick. My parents were friends with the owners. Dad might have had a message or a part to deliver, or maybe he just wanted to say “hello.” But there we were in the boat with the sun falling fast behind the hills of St. Thomas. A guest on the boat took this picture and later it was sent it to us. I was 12 and am wearing a short and shirt set my mother made. I had many of them.
I like this picture because it captures my father when he was at his best, with an open, friendly smile on his face. He smiled and laughed a lot. I thought then, as I do now, that he was the most handsome man alive. Movie star handsome, Gregory Peck/Cary Grant handsome.

Dad died of liver cancer in 1989. I still miss him. And writing about him makes me cry. Here’s to you Dad, the first man Erva and I ever loved.

Happy Father’s Day.

Abilene Goes for a Ride

This past week the '57 Chevy was taken to the garage to get aligned. It was quite the adventure. Although her engine is running the fuel line isn't quite right yet so she had to be pulled, hauled and pushed. I got to do all the driving, including backing her up to get her back into the garage.

Why Abilene? Because we're pretty sure that's where she originally came from.

Here she is out of the garage for the first time in at least five years, sans hood.

Here's Stan, looking like the proud papa he is.

And here's me, backing her up. And yes that's all my hair.

Three Pet Peeves

#1 Male bees that talk and are attracted to flowers. We see them in commercials. I don’t mind the talking part, I mind the fact that the bees are male and attracted to flowers. Any bee that is attracted to a flower is a worker bee and ALL workers are female.

A male bee, called a drone, lives for the sole purpose of mating with a virgin queen on her maiden flight, after which he dies. Drones have no stingers nor can they collect nectar or pollen. They have a short tongue which they use to get food from workers or from honey stored in cells.

By late summer when fresh nectar becomes scarce the drones are prevented from feeding by the workers. They are dragged out of the hive, half starved or dead, and tossed to the ground. They have become a liability to the hive because they are, basically, mouths with stomachs that need to be fed. The food they require is needed for the queen, the larvae and the workers that do all the work, like helping to move the air in the hive, thus keeping it at a constant temperature, or tending to the larva, or guarding the entrance against robber bees from other hives that come to steal their honey.

This is the life of a male bee. To see one mooning over a flower is somehow irritating to me. It goes against everything I know and love about bees. And how do I know these things? Because I have been a beekeeper.

#2 This peeve is similar to the one about male bees: male turtles that talk to people on a beach, as seen in a commercial. I don’t mind the talking turtle; I mind that it’s a male looking for all the world as though he’s resting on a beach. An interesting thing about a male turtle is, once he hatches from his sandy nest and makes his way to the water’s edge, once he gets into the ocean, he never, in his entire life time, ever returns to land.

#3 I usually come across this peeve when I’m reading a novel or story. It occurs when the author is trying to describe the aromas and smells of an exotic or tropical setting. Flowers almost always come into play. Frangipani, oleander and jasmine fill the air with their heady perfume, along with…hibiscus. Hibiscus? Well, hibiscuses may indeed be eye candy as they come in a multitude of colors and shapes, but they have no aroma. At best when you put your nose up to them there might be a sort of greenish plant smell and you will get dusted with pollen. This may be a really minor peeve but it bothers me, because it tells me 1.) the author has either never seen or “smelled” a hibiscus 2.) the author knows they don’t smell and ignored the fact and/or 3.) the editor didn’t know either.

Something else about hibiscuses is that they stay open for only a day. One does not need to feel guilty about picking them and making daily floral arrangement. They are as beautiful and ephemeral as sandcastles.

Here are a couple of pictures of a mutant hibiscus, front and back so you’ll know that the one petal wasn’t intentionally placed there by human hands.