Grandma’s girdle

Whenever I see a picture of that vintage torture device known as a “girdle,” I remember something my grandma once told me that scarred my brain. She said that as a teenager, when she slept over at a girlfriend’s home, she would wear her girdle underneath her nightgown when she went to bed.

Now that says something about what the folks of her day thought of women’s bodies. Granny couldn’t bear the thought of her actual (as opposed to conformed) body being detected, even by a good girlfriend in the middle of the night in the privacy of a home while she was asleep.

You could argue that this may be my grandma’s personal issue, and it is true that she was probably shyer than some. But she didn’t learn her horror of her natural shape in a vacuum,

Anyhoo, I ran across this today and thought it would be good idea to require all men to wear this not-so-vintage contraption every day for a couple of years. Just so’s they can get a truly visceral experience of what daily life can be like for women. We could cut them a break and let them take it off at night.

Oh, and here’s my beautiful grandma at age 20 posing for a wedding portrait with my grandpa, circa 1945.

Black Hillsbilly

Taking a short break from pretty much everything while I introduce Kevin to my family roots in the Black Hills of South Dakota.  Specifically we are hanging out in Deadwood, the town in which I was born and my dad and his siblings were raised.

Yesterday we walked up to Mt. Moriah Cemetery where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are buried, which is about half a mile from my dad’s childhood home.  It also happens to be where his cousin Tom almost hung himself when he was 10.

The cemetery is built on a steep mountain with lots of cliffs.  Tom, who apparently carried a rope around with him all the time, was showing off for his younger cousins, my dad and his sisters. He was saying, “I’m going to show you how they hung people in the old days.”

He tied the rope to a tree branch hanging over one of the cliffs, made a loop and put it around his neck… and then promptly fell off the cliff by accident.

While my aunts ran home to get the grown ups, my dad stood in the cemetery and yelled, “Is there a doctor here!?” over and over until a stranger came by who happened to have a pair of scissors in his bag and cut down cousin Tom.

The stranger told them later that he had been compelled to carry those scissors around  for years and now he knew why.

Tom was blue in the face by the time he was cut down. He could never wear a buttoned shirt or tie again.

Pumpkin carving in Kevinsylvania

Kevin and I carved pumpkins this Sunday with my sister and her kids. Because we are such good role models.

“Pukey the Punkin” by Guess Who. Rest of the photos are here.

Technorati Tags: Halloween, pumpkins, silliness

Just be glad it wasn’t Brokeback Mountain.

A few weeks ago, my aunt visited from Wyoming. While she was here we traded movie recommendations for our respective Netflix lists.

This morning we had the following email exchange:

— On Sep 6, 2008, at 8:41 AM, Ann wrote:

Who recommended “Fight Club”?

— On Sat, 9/6/08, Uppity Rib wrote:

I did. Why? Am I in trouble?

— On Sep 6, 2008, at 3:37 PM, Ann wrote:

Yes

— On Sat, 9/6/08, Uppity Rib wrote:

My work here is done.

Technorati Tags: movies, Fight Club

Voldemort sucks. Harry rules.

For more photos of the Midnight Magic soiree, click here.

The Kindness of Strangers

Open letter to the person who saved my nephew’s life:

I don’t know who you are, what you look like, or where you live. I don’t know if you are a he or a she. I don’t even know whether you are still alive today.

But the kid in this photo is very much alive, and that’s because of you.

Ten years ago, when he was three months old, my nephew Ray was diagnosed with Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID), a genetic disease that affects 1 in every 100,000 live births.  If untreated, most babies with SCID usually die from infection before their first birthday.*

At four months, Ray got his first infection. His body was covered head to toe in thrush that wouldn’t go away; with his skin flaking off everywhere, he looked like a burn victim. He was tiny, not growing - “failing to thrive,” as they say in the medical field.

He cried a lot, and so did we, watching helplessly as the disease began to sap his life away.

The only treatment for Ray’s SCID was a bone marrow transplant, and for it to work, we had to find a donor with the same marrow type as Ray. Marrow matches are most commonly found in members of the patient’s family, but none of us could help.

Thus we were forced to rely on the kindness of strangers for the life-saving marrow. Unfortunately, the chronic shortage of registered donors made finding a match difficult. Ray was already half into his life expectancy; we were racing against time.

Then we got the news we’d been praying to hear. Because you took a moment to register as an organ donor, our little boy survived.

Ray’s body accepted your marrow, recovered from SCID and hit the ground running. He’s our radiant Miracle Child.

Ray is smart, generous and kind. He likes school, Warner Brothers cartoons, Disney movies, and Harry Potter - that fellow “Boy Who Lived,” saved by love.

We in Ray’s family will probably never get to thank you in person, so we post this letter in hopes that it inspires Rib Readers to register as organ donors in your honor.

We hope your story convinces them of how much they have to give, and how five minutes of their time at OrganDonor.gov could mean a lifetime for someone like Ray.

With love,

Uppity & Family

——————————–

Thanks to BlogCatalog for giving its bloggers the opportunity to make today Organ Donation Awareness Day.

*Source: Wikipedia

Technorati Tags: Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, SCID, organ donor

Yesterday’s photo: I miss you.

No picture again yesterday - Excuse #3: Bob Barker’s final taping of “The Price Is Right” had me all lost in time.

When I was a kid, I visited my Grandmother pretty regularly on weekends and summers.

We’d go to the knitting supply store she owned in her little teeny tiny town. While Grandma minded the shop, I would crochet one long chain that would stretch from the counter out the door, and she would tell me it was beautiful.

In later years, we’d go to the library where she volunteered. I would spend the time copying Peanuts cartoon characters, and Grandma would pretend to believe me when I told her they weren’t traced.

Grandma would make me fudge that was so good, I would eat, be sick, and not care.

At night, we’d eat our home-cooked dinner on TV trays and watch “The Price Is Right.”

I haven’t watched that show for years but the sight of Bob’s smiling face and his microphone with the old-fashioned cord brought back all that unconditional love.

This photo of my Grandmother was not taken yesterday, but it’s my blog and I’ll cheat if I want to. It was taken in Denmark at a cousin’s wedding in 2004. I am really hoping that I inherited whatever genes she has that make her look so good at 80-something.

Grandma lives in Nebraska now, and I am too old to be shipped off to relatives by my parents every summer. She has email, but it’s just not the same. Grandma, I miss you.

Technorati Tags: The Price Is Right, Bob Barker

Ho Fucking Ho

“Your father is teaching the child to swear,” Kevin whispered.

As I readied my camera, the feisty old man had incline his be-hatted head to my oldest nephew and said, “Just tell them ‘Ho fucking ho.’”

I wanted Norman Rockwell; I got Homer Simpson.

That pretty much epitomizes the Uppity Family Christmas. We met at my sister Yo’s house in Hoquiam for dinner on Christmas Eve, and it was everything a family holiday should be: food, fun, and expletives. Thought I’d share the highlights before I repress them.

Dinner was the usual holiday fare: turkey, stuffing, some kind of green bean casserole thing that looked ugly but tasted great — and of course, for Yo and me, cranberry sauce still in the shape of the can, a tradition straight out of “I’m Dreaming of a White Trash Christmas.” Ah, memories.

At some point during pre-meal preparations, someone commented on the table-cracking volume and inquired about the exceptional stamina of the cooks.

“Cooking isn’t work,” scoffed Michael.

“No,” agreed Dad. “It’s magic. Someone goes in the kitchen and waves a wand and performs secret rituals–”

“–and sprinkles pixie dust –” I added.

“–and POOF! A meal appears,” Dad concluded. At this, Kevin and Michael engaged in mutual eye-rolling, united in the knowledge that they are solely responsible for saving my dad and me from rickets and scurvy.

Dinner with the Bickersons is always full of such warm fuzzies. Never were two people more like a married couple than my Dad and Michael, two old friends spiritually inseparable yet no longer capable of civil conversations.

Just as we were sitting down to eat, Mr. & Mr. Bickerson attempted to speak to one another. This attempt at dialogue degenerated rapidly and concluded with something approximating “Blah blah blah FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCK, goddamn it!”

“Who wants to say Grace?” asked my sister.

“Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub! Yay God!” I recited quickly, hoping to distract my sister and her husband from booting either of the child-warping old coots out onto the sidewalk.

With this auspicious and typical exchange, the carnage had begun. We had about 24 hours worth of slaving over stoves and ovens demolished within 15 minutes (which is precisely why cooking has always seemed to me much ado about nearly nothing, but I digress).

As our stomachs digested mass quanties, we argued about opening presents. It being Eve rather than Day, it was eventually decided that we would all open just one gift. Still, a present is a present, and after weeks of greedy anticipation, it was fun to have a dress rehearsal. A deafening paper-tearing frenzy ensued, and in its aftermath it was clear that this year’s holiday soundtrack was “It’s an Action Figure Christmas, and in case you didn’t hear - Oh by golly have an action figure Christmas this year!”

Because it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, all the so-called “grown ups” received a personage intended to mirror something of their own personalities, the specifics of which I will leave up to my dear readers to infer. (Best guesses will appear in follow-up blog post.) Dad cradled his Edgar Allen Poe, Michael his Shakespeare, Yo her Moses, her husband Eric his Alexander the Great, and Kevin his Johnny Depp in a do-rag and eyeliner.

I wish I could say I received Jane Austen or Jesus, or even a Devil Ducky, but we likes our Gollum if we don’t thinks about it too much.

After dinner is the obligatory ritual known as Visiting. I believe this is why Dog created Christmas; Christ died on the cross to force families to speak to one another once a year. Or at least give it the old college try.

“Do you know why lecturing on Beowulf always reminds me of you?” asked my Dad.

“No but I think you’re going to tell me.”

To paraphrase the fireside chat that followed: When my father lectures his college students on Beowulf, he tells them that J. R. R. Tolkein used to explain to HIS students that Beowulf is a heroic tragedy, but that modern people do not know how to understand Beowulf because they have no comparison in literature.

“In other words,” my father said, “I tell them that Beowulf is like Tigger: there is only one.”

So now everyone knows my terrible secret: my top is made out of rubber, my bottom is made out of springs.

I was a very bouncy child (”fun fun fun fun fun!”) who by virtue of my year of birth only narrowly escaped the clutches of the current Ritalin-pushing public school system. Hence, the family comparison to Tigger of Winnie The Pooh legend, which was just fine with me as he was the only character with any chutzpah whatsoever.

Several times during the course of the evening, I tried to get one decent photo of Kevin and me together, but my sentimental intentions never had a chance. Some kind of photographic disorder runs amok in my family DNA: whenever any of my relatives so much as glimpse a camera, their fingers immediately and involuntarily form bunny ears and hurl themselves at the back of the subject’s head. And they wonder why I am child-free by choice.

I much prefer the photos taken by my 8 year old nephew. Paulie took several other photos that day, but this is the only guy in a Santa hat he would spend a pixel on. At least one person in the family knows what he’s doing.

#11: Ray #12: Paul

I may be wage slave from 9 to 5, but I’m Auntie Uppity 24 hours a day.

Auntie is the best gig ever. My nephews and I have pretty much nothing to do but play when we are together. We go on field trip to the Science Center and the Space Needle; we walk to the park and play on the swings. At home, we cuddle under the blanket and watch Disney movies or read books. In the kitchen, Playdoh is pummelled in our hands, pumpkins are gutted and carved, and crayons and paper busy us for hours.

An Auntie’s job can occasionally involve actual work, such as helping on with socks and shoes, reminding to wear jackets or brush teeth, and adjusting the volume on the teevee. Sometimes it even involves cooking, but more often buying pizza.

After all this fun, the kids go home to mom and dad, and in their memories Auntie Uppity is Playdoh, pumpkins, pizza and unconditional love.

Working for The Man pays the bills, but being Auntie Uppity fills the soul.

Technorati Tags: aunts, nephews, unconditional love