• Omaha is very close to Iowa, and one should believe their GPS or they can easily take a little detour there en route from Omaha to Columbus.
• There are many farms and no cows in Nebraska.
• “Monday 5 o’clock rush hour” in Nebraska looks like Wednesday 2 am in Seattle.
• North Bend has a population 1,200 and is the birthplace of Marge Helegenberger, according to the sign out front.
• Columbus has 12,000 people and not one restaurant that isn’t a fast food chain or greasy spoon. But it does have a 24-hour Walgreens.
• The speed limit on the gigantic four-lane highway through Columbus is 35 and people actually obey it.
• Hotels in Columbus do not have coffee makers in the rooms, and “breakfast from 6 to 10 am” is more an approximation than a rule. And the coffee is more an approximation of coffee (being hot and brown) than the actual beverage.
• Visiting all day with your family is a literal PITA but worth it.
• Mayo is the staff of life.

Most of the letters in my closet are from friends and relatives to me. But I also have a manila envelope of full of letters sent from my mother to her mother.  They are mostly typed on non-standard sized papers with what appears to be an old manual typewriter, though they always end with her hand-written signature.  The dates on them span the last ten years of my mother’s life, after she’d left home until just before her death in 1971.

I was just shy of three years old when  my mother was killed, so her letters are little windows into the soul of a crucial person in my life that I never really knew.  They’re rose-tinted windows, to be sure, because that’s how one writes to one’s mother when one is so young and her love and approval mean everything. But even that tells me something about her, and I can never know enough.

My grandmother tells me that for a long time after my mother died, I recited the poems she taught me, over and over. One of them was “If you’re happy and you know it, clap you hands.” The other was a prayer.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

April is National Card and Letter Writing Month.  Write to your mother, your daughter, your grandmother. Give them a glimpse of your soul to keep.

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.

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.

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

[tags]Halloween, pumpkins, silliness[/tags]

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.

[tags]movies, Fight Club[/tags]

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

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

[tags]Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, SCID, organ donor[/tags]

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.

[tags]The Price Is Right, Bob Barker[/tags]

“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.