Big Dreams

   

                            

My Babies

Christmas 2013

  I'm copying photos [again] from one hard drive to another and scrolling through the thousands of images I've snapped of the kids since our family went digital in December 2003.  What this means for Owen (who was born in 2001) is that his early adorable years are locked away in photo albums and archive boxes and perusing them requires pulling books off shelves and boxes out of basements.  Rest assured, his baby days are appropriately archived (and he is the only one of my two children with a finished baby book) but they are not [as] easily accessible as Sarah's.  Honestly, I'm giving both of them enough material / evidence to effectively argue that they are not their mother's favorite - a la "you have more pictures" versus "you have a finished baby book".  All's fair in love and siblings, right?

January 14, 2006

The Very First Gymnastics Class

Green Hills YMCA

     I can say  without reservation that the best part of having access to thousands upon thousands of digital images of my children's childhoods is that I can pull up photos month by month and watch them grow all over again, skipping over the messy tantrum-y parts (which I photographed too), and focusing on the many firsts and middles and lasts of their young lives.  Take those two photos hanging out up above this paragraph for example, both snapped eight years ago today at Sarah' very first gymnastics class at the Green Hills YMCA. She was 23 months old and, as I've written about before, she took to gymnastics like a duck to water.

That picture over there on the left is from Sarah's Kindergarten graduation.  It's a tradition at SBA for each graduating kindergartner to receive their diploma then stop at the microphone before returning to their seat and announce what it is they hope to be when they grow up.  This photo captures the moment when Sarah said  "When I grow up, I  want to be a gymnast." At just six and barely tall enough to reach the very short microphone,  it was cute - especially considering her brother had said he wanted to be a ninja at his graduation three years earlier (and yes, many other children said they wanted to be things like a doctor or a teacher or a banker - we grow free thinkers here at Team Vallejo).  In the intervening years, Owen has moved on from his dream of being a ninja, but Sarah spends hours upon hours every week working hard at being a gymnast.  She says she wants to compete in college someday then move to Paris and become a successful artist with an emphasis on successful because Paris is expensive and you can't live there with no money.  I tell her she can do anything she sets her mind to, including college gymnastics and moving to Paris and supporting herself, as long as she makes good grades in school. She's heard me say dozens of times "Who gets into the college of their choice?  Kids with good grades get into the college of their choice.  Go read a book." Do I think she's going to be a college gymnast or pack her bags and move to Paris?  Honestly, I have no idea. I also know that it really doesn't matter what I think because these are her dreams, not mine. What I do know is that I am blessed beyond measure every single day to be on this journey with her and her brother.  These kids of mine are pretty terrific.   And since today's writing turned out to be more about his sister than about him, Owen can add this to the pile of evidence labeled "I know my sister was my mom's favorite."  

Owen at 2.  Those long eye lashes still make me melt.

And this face, it's a marvel that he wasn't spoiled rotten.

Oh, wait. I think he was.  

First child and first grandchild on both sides of the family,

it's amazing he ever learned to do anything by himself.

 

Sarah with Georgia flags, Fall 2013.
Go Georgia Gym Dogs.

Digital photos make cute movies.

I love living in a world with cameras.

December 1944, Battle of the Bulge

My grandfather, LJ Hurst, and my mother, Norma Jean

1942

My grandfather recorded his journey from the United States
to France and Belgium in November and December 1944,
his brief stay on the front lines and his evacuation
and subsequent hospitalization in Paris and England
in January and February of 1945.

[written on the back of photograph]

Left home Wednesday, November 14

arrived at Ft. Meade Thursday, November 15

Left Ft. Meade Tuesday, November 21

arrived at Camp Shanks Tuesday, November 21
Left Camp Shanks Friday, November 24
got on boat Saturday, November 25
Landed at Marseille, France on Friday, December 8
2 days near Marseille
got on train, 3 days
stopped at Toul near Nancy on Wednesday, December 13
Still at Toul now Sunday, December 17
Left Toul December 21 and arrived at St.==
December 21 left St. ==
December 22 arrived at ==
December 22 left ==
December 23 arrived at Metz
Today is December 25, Xmas Day
Just inside Germany, December 25
Left Metz December 26 arrived in Belgium December 26
at unknown town in Belgium December 26

[recorded in small black notebook]
Stayed in this town till December 28
Went to front lines December 28
Stayed at spot we first landed for three days
Beat of three counter attacks then left to take a small town
Sat on Hill overlooking town and dug in this way January 1
I had dug hole and laid down and fell off to sleep when I was hit
Was then cut off by enemy
Had to stay in foxhole for 2 days
Got moved out third night
Carried about a mile on stretcher where I was loaded on Jeep
and taken about 2 miles to ambulance
Then was taken to aid station
Taken from there to another station
then was taken to field hospital where I was operated on and sewed up
Stayed there 4 or 5 days then moved to 203 General Hospital outside of Paris
Left this hospital January 21 
was taken across Paris to airport
was loaded in C-47 airplane
Landed in England at some unknown spot
Stayed in hospital there one night
the put on train at 10 0'clock January 22
Was on train 10 hours
Landed at 83 General Hospital where I'm still, February 3rd


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Hitler's "Great Blow" 
Hitler then launched a plan called the "Great Blow" on January 1st. His goal was to eliminate Allied air power. German fighter planes swarmed over Belgium, Holland, and northern France bombarding airfields. Many Allied aircraft and bases were laid to ruin from the attack but the price paid by the Germans was devastating. The German Luftwaffe lost 300 planes and 253 trained pilots.

Have Blog, Will Travel

Written over many days in many places because I can!!  


The State of Things
I'm sitting at gymnastics.  Again - or still, maybe.  We spend hours here, SG and I.  One of us working, one of us watching.  To be fair, I also spend many hours not here. For my own sanity I've learned that it's better to just walk out of this building.  Also, there are afternoons where this place smells like feet, which isn't pleasant.  So it is that in the last few months I have become something of a coffee shop groupie.  My current favorite is the Starbucks inside the Barnes and Noble bookstore.  All the books make it feel like a library but the Starbucks makes it feel like a Starbucks.  They also have very clean bathrooms - something of a necessity when you're whiling away your hours drinking coffee.  The other perk to the B&N Starbucks is that I can travel from the gym to the coffee shop and back to the gym and only make right turns.  Right turns are good. Left turns are bad. Welcome to my world.

He Who Cannot Be Named
I don't write about my job, mainly because people who write about their jobs often find themselves looking for new jobs.  I fear unemployment like someone who's lived through it.  I love being employed and all the benefits that go along with it like a paycheck and health insurance.  But back to the point of this paragraph and my job that cannot be named. For the sake of argument, let's say I spend my working days making widgets.  Let's also say, just for the sake of argument, that I know without a doubt that I make top notch grade A quality widgets - what I sometimes stumble over is making quality widgets quickly.  I am something of a widget ruminator which means I have a hard time letting my widget work products go at the end of a project.  I struggle with endings.  That's not just at the widget factory by the way, I struggle with endings everywhere.

Courage, Please
I participated in one of those Facebook lists last week and I wrote that if I could visit the Wizard of Oz the thing I would I ask for is courage.  Contemplating big changes is tough (for me).  Making big changes?  Oh good grief, who makes big changes!?!?  So there it is. Courage, please.

Sanity Saver
This computer that I'm typing on was a gift from my husband.  There are some people who know the two of us, Joel and I, and are under the impression that I'm the one who puts up with Joel. Truth be told, he puts up with me.  All the time.  I am my own particular brand of difficult - an only child who's willfully stubborn and determined sometimes to cut off my own nose to spite my face.  Interestingly (or not),  that little saying was something my father said to me thousands of times (I'm guess-timating) during my childhood and for years and years I thought he was saying "to cut of your nose despite your face."  Back to Joel, he is patience personified.

Video Killed the Radio Star
I'm sitting at my favorite lunch spot and this song just came on.  It's a good place to end, especially considering I'm sharing (again) the video below.  There is a typo in the video, but I'm loathe to go back and correct it.  Where it says "She hit everyone in warm-up" it should say "She hit every one in warm-up."  We aren't hitters in our family.  Unless Vandy beats UT for the 2nd year in a row.  I might hit you if you rub it in.  I'm childish like that.  Seriously.

Still in the Closet

My 20th College Reunion is this weekend.  As of this moment I'm planning to attend.  I'm not my best self (and by "best self" I mean "not skinny") but in the spirit of embracing life and meeting challenges head on, I'm encouraging myself to just go with it - whatever "it" is.  In preparation for this momentous event,  I may (or may not) have done the following things in the last week.

• Googled "Make-up tips to make you look 10 years younger."  Realized that still makes me look "32".  Sigh.
• Decided not to buy anything new because I have lots of clothes hanging in my closet.
• Spent an hour in my closet. Confirmed I have nothing to wear.
• Took a trip to the mall.  Tried on "skinny jeans".  Tried on not so skinny jeans. Tried on skirts.
• Asked salesperson to show me their selection of slimming shoes.
• Returned home determined to wear something I already have.
• Found two pairs of college era jeans in the "never gettin' into these again" section of my closet. Felt wave of nostalgia for all things button-fly.
• Googled "dress up your yoga pants."
• Returned to my closet and realized I have approximately eleventy-million black sweater/dark jean outfit possibilities. Decide I hate every single black sweater I own.  Don't get me started on the jeans. Or the use of the word outfit. 
• Returned to mall in search of the perfect little black sweater. Purchased pink sweater - not for the reunion but because it was cute and on sale. 
• Googled "slimming scarves."
• Pondered whether or not November 1st is too late (really) to wear my favorite black linen skirt,
• Googled "slimming pearls."
• Returned to mall (again), determined to find "the perfect outfit." Fail.  
• Bought expensive "volumizing" shampoo - because BIG HAIR could be slimming.
• Hav[ing] an allergic reaction to expensive shampoo.  Hair has volume but I have hives. 
• Taking Benadryl.
• Remind myself I'm going to this reunion to see people, not to be seen. Laugh out loud.
• Remind myself I'm going to this reunion to see people, not to be seen. Try to believe it.

Now, what I am going to wear.  Sigh.

Ponchos Save Family from Fashion Crime

A Post in Many Parts


Part The First - Fashion Victims Identified

     Sarah has a thriving in-house newspaper that she publishes on a somewhat regular basis.  She always has a page or two of news stories, followed by several pages of what I like to call "do it yourself journalism". There's the ever-popular "Create A Poem Page" and the always fun "Make Up Your Own Word Search". Tonight's news headline reads "Ponchos Save Family from Fashion Crime." And in case it isn't clear which family she's talking about, the first line of her front-page article is "Ponchos save fashion crime victims at [our home address] and Fashion Designer SG sat down with us to tell us what happened." 

Part The Second - Like Godzilla, Only Bigger

     There was a time not so very long ago that I was able to sit down and write on a fairly regular basis. That was nice. I miss that. I still think about writing a lot, although by the time I get home at night and catch up with my oldest child and talk to my husband and investigate what else Jack the Dog has decided to steal from the trash and ultimately hoard in his corner of the laundry room, I'm too tired to write. Also, whatever it was that I thought I might want to write about has disappeared in a fog of exhaustion.  I blame this, mostly, on the ever increasing volume of time that my youngest child spends at gymnastics (and the correlative volume of time I spend making that happen). Gymnastics - it's a trap.

Part The Third -  He Was Born That Way

     I received a phone call today from one of Owen's teachers.  She wanted to tell me what a great kid Owen is and went on to compliment him on his empathetic nature.  I've often joked that having two children who approach life so differently has led me to the understanding that I can never take blame for their mistakes . . . or credit for their successes.  Owen is who he is and has been since the day he was born.  

Part The Third - No Sibling for You

     For many years, my mom and her sisters had a system in place where they took turns calling my grandmother on a daily basis to make sure she was alright. It was a great idea (the daily phone call check) and it's one that I tried to implement with my own parents.  Here's where being an only child becomes somewhat of a liability though - there are only so many days in a row that I can call my dad before he starts to question why I'm calling so often and then gets irritated at me because I'm treating him like (I want to say "child" but let's go with) not an adult. So then I make Joel call.   It's only now that I'm beginning to think that having a sibling or two to help out with the daily dialing might not be such a bad idea.  

Part The Fourth - My Dog is Sad

     Joel is out of town this week and Jack the Dog is sad.  He's in the laundry room, watching for Joel's car to pull into the driveway.  Watching him watch for Joel to return used to break my heart.  Not so much anymore.  I just want to tell him "Hey dog, get over yourself - we all got troubles. For example, some of us very recently found out that we've been walking around as Fashion Victims." 

Part The Fifth - Five Years and Counting

     Ponchos and parents and gymnastics aside, it's been a rough couple of months.  Somewhere in late July the awareness that the fifth anniversary of my Grandmother's death and the fifth anniversary of my mother-in-law's death were approaching left me at loose ends - for lack of a better phrase.  I miss them both.  I miss the life I had when they were still here. Life now is good, but seems smaller - less. That may not make much sense, I really don't have a great way to describe it.  Grieving is hard.

Part The Sixth - A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

They're happy. I'm happy. It's a simple formula, really.

You Can Lead A Horse to Water

     
      Sarah has a Family Heritage project due in school tomorrow. She and I have spent some time together over the last week looking through family photos and talking about how her family came to be in Tennessee. My goal for her with this project was that she learn something about her grandparents and great-grandparents and begin to develop an appreciation for the people she is descended from. Last night around 7 o’clock it became evident to me that her goal for this project was to have more pictures on her poster than anybody else.  Under the pressure of our creative differences, we parted ways. She headed for the kitchen to watch Full House with her brother (and it’s not for nothing that part of my frustration is that she can tell me every plot twist for a show that’s been in re-runs since the mid-1990's but she still can't remember her Great-Grandmother’s name - which is CLEO!). A little while later she sent me the following text:

So, yeah - sort of. That is a historical fact* and her text message proved that she had learned something about her ancestors, even though it wasn't necessarily the something I wanted her to learn. There’s also the fact that we at Team Vallejo need to stress the use of more politically correct terminology (even though the historical marker in the photo that may or may not be included on the poster she turns in tomorrow does not say “Native American”). Suffice it to say that my family's complicated history is important to me and I want both of my children to at least have a basic understanding of it all.  They are resisting. This makes me sad.

         Although she probably never thought of herself as such, my grandmother was a great storyteller. On the many nights I spent at her house, we would go to sleep with her telling me stories about her childhood. If I were to write a Little House version of her life I could have a book with chapter titles like A Snake in the Springhouse, My Old Homeplace, Cousins from Middlesboro, and Decoration Sunday - just to name a few. In the years that I was in college and graduate school in Knoxville, she and I would sometimes take long drives through the country. Our trips always followed the same familiar route -  up Maynardville Highway and then a left turn onto Hickory Star Road where we'd wind our way back through curve after curve before turning right onto Hickory Valley Road. If the weather was nice (which it always was if we were out for a drive) we'd make a stop at  Beeler Cemetery (where all of her family is buried) before continuing on through Malone Gap, where her old homeplace used to be before it burned. Then we'd head up through Little Valley and make our way back out to Highway 33.  If we were feeling ambitious we'd drive across the Highway 33 Bridge and take a tour through Sharps Chapel as well.  On every drive that we took together, she would always say to me "Now you remember . . . ".  My grandmother, Cleo, would have turned 93 today.  I miss celebrating a birthday with her but I'm doing my best to remember the stories that she told me.

Cleo Hurst, 2007

  

Sarah at her Great-Grandmother's House

in Union County, Tennessee.

The site where the house once stood 

is now home to Paulette Elementary School.

Standing next to my grandparents house 

looking up the Old Highway.

I learned to ride a bike and drive a car on this road

and I  used to run through this field and pretend

to be Laura Ingalls.

Detail of the back door lock and key.

I have these at my house.

The key is hanging in my guest bathroom.

If I'd known the fire department was going

to use the house for practice I would have stripped

the place clean. The chestnut floorboards in the upstairs closets,

the 100 year old windows with bubbled glass, 

the ornamental vents on the gables,

I am heartsick at the waste of it all.

_________________________________

*"Recorded History" is totally biased. I would love to read the historical account of the Native Americans who were on the other side of the 1780s skirmish that led to the death of a white settler along the banks of the Clinch River.  My guess is that if their descendants wanted to add their own marker to one of the two big boulders now located within the boundaries of Big Ridge State Park, they'd have to ship it from Oklahoma. 

The Blizzard of '93

     Way back in 1993 the media wasn't yet tagging everything as the next apocalypse, but if they had been I'm sure all the news stations and printed newspapers(1) would have been heralding the snow storm that hit Knoxville that March as "SNOWPOCALYPSE 1993!". A friend reminded me on Facebook this morning that it's been twenty years ago today that it started snowing (thanks, Tonya!) and from what I remember it didn't stop for what seemed like forever.  Joel and I were both seniors at UT that spring.  My roommate, Susannah, and I lived at 1824 Scarlett Oak Place in the Country Oaks Apartment complex and Joel lived at Sutter's Mill, a rival apartment complex a few miles away. The two of us (Joel and I) were still just friends that March - not even close to dating, really - but we were spending a lot of our free time together.  We talked on our land line phones several times a day and left messages tucked under the windshield wipers of each others cars in between classes (2). As for the snow storm, I really was trapped in my apartment (with heat and television and a VCR and running water but "trapped" all the same).  Things became dire though when I realized I was going to  run out of Diet Mountain Dew before the snow melted (I think I drank one every hour on the hour at that point in my life).  When I called Joel and informed him of my impending doom, he said something like "No problem, I'll be right over. I have a Subaru and I can drive in the snow."  I'm sure I scoffed at him and said, "I don't care what kind of car you have, you can't drive in this weather!  The roads are treacherous and impassable.  You will never make it here."   Several hours later there was a knock on my door and I'm sure it's no surprise that when I opened it, there stood Joel with a grocery bag full of my much needed Diet Mountain Dews. He also brought all the fixins to make cajun rice and sausage and I'm guessing he had a six pack of beer in there too.  While he cooked our dinner, he told a harrowing tale of slipping and sliding his way to Food City then helping other stranded drivers out of ditches and finally parking at the bottom of my apartment complex and walking up the hill in the blinding snow to save me from eminent caffeine withdrawal (and starvation). He really was a good friend. 

SNOWPOCALYPSE!  WITH ICECICLES!!

     At some point the snow must have melted enough that Susannah and I could make it out of town because by the end of that Spring Break week we were approximately 1100 miles south of Knoxville in Key West, Florida.  Why we drove 1100 miles to go to the beach is beyond me now, but at the time it sounded like a good idea.  Despite the rather touristy look of the photos I'm including here, we had a lot of good old fashioned spring break kind of fun on that trip.  (All photos of the actual fun are, for the time being, safely hidden away where my children won't find them (3) and (4). )

__________________________________________________________________

 

(1)  How strange it now seems that way way back in 1993 most of us still got our news from the actual printed newspaper and not from the internet because the internet had just been invented  and not all of us were tech savvy enough to have those dial up modem thingies (5) and so the morning paper was like a daily surprise of  "gee whiz, I wonder what happened while I was sleeping last night?".  

(2)  Notes left on windshields, this is how we communicated before texting and emailing were invented.  Most of the notes said things like "Meet me at O'Charley's after class." None of them said "I'm going to be in the library studying." 

(3)  All these years later, what I clearly remember about this trip (other than the many many many hours we spent riding in the car and the above-mentioned "fun") is driving through south Florida at daybreak and seeing mile after mile of devastation left behind by Hurricane Andrew.

(4) Please keep in mind that we were good Catholic girls (and I can say that without a hint of irony or innuendo) so our "fun" was less "MTV Girls Gone Wild" and more "What time does karaoke start?" 

(5)  Joel had a computer and a modem.  He was the first person I knew who had this new-fangled technology.