Sprinklers and Sparklers and Mayo, O My!

Long ago and far away, when temperatures were measured with metal feed-store thermometers hung next to mops and buckets on the back stoop and heat indices weren’t yet popular, we had our own ways of calculating summer heat.   Summer meant mirages shimmering above the black-topped roads, imaginary pools of water swirling, receding and evaporating before our eyes as we traveled.  In the heavy, breathless night,  sleep became impossible.  As trees murmured and complained, cots were dragged from houses and we lay beneath the stars, lulled into dozing and then on to dreams by the comfortable chirring of crickets.

Eventually the grass – soft, feathery blades that tickled our feet and stained our clothing – began to crispen in the fullness of summer heat.  Here and there, sprinklers appeared,  four revolving metal arms that whirled ribbons of life-giving water across lawns with a soft, rhythmic schlush.   We ran through them, slid past them, then collapsed giggling into them when we miscalculated and collided with a friend.  As the play grew more exhuberant, knees began to skin and the occasional howl of protest rose over our delighted screams.  Just as protests began to overtake delight, doors flew open and a mother, grandparent or  neighbor would yell, “You kids dry off and go find something else to do!”

There always was something more to do.  Sometimes we hopped on our bikes and headed for the little gas station where glass cases overflowed with penny candy: root beer barrels, tiny wax bottles filled with ghastly syrups,  orange slices and soft, pliable circus peanuts. No one liked the licorice bits with hard pink and white coatings, but we always bought candy necklaces, candy cigarettes with tiny pink “flames” and Necco wafers, bargaining for our favorite flavors with all the savvy and ruthless determination of commodities traders.

Twice each week the BookMobile parked in front of the grade school, and we chose new books to read.  One week was set aside for Vacation Bible School (grape Koolaid and graham crackers with chocolate frosting), another was devoted to Camp Hantesha (night-time raids on other cabins and tin-foil dinners) while a third was reserved for Craft Camp, otherwise known as Popsicle Sticks Run Amok.

In short, summer was a time to explore and try new things.  During the summer, we learned to throw a ball, ride a bicycle  or roller skate.   As we grew older, the challenges of summer became tinged with excitement and anxiety as we set ourselves larger goals: walking with a friend to an uptown movie, daring the high dive, or navigating the stacks of the “big” library on our own. 

If we hesitated, it was our own timidity which held us back, and not that of our parents or caretakers.  The rules were general, and common sense prevailed. Wear your shoes on a bicycle. Be home by dark. Don’t eat all your candy at once. Never swim alone. Don’t fight.   Beyond that, we were on our own.

 The pinnacle of summer was July 4th.  It was the High Holy Day of Play, and everyone took part.  In the morning, the community parade circled the town square.  Afterwards,  parents lolled about on porches or busied themselves in kitchens while we ran to the schoolyard to swing or hopscotched our way around the block.  Boys tossed balls to one another while the girls played jacks or helped set the table for the yearly feast.

When the time for the picnic arrived, no one was picking at arugala or chicken grilled with a nice lemon-tarragon glaze.  The traditional menu never varied: hot dogs and hamburgers on white buns, sweet corn, thick-sliced tomatoes, potato salad with celery, egg and mayonnaise, baked beans, brownies and pies.  We ate our fill, and left the rest for late-comers, snackers or Aunt Janet, notorious for needing “just one more spoonful” of beans or potato salad.   After sitting around on an outdoor table for six hours, there probably was a risk attached to the mayonnaise-laden salads,  but we didn’t think of that any more than we thought about the dangers of our evening’s entertainment - boxes of red, white and blue sparklers that we’d burn before we headed off to watch the town’s display of aerial fireworks.

It was a news spot on a local radio station that released this flood of memories.   A representative of a local hospital was urging the usual pre-Fourth of July caution about fireworks. In the course of her remarks, she commented that no child ever should be allowed to hold a sparkler.  As she said, a sparkler could damage an eye, or burn a hand.  As she didn’t say, but perhaps believes and certainly implied, the thoughtlessness of allowing a child a sparkler might well bring down the whole of Western Civilization.  

Listening to her, I was astonished first, and then appalled.   Living in an area of serious drought, I have no quarrel with restrictions on fireworks, or even their ban.  However accidental, burning down an apartment complex or half a subdivision doesn’t fall into the category of celebration.  But fireworks safety in the absence of rain was not her concern.  Her intent was to discourage every parent, in every circumstance, from allowing their child a traditional pleasure of Independence Day celebrations. 

Certainly, we live our lives differently than we did in the 1950s.  Many of the changes are a direct result of increased knowledge, better judgement and the desire for healthier and happier lives.  Other changes seem to be no more than an expression of the “Nannie factor” in our society – the desire of self-appointed experts or general busybodies to control the behavior of those around them.  As C.S. Lewis wrote “In Freedom”,

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busy-bodies.  The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Lewis’ “omnipotent moral busy-bodies,”  kind, well-meaning, benevolent folk who would control and repress us “for our own good” are nicely pondered by Ian Chadwick in his essay on Conformity.  As he puts it,

Personal agendae do not benefit liberty: they hinder it.  Pretty soon it’s dictatorship by committee – committees peopled with well-meaning, dedicated but unelected members whose goals are to enforce their own personal vision of utopia. They erect increasingly restrictive rules that slowly squeeze the life out of a community and bleed it until it is colourless.

Those laws and bylaws that hamper and constrict businesses, clamp down on dissent, free speech and free expression are often created to further some publicly stated goal like “beautification.” But they really mean “uniformity.” They strip the living skin off democracy in order to pound all the square pegs in the community into the committee’s round holes.

 

Such concerns may seem far removed from sparklers, sprinklers and over-the-hill potato salad.  On the other hand, as warnings against “this” product or “that” activity increase on a daily basis, I wonder:  are we in fact becoming a nation of Nannies, Lawrence Durrell’s “old women of both sexes” warning one another away not only from legitimate risk but even from the richness of life?   The nation I love always has been a nation willing to allow its citizens to celebrate and live  as they will – worshipping, parading, remembering, reciting and above all participating in rituals that sparkle and sting like the reality of freedom itself.

As the practical philosopher Erma Bombeck said, “You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4 not with a parade of guns, tanks and soldiers who pass by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die of happiness.”

In a world of sprinklers, sparklers and unrefrigerated mayo, can we slip and fall on the water-slicked grass that bends beneath our feet?  Of course.  Can we over-indulge in over-exposed foods and suffer the consequences? Of course.  Can the sun or the sparklers burn, the bicycle tip, the bone break, the puppy nip or the cat scratch?  Yes, and yes, and yes again to everything that “can” happen in a world that doesn’t take “care”. 

But too much of the wrong kind of care can lead to paralysis and disengagement, particularly when what passes for care is little more than fear.  For those who fear what “might happen”, for those who hunger to control what cannot be controlled and prefer to deny that brokenness, contingency and pain of various sorts always will be a part of life, there never can be enough care.  

“Don’t you care about your children?”, they ask.  “Don’t you care about your health?”  “Don’t you care about security and acceptance and the approval of others?”  Yes, yes, and yes again we say - we do care.  But we care as much for life and freedom, for speaking our own word and celebrating the gifts the world holds for those who love her.

In simple fact,  some of us choose to worry less and participate more and most of the time, for most of us, nothing happens at all.  We run through the sprinkler without slipping.  The sparklers light up the night and the last bit of potato salad gets eaten, just because it’s there.  The children fall asleep, and we tend to them in the darkness while the world sighs everyone home: safe, and sound, and free as the birds that cry through the deep summer night, careless and carefree at once.

 

 

Comments are welcome.  To leave a comment or respond, please click below.

And many thanks to Barbara Bieber-Hamby, whose Fourth of July greeting card to me included the quotation from Erma Bombeck and helped to pull this entry together.  As the newest Member of Team Muse, she’ll soon have her very own tee and a link back to this entry on the Team Muse page. 

Grandma’s New Year’s Toss

 

I’ll grant you this.  I rarely know where my car keys are parked and often I’m not certain I picked up the mail.  Sometimes I write out old-fashioned birthday cards, the kind that require an address and stamp, and forget to send them.  I’ve been known to run the same load of laundry twice, and on days when I’m particularly preoccupied, I sometimes neglect to feed the cat.

On the other hand, I can envision my grandparents’ house so clearly I might have hung the pail on the pump only moments ago before hopscotching down the sidewalk, away from chores and into the freedom of the afternoon.  It’s a mystery of increasing years that early memories sharpen, taking on the vivid nature of repetitive dreams.  My grandfather’s tool bench with its chisels and awls aligned like choirboys, tallest to least, the women clustered and twittering on the porch, stitching radishes and carrots across acres of tea towels while I smooth buttons between my fingers, sorting them into shimmering piles of abalone, copper and jet – I can bring the images to mind in a moment.

Memory, of course, is far more than intentional recall.   As New Year’s Eve approaches, Proustian moments abound.   My kitchen is redolent of ginger, cardamon and clove, the same spices that simmered on my grandmother’s stove.   The scent of cut pine, the mustiness of mittens drying on a heat vent, a slight tang of cedar hovering about tablecloths drawn from storage for the holidays - a single whiff sends me off to stand again between great, squared mahogany columns, sentries guarding the mistletoe ball hung where everyone passes.  If I’m a lucky child, I’ll get a kiss.  If I’m even luckier, I’ll get candy, and if you give me just the right piece of candy today – paper-thin ribbons, or a chocolate covered cherry, or tiny, crisp pillows filled with fondant - I’ll give you the number of holes in the iron heat grating in the floor, the bend of morning glories twining up sheer curtains breathing at the window, the shape and color of  ribbons worn by Uncle Jack, who was killed in the War and who gazes at our merriment from his frame, impassive and proud.

Laundry and Life: A Solstice Meditation

 

Every era has its luxuries and necessities.  For most women in the 1950s, a clothesline was a necessity.  Electric wringer washers  could squeeze laundry nearly dry as it was fed through the wringer bars,  but “nearly dry” wasn’t good enough.   House linens and clothing needed to be completely dried after laundering.  Since gas or electric automatic clothes dryers still were uncommon in homes, the laundry - damp, heavy and wrinkled from its pass through the wringers - was hung on clotheslines prior to being readied for the iron, or folded into closets and drawers.

One of the earliest discussions I remember hearing between my father and mother centered on the purchase of a new clothesline.  We had an oversized back yard,  part of a delicious corner l0t-and-a-half, but there was no convenient space for the standard wires and poles.  No matter which location my father suggested, there was an obstacle.  To the east, three sour cherry trees clustered around the sandbox. Close enough to drop their harvest into the hands of playmates in the heavy summer heat,  they were low enough for even the most timid child to climb and rest undisturbed in their branches.  At the north end of the cherries, a cluster of crabapple trees edged up to the sidewalk; to the south,  rhubarb and patches of gone-to-seed asparagus fanned out across the yard. 

Watching the Blogometer Roll

 

My earliest memories of my parents’ car aren’t of the car as a whole.  I haven’t a clue what the make, model or color might have been, but I can describe the back seat perfectly.  It was, after all, my world-on-wheels.  It came fully furnished with a red plaid wool stadium blanket in a carrying case, a plastic solitaire game with red and blue pegs, an old doll suitcase filled with crayolas, paper dolls and colored tablets, and a pile of Golden Books.  Whether it was a trip to the A&W for rootbeer floats, an evening at the drive-in movies or a trip to my grandparents’ house, the back seat was mine.  It was my castle, my refuge, my tiny bit of territory to do with as I pleased.

Sometimes on longer trips I’d tire of my paper dolls and books.  Stretched out across the seat, pretending to be asleep, I’d listen as the low voices of my mother and father murmured through the air, suspended like a conversational cloud that floated through my consciousness.  Sometimes I drifted off to sleep, secure against my pillows, clutching my special blanket and feeling the soft hum of the tires.  Sometimes I just listened,  enjoying the sense of movement and the hum of my parents’ voices.

Growing older, I began to take more interest in the trips themselves.    No longer content to sleep away the miles, I hung over the front seat, dangling my arms and chattering.  We played car games, reading the Burma Shave signs along the roadsides, looking for out-of-state license plates or ”stamping” white horses in the fields for luck.  Feeling a little constrained, a little impatient, I asked questions common to every traveler since Moses led his own ragged band across the Red Sea: how much longer?  How much farther?  Are we there yet?  Where will we stay?  Did you make reservations…?

Hanging over the front seat one day, I noticed the slowly turning numerals on the odometer.   Watching it, I began to understand distance in a new way, and when my parents bought a new car it was the odometer that intrigued me most.   I was disappointed when I missed seeing it turn over the first thousand miles, but I remember reaching 5,000 miles, and 10,000.  Any time a series of nines showed up, it was especially exciting: 39,999 miles was just as good as 99,999, and I watched the numbers turn over on those ”big days” whenever I could.

When I began driving my own cars, the fascination lingered.  When my last and most-beloved Toyota clicked over to 100,000 miles, I smiled approvingly.   When 200,000 miles arrived, I gave it a pat on its dashboard and whispered small congratulatory sentiments into its engine compartment.  As 300,000 miles approached, I developed a case of nerves.  Would it die before reaching the benchmark?  Might it be killed in an accident?  Would it dare to commit some sort of ghastly mechanical suicide while my back was turned? 

Nothing untoward happened.  Despite the fact that I had to drive around for ten extra minutes one evening to witness the grand event, I giggled with satisfaction when an unbelievable 300,000 appeared.  When the 350,000 mile mark rolled around it stil was cool, but at 386,000, I decided I was pressing my luck.  The young woman I sold the Toyota to still hasn’t achieved 400,000 miles, but she says she’s inching her way toward it, and plans to give the car a party when it happens.

As a child, I had plenty of opportunity to watch odometers chew through great chunks of mileage when vacation time arrived.   We lived in a Company town, and my dad worked for the Company.   The plants shut down each summer for two weeks of maintenance, and everyone left for vacation at the same time.   But as I learned, there are vacations, and then there are vacations.  Not all parents took the same approach.

My Dad was a car guy and enjoyed driving, but he always was willing to combine a little education and fun with his hunger for the open road.  Our trips took us to Minnesota, Colorado,  South Dakota, Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana. We waded across the Mississippi where she begins, and were amazed by her muddy Delta where she ends.  We learned the story of  Paul Bunyan and Babe, his great Blue Ox.  We carried home glass tubes filled with iron ore samples from Hibbing and chunks of granite and basalt from Colorado.  Indian Corn from the Dakotas hung on our front door in the fall, and photographs taken at the Continental Divide, Leech Lake, and the Flint Hills made it to Show-and-Tell. 

We even had a real adventure or two.   I still remember the horse-drawn ferry at a Kentucky river crossing, July snowball fights in the Rockies, and that stuff-of-family-legends night in Rainy River, Ontario, when we landed in a room above a tavern with a B-grade-movie neon light outside the window, a B-movie ruckus in the bar, and a chair shoved under the doorknob for a little extra security.

When the trips ended and families returned home, my friends and I compared notes on our adventures while our fathers went back to work.  The year we traveled to a Minnesota lake and stayed in a cabin, I was telling my excited tale of fish, snails and leeches when another girl looked at me and said, “Yeh.  Well, we drove over 3,000 miles.”   When I asked  where they’d gone, she said, “All over.”  When I asked what they’d done, she said, “We drove.”

Looking back on it now, it seems one of the stranger twists on Robert Paul Smith’s memoir, “Where Did You Go? Out.  What Did You Do? Nothing”.  Smith’s point was that kids always are doing something – most of it quite interesting – but that adults have neither the time nor the inclination to find out what’s happening under their very noses.  In the case of my friend’s family, however, the “nothing” experienced on vacation was just that: nothing.  Their two weeks were filled with highways, gas stations, trading drivers and trying to figure out how far they could go before they had to turn around and come back. 

Every year, it was the same.  When school started and it was time to write ”what I did on my summer vacation” essays, most of us wrote about camp, or fishing, or swimming, or trips to exotic destinations like Omaha. And every year we heard our friend brag, “We drove 3,000 miles”. We never knew quite how to feel about it.  Sometimes we were jealous, and sometimes we just didn’t understand the point.  Since we weren’t any more clear on what to say to her, we simply told our own stories and moved on.

I suspect none of this would have come to mind had I not logged on to WordPress last night, checked my stats and discovered a surprise.  After three months, 4,996 page views had been recorded.  Looking at the page, I was mesmerized.  I might as well have been a kid again, back in the family car and waiting for the odometer to roll over to 5,000.   I needed to leave, but I couldn’t move.  As I watched, the total views clicked up to 4,997, and then 4,998.  With the total sitting at 4,999, I pushed back my chair and left.  There was no way to make a phone call and say, “Sorry, I’ll be a little late.  I’m waiting for 5,000 hits.”  Even if I’d made the call, they wouldn’t have understood.

When I came home, the page still was showing 4,999 views.  Whether the Great Cyber-Gods arranged it that way or dumb luck had intervened, I got my screen shot of the benchmark 5,000 hits.

Afterward, I did a good bit of thinking about statistics, and the frantic search for “hits” among bloggers.   Like my classmate who bragged she traveled 3,000 miles but didn’t have a single story to tell, or like travelers so focused on their odometers they have no time for even a glance at the scenery along the way, some folks seem to be missing the point.  Behind the Sitemeter, StatCounter and Google Analytics numbers are people: human readers who arrive on sites for particular reasons, and who are far more complex and valuable than simple marks on a graph.  Turning those readers into real friends requires far more dedication and effort than simply throwing them onto a list at BlogCatalog.

Certainly I have goals for my blog, and those goals include increasing readership.  But I faced the question early on: am I traveling to see the sights, meet some people and enjoy the experience, or am I traveling simply to be able to brag about the miles I’ve covered when I get back home? 

Of course I know the answer to that question, and if you’ve come to know me at all, you know my answer as well.  When six months rolls around and I’m peering at my blogometer again, no matter what the numbers say, I’ll be thinking about them in the context of writing, readers, and the relationships with people and life they represent. 

It’s a fact that you have to drive to get somewhere.  But the larger truth is that, whether you’re driving 3,000 miles, or 300, or 30, there’s no reason not to pull over now and then, kick off your shoes and enjoy the scenery with the locals.  You might hear a good story or two, and you might have something more than miles to talk about when you get home.

Photo Compliments Routing by Rumor

 

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