MY MOTHER'S FURNITURE

               MY MOTHER'S FURNITURE

My mother must have bought a house full of furniture before the Great Depression set in. She wanted nice furniture.  The three-piece living room set was upholstered in black carved velvety material that never ever wore out in spite of all the living we did--- using it as the main comfort zone. There was the regular davenport, as it was called those days, the winged chair and the big overstuffed rocking chair.  That became a double rocking horse for the grandchildren, who used  the comfy arms as great saddles.

They don't make living room furniture like that anymore.

Then there was the dining room set.  The family always ate at the dining table, never ever in the kitchen.
I used to love to polish this walnut set every week.  My mother had a gallon jug of furniture polish bought from a door-to-door salesman who probably didn't have a real job and was trying to make some money by concocting his own brand of furniture polish.  There was no label on the jar. Heaven only knows what kind of oils he put in that polish.  But it did the job. Maybe there was something in it that made polishing the furniture a pleasurable job. I don't think I really experienced a "high" from using it, though.

And then there was the great big Ellington piano with real elephant tusk ivory keys.  I loved that piano.
It always got a tune-up when needed, no matter how short on money the folks were.  And I polished it with loving care.

The sewing machine, too, was a wonderful thing.  All folded up, it looked like a regular little living room table with drawers.  It was electric, not a pedaled machine. So that needed to be polished, too.
Later, my mother got rid of it and bought a portable Elna sewing machine. I still mourn the old one.

My folks slept on a four poster bed with a Beauty-Rest mattress. My mother always bragged about that mattress.  I think they still manufacture them today. The matching vanity had three mirrors--one on each side of the main mirror and they were on hinges, so you could see how you looked from the side.  As a teen-ager, I spent a lot of time in front of that vanity!

So that's the story of my mother's furniture.

WHAT"S IN A NAME?

I think it was Shakespeare that didn't think a name was very important. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," he wrote. Correct me if I'm wrong.

How a human can remember the names of everything they know and everybody they know is beyond me. And we remember the names of people we saw in movies or TV or on the Post Office Wanted Posters. I have to confess, I am beginning to have a hard time remembering names of famous people due to old age. My old age, not their's.

I said to my hubby once a long time ago, "I don't like telling anybody that my name is Smith."

"People think I'm lying."

Smith is your name, not mine! How would you like to have to have my maiden surname as your last name just because you married me?"

He wasn't going to bothered with such a silly question, so I got no comment. Things have changed for the better in today's world!!!

Well, what if his last name had been Temple, and my first name was Shirley? I'd have to go around telling people that my name was Shirley Temple, and I would die of embarrassment.

Or what if his last name had been Mylzinkomakovich? If someone asked me my name, I would just say, "None of your beeswax!" Or "Who wants to know?" Or lie and say "Mary Jones."

Anyway, I wanted my own name back, but of course, I couldn't get it. Then something wonderful happened! I saw my grandmother's death certificate dated April, 1910 and her father's name was written on it. His name was Smith!!

I am entitled to the name Smith even if he didn't marry my grandmother's mother. His appendix ruptured and he died before they could tie the knot. Well, that's one story, anyway. So I feel a little better now about using the Smith name. Of course, maybe they just put Smith on the death certificate and it wasn't true at all. But then, "What's in a name?"

GROUND BEEF

When I was nine, my mother tied a dime into a hanky and pinned it to my dress and sent me off to a grocery store two blocks away to buy a pound of ground beef. Yes, a dime! Not only was meat cheap but was wrapped in paper that I could use later to draw my pretty ladies on. Even the string was saved and was tied to a big ball of string saved from former grocery purchases.

I remember getting a candy bar once in a while, too, and the real, honest-to-goodness tin foil that it was wrapped in was also saved and added to the ball of tin foil that my brother claimed. When the ball of tin foil got heavy enough, it could be sold for some very scarce stuff----money. Talk about recycling!

Fast forward a few years. The price of ground beef went up, of course, and it was scarce. If my mother gave me some money to buy a pound of ground beef, I would also need to have a little stamp torn out of a ration book, or I could not buy a pound of ground beef or any other meat. The meat went, rightly, to the armed forces first and then to the civilians. Gasoline was severely rationed, too, along with coffee and sugar, if memory serves.

My father learned to make a good hamburger probably when he was a cook's helper in the First World War. Today you get a rather dry patty wrapped in a rather dry bun, but in those days you dredged the bun in the frying pan grease that came from the meat that was still holding on to some of its fat and along with french fried potatoes cooked in real lard, you had something that you wouldn't believe could taste so good.

I don't remember seeing very many obese people like you see today, because even it you ingested lard, you didn't have as much to eat as people usually do today. Oh, yes, there were people who were bottomless pits, so they loaded up on potatoes and bread and put on the pounds. A couple of ladies in my neighborhood must have weighed three hundred pounds, more or less. But they didn't live long lives.

But my skinny, little fat-free grandmother lived to be eighty-seven.

The Broken Ribs

I was busy with my household duties, and as I came down the stairs, I heard a knock on my front door. I knew it was somebody I probably didn't know because my friends and relatives came the back way. Usually it is salesmen, politicians or Mormon missionaries that use the front door.

I peered through the little window to catch a glimpse of who could be out there, and saw a perfect stranger--a man. So I opened the door a little and he immediately called my attention to my neighbor who was lying in the gutter across the street.

The stranger said, "I recently had heart by-pass surgery and I can't lift anything over a few pounds, but we need to get this man off the street."

There was no way I could lift a man over six feet tall and my husband was at work, so I said I'd get Joe who lived across the avenue. Joe came right away and got Ed up, and here comes Ed's daughter just off the city bus. So she went into the house and got Ed's wheelchair. Ed's wife was seeing her eye doctor and was not at home when Ed, who was a victim of Parkinson's disease, decided to mow his lawn which sloped down to the curb. No one wants to think of themselves as somewhat helpless, so Ed decided there would be no one to stop him that day.

So Ed was lifted into his wheelchair and was now safely in his home with his daughter, and that

was that. Or so I thought.

Some time later, Ed's wife knocked on my back door with the accusation that my husband had broken two of Ed's ribs when he lifted him off the street. I set her straight on that.

Well, she advised me, "Next time you see Ed fall outside, go over to him and take two pills out of his shirt pocket, one pink and one blue, and give them to him."

I told my husband all about this when he came home and he said, "If there is a next time, just call 911."

Now why didn't I think of that?

My Problem with A. Einstein

I was watching a scientist on TV the other day, and he, of course, mentioned "The Theory of Evolution" and I am always interested in stuff that is way above my head.

But after listening to him, I came to one conclusion: The trouble with Einstein is that he was of the male gender.

I say this because the TV scientist, whoever he was, told his audience that if we could travel in a time warp, we could take off for somewhere in the vast universe and come back only to find that we had not left yet. Now that boggles the mind! Especially a woman's mind. Why?

Because.

Think of it. If a woman was three months pregnant when she took off from Earth and met up with a time warp, would she arrive back on Earth still three months pregnant, or with a child that was 5,000 years old, or would she now be two months pregnant, not three months?

Now you know why men get exasperated with their women.

Too Many Moves

The reason I have a great recall of many experiences back to the age of three, is because my family moved from house to house to house to house. I remember certain things that took place in each of these many houses. I can't explain why the folks moved so many times, though.

By the time I was three, we had moved four times, but all within the same area. The next house was rented and called Keller's house and had trees in the back yard where huge green worms lived and fell on me while I used the swing my father put up for me. I guess swinging shook them out of their cozy home. Of course, I gave up swinging. So we moved to the next block, but down a block or two. I loved this house when I was four because it had blueberries in the front yard. It was a two story house, but unfinished upstairs. This is where I learned what was underneath the sheet rock or plaster. Here is where one of my little friends dropped a whole roll of toilet paper into the toilet. I was so scared that I would get blamed. I don't remember getting punished, though.

I don't think we stayed there very long, and soon moved out of the "additions to the city" to the city proper. Twelfth Street South. I loved this house. It had an ironing board that dropped out of the kitchen wall and a swinging door between the kitchen and dining room. By this time I was six, and was bullied by an older girl who waited in the bushes to pounce on me on my way home from the nearby school. My mother reported her to the school principal, and she quit pouncing.

Then we moved to 2nd Street South and 2nd Avenue where my father ran a gas station and the house came with it. But because my father extended credit to his customers, people didn't pay their bills, and Pa lost the gas station along with the house, and we had to move again.

We moved to 2nd Street North in the upstairs part of the two family house. I wrote a blog about living there. Just an awful experience, and I didn't even mention the bullies. We endured living there for about two years, and then bought a home and we were back to an addition to the town again. Loved this house, but had to move because the people that sold it to us, really didn't own it. So we moved to another addition to the town. Then this house was offered for sale, and we couldn't buy it. So my mother said, "We are going to build our house and quit moving!" And they did. Little by little it came into fruition and was quite attractive for those Great Depression days.

But eventually Ma wanted Pa to build another house, so he did, right next door to that house. There they lived until Pa retired.
Pa built a cabin on Lake Vermillion and they lived there in the summer. In the winter, they lived in Mississippi where Pa built another very nice little house. But then they then moved to Florida, and bought another house. (Pa was tired of building houses) I think Hurricane Katrina destroyed the Gulf Coast house, and a fire destroyed the Lake Vermillion Cabin.

But as far as I go, I have lived in this house for thirty-eight years. I think I might get an urge to move one of these days. It's just in me.

SCHOOL DAZE

School is starting again this month. I was four years and four months old when I was sent off to attend kindergarten. I had never ventured out into the world alone until this day in September, 19--. I probably followed behind my brother who was four years older and hated girls. He got over that condition later in life.

So my teacher instructed me to sit on my little green chair and then she commenced to give the kids some religious education. I remember reciting the little poem every morning that most of you readers will still remember. It goes:

Thank you for the world you sweet
Thank you for the food we eat
Thank you for the birds that sing
Thank you, God, for everything.

Although I loved the poem it was hard to think of the world as "sweet" when I was made to sit next to little Billy, who smelled bad.
I mean, Billy reeked of something horrible, and not only that, but the teacher was a full-blown alcoholic who ruled the little kids with a wooden ruler in her hand. Once she broke it in half when she hit little Jimmy on his head. You can imagine how hard it was to go back each day to face a person like she was. Later, she was dismissed and replaced by a lovely lady.

Little Billy's mother was reported to the health department, but that really didn't change anything. Years later, Billie went to war, was captured by the enemy, spent many months in a prisoner of war camp, was freed and discharged with back pay, bought a small airplane, crashed it and died.

But to go back to my childhood memory, that little poem we were taught while we sat on the little green chairs made me wonder about this sweet world and so I
asked my mother where I was before I came to this world. She answered," There wasn't any you!"

Wow! I was in the state of shock after hearing that I didn't exist before I came here. I found that hard to believe. I also wondered how I could move around and make noises without being plugged into an outlet in the wall like the vacuum cleaner was in order to do its work. But I was afraid to ask my mother another question for fear of another disheartening explanation.

But I still ask questions and I still wonder. It makes for an interesting life, sometimes.