Thank you Arthur Fry

This year has flown past with such speed and I am shy of accomplishing so many goals.  Shy by a mile.  I’ve a list a mile long that remains unchecked – typing a friend’s journal, finishing my own journals, updating my recipe blog, weeding the garden (again!), finishing the quilt for my daughter, starting the scrapbook for my younger daughter, cleaning my desk, sending off a baby shower gift (to friends’ whose baby is now 6 months old), and so much more.  I hope to have achieved at least half of the aforementioned before the years’ end.  How do I allow the time to pass away and escape me so each year?  I’m not lazy, nor do I procrastinate.  And yet, I’ve piles of unfinished work set about.  

Wham!

I’ve been encouraged recently by a dear friend to try to verbalize memories that I wish to have live on outside of my fleeting thoughts and mind’s images.  Part of me, a great part, is hesitant to do as such because they are mine.  They are intimate and personal and to put them to pen (in a sense) shares them.  Call me selfish, but I’m not certain I am comfortable with this idea.  They’re mine.

And yet, I am going to give it a brief attempt.

Christmas 1996.  My father hadn’t yet been diagnosed with cancer and I hadn’t yet asked God to rob him of his life.  My marriage was still seemingly fruitful and I was pregnant with our second child.  All in all, life was fairly good.  In truth, this was one of my last “good” Christmases.

I don’t right remember when my father arrived to stay with us for the holidays, but it was a good week or more prior.  It seems odd to word it as “stay with us” when the truth of the matter was we lived in his home.  It was the home I’d lived in until my early teenage years and as a grown adult, we rented from my father as he no longer lived in it.  But it was his home.  The semantics of this all are rather irrelevant, I am certain, nonetheless, necessary to me.

He arrived by train.  We drove out to the train station to pick him up and I recall being so worried that he had lost his mind when he arrived because he had no glasses.  My father was legally blind without them and had worn glasses since childhood.  Yet when he stepped off the platform, he had none on.  I asked him where his glasses were and he asked me, “What glasses?”  I frantically began trying to find an Amtrak worker who could help me locate his glasses, all the while wondering how in the hell I was going to take care of my senile father.  He let me panic for a few minutes, more likely a few seconds, but in my memory it was forever.  Finally he told me that he had underwent the laser surgery and no longer used glasses.  He seemed so tickled with himself that he could get me worked into a tizzy.

It’s odd.  I remember so much about the days around Christmas that year, but not the day itself.

That first night, I had set about to make a pot roast.  I remember this because he would come into the kitchen and chop up celery to add to it and I would come back in and skim the crap out of my pot.  After two or so more rounds of this, I took the remains of the stalk to the trash and he lectured me about how it wouldn’t taste right now.  I don’t know why this stands out to me so vividly, this incident of too many cooks spoiling the stew, but it does.  I can’t even think of why I even had celery in my house, since I really cannot stand it.  Odder yet is that I now use it in every stew or pot roast I make.

Another night, he offered to stay home with my oldest daughter, our only daughter at that time, while my husband and I went to the store.  I remember thinking it rather silly since she wasn’t yet two and shopping for her Christmas presents was still something we could easily do with her.  But we went out for more Elmo finds anyhow.  The Tickle-Me-Elmo doll was the hit of the season that year, but I had already purchased her one that summer.  With all of the insanity surrounding that doll, I always worried about her taking it with her in public for fear of being some statistic.  She loved anything Elmo though, so we went out hunting for more odds and ends.

We all loaded up into my van and took a ride through the light tour down on the beach.  An ingenious tour where you purchased a cassette tape to play and your drove at a snail’s pace down the boardwalk enjoying the lights.

Daddy suggested we finish it up with a trip to Coleman’s Nursery, a tradition in our family when I was a little girl.  He toted Alannah around like she was a sack of potatoes worth enduring and her eyes lit up at every single sight.  I remembered fondly the Dutch Hot Chocolate and we finally located the kiosk where it was sold.

My husband at the time was in the Navy and as such, I attended Navy Wife meetings.  I was on a planning committee and we were trying to come up with holiday ideas.  The suggestion was made about hiring a Santa and I suggested we save funds and hire my father.  He was retired Navy and had played Santa for years.  He had so much joy and pleasure in making memories for families through his Santa work.  I mentioned that he was a truck driver but that he was home for the holidays and would gladly do this for us.  The wives sneered.

Literally.

A truck driver?  Playing Santa.  In their minds it must have been a game of limbo and I was not very politely told that they would never stoop that low.  I was outraged and rather vocal.  And then I left.

I remember sitting with him and telling him how upset that made me.  That they would think him some unfit individual because some truck drivers are regarded as sleazy.  He wasn’t terribly offended, I suppose he had heard it before.  I’m sure he had.  I poured him a glass of Jack and Coke and we sat outside talking.

In retrospect, this was the last Christmas with my father when the clock wasn’t ticking.  Within a month I would ask God to kill him, he would be diagnosed with cancer, and the time bomb on normality would be set to detonate.

Seeking Carmen Louise Clark’s mother

I am seeking information anyone might have about a baby born MARCH 28, 1956 named CARMEN LOUISE CLARK.

She was most likely born in KANSAS, possibly in GARDEN CITY or in WICHITA.

She was given to the adoptive parents on MARCH 31, 1956.

As early as January of 1956, her mother had made arrangements to give the baby up for adoption.

The mother may now be between 65 and 75 years old

A friend has compiled the below pictures of what the mother may have looked like:

Any help you can give would be so greatly appreciated.

You can write to me:  protogere  at   yahoo dot com.

AFK – ish

I’ve not fallen from the face of the Earth, I promise.  And while I have still been writing, they aren’t ready to publish.  I’ve just been so busy and hectic that when I do have a moment to myself – I don’t care to proofread.  I will finish posting the UK logs soon and the other bits.  Thank you for the encouraging feedback though, I’ve not time to reply to each but I logged in this morning for the first time in near on a month and saw them.  Thank you.

FYI

I was just notified that evidently my blog is of some interest to members of Fodor’s, a forum I had attempted to get advice from last year when trying to plan my trip, and learned since on my blog I dared to post pictures of myself and the parts I enjoyed on our family trip that I am selfish and shame on me for not taking pictures at other places my family wanted to see or that we didn’t even dare to venture to any place anyone other than what I wanted.  All of the photos from our trip that I chose to include in my online photo album are here and what you see on this blog is from my journal of our trip.  If my children choose to make public their journals, then their memories of the trip would be available, but again this is my blog and I won’t be posting their journal entries here.  If your life is so unfulfilling that you strive to track down and read up on the blog of a poster who asked for advise of the forum you frequent almost a year ago and then spend days nitpicking my every comment, twisting and distorting the complete entries to colour the interpretation to meet your needs, mocking my family and myself along the way – who really needs help?  And to follow that up by making crude comments here about myself and sexually inappropriate comments about my daughters – sick.

Windsor, Day 1

We started today later than most, but it was to be a casual day – relaxed.  We woke around 8 am, readied ourselves and ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant around 9:30 and then set out with Billy as our guide.  By this point, we’ve become pretty familiar with the double roundabouts, two in a row, leading away from the hotel towards the motorway.  In fact, we didn’t even need Billy to tell us to get to “take the roundabout, second exit”.  It was almost a fluid motion.

15 March, part 1

This journal includes part of my audio log as well as written entries after returning from the city.  I’ve tried to edit out tenses, I may have overlooked some.

Westminster Abbey, Part Three

This picks up after leaving the Nave and moving through an outdoor hallway/garden area (the Cloisters) to the Chapter House.

Westminster Abbey, Part Two

This picks up at 27 minutes and 43 seconds in my audio journal of Westminster Abbey, having just left the area where the Coronation Chair should have been.

Westminster Abbey, Part One

For Westminster Abbey, I chose to keep an oral diary of sorts, recording my thoughts as we toured the church.  This entry is long, and likely of limited interest.  But as it is part of my trip journal, it is included in my blog.

Arriving in London, again, for the first time.

I’d been advised by a few online friends to not venture into London earlier than 9 unless I wanted to deal with London rush hour, which they assured me I did not.  So this morning we slept in til 7 am!  We took our time getting ready and decided to give the breakfast buffet at the hotel a whirl.

15 March, part 2

We began a northeastern path towards Leicester Square, a site we were anxious to see.  Specifically of interest the commemoration to Shakespeare.  Also the handprints of stars and the notoriety for street performers.  The idea of sitting back and absorbing as the world moved around us was kind of exciting.  Every site we’d seen every place we’d been had required walking, exploring, going, moving – not once could we simply sit and absorb.

Walled Up Toilets Are Of No Use When You Have To Pee!

Monday, the dreaded day arrived; the entire reason for our trip was at our doorstep.  Were we ready?  Could Alannah hold her nerves together well enough to overcome her shyness and boldly plan out her future?  Was I ready?  While we had talked for almost six years about her dreams and goals, this was one of the first steps in bringing them to fruition and aiding my baby girl to cross the street on her own.  Big girl pants and all.

The First Great Day of Our Trip

I didn’t want to get my hopes up, seeing as they’d been dashed to bits many times over in the past six days, but this day was really becoming something worth putting my pen to paper for.  Leaving Salisbury, we drove north towards Avebury, following the same path proposed to have been used by the ancients to travel between Stonehenge and Avebury.  It was perpetually sunny, something that had occurred almost immediately as we drove out of London.  It was like the sky opened up and said ahh you’ve escaped, welcome to a better world!

Crop Circles and Castles, Oh My!

I’d only heard of Old Sarum through DAOC.  It was the name of the village our guild house was in, situated in Rilan.  So naturally when I began planning this trip and I saw there was a place called Old Sarum just south of Stonehenge, I had to see if it was worth a visit.  And oh my.  Old Sarum is a fort, a castle, a massive beast on the landscape of Wiltshire county.