A MOTHER'S VOICE

It's amazing what you find out about people that you have known only for a short while. I met Phyllis Adair-Ward through the dental office where I work. I always admired her style and calm way of speaking. She always has the most fashionable clothes and we talk about clothes and she brings me bags of jewelry that she no longer wears because she knows I love jewelry especially jewelry that has been worn by my friends~means something special~a little piece of themselves. How lucky am I?!
I discovered not only her fashion sense but that she is a published author. When I found this out, I immediately ordered her book Wind Chimes and Promises. I read away...couldn't put it down curled up in my sun room till late at night imagining what it must have felt like to move north from Georgia to an urban Midwestern city. What a delightful book, so easy to read because the words and images flow on the pages just like Phyllis speaks. Phyllis wrote this book for her mother as a promise and it is a story that is worth repeating and continuing. This book is a unique true testament of love written in her mother's rich voice restitching the rich, colorful family quilt of memories.

"There are few sounds sweeter than the sound of promises kept. The sound is like wind chimes. If you listen closely, you can hear it."~ Phyllis J. Adair
I highly recommend this book...you will be moved.

Rereading an Old Friend

Love, love biographies of poets, authors and artists~in particular Picasso and Van Gogh. The bio written by Francoise Gilot called Life With Picasso is one that I reread every year~it's like a familiar smell that takes you to that pleasant place in your mind..an old friend that you long to spend unlimited, uninterrupted time with. Francoise has total recall of her life with him. It's amazing that she can remember all the things he said, she said and the dialog of people around him. How does one do that? Here is the link of an interview with Francoise Gilot with Charlie Rose~
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/5090
Francoise Gilot is a French painter and the mother of Paloma Picasso, the French/Spanish fashion designer. She is so incredibly talented and sure minded that I'm not sure if Picasso's life was so rapturous to me or her delivery of the recollection of their life together that made it appear so. Granted, he was a very profound and prolific artist and many bios have been written about him. For sure, he had a very strong and especially charismatic aura. But it is Francoise Gilot who is such a fascinating powerful woman and artist that has had a very compelling life. She had not only been with Picasso for 10 years from the time she was 21, but she was married to another outstanding man of the 20th century for 25 years, the research scientist Jonas Salk, the inventor of the Polio vaccine.
Please enjoy this interview..it is 1 hour long but well worth the time spent listening to this gifted woman of intellect and talent.
If you can pick up this book Life with Picasso by Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, you will thoroughly enjoy it. There was a movie also made called Surviving Picasso starring Anthony Hopkins based on the unflattering book Picasso Creator and Destroyer by Arianna Huffington. It is on DVD. It was enjoyable to me but not authorized by Francoise Gilot or her children.
.....I'm off to reread again......
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Happy Birthday, Suzanne!

I am dedicating this post to my best friend of 31 years! Suzanne is from England and I met her in 1979. We became best friends immediately when we met~it's as if we were always together~maybe in another realm. She's blonde and I am brunette. Our colors are on the opposite of the color wheel. She is an artist, a decorator,a teacher,a gardener, a wonderful cook and can cook up a gourmet meal with nothing in the house but flour, butter and sugar and she can do it in record time and it will be artistically presented! I've known her as we've made block prints and printed walls 'cause I couldn't afford wallpaper and we've painted my fireplace when I could afford it. We've decorated, used our ingenuity on how to make a delicious meal for four with 1/4 pound of ground beef, suntanned, sketched and painted, raised children, complained, fussed, shopped, seen ghosts together and talked till dawn whether she is at her home in Florida, my home or in England. We've been married and unmarried and back to married again. We've shared secrets..all those things best girl friends do. She and her husband would put 2 life jackets on me and we would row on their lake in the late summer evenings (I am afraid of water). We had our palms read in New Orleans and pretty much had the same readings! Whenever I don't feel right, I call her and she tells me what holistic remedies and vitamins to take...I'm always cured.

Our happiest times in our lives, we mutually and tearily recall, were when we did not have very much money way back in 1980. One particular time, we dressed up (we always dress up though)and slipped on our stilleto heels (she can STILL wear them~I can't-boo hoo) and lunched and shopped with $2 a piece in each of our pocketbooks. We looked smashing and turned heads and ate the best lunch~ salad, soup and dry vermouth with a twist of lime (English martini) graciously offered by our wonderful mutual babysitter's dad sitting at the next table, and shopped in wonderful shops with that $4.00 in quaint Nashville, Indiana. We were offered tea and cookies in a delightful little "up a small winding staircase" plant shop and were able to each purchase a potted fragrant herb. We had many repeat happy times like that. We felt rich.

Our outfits and jewelry are still admired and we still have lunches like that, now we are able to add a delicious slice of quiche with our salad and dry vermouth martini and we feel rich. We are very, very rich in friendship.
Happy Birthday, Suzanne, Love ya!

Come on Over...You Won't Be Bored

My nephew in Prague asked me to post more pictures of my house. Those who know me, know I decorate with the the creative, the unexpected and visually interesting. Here you go David and Allie. Come on over and travel to "Any Where In The World". We have fun don't we? Let's take a trip~I'll get the tea and cake ready.

I Wanted to Look Japanese

When I was younger, I wanted to look Japanese. I tried to slant my eyes with my fingers so they maybe would stay in that almond shape. I wanted to wear kimonos and I wrapped old drapes from grandma's attic around me and used my daddy's ties to make a sash.
Sometimes I would want to look very Lebanese~half my heritage~the other half is Scot Irish. My hair had turned dark by the second grade so I felt I was part way there and I tanned well so that, I felt, was the ethnic appearance. I spent the summer between 7th and 8th grade in Maine with my Lebanese relatives and bought big round black glasses that were the "hit" on the East Coast...I'm from the Midwest. I thought they looked smashing especially with my braces on my teeth. Kids on the bus teased about them but when they broke they said they really liked the glasses and missed them! Who knew?
When I began high school I wanted to look Swedish and with the help of my dad and the drugstore we colored my hair with Nestle's Henna. I thought my hair would instantly turn blonde. Daddy helped me wash it in and comb it through~he always encouraged the girlie girl in us 3 girls~Mother was a tomboy, haha. My hair came out with reddish highlights~I didn't realize you had to strip your hair with peroxide first to remove the natural color! I was disappointed but I didn't tell daddy..he told me it looked beautiful and blonde...what a sweetie!
It appears that at some point or points in our lives we all long to look differently than we do. We want more character, less character, long straight hair~remember ironing our hair on the ironing board with the clothes iron? Those with the straight hair wanted curl or body. We didn't wash our hair every day..heaven's no...we washed it once a week and put Dippity Doo on it and taped our bangs flat and rolled our hair with juice cans and then we sat under the portable hair dryer (a real modern convenience) with the bonnet attached to a tube and the bonnet made crimpy marks on your forehead and cheeks! If your boyfriend called you actually couldn't go on a date because you had just washed your hair and it took hours to dry. On the days you didn't wash your hair we carried baby powder in our purses and dusted our hair in the bathrooms at school and brushed the oil and the white talc out of our freshly bouffanted and ironed coiffures. We didn't have panty hose back in the day either. We wore panty girdles or garter belts under our mini skirts. How did we do that?? If the clasps on the garter belts or girdles broke, we used a penny to secure the hose top to the garter. Actually the boys said they enjoyed those days~sometimes the girls would forget to sit ladylike. This I heard at our 4oth high school reunion. The things those guys remembered.....they had trouble remembering their old friends' faces now.
So now that I am much older, do I long to look like something else...well, I would like to be the same weight I was 16 years ago, of course, I would like my hair to be all the rich brown it used to be without these "highlights" and sometimes, yes, it's true, I do wish my eyes were that beautiful slanted almond shape. I still don't have a real kimono either.

Wiling Away the Winter Hours

This will be the 3rd winter that I have done what I put my mind to do and I am so proud. This winter I bought a stack of books, diaries actually, of the women who ventured west in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was precipitated by my daughter's gift of Undaunted Courage: Lewis and Clark and the American West by Stephen E. Ambrose. It fascinated me so that I had to search out more and I found several womens' diaries of the family journeys that many strong and courageous women made in covered wagons, faithfully recording their daily experiences of cooking, walking beside wagons in knee deep mud, childbirth, sickness, starvation and death. Those stories are the real stories that you won't get in a high school history class. Most of these books have been compiled from letters and journals and published with respect of the original misspellings and grammar. These are better than any reality show on television~this was reality of the American dream.
Our winter has been unusually snowy, but can you imagine having to hunt for game when the cold has driven them all out, being on the barren prairie with nothing to eat, no food for your family or oxen and the oxen dropping dead and you have to help pull the wagon? Being lost on a trail that someone posted on a tree that turned out to be very treacherous and a wild goose chase? Leaving your husband or child in a makeshift grave in the middle of nowhere~a place that you will never be able to visit again? It really makes me wonder if I could have survived physically or maybe more importantly emotionally? I stay up late at night, sometimes too late, and read and wonder and try to put myself in their shoes. I write the authors of these compilations and thank them for the research that they have done and the incredible mental pictures they have given me and all the other people who have read these marvelous works gleaning out a little bit of imagined experience.

Choose a Life

Would you like to step back in time and experience a "past" life~in your mind? Would you live in a big old mansion or a covered wagon? Would you have a good parlor that was used only on Christmas and Easter, or a pan to cook in and to wash up in? Would you live on a sailing ship? Would you sift for gold? Would you be a Civil War doctor or a Scarlet O'Hara? Would you be a sulky racer or a newspaper printer? Would you be a suffragette or a President's wife? Would you wear dresses every day? Would there be no use for cars because every shop, school and office would be within walking distance? Would you be one of the workers who helped open King Tut's tomb? Would you be one of the Mayans who developed the Mayan calendar? Would you be a flapper or a fortune teller? The ideas are endless. Choose a Life and let your imagination run wild! Let me know what your "past" life would be.