Category — The History of Me

I’m sure all you’ve done since I’ve been gone is pray that I’d return, and that’s sweet and all, but I’m still doing what I said I was doing before at a decent pace, so this is merely a brief interruption to my sabbatical, not an end.

(I know I’m pushing it. If I stay away too much longer, the few Record fans left will give up hope and I’ll have to start all over. Just give me a little more time, please. Would it help if I told you that I have missed you?)

I’m just dropping in to share a couple gems I found in a box in the top of my closet today while I was looking at old photographs instead of packing for our trip to Abilene. It’s not really my fault I got sidetracked. Chris is the one who announced that the software update that would make our scanner work with our computer again had finally come out. How I could think about anything else with all that scanning I’ve had backing up?

Anyway, right now, I’m really just focusing on scanning in pics from undergrad. (I don’t know what I’ll do with them. Maybe I’ll put a few on Facebook or something.) But I came across one from way before undergrad and couldn’t resist pairing it up with it’s partner from HSU. Enjoy.

Me (and most of Papa Joe) at our house in New Jersey, Christmas 1985.

Me (and Janice, Darrah, and Kelly) dressed like 1985 outside The Black-Eyed Pea before some costume function at HSU, Fall 1999.

It’s too bad you can’t see the back of my hair. It was pretty incredible. If only I’d been born 10 years earlier. (Incidentally, some of my Basic Writing students thought perhaps I went to Senior Prom in 1987.) When C.C. saw this picture, he didn’t even notice our clothes. He just gave me this disapproving look and said, “Gee, Katy, you’ve really started wearing a lot of make-up since you went to college.”

Break over.

Unfortunately, I still don’t have those Official English Paper files from middle school, jr. high, and high school. I will one of these days, though, and I’ll share something from them when I do. In the meantime, how ’bout a couple writing samples from my baby book, which, for some reason, I do happen to have?

I was about five-years-old, maybe six, when I wrote these. As you can tell, I had great concern for both the animal kingdom and the Kingdom.

And lots of confusion about apostrophes, commas, and possessives. (But check out that semi-colon use, eh?)

I don’t think this first one is supposed to be a poem. My blue-crayon handwriting just took up a bunch of space per line. (I’ve preserved spelling, punctuation, and line-breaks.)

“Sam The dog”

to Dad

Sam is a dog.
Johny is his,s oner.
Johny play,s with
sam. and Sam
play,s with Johny.
Sam loves
Johny. and Johny
Loves sam.
Sam like,s cats; sam does
not clime fenses. Sam
is a boy dog. Sam
likes pepple too.

Later in the year, I figured out how to spell “fence” and the difference between an apostrophe and a comma. Apparently, I was also learning about using commas with conjunctions. I hope some instruction on pronouns and antecedents followed shortly.

(FYI, this story also included pencil illustrations of Tom, Sam, and the cross on a hill with flowers. There’s also an “I *heart* You” enclosed in a rectangle at the bottom of the page, though the recipient is unclear. Mom taped it to the back cover of my baby book, but, if you look closely, you can see some math work, involving dollar signs, on the other side of the paper.)

“Tom’s Cat”

Tom had a cat. His name was Sam. Sam was a good cat, but one day Tom fowned that he was on the fence and was chaseing a cat up a tree! Sam was a bad cat that day. But, God and Jesus helped him to be better because he died for us that we mite be saved, and that’s just what he did. And, that is how he got saved. And that was that!

As a bonus, here’s a poem (of mine) from 2003 that I’m not particularly fond of, but I’ll share it anyway, because, thematically, it fits well in this post and eliminates any doubts about the authorship of the earlier pieces. (Relax. It’s just a poem, not a theological statement.)

Searching for Maverick at Midnight

The night we left town for
a restaurant where no one
we knew could find us,
my sister called to say
Maverick was missing.

You tried to convince me
he was alive, we wouldn’t
stumble over his body,
the tips of his fur lifting
and falling with the wind
of passing cars. You said
wait until morning, we’d
get a call from the shelter.

Still, you gave up the dinner
we’d traveled three hours for,
headed back to Abilene.

We circled the neighborhood
with the windows down,
slower at my command,
the flashlight illuminating alleys
the moon couldn’t touch.
You didn’t complain about
the cold or ask me to stop
whispering his name, remind me
dogs aren’t worth crying over.

You didn’t laugh when I
suggested prayer, reverting back
to eight years old. You didn’t
scold me for believing dogs
have souls, and even if they don’t,
a God as big as ours could save
the soulless if he wanted,
could whisper one word
and raise a dog from the dead,
make a hole in the dark sky
with the slightest gust of wind,
let light shine right on Maverick.

You just smiled at me for loving
dogs as much as people and
pulled your coat tighter, aimed
the headlights down another road.

With the return of NBC to iTunes and the dawn of HD episodes, we’ve been re-watching the last season of The Office. I’d almost forgotten how funny it is. Not the show in general, just last season, because what’s fresh on my memory are the episodes after the strike. I may be in the minority, but, I think that while those episodes were good, something was just off. I didn’t feel like we were back in sync until “Did I Stutter?” where Stanley and Michael come head-to-head.

But it really is a funny season. And it brought us some major relational shifts: Dwight & Angela broken up, Michael & Jan living together, Jim & Pam dating. I care about each of those, and I know getting involved in PB&J is the cool thing to do, so I hesitate to even mention them, but it’s hard not to when I see the way Jim looks at Pam in those first few episodes.

John Krasinski nails it! I’m not sure there’s a girl in all of America whose heart doesn’t melt when he even just thinks about Pam. Last night that look got the best of me:

Me: “I’m sure Jim & Pam will end up together, even if they break up, because this is TV and it would be cruel for the writers to do that to the fans, but do you think they’d end up together in real life?”

Chris: “Of course they’re going to end up together. You can’t build that much anticipation around two characters and not put them together.”

Me: “Yeah, but I mean in real life. Would they end up together or do you think they’re too good together or something? Too much alike? You think they’d have this great relationship until a bit of doubt crept in and ruined it or do you think it’d be smooth sailing? And if they didn’t end up together, you think they’d be able to be happy?”

Chris: “Jim & Pam in real life?”

Me: “Yeah.”

Chris: “In real life, Jim & Pam aren’t real.”

Don’t worry. I know Jim & Pam aren’t real. But I do think they represent real humanity. And I don’t know if they’ll end up together on TV or not. The Office takes some close looks at some hard human issues. That’s part of what I like about it, but I doubt they’d end in such a heartbreaking spot. I don’t know if those two would end up together in real life either, but I figure there’s a higher chance that they wouldn’t in that scenario than on the airwaves.

Nothing profound came out this conversation, just that Chris doesn’t think about TV in terms of real life and he couldn’t think of a reason why those two made-for-each-others wouldn’t get together and stay together. And I, obviously, get caught up in the reality of TV all the time and wouldn’t doubt for a second that they might not end up together just because that’s the way it happens.

With that melancholic mood in place, we settled in to watch the last two S1 episodes of Mad Men, the show we’re currently watching at night. Chris picks the nighttime show — we just finished S4 of Alias and the most recent season of The Closer. He picked Mad Men too, probably because his design buddies love it, but it’s not his usual fare. It’s a quiet drama, all relationship, the opposite of what he likes. But he says he’ll come back for the second season, which is good because I’m at least mildly interested in finding out what happens to these people.

But that’s not the point. The point is the season finale wrapped and I went to sleep with this bit on “nostalgia” curled up beside me:

In case you can’t tell, Don’s an ad man, making a pitch for a slide projector. He’s a complex man who’s taken his wife for granted and run away from his past. (The guy who leaves the room crying is in the doghouse with his wife.) Don’s pitch sounds like a pitch, but I still really like what he says about nostalgia.

Then this morning I came across this story about these two young people who really are perfect for each other and know it instantly, but when they start to doubt that happiness should so be easy, they decide to test their rightness for each other by breaking up and waiting to see if life brings them back together. Years later, they do meet again, but by that time life has taken their memories and they walk past each other forever, not realizing that every other love will never be as perfect.

It’s a well-written story, and you know what? It’s what I said could happen to Jim and Pam and got scoffed at for just last night!

Just to drive this weekend’s nostalgia theme all the way home, I also read an article on eMusic where this musician lists her favorite albums. She starts the description of one with, “You know how people who love music are always talking about how an album takes them back?” That got me thinking, because while I figure she’s probably right, I’d never imagined that that’s not true for everyone. I mean, I have albums I listen to for the mere sake of going back, but that also happens unintentionally. And with all the sensory ties to memory, it’s hard to believe music wouldn’t do that even for people who aren’t “music lovers.”

Anyway, I planned on connecting all these incidents into some cohesive thoughts on the nature of nostalgia, memory, media (TV, literature, music), and the senses. (I was gonna tie The Office into memory, maybe via personality, but really, I just wanted to talk about The Office, as if you can’t tell from Twitter.) And I was going to revise each of those points down, but Caelyn’s crying, so I guess I’m not. I’m sure I’ll be getting nostalgic later this weekend anyway, so maybe I’ll have some new thoughts that’ll make a nice tie-together post on Monday.

In the meantime, this is what you get.

But I will try to sneak away for comment responding sometime this weekend! (Thanks for all yours!) And, I’m not sure if it was a request or a threat, but here ya go, JSmo! If you make your first post something about the psychology of memory, I might not even have to finish this series.

So Cristin sent me one of those All About You email questionnaires today. I’m not very good at responding to them, but Cristin did name me in response to question 19, so I figured I’d better give it shot. But then I faced a dilemma: do Cristin’s thing or blog?

Suddenly it hit me. Why not have my cake and eat it too?

Help yourself to a slice:

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Caelyn and I went to Altus a few weeks ago without Chris. That means I stayed up all night. And that means I looked through lots of old HS photos and yearbooks. . . .

I’m a pretty nostalgic person. Just last night I got nostalgic about the Little League field lights, and I’ve never played! But, for some reason, I can’t muster up an ounce of nostalgia for the town I lived in for 10 years. It’s hard to say why. Maybe because my parents live in the house I lived in from 12 to 18, not 8 to 12 (and something sweet and warm in a person gets lost after 12), or because they replaced the carpet with tile. Maybe because I didn’t love high school or because my friends have moved away. Maybe because the church I grew up in is full of different people in a different building or because the country just isn’t the same without the teenage angst.

Or maybe I’ve just turned into a big city snob.

Whatever, you’d expect me to start feeling fuzzy as soon as I cross the Red. But I don’t, not even when nostalgia-inducing events occur. This visit, my old next-door neighbor came over. Then Mom made us stop to say hello to my old band director. It was nice, but being in the band hall only made me think about how I won’t encourage Caelyn to be in band. C.C. was in town too, which was good, but it didn’t feel nostalgic. We didn’t sit around talking about the old days. We talked about the now ones.

But it was still fun to look at those pics and yearbooks. To be honest, though, I don’t remember everyone who signed them. One guy addressed me as “baby.” He was moving that summer and gave me his new number. I had to think long and hard about who he was. (To my credit, I don’t think he had a reason to call me “baby.”)

Anyway, mixed in with those yearbooks I found my Official English Paper Files for middle school, junior high, and high school. And! My Creative Writing Files for junior high and high school. I bet you didn’t know I wrote a murder mystery in the 7th grade or a courtroom drama in the 8th. There’s a romance for Freshman year, along with a re-visioned ending to Little Women (where Jo marries Laurie) and a piece about God turning outhouses into castles. I can’t not mention the state-wide anti-tabacco essay winner that landed me a “Smile In Style, Don’t Use Tobacco!” t-shirt. And let’s not forget the short-story that earned me a grand-prize trip to Electricity Camp! Of course, there were papers on Hamlet, Death of a Salesman, As I Lay Dying, and Heart of Darkness too.

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