Color Him Father

This photo is courtesy of the Wayback Machine--Christmas, 1982 to be exact. I made my social debut at the Chester Assembly in the small South Carolina town where my Daddy grew up. That’s me with the handmade silk dress (thanks, Mama!), my graduation pearls, and my grandmother’s kid gloves. The handsome man on my arm is my father, John N. Gaston, III.

There’s no denying I’m my father’s daughter--check out that hair and the facial structure! But I’m much more like him in ways you can’t spot right off. I learned to love baseball, British humor, and Bugs Bunny cartoons because of him. He taught me how to think for myself and stand my ground. He helped me through integers (he’s a computer scientist) and having to put my dog to sleep (he listened to me sob on the phone and gave me the warm reassurance that I was doing the right thing for a faithful companion in pain). Thanks to him, the white hair on my head is taking over more swiftly than it is in any of my siblings. But that’s not a bad thing. The kids at school call it my “wisdom streak,” and I got a bit of that from Daddy as well.

I inherited a couple of his vices, too, like complete impatience with bad design, thoughtlessness, and ignorance. We both have a tendency to fall in love with our own opinions and veer toward stubbornness more often than is good for us. But in the end, I hope that our shared capacity for love and forgiveness will help us ease over the bumpy spots.

Happy Father’s Day, Daddy. You taught me why daughters need good fathers and provided a model for the kind of father I wanted my children to have.

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Fixin' the World

Tonight at dinner, mimi and her companions got an ugly reminder that there are some folks out there who just don’t get it. The three of us were enjoying some gorgeous Kentucky weather at a sidewalk table of a Louisville pub. Next to us were two nicely-dressed women about our age doing the same. Later in the evening, our server, a darling law student at the U of L, came to us with a puzzled face, pointed to the now-empty table next to us, and asked if we’d seen the other women leave. We hadn’t. Wish we had, since they stiffed him.

I don’t know about you, but in mimi’s book, that’s tacky.

Unfortunately, tacky runs deep in a certain segment of the American population, I’m sorry to say. I’m not talking about not-knowing-how-to-dress tacky or forgetting-your-manners tacky. I mean the epitome of tacky, the I’m-better-than-you-because-I-make-more-money-than-you kind of tacky that apparently gives some people the idea that they have a license to treat other people like dirt.

Let’s face it: there are some folks who think their Mercedes keys or gated communities or season tickets or expensive bags or what have you have somehow conveyed special privileges upon them. And that’s tacky. What’s classy is treating everyone, from the man who picks up your trash cans to the Queen of Sheba, with courtesy. But since some folks don’t seem to get it, here’s mimi’s plan on how to fix the world. Or the good ol’ U.S. of A., if nothing else.

Everyone who graduates from an American college or university, especially of the Ivy League variety (because it’s folks in those tax brackets who suffer the most from this type of tacky), is required to work for a minimum of two weeks at EACH of the following jobs before being permitted to step onto their respective career ladders:

1. 1. Server in a restaurant (nothing upscale)
   

2. 2. Retail sales clerk
   

3. 3. Receptionist or other front-of-house worker in a business
   

4. 4. Candy striper in a hospital
   

5. 5. Substitute teacher
   

Each of these jobs requires hard work, patience, and service to others, skills the entitled crowd either lacks or ignores. It’s about time the folks who equate bank balances with personal worth learned that all people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. That hollering at the poor girl who answers the phone isn’t the way to get the service you want. That leaving piles of clothing in dressing rooms and unfolding stacks of T-shirts for some department store minion to handle for you is rude. That teachers earn those measly weeks off in the summer with all the early mornings, late afternoons, sacrificed weekends, and bolted-down lunches. If those women today had ever had to bust butt in the weeds at a busy restaurant, they wouldn’t have dreamed of walking away from measly $12 check. Twelve bucks! That’s not just tacky; that’s downright ugly. Thankfully, mimi has, and so had her companions, so we covered the tacky women’s missing check and wrote in a healthy tip on our own.

mimi has a sneaking suspicion that the tacky women are attending the same event she is this week. If so, and I recognize them, I’ll flash them what my college roommates used to call the ES&D (Eat Sh*t and Die) smile and see if they’re up for a lesson, bless their tacky little hearts.

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War and Remembrance

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

—John McCrae, 1919

God bless those soldiers who have given their lives to preserve our freedoms.

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Dugout Wisdom

Nothing like a rain delay to get you to daydreaming. While infosnacking on the Interwebs today (okay, while avoiding writing a synopsis!), I came across this nugget from Hall of Fame pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige:

“Never let the odds keep you from pursuing what you know in your heart you were meant to do.”

Timely advice, considering I was letting odds and everything else keep me from pursuing this particular book idea. This is the fourth book in a series I need to pitch to Dream Agent, and it’s bolloxing up the whole works.

Satchel Paige is rightly recognized as a true star of baseball, one who make the Negro Leagues such tough competition and classed up the joint once the Majors got their act together and integrated the sport. Not only that, but he pitched to major league hitters--Joe DiMaggio said that Paige was the toughest arm he ever faced--until he was 59 years old. Fifty-nine! That’s like 112 in baseball years!

He was colorful off the field, too. He named his nearly-unhittable fastballs and took pride in what he called his “be ball,” because it would, as he said, “be where I wanted it to be.”

But I have another reason to love me some Satchel Paige. My father’s favorite advice (and this is a man who grew up with a first-class raconteur in the house) was Satchel Paige’s famous “How to Stay Young” from Collier’s Magazine in 1953:

1. •Avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood.
   

2. •If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
   

3. •Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
   

4. •Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society--the social ramble ain’t restful.
   

5. •Avoid running at all times.
   

6. •And don’t look back--something might be gaining on you.
   

Good advice. Time to go work on that pitch.

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Mother Lode

There she is--Miss Carolyn, new mother of the first grandchild on both sides of the family. And there I am, all hair and bright eyes, bushy tail carefully concealed in a blanket. I posted this picture on Facebook and was astonished at how many people swore I looked just like my mother. The joke in our family is how much of a carbon copy of my Daddy I happen to be, so hearing from a fairly diverse group that I take after Mama was a surprise.

My mother never finished college--she left after two years at Queens to marry Daddy. Two years later I arrived, followed by a sister and a brother. She stayed at home with us. Despite her lack of degree, she managed to teach us all so much. Once Mama gets interested in something, look out. She can relate the provenance of every antique in her house and turn it into a history lesson or an explanation of furniture-making or restoring technique. She learned enough about drug interactions and anatomy while managing my younger sister’s serious asthma to sound like a walking PDR and impress seasoned doctors in the process. She’s an amazing cook and an accomplished tailor and dressmaker. She designed and sewed my wedding dress, cutting and hand-stitching lace medallions onto the raw silk so perfectly each side of the dress was a perfect mirror of the other (the same technique everyone went gaga over on the new Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding gown, I’ll have you know). She has a self-trained eye for design that’s never wrong--her work puts half the people on HGTV to shame, and she can do it on a real budget. And she mixes a mean bourbon eggnog.

In one favorite story from my childhood, Miss Carolyn schooled the dismissive manager of a Firestone tire center on the inner steel of the Southern woman. He wasn’t planning to replace her three separated tires--yes, they were Firestone 500s--without a hefty check first. Daddy took a crack at him while we three children and Mama lunched on some fried chicken and tried to ignore the 100+ degree heat (we were just outside of Columbia, SC, the town Daddy says in the summertime is a “direct pipeline to Hell”). Ten minutes later, Daddy stalks back, madder than the aforementioned Hell at the obdurate Firestone man. Mama wiped off her hands and sallied forth. Firestone man essentially rolled his eyes at her and told her to go fetch her husband again since menfolks handled that kind of thing.

Big mistake. Miss Carolyn is the elder daughter of a traveling salesman who taught both of his girls how engines worked and should be maintained. She coolly asked to speak with his district manager, burned up a chunk of change explaining the problem over long distance, and watched the color drain from Firestone man’s face when the “big cheese” got back on the line.

“Here,” Firestone man said, handing the phone back to my mother. “He wants to talk to you.” Big cheese told Mama that store manager would replace all four tires for the sum of $100 and have us all back on the road within the hour. “Thank you very much,” she said in that born-in-Florida, seasoned-in-Atlanta accent that has reduced men to mush for more than half a century, and hung up the phone. “Now,” she said, turning to Firestone man with a brilliant smile and putting on her sunglasses, “if you’ll just get my broom ready, I’ll get out of your hair.”

I tell you what--if I do resemble my Mama, I won’t want it to be for looks (although she has always been gorgeous). I’ll want it to be for her style. Happy Mother’s Day, Miss Carolyn.

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Mending Wall

One problem of living in the Sunshine State is the hellacious thunderstorms (go figure). We had a doozy last month--50 to 70 mph winds, crazy sideways rain, bend-over-and-kiss-your-butt-goodbye alarmist weather reports--and the long story short is that a tree between our house and the neighbor’s fell. Yep, creamed her new pool enclosure but good. It didn’t hit the main house, thank goodness, but it was a mess. Boy howdy.

And then the trouble started. We called our insurance company, gave her the information, and waited. In between then and now, there’s been power restoration, cleanup, some terse text messages about who said what about taking that tree down when, and then silence. Frankly, the ice storm that followed the thunderstorm has been worse. This week the fence guy came out, and now a chunk of the picket that used to be near the tree has been replaced with six-foot stockade. Ouch.

Robert Frost had a bit to say about fences and good neighbors. This extract from “Mending Wall” struck me:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself.

Mr. Man and I are going over with a bottle of wine to work on patching things up. Fences are one thing, but walls are something else entirely.

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The Bed List

There’s a clip in the opening credits for Castle where Nathan Fillion catches a glimpse of himself in a store window and exclaims, “I really am ruggedly handsome, aren’t I?” Why, yes, Mr. Fillion, you are. I may have come late to the party--never having watched Firefly and only picking up Castle recently, but I play a mean game of catchup thanks to streaming Netflix. If Nathan Fillion is anything like either Captain Mal Reynolds (a confident risk-taker) or Rick Castle (a clever rogue), then his ruggedly handsome self is welcome wherever, whenever.

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