An Old-Fashioned 4th of July

by RGH on July 7, 2010

When we were kids, before the people who automatically frequented all family celebrations began to age and die, we had big picnics on Independence Day. There was always enough food of every conceivable holiday persuasion to ensure that everyone present went home overstuffed, not to mention plenty of jokes, games, and (usually) happy gossip. The one thing that there wasn’t was a fireworks display because fireworks were illegal in our state at that time – which was why I had to run the gauntlet to bring them back from an adjoining state for the use of me and my friends (but not family, which definitely wouldn’t have approved). Ironically, someone would invariably provide the kids with sparklers, which get hot enough to melt metal, and there might even be a tiny firecracker or two, but real fireworks were strictly reserved for the big public displays.

Now we’re not kids anymore, and luckily we have hospitable friends with a real thing for bright and sparkly displays. Here’s a tribute to their most recent.

We hope everyone had as much fun on the 4th as the Setzers provided for their family and friends!

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Seed Packet Moment

by RGH on May 10, 2010

Our neighbor kindly prepares a large garden plot for us on an open piece of land next to where our private road joins the public road. The first year – two years ago – I got a good crop of tomatoes and potatoes. Last year, we had too much rain, and the only crops that did much of anything were Brussels sprouts and sweet green peppers. It was so wet that even the usually reliable apple trees didn’t produce.

I suppose a sensible person would say that the odds aren’t good and wonder if it is worth the trouble. As for me, I am buying plants to set out as soon as it seems sensible, given that we get frosts here sometimes into June.

Some types of produce I wasn’t able to find in plant form, however, and I found myself before a revolving rack of seed packets in the usual size, with a description on one side and a brightly colored photograph of improbably large produce on the other.

A memory overcame me. I was no longer in the local farm store, but standing beside the breakfast-room table in my childhood home with a box of seed packets  from school, whining at my parents to buy the lot instead of forcing me to go door to door, selling individual packets.  This was an annual ritual for years.

“What are we going to do with seed packets?” my father would say, irritably, shaking the cardboard box. (He didn’t like spending money, especially not on something entirely superfluous to his way of life.)

“Now, Bobby,” my mother would say, somewhat more sympathetically, “you know you’ll enjoy seeing the neighbors, and they’ll be glad of the opportunity to buy such nice seeds.”

And I’d trudge all over the neighborhood, and the outcome would be the same as it was every year. Some of the neighbors took pity. Most pleaded that they’d already bought several packets – which was almost certainly true as every other kid in the neighborhood who attended the same school was also out pushing seeds.

I’d go home. My father would say I hadn’t tried hard enough. My mother would say she just couldn’t understand why all the neighbors didn’t buy a packet. She always did. Then they’d look at each other and at me and the partially filled box of packets, and my father would open his wallet.

I wish I’d known enough to recognize then what they’d done. After all, it would have been easier on them just to have handed over the couple of dollars up front and saved all of us the trouble.

I wonder if they’d done that if I’d be planting the garden again, in spite of failures of other years. The truth of it is that  they taught me a valuable lesson, to wit: if you don’t make an effort, even if you aren’t sure of the outcome, you’ll never know what might happen.

They were great parents.

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Better, but Probably Not Good Enough

April 24, 2010

Well, here we are. The curtains are back from the cleaner’s. Everything is back in place. My lungs have almost recovered from inhaling ammonia fumes. (We started cleaning with vinegar water, but after a while green intentions gave way to a need for speed.) As always, we find ourselves going from room to room, admiring [...]

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Spring Housecleaning

April 16, 2010

Let me say up front that we are not particularly tidy people. There’s a lot of stuff in this house, not to mention all the outbuildings, my workshop and the studio. It’s probably dangerous for two creative people to stand in front of the preacher and not have the vows for both include, “to love, [...]

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Saving Someone Else’s Memories

March 20, 2010

I mentioned in an earlier post that my wife and I have a weakness for the old photo albums of others. Turns out we’re not the only ones. I’ve heard from several people who’ve done the same thing. An interesting suggestion was made about what to do with these albums that makes a lot of [...]

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Will You Ever Need to Find It Again?

March 2, 2010

One thing to consider with slide, photo and negative storage is how likely you are to need to locate a specific item again, and how often. Some examples: If you’re from the kind of family that’s always asking if you’re the one who has a certain image, you’ll definitely want to keep the family photos [...]

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A matter of disposition . . .

February 23, 2010

Most of us end up at one time or another with  lots of visual material, most of which has significance only for us and a limited circle of people. What we do with it is up to us, and people resolve the issue in different ways. Probably the most common approach, because it’s the easiest [...]

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What to do with all the pictures . . .

February 22, 2010

Even as I regret not having more photographs from my past, I realize that we are already drowning in photographic material. We are both professional photographers with thousands of pictures taken of various subjects. In addition, I have all of my parents’ and my paternal grandmother’s photographs. My wife has those of her two grandmothers and [...]

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Preserve your life . . .

February 21, 2010

A sure-fire memory jogger is just about anything tangible – photographs, memorabilia, souvenirs, toys. Even as it sometimes seem that all of us are drowning in clutter of the non-fun variety, I’d like to have some of that stuff from my childhood. I feel particularly nostalgic about my O-gauge Lionel layout, which is odd since [...]

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Memory fishing…

February 20, 2010

Before my run-in at the antique fair with the hard-rubber Mickey Mouse airplane toy, I had not even remembered I ever had such a thing. It probably wasn’t around long. I wasn’t the kind of kid who said “thank you” for a new toy and put it on a shelf to be admired. I played [...]

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