Monthly Archives: March 2017

There is no Frigate like a Book

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                                                 There is no Frigate like a Book                                                                                                                       To take us Lands away                                                                                                                          Nor any coursers like a Page                                                                                                                         Of prancing Poetry                                                                                                                                                      Emily Dickinson, 1894                                                                                                    

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about some of my favorite fiction books.  In order to be fair, I should also blog a bit about some of the so-called literary classics.   By the 7th or 8th grade, my friend June and I had read most of the English and American “classics,” along with many of the Russian novels.  Looking first at English literature, I still think Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is one of the best of all time!  Who can ever forget that opening line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”?  Remember the bloodthirsty, infamous Madame DaFarge knitting the names of the victims of the French Revolution into her knitting patterns.  When we were in Paris a couple of years ago, we saw the site where the many guillotine executions took place.  What a sad time in French history.

One of my other favorite English classics is Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.  I was never too much into her sister, Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre; she always seemed a bit insipid to me.  In American Literature, I always really like Nathaniel Hawthorne!  I have warned you from time to time that I am somewhat strange.  I really like The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.  In fact on my first Master’s Degree I actually did my master’s thesis on Hawthorne.  Who can forget the sad and somewhat mysterious Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter or the cursed Pyncheon family in The House of the Seven Gables?   One of my hobbies is genealogy, and perhaps learning how many of my ancestors lived in both New England and Philadelphia in the 1600’s accounts for some of my interest in the stories of this era in American history.

The House of the Seven Gables, Salem, MA

There are so many great novels in world literature that it is simply impossible to even begin to mention them all!  There is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and on and on!  Incidentally, Conrad was Polish, but he taught himself English by reading newspapers and wrote his novels in English, quite an accomplishment!

I’ve also read, or was forced to read, pretty well all of the famous Russian Novels. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is sort of an interminable bore, but his novel Anna Karina is much better in my opinion.   Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is quite good!  I also like his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, although it is pretty deep.

George Eliot

Oh so many moons ago when I taught high school English, we had a very prescribed curriculum we were expected to follow.  The poor sophomores had to read George Eliot’s novel of Victorian England, Silas Marner.  Now I have to tell you that I hated that novel (and still do, I might add), and really had to psyche myself up to teach it.  If you want to inculcate a love of reading into young people, I’m not sure Silas Marner is quite the way to do it!  My only sympathy for George Eliot, her nom de plume, was that as a woman writing in the mid 1800’s, she couldn’t publish under her own name of Mary Ann Evans, so she had to adopt the more acceptable male pen name.

For my junior students, they had to read Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, a novel of a somewhat cowardly Union soldier during the American Civil War, or the War Between the States, as it is more properly called.  Crane is a bit better than Eliot, but not by much!  I also managed to get myself into hot water with my school principal and the Fort Worth School Board because I also had my junior students ready J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.  Salinger’s novel of teenagers coming of age had way too much bad language and sexual innuendo for conservative Fort Worth in those days!

Maybe that is why getting to teach A Tale of Two Cities to the seniors was such a breath of fresh air to me.  I could actually work with a book that I personally liked and admired!  It had history, adventure, and a memorable cast of characters.

 I started this post with a famous quote from the American poetess, Emily Dickinson.  The wonderful thing about reading is that, no matter what your preferences might be, immersing yourself into a book can literally transport you to a different time and place, without ever having to leave the comfort of your own home!

©The Eclectic Grandma, 2017

Oh No! More PE Classes!

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After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School in Dallas, I headed off to North Texas State University in Denton, Texas.  I was the first person on either side of my parents’ families to go to college.  Sadly in those days … Continue reading →

Gym Classes and Other Forms of Torture

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When I was in Junior High School and Senior High School, the Dallas ISD (Independent School District) decreed that all students must have four years of PE in order to graduate.  Funny, in those days we didn’t have the epidemic of childhood obesity that we see today.  I can only recall one person in my entire graduating class of over 500 students at Thomas Jefferson High School who was “fat,” as we so nastily referred to it. In elementary school, we ran ourselves silly with playing Cowboys and Indians, King of the Hill, or Red Rover.  I also stayed active with swim classes, tumbling class, riding my horse, and plenty of outdoor activities.  I was the true tomboy in those days. Interesting, we had no diet sodas, little or no fast food, no computers or tablets.  We entertained ourselves and were generally outside the entire day when we were not in school.

For the infamous PE classes, we had the most hideous one-piece gym suits ever.  They were a stiff white, muslin type of fabric with an elastic waistband.  Our first name was embroidered in red on the front pocket and our full name on the back.  Maybe that was so that our gym teachers didn’t have to worry with trying to learn our names!  “Hey you, Waldman, get over here!”  Those gym suits would have made Marilyn Monroe look frumpy.  I was a tall skinny beanpole in those days so I looked somewhat like an old flour sack hanging on a flagpole.  I suspect they were designed by someone who flunked out of the New York Academy of Design or some such!  I am quite sure that the designer moved on to another highly successful career designing uniforms for our nation’s jails and prisons!  Maybe it was all a plot to be sure that the boys weren’t looking in our direction.

We only had two regular activities in those awful Gym classes year after year, both of which I detested.  When the weather was warm, which was most of the time in Dallas, we played girls’ softball outside.  Now I have to tell you I hate what I call object-implement games!  This entails any activity where I have to hit an object, such as a ball, shuttlecock, puck, etc., with an implement of any kind.  This would include bats, rackets, golf clubs, or even my own hands or feet.  Before I arrived on this earth, I’m sure God had a good chuckle as he was dishing out the chromosomes.  “Let’s not give this one any hand-eye coordination genes.  That should be amusing!”

The other activity when it was too cold or rainy to be tortured outside with softball, was volleyball inside the girls’ Gym.  Other people did spectacular leaps and hits back and forth over the net.  Not me, I mostly just stood there surreptitiously eyeing the clock on the wall.  Even time stood still for those endless games.  Once in a great while we got to do calisthenics.  That was fine; I loved that!  I probably would have loved and excelled at track and field types of activities or competitive swimming.  It is a shame that those activities were not offered or encouraged.  It was really a toss-up which I hated more, the softball or the volleyball, and I haven’t changed my opinion of either over the years.

Only one good thing in my life ever came out of volleyball.  At the beginning of my second year at NTSU (North Texas State University), now known by the loftier name of the University of North Texas, I went one evening with a couple of friends to the BSU or Baptist Student Union.  Now I was not Baptist or even overly religious, but figured I might meet some cute guys, so it was worth a visit.  With my hair fixed and make-up on, I wore one of my favorite dresses, an orange, two- piece dotted-swiss one.  We arrived at the BSU, and, God protect me, they were having a volleyball game!  Against my better judgement, I was coerced into playing that horrendous game yet again.

Then suddenly, Whap, right in the side of my head!  I got taken out by a spiked ball from some sadistic player across the net.  If I had been a cartoon character, I would have been covered with stars and chirping birds.  The culprit rushed to help me up and ended up walking me back to my dorm later that evening.  He turned out to be a tall, blue-eyed guy with a blond flat top.  We began dating, and the rest is history!  We now have two great looking blue-eyed, blond sons, and two adorable grandsons (and of course, two wonderful daughters-in-law as well).

It wasn’t until after we had been married for several years that Bill finally summed up the courage to tell me that he hated my beloved orange dress and thought it was hideous.  It was probably a good thing he didn’t tell me that sooner, or history might have taken a different path!

©The Eclectic Grandma, 2017

 

Favorite Skinny Dipping

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The past couple of blogs have been a bit heavier in content.  Let’s take a look at a somewhat lighter topic today!  OK.  It’s true confession time!  How many of you will actually admit to having gone skinny dipping?  You do know what that is, right?  It is swimming butt-naked, usually with the connotation of doing it secretly.  Now I guess we have all done things that our parents didn’t know about.  This was one of my little adventures.

Camp Kiwanis YMCA

Somewhere in my mid-teens, my best friend June and I decided to give skinny dipping a try.  Now we were both strong swimmers and often participated in summer swim meets and classes.  She lived about a mile or two from me, and we often spent the night at one another’s house.  She lived in a somewhat more upscale neighborhood than I did with tall shade trees in the back yard and lush, green St. Augustine grass where you could actually walk barefoot outside.   I think I have mentioned before that our yard was a mix of weeds, a bit of Bermuda grass, and lots and lots of goats-head stickers just waiting to puncture anyone stupid enough to go barefoot in the yard.

Camp Kiwanis Grounds

June and I were inseparable buddies from the fourth grade all the way through high school,  What one of us didn’t think of, the other usually did.  I don’t recall whose idea it was initially, but we decided that we would sneak out of her house in the middle of the night and go swimming.  Her house was about a mile from Bachman Lake in Dallas.  One of our favorite activities was to hike all the way around the lake.  There was a YMCA camp next to the lake, called Camp Kiwanis.   Built in the twenties, it served decades of young kids and teens until it was finally closed and torn down in the nineties.  We used to go to summer camp there.  Activities included games, crafts, canoeing, and my favorite, swimming. We even had occasional swim meets with our peers and other Y groups and camps.

So, it was only natural that when we decided to go swimming au naturel, we should pick the familiar pool at Bachman Lake for our escapade.  I don’t recall the exact time, but somewhere about 2:00 AM or so, we donned our clothes and sneakers, and out we went.  To get over to the lake, we had to cross Northwest Highway, a busy four lane highway even in those days.  Luckily for us, it was very quiet with no traffic in either direction at that hour of the night.  Across the highway we went and then strolled along the grass and under the trees to the Y Camp and pool.  There were no street lights or any kind of security guards on duty.  Once again, lucky for us!

Once there, we quickly scaled the tall fence around the pool.   We discarded our clothes and quickly slipped into the dark, still water.  The total feeling of freedom with the cool water flowing along your body was a delight.  We swam leisurely back and forth the length of the pool multiple times, enjoying the darkness and the water.  When we had our fill of swimming, we dressed again.  We hadn’t bothered to bring any towels, so we just scrambled back into our clothes still dripping and retraced our steps back home again—over the fence again, along the dark quiet lake shore, across the highway, and back to bed.

Site of the old pool

I suppose if her parents had happened to look in on us, they might have wondered why our hair and the pillows were wet!  We didn’t do it again, just the one time.  Those were no doubt safer days with less to worry about!  As the adult looking back several decades later, I am somewhat surprised at myself that we actually did it!

Interesting side note to this story—as I was looking on the internet trying to see if the camp still existed, I actually ran into a Camp Kiwanis Alumni Facebook page with some old photos of that old camp.  Like my old elementary school that I wrote about a couple of months ago, it too is long gone.  The photographs that I have attached show the big old, white camp building, some of the tree-shaded grounds, and the outline of the now filled-in old pool where June and I did our infamous skinny dipping!

Ah!  The wonders of Google!  Isn’t it interesting that google has actually evolved into a verb in today’s lexicon!!

©The Eclectic Grandma, 2017