Monthly Archives: November 2024
The Iron and the Bottle
Irons and Ugliness
I have a hatred of irons, which is only tangentially related to the fact that I don’t like to iron. I am frightened of irons. Currently, I don’t even own one. I mean, life is short.
Remember button jars? Darning eggs? Well, I do, but just barely. Ironing was one of many tasks central to wardrobe upkeep accomplished by women in my early childhood; weekly mending, darning, ironing. These tasks were still a thing. My mother used to take the collars and cuffs off my father’s shirts and turn them to hide wear and that old nemesis, “ring around the collar.”
The reason women did all this? Polyester clothing fiber was unknown when I was a child. Everything was cotton, and it needed starching and ironing. And then polyester came along, easy care, forever-wear polyester. Women embraced this new fiber with great relief.
Less Ironing is a Good Thing
I have distinct memories of my mother ironing clothing when I was a child. (“DON’T GET TOO NEAR THE IRON!”) And she liked to sew, and she liked to do it correctly, so that involved ironing, too. It felt sacramental, the way she pressed those tissue pattern pieces.
I have many impressions of Mom standing at the ironing board with the hot iron that scared me to death. My fear was balanced by the comforting smell of cotton fabric being pressed into submission. When I was that young, her electric iron didn’t have a steam feature. So Mom used a shaker bottle to wet cothes before ironing them into hot, crisp order.
Just like Mrs. Butterworth, this ceramic bottle was in the shape of a man. You filled him with water, which you sprinkled out the top of his head. I thought he was the cutest thing ever. Mom retired the shaker bottle when she purchased her first steam iron with S&H Green Stamps, which I help paste in the book, thank you very much. The steam feature added another level to my terror (“DON’T LET THE WATER RUN OUT ON THE STEAM IRON!”).
This was the iron I learned on, because if you were a girl, you had to learn. I did, but barely. (“DON’T TURN IT TOO HIGH, YOU’LL SCORCH THE FABRIC!”) Standing there by the ironing board, that creaking contraption that always felt like it was on the verge of collapse. (“DON’T LEAN ON THE IRONING BOARD! IT MIGHT FALL!”) And if the ironing board collapsed, what would happen to the iron? Would I be holding it? Ould it swing wildly, landing on my person to burn me? Maybe my fear of hot irons is the “why” behind my lack of skill with them. (“OH MY GOD DID I LEAVE THE IRON PLUGGED IN AT HOME?!?!”)
I Visit the Past
So yes, I hated irons, but I had a fond, nostalgic memory of that shaker bottle, remembering it with the admiration of a child for the clever. Imagine my delight when I found him in an antique store a few years ago. “Oh,” I cooed, “My mom had that shaker bottle when I was a kid!” I picked him up, held him fondly.
And then I looked at it.
The sensation was something like I felt when I took my then six-year old then-niece to Disneyland, and was so excited to show off my favorite ride, it was the best ride, just wait, the line is totally worth it, let’s climb in the little ship and take off and sail through the air to the dulcet strains of…”What makes the Red Man red…UGH!” Yes. Just like that. Just like that big sinking hole you feel in your gut when you confront the casual racism in your upbringing. It’s all over Disneyland, but that’s another post.
I have some figurines in boxes from the midcentury decor fad they call “Orientalism.” Decor was littered with representations of the Far East that range from elegant to cutesy, and it’s probably–no, definitely–racist stuff, but not like this. Why is this bottle worse? Because he helped with ironing + part of your laundry = Chinese laundry…give me a break.
I grew up in South Dakota. We had no Chinese laundries, but I understand them now. Ironing is part of laundering. Laundry is a hot and dangerous task, relegated to women and minorities. This shaker bottle illustrates it.
What do you do with this stuff??
I don’t know what to do with offensive crap from the past. I know there’s a market for racist memorabilia, and many of the buyers are of the stereotyped ethnicity. There are museums of racist objects, curated and displayed so that we never forget just how pervasive and ugly it was (and is). I don’t know what my point is, other than I hate ironing and I’m also embarrassed by a relic from my childhood.
This put me to thinking about a few pieces of jewelry I own. Just three, three old pins given to me in the 1980s by a relative who thought I’d like them because I’ve collected cool old vintage pins since I was a child. I’ve been troubled by these pins for decades, but I didn’t donate them or sell them because I consider them as valuable (I think one is an Elzac) as they are offensive.
I finally wrote to two museums that accession racially stereotyped memorabilia, offering them for donation. I’ll let you know how that turns out. I’m not hopeful. The Jim Crow museum is full, which should surprise no one.
And if you’re wondering, these are NOT my beautiful Elzac Victims of Fashion pins (they both look something like this, but more sophisticated). I consider these brooches beautiful. Though I don’t wear them anymore, I’m keeping them.
What a cheerful post. Happy Holidays, and now back to our regular programming.
The Turkey
Learning the Bird
My first mother-in-law taught me how to make a Thanksgiving turkey when I was in my teens. I paid attention and learned well. When I followed her steps to make my first turkey dinner, I discovered that her recipe was ghastly. Instead of broth or butter, she used melted Crisco in her stuffing.
The next time I cooked turkey would have been in the Fall of 1982, when I decided to make Thanksgiving dinner. I invited my parents over to the corner of Skidmore and Haight, where I lived with my second husband and our wee baby girl. She was only three and a half months old. I securely wedged her little plastic baby chair in another chair, and she watched as I cooked. With my bright eyed audience, I put together a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, served it up, and felt like I knew what I was doing. No Crisco was involved.
We soon began the tradition of going up to my in-laws for that holiday. My second mother-in-law was quite vain about her cooking, but her method resulted in a bone dry bird every single time. She played fast and loose with the gin and tonics on the big day. That might have been part of it. Or maybe it was the constant stream of menthol cigarettes mucking with her tastebuds. Or how she played fast and loose with the rules of food safety, which meant she roasted the hell out of an empty bird in the wee hours of the morning and left it on the table for hours while she cooked everything else.
I liked gathering at my in-laws, but I did not like her turkey. I decided to make my own at Christmas, a holiday we celebrated at our own home. And I did it my way. I liked my results.
Buying the Bird
During my early years of being a young mother, I developed parasocial relationships with several of the checkers at our local Fred Meyer. I wrote about this in The Iris Files, as I wrote about so many of my experiences in Iris:
I’m on a first name basis with all the grocery store checkers. They call out to me as I approach with my cart full of milk and cereal, macaroni and cheese, apples, peanut butter. “Hey Iris!” They like me at the store, they jockey for the privilege of ringing me up, they make me feel funny and popular and special.
And yes, I am aware of how pathetic this is.
As part of this attachment to my local checkers, I bonded with one whose husband was Black. This sometimes happened as I went through the checkout line with my little rainbow of mixed-race daughters. A checker would shyly let me know that her husband was not white, and we would talk about how her future children might look. This was every bit as sweet as it sounds.
This young woman’s husband might have also worked at Fred Meyer—the details are lost to time—but I encountered him a few times. He was friendly to me. I’m not sure where he was from originally. He was a lovely man with a lovely way of speaking that sounded like Elmer Fudd with a French accent. Once as he was going through her line in front of me, he saw I had a turkey and exhorted me to get a turkey bag. Like I said, he sounded like Elmer Fudd with a French accent, so it sounded like “twooky-bag “when he said it.
This stuck, and my daughter and I would joke about Twooky Bags for years after.
Refining the Bird
At some point, I was divorced again, and my former mother-in-law had smoked her last Tareyton Menthol. A turkey was in order for Thanksgiving. My oldest daughter had taken over the planning and much of the execution of the feast, but she was getting her cooking tips from upscale cooking blogs. She was baffled that Safeway didn’t have canned whole chestnuts. The inability to acquire freshly tapped maple sap was another disappointment. She made do.
Our Thanksgiving celebrations quickly grew to epic proportions, partly because my daughter is such a good cook, and partly because going to someone else’s home on Thanksgiving is a fantastic luxury. We joked about Twooky Bags each year as we circled the gigantic birds we bought, preparing to roast them into submission. We were only joking, because we would never use something like that for our important meal. Wouldn’t the turkey be…wrong? Unbrowned? Weird? No turkey bags for us!
She decided that for the bird itself, she preferred Martha Stewart’s cheesecloth and white wine method. We had trouble finding cheesecloth, so we sacrificed a clean white dish towel every year. And the turkeys were good, but they cooked all day. The whole house smelled like turkey from about 6AM on. By the time that bird came out of the oven, I wanted nothing to do with it.
And it was never quite clear when the turkey would emerge. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to how long it might take to cook the bird, no accurate formula for poundage to oven time, no pop-out thermometer or wiggled turkey leg that could be trusted. We could have a crowd of hungry people circling the kitchen like vultures while it finished. Or it could finish early, and sit there getting cold while I worried about food poisoning in the body cavity stuffing.
Transforming the Bird
So the first year that my daughter no longer lived at home, the bird was my responsibility again. I bought a turkey bag. The instructions were clear and easy. I seasoned the bird, buttered the skin, popped it in the bag, and roasted it empty. It came out perfectly browned, nice and juicy, and right on time. I have never cooked a turkey without a turkey bag since.
But no turkey bag for me this year. No turkey, either. I’m bringing side dishes over to my middle daughter’s home. Like I said, going to Thanksgiving dinner at someone else’s home is a fantastic holiday luxury.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. May your day be happy and your turkey perfectly browned. And if you’re vegetarian, I wish you an edible Tofurkey.
Literary mysteries – Can you help?
Literary or not so literary
Image by 0fjd125gk87 from Pixabay
I’m looking for two stories that I read as a child and can’t locate as an adult. I know at least one of them was made into an “Outer Limits” or a “Twilight Zone.”
I thought the internet knew EVERYTHING. But it doesn’t recognize these.
Department store+y
One is about a man–a writer I think–who is disillusioned and poor (no wonder, if he’s a writer) so he decides to live in a department store. To his surprise, he discovers other people who have made the same choice. Some of them pose as mannequins, or store help, but they punish people by turning them into mannequins. At the end of the story, he’s hiding the manuscript that we have been reading, asking us to look for a mannequin of a certain description–it’s him, he’s going to be punished.
Found by April: Evening Primrose by John Collier
Endless Escalator
Another is about a man trapped on an escalator going down and he can’t seem to get off. He keeps trying, and he somehow can’t for reasons I can’t remember. So, in despair, he decides to ride down all the way down, assuming there will be an “up” escalator eventually. He rides down, down, down, almost succumbing to hunger and thirst and exhaustion. The escalator is endless. But finally he gets to the bottom, and staggers over to the up escalator. There’s a chain across it with a sign: “out of order.” This is the one I think has been turned into a script for an episode of an old TV series.
Found by Amy: Descending by Thomas M. Disch
The Poem of Giants
I’m also looking for a poem that was given to me as a handout in a college class I took. I don’t know if this was the first, second, or third go-round of my college education, which means it might have been in 1979-80, 1981-82, or 1998-2000 (it took me three tries to finally get a degree). The narrator is looking at a suburban street, when something shifts–the angle of the light, or maybe just his perspective. But he suddenly sees monstrous personifications of human emotions, like Joy or Pride or Fear, walking up his suburban street as huge blockheaded walking humanoid creatures. I loved this poem’s disorienting shift, the way it opened up to be strange and epic, and I have NEVER been able to locate it.
Rereading can be a disappointment for me (sometimes a GREAT disappointment), but I still want to read these again. If you know these works, or if you have an idea where I could post to find them, Please Let Me Know!
Thoughts after the rereads: I found both of these stories terrifying as a child. I mean, they both stuck with me. I was surprised by the language of the department store tale, so flowery and poetic and sort of silly. And the story itself is so short! Those translucent people, ancient but nimble, clambering around the balconies–that’s terrifying. Flowery, but frightening. The escalator story is more to my present tastes, as far as style and language. And it’s also terrifying. It’s interesting that both stories are about people without money trying to game the system, paying with their lives.
I wonder if anyone will lead me to the poem about the giant emotions.
I am an artiste!
Unearthed Artistic Treasure
My sister found a piece of my “artwork” while going through her old stuff and texted me photos. I really can’t stand how fantastic it is.
Why does she have this? I have no idea. Did she save it out of amusement, or was she enthralled by my talent? I’m not sure. We were on the phone together as I opened the photos, and it was hard to understand her through the rip-snorting belly laughs we were both emitting.
Let’s take a deep dive into the components of this masterpiece.
The Berryhill Dollhouse
The framework is provided by a stylized representation of the Victorian-style dollhouse that was key to the marketing and branding of my parents’ miniatures business, Berryhill. Berryhill was a very big deal in the world of miniatures for a while. No, seriously.
There was Berryhill furniture made by my parents and whichever child they could rope into furniture construction. There was a Berryhill mail order catalog that featured the furniture de famille, plus many other items of a miniature nature. There was even the Berryhill News, a charming newsletter that I had a serious hand in creating. I wrote, I reviewed, I drew exceptionally charming artwork like you see in this post!
A note here on the Berryhill dollhouse. When my parents started Berryhill, they took a dollhouse image from a notecard, redrew it, and incorporated that image into the business logo and letterhead (you can see it at the link above). Yes, that’s right, my parents didn’t actually own a dollhouse when they started their dollhouse business. This should surprise NO ONE who knew my parents.
But eventually Dad did build one that looked a great deal like the drawing. He never finished it. It spent most of its 40+ years of existence in garages and closets, lugged from house to house, town to town, state to state, more bits falling away with every move. At Dad’s estate sale, we successfully begged someone to take it away (we may have offered to pay her).
So a stylized and elongated version of the Berryhill Dollhouse forms the structure for this artistic endeavor. And rest assured, no rulers were harmed (or used) in the construction of this masterpiece. There isn’t a straight line on the page.
Let’s start with the attic, shall we?
The Genie in the attic was inspired by a popular advertisement of the day in which a genie rose out of some carpet. But it was NOT Carpeteria. I’m sure I only used the advertising genie as a reference point, rather than copying it wholesale (I copied it wholesale). But here’s the good news. Even if I did, the result is so awful that I don’t think I’m committing copyright infringement (I hope).
On to Santa.
Why Santa? I have no idea why Santa. I mean, why not Santa?
In general I do love a nice representation of Santa. I’m certain I drew this purely from my own imagination, insofar as one can ever draw a Santa in a red suit that’s been used to sell stuff in December for a hundred years and call it a work of imagination. I like how his expression is a little harder to read than most Santa faces. He looks startled. Or maybe he’s lost his glasses.
Is the sleigh upholstered? With red starfish? I’m not sure, but the gigantic candy cane is a nice touch. I’m not sure why I put it there. Maybe to give Santa something to eat while waiting for his reindeer to show up? I didn’t know how to draw reindeer back then (still don’t), so Santa was in for a long wait. He’d no doubt need a snack. Or maybe Santa was inebriated, so someone took away the reindeer reins and gave him this giant candy cane to hold, and he thinks he’s driving the reindeer, so he’s happy.
Ho! Ho! Ho!
The floating mirror is obviously a statement on, I don’t know, floating mirrors? I don’t have an isolated closeup of it because my sister didn’t send one, but you can see it in the shot below. I did a great job of coloring in the inky darkness of the glass, imbuing it with deep mystery and all the graphite from one No.2 pencil.
Let’s move onto the Golden Archway of Descending Cats.
Clearly the cats are coming from Somewhere Special. Because behind the curtain, it’s a very special glowing yellow. Like the sun, or maybe molten gold. A magnificent golden portal of some kind.
And wow, would you look at that magnificent textural work on those tubular curtains? Don’t they look real? Isn’t it just like when you stand in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the gallery of the European Masters and look at the gowns on the ladies, and you’re awed by how those masters painted textiles to the point where they look absolutely real? Like that? Right?
And then we have the random geometric shapes on the stairs, which also seem Special and Artistic. Please enjoy the shading, which seems to defy all laws of light and shadow.
You can get the full gist of the magical shading in this extended view of the staircase.
Where is the light coming from? A good question, but an even better question is, where is the light going? And what kind of particle bending did it do on its way there?
Physics, my art defies you.
Once again, my mastery with textiles shows in the pinkish-reddish-scarf-or-carpet-like thing that dangles down to a fringed terminus. I think the fringe is nicely done. The cats are nicely done as well. This means I copied them from somewhere. If you asked me to draw a cat freehand, it would look more like some circles with pointy ears and whiskers (see the featured image on this post, which is an example of my more recent artwork circa 2011).
But back to the cats. To achieve these results I must have had a few cats at hand as models. Not my own cats, Shasta and Casey, a dilute calico and a black longhair. No, these are some other cats from an ad or a book, or perhaps they are a menage of pirated cat images, I don’t remember. Their origins are as mysterious as the Glowing Yellow Archway above them.
So what does it all mean?
It all means something, yes? Something more than I liked these things when I was seventeen and stuck them all in one drawing. There must be more to it. I must have been making an artistic statement, and I have theories. Like:
- rampant commercialism contained within symbol of a closed business
- blackened floating mirror as statement on blind consumerism
- desire for magical wish fulfillment locked in eaves
- broken laws of light and shadow = determination to escape mortality
- cats as evanescent navigators of liminal spaces
- cats as angels descending from heaven (not likely since artist is not religious but it’s possible so including it)
- geometric shapes definitely not copied from younger brother’s wooden shape sorter toy
So many possibilities for interpretation, here. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
And Heather Hogan, if you happen to be reading this, I’m sorry but my sister folded this back up and kept it. I can’t frame this one and send it to you. Besides, you got the dragon.
One of my teen masterpieces should be enough for anyone.
Baskets of Momsakes
Woven Vessels
This was supposed to be about two baskets, both belonging to my mother. The first was a gift to Mom from her best friend, Phyllis, in the 1970s. Mom stored her thread in it. If you had to mend something, you’d take down this basket, lift the lid, and find the perfect spool because I swear, Mom had every color in there. The thing is, Mom’s sewing basket is an outstanding piece of Alaskan basketry that wouldn’t be out of place in a museum.
This was a gift to Mom from her lifelong best friend, Phyllis. They met as single mothers enrolled in college. My sister and I babysat for her two-year-old daughter, who would swagger through their tiny apartment wearing only a diaper, taking swigs from a bottle of Catalina salad dressing. We found both mother and daughter wildly entertaining.
Phyllis married Mike of the impressive mustache, and they moved to Alaska to teach in village schools. They had two more children. They would call once or twice a year on radio phones, voices echoing, words delayed by radio signal. In the summers, they came down to Oregon to go to the teaching college in Monmouth, with a side trip to see us. No matter where we lived–Arkansas, Montana, Washington or Oregon–we saw them in the summer.
Phyllis sent us plenty of Native art as gifts; beaded medallion necklaces, Eskimo yoyos, tiny mukluks for my baby brother when he was born, and dolls. But this basket was the best. When Mom died, Dad let me have it. I plan to pass it along to my own daughters with the story of its origin.
More baskets.
I think Mom found the second basket in an antique store. It’s a PNW grass basket. I took this one after Mom died, because it has a sweet little selection of things in it.
Going clockwise from top; her disabled parking permit, Medicare card, and last driver’s license. There are two small ceramic plates, one of which commemorates something called “EIC”, the one on top with a flower. Next to that are two tiny books, one about palmistry ( ! ) and one below, a little notepad that I found in a box of Cracker Jack in my teens. It was mine, and I kept it with my miniatures, but there it was when I opened the basket (Mom had notoriously sticky fingers).
There’s a photo-booth pic of Mom that I’d put at age nine, so 1944 or so. The shamrock ribbon is a keepsake from our first dachshund–Mom loved that dog intensely. She would dog-nap her and take her up to Bainbridge now and then for a visit. She must have taken her to the groomer. The little gold notebook is the closest thing any of us four kids have to a baby book, with notes on our early years.
I love this little trove. When I went to retrieve it from the top of the bookshelf to take a photo, I found another little grass basket from the PNW. As I picked it up, I remembered that this basket is also full of stuff.
Sculpy pins, Cub Scout and Boy Scout charms and pins, satin pouches. The specifics of these items are unknown, but I do know that they were in the basket when it was given to me by one of my middle daughter’s best friends. She lives in NY, and her mother lived in Portland. After her mother’s death, she was here finding homes for her mother’s things. This came to me along with everything in it.
Maybe it’s funny to keep this small trove from a woman I only met once. But it seems that both of these little baskets are meant to contain Momsakes. Far be it from me to edit their contents.
it’s been a bit crushing around here.
Catastrophes and Comebacks
I don’t even want to go into all the crap that’s been going on around here (clearly I am going to). We’ve been wrestling with mortality, I guess. Kidney stones for my husband, a bad fall where I cracked my head on a concrete step for me. Emergency room visits and the kinds of medical bills that mean everyone is getting a big hug for Christmas, to quote a recent meme. Then my sister had a medical event that almost took her out. But she’s here. My husband is here. I am here.
When did all the doctors get so young?
I’ve had some moments.
I took my sister to see Bonnie Raitt in early October, and we loved it. Bonnie is still going strong, as skilled and beautiful and rich a performer as ever. She lost too many people during Covid. That added an edge of bittersweet mourning to the show. When she started to sing “Angel from Montgomery,” I lost it. That was one of Brother Steve’s songs, one of his standards, and I sang the harmony on it more times than a person could ever count. So I sat and sniffled and my sister sat and sniffled and it was cathartic, but what I really wanted was to have my brother back.
My youngest daughter took me to see Maggie Rogers on the 20th anniversary of my mother’s death. I had decided to let the day pass without any public expression of grief because I wondered, after twenty years, if anyone needs to hear me beat my breast over the sparkling, complicated woman who gave birth to me. I have done so much of that.
As the concert started, a very short clip of “O mio babbino caro” filled the Moda Center. I was washed over with chills. My mother was a tremendous fan of opera. This was her favorite aria. It has popped up on important days, including the wedding day of Mom’s first grandchild, my oldest daughter. Again, chills and tears. I took my daughter’s hand, squeezed it tight, told her what was what.
Yes, I felt the presence of my mom. It had to be enough, but it was not enough. I want to have her here. To see these wonderful women I’ve raised. To meet her last grandchild, to meet her great-grandchildren.
And then there’s the election of course.
So yeah.
It’s been a rough go the last couple of months. But I’m still here. Still plugging away. Wondering how it is I got to this age, this place, with these people in this time. I’m glad to be here, make no mistake about that, but please forgive me if I’m not graceful about these changes and pains, these small triumphs and huge disappointments. I am new to getting old. It crept up on me while I was busy living. I have never done this part before.
Hey, I have a new poem out there in the world: The Red Thread
Also, I am on Bluesky now. karentheberry
Here’s a beautiful Maggie Rogers song for you. I hope it does for you what it does for me, which is to fill your already brimming heart with the pain and beauty of being alive.