Blogs I’d like to see would include:
Iconic family stories. One of my entries would include the time my brother asked me to run away with him. We were alone in the house, I helped him pack peanut butter and jelly sandwiches of which he tucked into a bandana and said he’d tie it to the end of the stick. I walked out the front door, he told me we had to go out the window or “it wouldn’t count”. He always was a bit of a romantic.
Another would include when my dad flew his private plane after his stroke and how we learned that his remembering how to fly came from a part of the brain that was more emotional vs. intellectual. Not sure if this last part is true, but it’s stuck.
Now I tell my kids about how I’d call home collect and person-to-person for the dog which was the signal for mom to come pick me up at the high school that was eleven miles away out in the country. But this is a story that isn’t so much a family story but of technology and the seventies vs. the two thousands.
Crazy things each of us believed as a kid. I thought my soul looked like a hockey puck. Exact size, not black but white, and it fit somewhere under my heart above my stomach. I think a Sunday School teacher, or my mom must have tapped their chest when I asked where the soul is. Who knows where the hockey puck shape came in.
My brothers told me the middle of a green olive was a cows tongue. This seemed logical, I mean we always had one of our heifers or steers in our freezer, noting which cuts of meat were always the last to eat.
Timelines we each drew at some point of our lives, future included. OK, maybe everybody doesn’t do this, but I have a few. The most recent was in the mid-nineties (when I find it I’ll include in this post). It had a lot of forks-in-the-road and is annotated with the randomness of what precipitated a slight shift or right-angle turn. It was made with colored pencils on tracing paper.
Maybe these personal timelines could be a collection of lists, that stuff that’s collected in that drawer that is usually called the Junk Drawer that is usually in the kitchen and always has a pair of scissors in it. I like the idea of seeing what was not intentional but yet supports the day to day to document time.
Vignettes: I’d ask people to post a photograph of those little identity-portraits of whatnot that they’ve made on a shelf–those arrangements that aren’t quite shrines but are curated gatherings of objects in random places. Wouldn’t that be great to see? I wonder what’s on my friends fireplace mantles and do they also stick their collection of (3) shaving brushes inside the medicine cabinet on the shelf next to a glass ballerina that they couldn’t get rid of because it came from their gram and it fit perfectly between the drinking glass filled with q-tips and the Benadryl box?
margo halverson 