Category Archives: Remembering

Preening

December 10, 2008 laurahinnj 11 Comments

Sometimes it feels as if the entire space he carved out in the world has simply closed over.

A coworker the other day noticed the faraway look in my eyes and asked what I was thinking about. “I’m trying to find something in my mind,” I told her. I have this penchant for losing track of stuff and then becoming obsessed with finding whatever it is. Often this necessitates tearing the house or my desk apart.

A couple weeks ago the search was for a handwritten note from my dad; one he’d written years ago to accompany the return of some money I’d loaned him. It wasn’t some thank-you note, mind you, but instead a sort of brief family history. The theme of that history was money, specifically loaned money, and detailed my father’s firmly held belief that what goes around, in terms of generosity, comes around.

Anyway… the details of the note and our family’s financial history are probably too personal to share here, but suffice it to say that I really wanted to find that note and feel the connection to my dad that it represents. I don’t have much else tangible to remember him with. When I first came across the note a couple years ago, I’d probably put it aside for safekeeping and now it’s lost forever.

😉

The other day at work I somehow started thinking about the small gold cross my dad gave me as a little girl. I’d worn it exclusively for years, on a necklace that had been my mom’s. I have even fewer tangible thngs to remember her with, save that necklace and a pair of earrings and her wedding band. I’d been obsessively hunting for that necklace and cross the last couple days and wasn’t able to put my hands on it. I found every other piece of jewerly I own, mind you, but not that simple cross my dad had given me so many years ago.

This put me in a bit of a funk, you know? Granted, my foul mood wasn’t only about that, but oftentimes some seemingly inconsequential thing is the trigger for major crankiness.

The people closest to me must be used to this part of me by now, the part that hangs the *do not disturb* sign on the door and disappears from them without any warning. Those with more open hearts don’t often understand the need of some to draw inward, in self-preservation, when life gets to be too much.

I’ve learned how to take my space when it presses in too closely, even when I can’t physically wander away. Plenty of people don’t understand that about me, don’t understand the secret hiding places I can curl myself into, that you can’t win anything by force with me, that there is no prying me out of my muteness.

I recognize it straight-away when I meet with this trait in others. Often it’s a child, but there’s plenty of people who’ve grown to adulthood processing the world in the same instinctual way I do, people who live everything from a place very deep inside. We recognize each other, somehow, and meet somewhere in the open between backing off and standing by. That’s a sweet spot, I think. A place of acceptance. A place where the things we hold onto and the lengths we hold on is understood and trusted.

(Oh and I finally found my necklace. All is right with the world again.)

😉

Remembering, Snapshots, Whatever

Pie fixes everything

November 28, 2008 laurahinnj 8 Comments

Remember doing this as a kid?

Can you imagine me pouting when the whipped-cream covered beaters went to the two youngest relatives gathered around the table and I wasn’t one of them?

Pout.

There was also some pouting involved with having to sit with the grown-ups afterwards drinking coffee and discussing important issues (arguing over politics), instead of curling up on the floor in front of a movie.

Pout.

The pie made up for it, almost.

Remembering, Snapshots

Sundog

November 24, 2008 laurahinnj 11 Comments

There’s an old folk belief
that demands a sudden gift upon spotting a sundog
and one that says it brings good luck on a long journey;
I have only words to toss into the chilly air of a November sunset
and this thought of you that stays
long after the turkey vulture, like a plane, disappears from sight.

Click on the pic for a bigger view!

Remembering, Small truths

That magical muck

October 10, 2008 laurahinnj 12 Comments

The mudflats of the tidal marshes of Sandy Hook Bay or any of the brackish creeks closer to home exhale a sharp, salty smell at low tide. Some might call it rank or putrid, but to me it smells like home. I know very well the wealth of fidgety creatures that lay exposed at low tide in that slick, smelly mud.

Very few of us have the good fortune to live as adults in the same places we knew so intimately as children. Set me in some other landscape, one of rolling hills or towering evergreen woodlands, and I can imagine myself reeling and disoriented, wondering from which direction the scent of salt water will come.

The landscape of one’s childhood is all magic and heart. For me, that magic is more about the smell of seaweed than of hay. It comes from knowing where the masses of swallows will gather in late summer or when to find scoters and scaup playing at the edge of the sea or which stand of beach plum produces every year regardless of the vagaries of weather.

This deep intimacy with a place is learned slowly; little bits of wisdom accumulated by observing the rhythms of days and years until one’s fluent with the language of a place. Anywhere else I’d miss the clamor of laughing gulls and the fall bloom of the groundsel tree, the hiss of wind across the dunes and the greening of the cordgrass in late spring. I’d miss the presence of the sea and the smell of that magical muck as the tide shrinks.

What intimate details do you recall from the landscape you grew up in? Things that only a child could know… maybe it’s the sweet scent of honeysuckle, the glow of tamaracks in fall, a pale moon in the desert, or the taste of windfall apples… tell me what you remember and long for.

😉

Remembering, Travels with the flock, Wanderings, Whatever

Time for a tease

October 8, 2008 laurahinnj 14 Comments

Susan’s counter thingy says that the Cape May Weekend is just 15 days away and I hear that Lynne has already started packing and KatDoc is saving quarters for all the tolls on the Parkway… and I’m resisting the urge to visit ahead of the rest of the flock.

I’d really like to go now while it’s still warmish and the Monarchs and Buckeyes are moving through. I’m sure Bunker Pond is still full of egrets and that there’s plenty of Peregrines soaring past the lucky people crowded in the shadow of the lighthouse and Merlins cruising low over the dunes in the late afternoon. Have a peak at some of the most recent numbers here.

Rather than that, I’ll think I’ll probably spend the next couple weekends wandering around the Pine Barrens. October is a great month to visit and there’s lots to see and do with the beginning of the cranberry harvest there.

I just got distracted with the duck numbers in that Cape May link, sorry.

Girls… you’ve got to find time to visit the Seawatch at Avalon while you’re here… it’s such a spectacle! I remember standing out in the pouring rain on Friday of last year’s weekend, wondering why you all weren’t there with me to witness the tens of thousands of scoters flying past in the fog and rain. It was just unbelievable and very wet.

😉

Something else we should all look forward to is more goofy pics of Susan playing in the surf. Though I suspect I may instead have my camera trained on Lynne as she dips her toes in the Atlantic for the first time.

So girls… what’s on your to-do-in-Cape May-lists?

Heather, you still in? John? Patrick? Patrick’s away on his honeymoon… what am I thinking?

😉

Growing up, Remembering, Whatever

Tickling the ivories

October 2, 2008 laurahinnj 19 Comments

So far as I know, my mom’s piano – my piano, still sits in the garage of the house I grew up in. Something else we didn’t have the heart to throw away after my dad died and we sold the place.

It was a battered old upright even when I first began tinkering at it. The paint was chipped and fading, keys stuck and it was perpetually out of tune, most probably because it sat in the damp basement.

The basement was a good place for a piano student though, as it had a door that kept anyone unstairs from hearing me practice. My brother’s drum set was down there too, but the door did nothing to muffle the sound of his banging. I don’t guess piano practice is painful to listen to, except for the constant repetition, compared with say, the clarinet, which I gave up in favor of the piano. I was pretty bad on the clarinet; good at making those awful squeaky sounds, but not much else.

I took lessons for a number of years; I already knew how to read music fairly well, but then had to learn to read two clefs at once and cooordinate my eyes and hands to play both parts at the same time. It amazes me that anyone ever learns to do it; it’s that hard. I never could seem to practice enough to satisfy my very strict teacher and never did learn to play much beyond a simple version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Serenade. Eventually I stopped going to lessons, probably because of some boy…

My brother Brian seems to have the most musical talent of the bunch of us; if you think of drumming as requiring musical talent, that is. He plays the trumpet like my dad did, and the guitar some and thinks he can sing, too. What always got me though, was the way he could sit down in front of that piano and play songs just by ear. His fingers were in all the wrong places and he mostly jabbed at the keys, but he could play real music as opposed to those silly songs I had to practice or those awful scale exercises meant to improve my technique.

What about you – did your parents send you for instrument lessons? Do you still play? Like me, maybe you wish you’d stuck with it?

I’m still determined to teach myself the tinwhistle. Though it does sort of remind me of the squeakiness of a clarinet. Worse, so far.

😉

Remembering, Small truths, Whatever

Legacies

September 27, 2008 laurahinnj 15 Comments

I can not:
sew
cook
decorate
match shoes to bag
make small talk
say goodbye
show interest
at baby showers

I can not stop:
looking back
pushing away
keeping secrets
being late
trying too hard
pretending
it doesn’t matter

I can:
laugh in spite of myself
(most often at myself)
wonder
be honest
be happy
be vulnerable
see love and loss
without fear

– – – – – – – – – – –

There are days when I feel like I’m writing the same blog post, over and over, but with different words. And I wonder if you all notice?

😉

(Blogging as free therapy)

There’s some tangential relationship here to this post, I think.

What has me thinking about my mom tonight, some thirty years later, I’m not sure. Probably it has to do with this lady I work with; there’s something about her and the way she carries herself in the hallway at the office. There’s times when I catch sight of her; really, it’s the sound of her shoes that reminds me of my mother – something inexplicable and familiar.

Weird.

Remembering, Wanderings

The blink of an eye

September 22, 2008 laurahinnj 9 Comments

While I was up in North Jersey on Friday to visit the hawkwatch site, I took a stroll around the campus of the college where I did my undergraduate degree.

When I was a student there it was still just a college and not a university like it is today. That change is mostly superficial, I guess, yet I went there fully expecting that I wouldn’t recognize the place for all the new buildings that have been constructed since I graduated. I was happy to find that the core of the campus was unchanged and that the feel of the place was the same to me. It does feel much more grown-up somehow, though, with a cafe attached to the library, a diner right on campus and its very own train station.

I spent an hour or so sitting on the familiar benches outside Partridge Hall, which used to house the Department of Spanish and Italian, where I spent the majority of my days for those four years. It was only twenty years ago this month that I started there as a freshman, after all.

Cripes! Where did twenty years go?

In the blink of an eye…

I’d started college as a Political Science major, of all things, but mostly C’s and a D or two (plus the riot act from my dad) convinced me that Poly Sci most probably wasn’t where my talents were.

How exactly I ended up as a Spanish Translation major is less clear in my memory, but I suppose I might have been influenced by the mission-style architecture of the campus, or my Spanish-born uncle, or more probably that I mostly always got A’s in Spanish without very much difficulty.

😉

Anyway… Spanish was a good fit for me. Not as easy one, as Montclair State is blessed with a diverse population and an excellent faculty that hardly ever cut me any slack as the only non-native speaker in most of my classes. One of my professors often ‘complimented’ me on my ‘creative’ use of the language, in fact.

😉

I never was able to make a living doing the type of translation work I love – literary translation – nor was the year spent doing legal and medical translations very lucrative, but I think I’ve been lucky since then to be able to make use of my undergraduate degree in most all of the jobs I’ve held over the years. That’s probably more than can be said for my friends who stuck with Political Science.

Of course I’m denying the fact that I had to get a graduate degree to be able to make any real money (as if!) but that’s another story, anyway.

It was nice to spend a couple hours there and see myself 18 again with the whole world for my imagining.

Books, Remembering, Snapshots, Wanderings

Skywatch Friday

August 23, 2008 laurahinnj 21 Comments

You have to know how to look at this country. You have to slow down. It isn’t pretty, but it’s beautiful.
–Kent Haruf in West of Last Chance

In the weeks before I went to North Dakota in June, I spoke to a couple people out there and the weather always came up in conversation, mainly the hope for rain to “green things up some.” Green it was, but every so often we’d come across a view like this of a pale ocean of prairie grass laid out to the horizon. More often than not there weren’t any trees to mark the edge of vision, the sky and clouds a kaleidoscope of moods, the play of sunlight on the land the only thing to distinguish one moment from the next.

Visit here for more Skywatch posts.

Dog days, Remembering, Snapshots

A year later

July 29, 2008 laurahinnj 10 Comments

It’s the Spring of your life,
I laugh at your foolishness,
protect you from danger,
make sure you grow and glow with health,
practice and play until…

It’s the Summer of your life,
What a beauty you’ve become!
You’ve (almost) grown into yourself,
You live at full tilt, with a passion for life.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

It all started innocently enough. Heartbroken and dog-less for the first time in 12 years, we found this adorable pup to ease our lonesomeness. He’s brought joy and a good amount of laughter, but also a sense of déjà-vu; that we’d done this all before, that we know all the pitfalls, have fallen for these same tricks and devilment sometime in the past. There is no better way to forget, or remember, than a puppy.

I imagine I’ll always think of them linked this way; the leaving of one so close to the coming of the other. Today is Luka’s Gotcha-Day and this past Friday marked a year since Buddy passed away.

Dogs, especially old dogs, are a treasure. They are more than themselves, they are us. Part of us. They live our life, are the calendar of our joys and sorrows. We run our fingers through our past when we caress their broad chest and velvet ears.