"I was utterly fascinated watching Nina make a bracelet of beads that looked like a string of flowers, one right next to the other! I would have been six and sadly didn't learn how to do that myself. "When I read those words "a bracelet of beads that looked like a string of flowers," a memory came flooding back! I went to my sewing box, where I have a jar of old beads from Rovilla's house and found the scrappy little daisy chain pictured above. It must have been a full bracelet at one time, but all I can remember is what you see now, the four little blue daisies. Maybe Nina and Rovilla made the "string of flower" bracelets as girls together!
"Even in her later years she kept a plastic container on her dresser with a hole in the lid, for stuffing hair from her hairbrush, to create the "Rats" needed to create that look. (I loved to snoop in Grandma's bedroom! She never complained, that I can remember!)"
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| Born on this day 135 years ago: my maternal
grandmother, Rovilla Heideman Lindsey (8 October 1891 - 14 June 1966) with her brothers Harry and Melville Heideman. Photo taken in 1911 when Rovilla was 20 years old. |
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| My Ancestry Binders |
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"Margaret was attracted to two works by Jasper Johns [b 1930]. The first titled Map [1961] and painted with broad, seemingly hurried brushstrokes of blue, red, yellow, and orange, bore a rough resemblance to a map of the United States, but with the borders blurred and overlapping.
"The second False Start [1959], with chaotic, sharp-edged splotches of blue, red, yellow, gray, white, and orange, also had words for the colors teenciled atop the splotches but almost never in the same color as the word. Margaret wasn't sure what all that meant, but she liked the bright, happy colors. Though she wouldn't have said so for fear of offending Charlotte, she really did find them somewhat childlike--but that was what she liked most about them. There was a playfulness to them, the sort of unbridled enthusiasm that usually fades with age or becomes buried by disappointments.
"Bitsy's appreciation of Johns was more nuanced.
"He's a trickster, trying to confuse our brains by painting the word in a different color, forcing us to look twice to make sure we got it right. Or a joker, she said, leaning closer to study the canvas, a naughty boy who scribbles on walls because he knows he can get away with it. Or maybe a philosopher? Challenging us to confront the fact that borders are just arbitrary lines marked out by somebody who woke up one day and decided to put them there. Or possibly all three. Hard to say." (all passages, 87 - 89)
My last post featured three lapel pins that I found inside of an antique trinket box belonging to my Great - great - grandmother Elizabeth Birkinbine Miller (February 28, 1838 - March 28 1925).
This post is about the box itself, which you can see above, made of cardboard, wrapped in heavy blue floral decorative paper, and lined with a piece of newspaper dated 1846. Specifically, the article describes some "buildings that are to be erected by the 1st of September 1846."Explaining the provenance of the oval box, my Grandmother Rovilla wrote the note above; and on another small scrap of paper:
"This little blue box was from my Grandma Miller.
It was a birthday present to her."
The newspaper clue reveals that the box was lined before September 1846, so perhaps it was a gift for Elizabeth's 8th birthday in February of that year.
Here is the "tiny box inside" (2 1/2" x 1 1/2") that Rovilla refers to. It is bound like a tiny book, with the dancer on the front, a mirror on the inside cover, and "Forget Me Not" on the back. Rovilla's note says that the writing is "too faint to read," but I think I figured it out:
The colorful graphic also made me think of this lapel pin that I discovered when sorting through my Grandmother Rovilla's things, enclosed in her Grandmother Elizabeth's little trinket box. I wonder who once wore this intriguing little pin, preserved among my grandmother's treasures? My guess is that it belonged to Elizabeth's daughter / Rovilla's mother -- my Great - grandmother Anna Mary.Now that it is in my possession, I wanted to learn more about what it means:
"When I see a woman wearing a little bangle, pin or badge enameled in yellow, blue, violet, green and white, and bearing the letters U. F. E. C. M., I know that I have met a woman that has pledged herself to keep as sacred the duties of a Royal Neighbor of America Lodge as those of her own household. To show that she . . . has taken such an obligation . . ."
~ from the Christian Cynosure, August, 1901
The initials:
• U – Unselfishness
• F – Faith
• E – Endurance
• C – Courage
• M – Modesty
"The Royal Neighbors of America was originally founded in 1892 as a fraternal benefit insurance society for men and women aged 16 - 60. There were 159,982 members in 1994. The organization publishes Field News, Office News, and Royal Neighbor, all monthly. The Royal Neighbors began as an auxiliary of the Modern Woodmen of the World and were then reorganized in 1895 as a separate benefit society. The rituals are rooted in deism with heavy Christian overtones, and the overall head of the organization is a Supreme Oracle. In practice, this is a typical successful insurance society, in which the fraternal ritual is increasingly irrelevant. Its good works are directed toward orphans and the deaf."
End of Summer
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
—Stanley Kunitz
Autumn Song
Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief
Laid on it for a covering,
And how sleep seems a goodly thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
And how the swift beat of the brain
Falters because it is in vain,
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf
Knowest thou not? and how the chief
Of joys seems—not to suffer pain?
Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the soul feels like a dried sheaf
Bound up at length for harvesting,
And how death seems a comely thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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| Samuel Gordon Lindsey:
"We have all been examined and passed every one. We all got vaccinated this morning and got a shot in the arm also with some kind of contagious germs I don't know what, maybe typhoid." Enlisted in January 1918, in Oklahoma. Writing from Camp Travis, San Antonia, Texas. |
As you can see from his letter, when my Great - Uncle Sam entered the United States Army, one of his first official acts in service to his country was to get vaccinated!
"It is all right to do fool things if someone is standing by able to protect us from the fruits of our folly. But, let it be emphasized, if the cultists [anti-vaxxers] inherited the earth the epidemic diseases would be upon us with their original pristine terribleness. After more than sixty years [written in 1938, thinking back to 1878] I can still hear the eloquent prayers that filled the countryside when epidemics of diphtheria appeared. One tube of antitoxin will do more good than all of these prayers. I have seen all of these things. A doctor, an M.D., must think the truth. Perhaps it would be better if he sometimes proclaimed it."
~ by Arthur E. Hertzler, M.D. (1870 - 1946)
~ from his autobiography
The Horse and Buggy Doctor: A Memoir
P.S. This memoir was recommended to me during COVID by the Chief of Staff (and endocrinologist) at UMKC Medical Center, Dr. Lee Graves. He said: "How incredible and discouraging that this quote in 1938 could have been written today."
Additionally, in January 2022, he wrote, "We are so busy again with 110 covid patients in our hospital and 500 employees out ill so things are maybe worse than they have been. Of the 110 covid patients we have hospitalized, only 5 were previously vaccinated and of the 20 in the ICU and 14 on ventilators none had been previously vaccinated. The vaccine works, and that is hope and good news."
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| Conversation at the Wall (1950)
by Wolfgang Hutter (1928 - 2014) |
An argument against . . .
The Myth of Female Inferiority
The best slave
does not need to be beaten
She beats herself.
Not with a leather whip,
or with sticks or twigs,
not with a blackjack
or a billy club,
but with the fine whip
of her own tongue
& the subtle beating
of her mind against her mind.
For who can hate her half so well
as she hates herself?
and who can match the finesse
of her self-abuse?
Years of training
are required for this.
by Erica Jong
from the long poem
"Alcestis On The Poetry Circuit"
"If woman discovers herself as the inessential and never turns into the essential, it is because she does not bring about this transformation herself. . . . they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received. . . . The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history. This is the fundamental characteristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other. One might think that this reciprocity would have facilitated her liberation." (28 - 29; in my copy 10 - 12)
"The problem of identity was new for women then, truly new. The feminists were pioneering on the front edge of woman’s evolution. They had to prove that women were human. They had to shatter, violently if necessary, the decorative Dresden figurine that represented the ideal woman of the last century. They had to prove that woman was not a passive, empty mirror, not a frilly, useless decoration, not a mindless animal, not a thing to be disposed of by others, incapable of a voice in her own existence, before they could even begin to fight for the rights women needed to become the human equals of men." (from Chapter 4; in my book 138)
"Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. . . . I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate” -- not a female eunuch."
" . . . pink: that color which is one of our markers of sexual difference and which, unlike its diacritical partner blue, remains -- way past the nursery -- marked as feminine. If blue, outside the infantile realm, is no longer a particularly masculine color, might not that relate to the phallocentrism which in our culture (as well as in most if not all others) raises the masculine to the univeral human, beyond gender, so that the feminine alone must bear the burden of sexual difference?" (163)
E.g., as with the term "coed"
"Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives; but all of that is gone. Vanished! And one day, Mr. Watts, you yourself will be gone.
"Perhaps if you have children, they will remember you; if you have grandchildren, they, God allowing, may also retain a few fragments of memory including you, but their children will not. They may keep some old photos in a book on a shelf, and perhaps two or three times in a lifetime may turn the page and find your face and think, Ah, yes, doesn’t Jimmy resemble this great-great-grandfather Mick, and continue to turn the page, and so that will be what is left of you, nearly erased, in fewer than three generations, and your life, the life you see from the inside, right now, as monumental, will be reduced to the blood in their veins and perhaps, if you are lucky, a distant namesake, a name plucked from the family tree that has come back in vogue after seventy-odd years as fashionable things tend to do and slapped on a newborn baby who will know nothing of YOU.
"And yet, if one has committed oneself to the page, the tragedy I’ve just laid out will not apply. Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?
"If all of this amounts to you as nothing more than drivel, then you might also consider a simpler value of the written letter, which is, namely, that reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world, the preservation of which has to be of some value we cannot yet see. The WRITTEN WORD, Mr. Watts. The written word in black and white. It is letters. It is books. It is law. It's all the same. I had some notion of this from as far back in life as I can remember, and I've been writing letters out into the world since I could form a sentence with the pen (age nine)."
(pp 46 - 47)
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| I was a fan of the "Granny" paper doll
for the same reason that I liked "Shirley Temple" -- because she was 18" tall! None of my other paper dolls approached this height! |
