Category: Nostalgia

The Post Office Leaves Its Stamp on Us

2/25/2013

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The post office has been in the news lately.

A lot in the news.

It's never a good sign when something we take so much for granted suddenly blips onto the radar. Built into the granted-taking is ubiquity. And seamlessness. Only when the fabric begins to show some wear do we begin to pay attention. Let's hope in this case it's not too late for salvage.

I worked for the Postal Service for 26 years, so I've been paying attention for quite some time. I've never been an apologist for the organization. Like any large entity, it has its problems, its functionality bogged beneath the weight of itself. And the USPS's quasi-semi-pseudo-governmental status hasn't contributed to its ability to thrive in a rapidly evolving communications market.

I'm not especially interested in discussing the whys or hows or the details of the decline of the Postal Service. These have been examined at length in the media and, as importantly I think, in Town Hall meetings and around the country's supper tables. Also under discussion have been the Service's many successes. Or so it would seem, judging by the public's resistance to allowing the stamp of the Postal Service to be cancelled into oblivion.

The one conversation that really fires me up is one that I don't see much written about. The Postal Service is, despite its official status, at its core a government agency. And I don't know of any such agency whose continued existence requires that it be entirely self-supporting. Sure, some agencies are able to assess user-specific fees which offset some administrative costs, but it's never assumed that the agency will generate the revenue necessary to completely pay its own way. That the Postal Service has accomplished just this for over for forty years is to its credit, but the Service should not be handcuffed to an arrangement that is no longer tenable.

Sure, we need to talk about the viability of this or that mail service or discuss improved transportation networks. We should debate the number of service days in a week. We can argue appropriate staffing levels due to changing shipping volumes. And weigh the relative value of a small post office in a rural community or the necessity of one particular processing plant or other. Every organization should always be working toward its better, smarter self. But a government's mission is not a corporation's mission. A government's mission is to serve its people.

The Postal Service's own website sums this up best:

The history of the United States Postal Service is rooted in a single, great principle: that every person in the United States – no matter who, no matter where – has the right to equal access to secure, efficient, and affordable mail service.

It would be nice for us all to write our Congresspersons. But failing that, we could always email them a link.

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Oh, Bother. Why Bother With Those Bitty Obits?

2/4/2013

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When word came this week that André Cassagnes, inventor of the Etch A Sketch, had died, a little dial twisted inside me, and a squiggly black line tugged at my heart.

I had never heard of Cassagnes, had never even considered that there might have been a real person behind that iconic, maddening toy of my childhood, behind tens of millions of other childhoods.

But here was Cassagnes—baker's son, electrical technician, man with a story—and were it not for his invention which has endured for over fifty years and the obituary reporting his death at the age of 86, I never would have heard of him.

When I first read the news of his death, I thought I'd end up writing about toys and games—even candy bars—remembered from my past, many of which have been reappearing in the stores these days in a sort of retro revival. But then I got to thinking about the obituaries themselves, how they are fading toward their own demise. And how it's looking pretty unlikely that they will ever be revived.

The good, local newspapers still print them. These notices of death are often the only means that one-time friends and distant family members have to learn about the loss. An obituary offers the practical information about arrangements and services, but it also provides a public record of an person's life. These records can be precious to generations to come, links to an otherwise inaccessible history, but in the present moment, a community that values its humanity does itself well to take pause, if only for a moment, and recognize the loss of those who have walked in its midst.

It's particularly sad to note that my own community newspaper, for economic reasons, has ceased to publish the standard obituaries. Sure, an option remains for loved ones to pay for column space to post a personally written notice. But while these paid remembrances can be heartwarming as well as illuminating, they are infrequently timely, and no replacement for those traditional postings, wherein each of the lost, regardless of means or history or social status, had one final chance to stand equally among all for recognition. For remembrance. The barest bones of our lives have become, it seems, as ephemeral as a child's scrawlings on an Etch A Sketch.

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So Whatcha Gonna Do, Card Me?

10/8/2012

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Hallmark, the greeting card behemoth, is worried.

Today's Associated Press article tells me that consumers are buying a lot fewer—a billion fewer— greeting cards per year than they were a decade ago.

A number like a billion doesn't mean all that much to me. I understand numbers that come in the size of fingers on hands or eggs in a carton or dollars on an electric bill. But I get the general idea: a billion is a lot of cards and sales are going away.

It's not hard to figure this out. With so many ways—speedy ways—to communicate, who's got the inclination to take the time to choose a card, dig up an address and slap on a stamp, not to mention hunt down a mail box to drop it in?

I'm not really feeling blue about Hallmark. Big companies have a way of tacking when market conditions shift. (Though I do feel for labor when an industry's in transition.) But I do get a bit downcast thinking about what we lose when we abandon the tactile for the virtual, the plodding for the quick.

Don't get me wrong: I love speed. I love immediacy. I love that I can take care of business in almost-real-time. I love that I can type a note to a friend in a jiff, hit the send button, and by the time I've reached for my mug and taken a sip of tea, my little bit of correspondence has already arrived at its destination. Instant gratification!

But I'm convinced of the value of the old-fashioned ways of correspondence. And it's not really about the mass-produced Hallmark sentiment. I'm thinking of the love note tucked in a lunch pail, the personal invitation, the letter of condolence, the unexpected missive sent off to a friend.

I actually make a lot of my cards. Or cobble my cards from a jumble of materials I keep on hand. I thrill to the trappings: the paper and the pens and the scissors. The rulers and the glues and the razor blades. Friends sometimes tell me how pleased they are with what I've sent. But I don't really know if they at all understand where it is I'm coming from. When I collect those materials to fashion a card or choose the words to compose a note, the pleasure is entirely mine. What joy it is to offer a friend a piece of me that says, I saved this moment to think of you. Only you.

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It's About the Hair

9/17/2012

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WHICH HAIRCUT WOULD YOU LIKE, LITTLE GIRL?

I had my hair cut Friday.

Not styled. Not shaped. Not highlighted (as a friend would advise). Not even blown dry. What I do with my hair is quite simple: I have it cut.

I have difficult hair. Thick and tough and wiry, it has more kinks than a cheap hose. Little wings flare out from my temples, from behind my ears. Depending on the season, the back might actually sport a nice wave, but the top salutes like a Marine. Well, several Marines. Saluting all seven seas. Think whisk broom. Think Chia Pet.

When I was a child, my hair was a fuzzy bubble. My mother would try to tame it by installing three fat, foamy curlers around my face, a process I hated and squirmed straight through. When I was about 10, a neighbor lady recommended a place in Santa Ana (17 miles away!) called "De Puppe," which the neighbor inelegantly pronounced Dee POOP-ee. Despite the grotesque embarrassment of the name (that shame somewhat by the fact that it was far far from home, thus minimizing the risk that I would see someone there I knew), I was optimistic. The hair lady pointed at some images on the wall, and I selected as my model a pretty girl in a blue dress with shiny, to-the-shoulder, auburn hair. The girl wore a sleek, powder blue barrette which pulled her long bangs away from her face and held them attractively at the side of her head.

I would be that girl.

I understood this was a process, that the promised transformation would involve several visits before the new and more beautiful me would emerge. So my mother drove. The De Poopy lady tugged and pulled, pinned and cut. Conditioners were applied. A special hair brush was purchased. My mother drove and drove. The De Poopy lady cut and cut. But the Chia Pet stood fast. I never got that blue barrette.

Over the years there have been attempts. There have been consultations. Hushed, Frito-breathed advice over the shampoo sink.There was even an unfortunate experiment with a lightening product. Unexpectedly and at last, liberation came in the guise of an outdoor job, when practicality demanded I crop my hair short.

And short it has stayed: #6 clippers on the sides, hand cut on top, rounded at the neck, no points on the sideburns. This formula courtesy of Barb—Barb with a touch like Edward Scissorhands. Barb, who for years had me in and out of the chair in 15 minutes and still managed to catch me up on all the gossip. Barb who never tried to sell me color. Or conditioner. Or Amway or Tupperware or Pure Romance products. Barb who never once had Fritos on her breath.

And then she was gone. One day her arm swelled up and turned purple, and that was it for the haircutting career. Barb had been poofed to the netherworld of carpal tunnel syndrome.

The magic wasn't just the clipper/cut formula. The magic was Barb. And without her I've been adrift for nearly three years, back to the tutorials, the micromanaged instructions. No no to flipping through stylebooks. No no no to the gels and creams in their gold-lettered bottles.

It was a coupon that led me back on Friday to Barb's old place. My loyalty could be bought for $7.99, the price of getting me by for 6 more weeks. And guess who was there at the salon, who ran to hug me when I stepped through the door?! Barb snapped the cape and tied it around my neck. Pumped up the chair and tugged on those wings behind my ears. Are we still using a 6 on the sides? She was one week back at work, and it was as if my heart had never skipped a beat. Though, this time the haircut took an entire 20 minutes. We had a lot of gossip to catch up on, after all.

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Back 2 Skool & the Loss of My Innocence

8/20/2012

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I love back-to-school shopping.

I have always loved back-to-school shopping.

All those aisles filled with the heady smells of pens and pencils and Crayolas and rulers and scissors and Pee Chees and glue and erasers and paints and . . .

. . . wasn't I surprised in the 5th grade when Kathy Hurd told me how much she, too, loved back-to-school shopping. O frabjous day! A soul mate!

Except . . . turns out that Kathy Hurd was talking about clothes shopping. Really? Clothes shopping??

I was stunned. It had never occurred to me to associate the joys of school shopping with shopping for clothes. Never mind that I attended Catholic school, where every new school year meant little more than replacing last year's plaid wool jumper and getting a fresh set of white blouses with the requisite Peter Pan collars. And that the fact of my orthopedic footwear didn't even allow for one single pair of saddle oxfords. Even if I had revolved in the same orbit as my public-school friends, new dresses and sweaters and anklets would hardly have been the thing to excite me into Hinshaw's Department Store in August or September or any month for that matter.

But what was even more shocking to me than the revelation that back-to-school shopping meant clothes shopping, was the obvious fact that my perception was so far out of whack. So I asked around, asked everyone I could think of. Did my 10-year-old's version of scientific research: What does back-to-school shopping mean to you? If I was off base, I wanted to know just how far off base I was.

And what I learned was that I was so far afield that I wasn't even in the ballpark. I wasn't even in a city with a ballpark. I wasn't even in a state in a country with a ballpark. Think slapped knees and raucous guffaws and lips curled in that classic, spirit-crushing "you're so weird" response. Apparently I was a 64-Crayola kid in an 8-Crayola world.

It took me a long time, but I finally found what one friend calls "my tribe." You know who you are, My Friends, my soul mates out there who understand the pleasures of a pencil's heft. Who can lose an afternoon to a stapler catalog. Who never met a ruler they didn't love. Who teem with opinions about gel pens and liquid ink. Who know to this day the smell that Crayolas leave on their hands.

Now I'm off to the office store. Folders are on sale for a penny each!

FOR EXTRA CREDIT: Read this blog entry about the Hinshaw's Arcadia Store
(goes without saying that "my" Whittier store was better!)

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If I'd Only Had The Googles

6/11/2012

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If I only had a brain, sings the Scarecrow so famously in the 1939 film classic, The Wizard of Oz.

I'm beyond wanting a brain. Just give me The Google. Or The Googles. (If singular is good, is plural better?) My midlife filing system may be getting a bit corrupt, but it turns out that there's still more than enough room in the interstices for me to keep chucking in the data.

Although I realized long ago that my mother had lied when she told me, "You can do anything you set your mind to" (my shaky hands, for instance, could never have managed a scalpel), my mind is still as eager a trapper as it ever was, those bits and bytes in my head sparkling like fireflies in a jar. And while I know that all that brain junk rattling around certainly doesn't make me any smarter, it does make me feel more secure. Which is something, I'll admit, that counts for a lot.

I was an inquisitive kid, always poking into things. My mother would drop me off at the library (a mother could do things like that, then) and leave me there for hours while I explored the day away. The trouble was, my curiosity was squelched by insecurity. I was easily embarrassed and equally afraid to admit what I didn't know. Ever worried about doing the wrong thing, I often did nothing at all. The answers to all my questions were limited to what I discovered by chance on my own.

So went my education, spiraling like a barber's pole in its contained little circle. I stuck with resources I knew I could access without risk of failure or humiliation. The dictionary was a faithful friend. The encyclopedia as well. The World Book filled the bookshelves at home. The library carried the intimidating Encyclopædia Britannica (with its funny spelling, so few pictures, and all that tiny print!) and something called Compton's, which even to a young girl seemed a resource only "babies" would use. I would never have dared to approach the librarian and ask for help. When I finally figured out how to use the card catalog, I felt as if I'd discovered the universe.

So I wonder what access to The Googles in 1968 would have meant to a girl like me, a girl who faked her way through everything so she wouldn't have to admit to not knowing anything. Not that it really matters now—aren't we all our worst enemies, in one way or other? But I'll tell you this: Last night when I happened on a bit of computer shorthand I didn't recognize, I didn't have to ask anyone but my trusty, faithful Internet friend.

Which means I can turn to you now in all my cool hipness and say with confidence that

I <3 The Googs!

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Memorial Day Without the Memories

5/28/2012

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Adrian Vaaler prepares to play "Taps"

I'll just say it: I'm lucky. Lucky to have come from a family relatively untouched by loss from war. So on this day, Memorial Day, my gratitude pours more from my head than my heart. It embarrasses me to write that, but what's true is true.

My mother, the daughter of Polish immigrants, was a first-class patriot. She understood—and felt deeply— what this country symbolized, despite its imperfections. In 1943, she saw her husband—my future father—off to a Navy destroyer in the North Atlantic. He returned. So many others did not.

My mother bore her children in the prosperity of those post-war years, and we were the beneficiaries. She tried to instill in us her loyalty to the flag, but her history was not ours, the lessons already a generation removed. Informed and influenced by the particulars of my own history, my patriotism is more guarded, more cynical.

And yet there it stands in that last sentence, preceded by its own and unapologetic possessive pronoun: my patriotism. My patriotism, which brought me yesterday, as is has for the past decade or so on this commemorative weekend, to the grounds of the Eugene Masonic Cemetery to hear Taps played at noon in the Public Square. This cemetery, quietly managed to honor its location's natural history, is home to the graves of many of our city's founding citizens as well as veterans of 15 decades of wars. To my mother, who made me stand up for the Stars and Stripes, even when they were passing on a television screen, I will say that your lessons did not go unheard. To the women and men who never lived the future I was fortunate to have had, I say "Thank you."

THIS YEAR, 2012, MARKS THE 150th ANNIVERSARY OF TAPS:

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Feels a Little Drafty in Here

5/21/2012

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I've been a bit stuck lately, writing-wise. I don't get much into the muse-myth (sparkly ideas landing unbidden on my shoulder) or the notion of writer's block (bricks—unbidden as well— blamming down to squash the sparkle). I'm pretty much of the school that believes that you just pull up your big-girl underpants and get the work done.

One of the things I do to get in the mood when I'm not in the mood is take a little side-trip through my Drafts folder in search of an idea to kick-start my ambition. The Drafts are little baubles that once caught my eye, but didn't quite make the cut on paper. In theory, what once glittered is still gold, but that doesn't always prove to be the case. This example, for instance, which just last night I hauled up from the muck:

No one knew
where the cat came from,
but there it was in
stereotypical blackness,
hunkered
behind the baptismal font,
ready to strike.

Huh????? I have absolutely no idea where that came from, nor do I now find that passage the least bit interesting, but it does get me thinking about baptismal fonts and black cats:

Which gets me thinking about mosaics and Halloween:

Which gets me thinking about witches and food:

Which gets me thinking about television and good food:

Which gets me thinking about France and French cooking:

Which gets me thinking about Julia Child and that poem about her I've been hungry to write . . .

So what have I been stalling around for?

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%*#& Is Where the Heart Is

5/14/2012

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Thanks to Cousin Lori for the sampler!

An unexpected repair to my house has me feeling grumpy. Okay, more than grumpy. Exponentially grumpy. So grumpy that I've been feeling that I don't love my house anymore. My house has betrayed me. My house makes me think I'll never trust it again. The house is a bad marriage, and I want out.

That was yesterday. Today the sun is up, the sky is blue and even though I haven't yet planted the red geraniums in the pot on the porch, it's looking like a red-geranium day. Tra la la la la la la. Pollyanna has come home at last!

I'll admit to being a bit of an optimist. Or a hopeful-ist (though some would say delusionist.) And I've never been one to blame a messenger. So I got to thinking about all the things I love about my house. Things which, despite my momentary despair, were all still true when the sun blared up over the hilltops this morning--

                                       THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MY HOUSE:

LOTS OF LIGHT AND SHADOWS       TALL ENOUGH FOR A GIRAFFE                  COOL RAILINGS

PARAMECIUM-SHAPED SPOT ON TILE ROOM FOR ALL MY JUNK WEIRDLY REFLECTIVE DOORBELL

But what I love best about my house is that
KOBI LOVES IT, TOO!

And if you feel as if you need a little Pollyanna in your life today, check out these videos:

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Mad About the Good Ol' Days

4/23/2012

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I don't watch "Mad Men." (I couldn't even make it through the first episode. I thought it was boring, not to mention that all the cigarette smoke gave my phantosmia fits.)

Elisabeth Donnelly does watch "Mad Men." And she wrote about it on the back page of The New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago. Donnelly couldn't understand why her mother, who had experienced the early 1960s first-hand, found the show "painful."

Flash forward to Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker last week. Gopnik talked about something he named the "Golden Forty-Year Rule," which suggests that the prime site for nostalgia is the forty-to-fifty-year period prior to the present time. During the 1940s, the aughts were the bee's knees. The 70s were in love with the 30s. Following that pattern, it comes as no surprise that culturally we're smitten with the 1960s.

Gopnik has a interesting theory on the reasons behind his rule, mostly having to do with who it is that actually controls the creation of pop culture. And then he leaps forward to four decades hence and considers how the 2010s will look when viewed through the lens of the forty-year future.

For the 1960s, Donnelly is that future. But confronted with a TV show and the first-person reflections of her own mother, Donnelly tips toward the media view. She's a reluctant believer in the realities of that era as expressed by someone who lived through the time.

All this leaping forward and looking back had me thinking this week: No one owns the final word on what a decade was really like. Even the past five minutes can be questioned: ask anyone who's witnessed a traffic accident what it was that actually happened. The future will collect the bits and pieces we leave behind and create the narrative as it will. All we can do is toss and scatter the best of ourselves, then settle back with our remotes and hope we'll be able to enjoy the show.

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The Post Office Leaves Its Stamp on Us

Oh, Bother. Why Bother With Those Bitty Obits?

So Whatcha Gonna Do, Card Me?

It's About the Hair

Back 2 Skool & the Loss of My Innocence

If I'd Only Had The Googles

Memorial Day Without the Memories

Feels a Little Drafty in Here

%*#& Is Where the Heart Is

Mad About the Good Ol' Days

Nancy Carol Moody

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