I Want My Own Thread About ME!

That woman can talk.

this thread is about squinney Gus.... leave me out.....

gotcha

I want it all about me.

And what a pleasure to read!

(Reclines on the Wabbits couch and continues after nibbling a cucumber sandwich.)

Sometimes we would get a package from my real Mom. Once it had kewpie dolls with powder that my sister and I could put on our dressing table. They looked just like this:



Another time the package had a little pink round powder box with it's own puff. Mine had a sunflower design on the lid. We felt very girlish with these items on our previously bare topped table. One day I came home from first grade and Lori had been in our room. My new Mom, Betty was talking on the porch with one of my Dad's best friends. I came back out to the porch crying and told her Lori had spilled all of my powder from my real Mom. She shushed me away. I bit Lori really hard on her arm and made her cry, but I told Betty I didn't know who did it. Then I felt really bad and sat with Lori to watch cartoons. I held her hand.

Dad talked a lot on the phone. He had a desk in his and Betty's room that was green metal and always covered with important papers he couldn't find. When he was talking on the phone it was very serious and we all had to be quiet. One day I forgot to be quiet and when my Dad got off of the phone he came into the living room and yelled at me and grabbed my arm real tight and spanked me. His face was red. That was the only spanking my Dad ever gave me. I know he felt bad after he did it even though he didn't say so.

The hall between the kitchen, living room and which led to Dad and Betty's room, had a mustard yellow colored grate about two feet square in the floor. It had something to do with the heat and we were told not to drop things into it or it would cause a fire. My brother liked to drop stuff on purpose and lay there and wait for it to catch fire. It never did, but he scared me.

When Dad was gone to a horse sale or something, Betty had to feed all of the horses. Sometimes she would turn on the hose to fill the large water tank and forget to turn it off. After dark she would remember and ask my brother to go turn it off. He would refuse to do it cause he was afraid of the dark. He was very afraid of the dark all of the time. Betty would make him go anyway. One time he just hid behind the mullberry tree and waited until he thought the time was right and then he came back in. The next day there was a bunch of water around the tank that made a mess when the horses stepped in it and he got a spanking from Betty.

Just got back to this. Wow! Great stuff, squinney. Please continue.
You have a genuine gift, girl.

oh god.

not squinney again..

squinney does have a nice way of painting a picture while keeping her words to a minimum. Not easy to do.

Have a sandwich and some gin. I've only just begun.

Thanks Roger and Gus. I've always been minimal in words.

So much to love, but this is particularly good:



That's so YOU! :-)

By the way, I'm all for keeping this thread about squinney and just squinney.

I started calling Betty Mom. My brother wouldn't do it for a long time, but I thought it was okay cause she was nice to me and I still called my real Mom Mom when I wrote to her. I would make cards for real Mom and address them to Mom and Owl. I didn't know for a long time that his name was Al. The tufts above his ears reminded me of an owl, so I thought that was where he got his name. And my Mom collected owls, so I thought I was right. I felt really embarrassed when I learned he wasn't Owl.

When my new Mom, Betty, went to the barn to work with Sabrina and my brother, I had to watch Lori. She would just sit with me and watch tv. If it got dark before they came back I was scared. I didn't know how to change the channel and one night they didn't come back for a long time and "Gargoyles" came on the tv. I was crying when Mom came back and she went to put Lori to bed and sent me upstairs to take a bath by myself. My brother wouldn't come with me cause he thought it was funny that I was scared.

There was a brick building across from our house that everyone referred to as the old library but it also had a water treatment place somehow connected to the back side of it. Two old ladies lived in the brick building. One was named Marianne and they were very nice. They would make paper dolls with paper clothes for me, but Mom said I shouldn't be bothering them. I wrote to them one time after we moved and Marianne had died. I wanted to hug her friend.

Up the road a few blocks was a city park with a baseball diamond, picnic shelter and open area with benches. When my brother played t-ball I would take my doll over to the shelter with Lori and we would play house. One time Lori had to go to the bathroom real bad so I held her hand and took her to Mom who was in the bleachers. Later I remembered that I had left my doll. When we went back to the shelter it was gone. I just knew that the mean girls across the street had stolen her. I cried cause I thought she was real and that the mean girls would hurt her and make her cry and not know when to feed her. After the game Dad took us to Dairy Queen and let me sit on his lap. He never told me she wasn't real and couldn't feel.

If squinny gets a thread, then I should too!!!
I feel so out of touch.

Jesus lived in one of the little houses across from the park, but not on the same side as the mean girls. He had real long wavey brown hair and a beard that went all the way to his belly. He was skinny and had a long face. He rode a red lawn mower on the road but it was quiet cause it didn't really cut grass. Sometimes I felt sorry for him and sometimes he scared me. I wanted to like him and be brave and say hi or something so he didn't think I didn't like him. But, Mom and Dad said to stay away and not talk to him and didn't say why so I minded. One day Sabrina went to his house cause he offered to give her a quarter. She said his whole house was filled with quarters. He had mayonaise jars all over the floor and counters and every piece of furniture, all filled with quarters. They were even under his bed. He gave her a silver dollar and told her to keep it and remember to not judge a book by its cover. I knew what that meant and it made me cry. No one else ever found out cause that was just part of our secret talk at night before we fell asleep. We could say anything during secret talk.

Opposite the park a few blocks was a little general store. It had big jars filled with penny candy. If we went there with a quarter we could get a whole bunch of candy that the clerk put into a little brown bag. If we were gonna share, he would give us an extra bag so we could each have our own. On rare ocassions we had enough to get a strawberry creme soda or a root beer from the soda machine. I thought the soda machine was neat. I liked it when I got to be the one that pulled the bottle out. I liked the sound of another bottle appearing to takes it's place, rolling glass, clink, ching as the metal moved back into place to secure the new bottle until the right coins were inserted again. I could see through the opening and cracks to the insides of the machine and there were a lot of bottles waiting their turn. But, my favorite thing of all, even more than the candy, was the screen door at the entrance. It was rusty and it had a piece of metal across the middle that was green and said 7-Up with a red dot. The spring for the screen door was rusty and the wood frame wobbled, catching at the bottom right corner which made me have to pull harder sometimes. If you let the screen door go when you got inside, it made the most wonderful combination of creaks, wooshes and bams as only an old wooden screen door with a too tight spring can do.

I love this.

And this...

In the summer of '69 we moved back to Missouri for some reason. Dad and Mom sent us ahead to his Mom and Dad's until they could get the house sold and our things packed. I made a list so they wouldn't forget my kewpie powder.

Grandma and Grandpa G lived in a really big farmhouse that was white and had a tin roof. There were five bedrooms upstairs and I got to pick which one I wanted to sleep in while I was there. I chose the one with the big oak posts and pretended I was a princess.

We had gone to church sometimes with Dad and Mom but Grandma and Grandpa G went every Sunday and sometimes on Wednesdays and other days in the same week. One Sunday I couldn't find my socks and Grandma was getting mad cause we were gonna be late. She said to put my shoes and socks on as she bustled back to her room for something and I told her I couldn't find them. When she came bustling through the living room again she was really mad cause I still couldn't find my socks. She yelled at me and reached in my little suitcase and pulled out a pair of socks and handed them to me in a mean way. Then she slapped me. We were not late to church.

Mr. H always sat in the same place during church, fourth pew back on the left all the way over by the wall. He didn't need to sit that close cause he always fell asleep. Sometimes he would snore and my brother and I would get the giggles and Grandma would give us a sharp look. After I made friends with Scott we would sit together at the back of the church and laugh where they couldn't see us. When Mr. H was awake he had a sparkle in his eye that I liked. He was always passing out candy and pulling quarters from behind our ears. We didn't know that lots of people could do that.

There were a lot of really old people there that were already in their sixties but they were all very nice. The mens group always fixed country ham biscuits for the Easter Sunrise service. I thought it was nice that they would give their wives a day off like that.

Grandpa was a tall man, very fit. He would do exercises in the living room every morning. Sometimes he would let me sit on his shoulders while he did push ups. What I loved most was when he laid on his back and I put my belly on the bottom of his feet and he raised me way up in the air by straightening his legs. Grandma thought we might break something. One time we did and we both felt bad. Grandpa didn't seem to let it linger, but I felt really guilty when I ate dessert that night.

Grandpa had a bird dog named Lady. She lived in a shed. He told us to never open the door because she would run away. I thought she must be the lonliest dog ever cause Grandpa didn't hunt very much. Then one day she died and I cried and asked Grandpa not to do that anymore. He promised.

After Labor Day I started second grade at a little country school that was brand new. I liked my teacher and I had met some of the kids at Vacation Bible School. A little bit into the year a new girl came to our class. The teacher asked me to be her friend because we had horses and the new girl liked horses a lot. The new girl was very tall and I thought she should be in high school but I was her friend. We ate lunch together but we couldn't see-saw at recess. Her legs touched the ground on the monkey bars. She wasn't in our class very long cause she learned to read.

Our new house was a brick ranch with a basement. The formal living room upstairs had orange, red and yellow mixed shag carpet. The downstairs had pea green shag carpet. I do not like peas or anything pea green but it was in my bedroom that I shared with Sabrina.

Sabrina wasn't home very much. She got to travel with a lady that took her to a lot of horse shows all over the country. Sabrina won a lot of trophies and had articles written about her. Dad had shelves built in the basement and the trophies covered two big walls and went all around the ceiling. I thought she was very brave for doing that and being ten.

Mom hurt her back. Sometimes she couldn't move very well. My Dad was still gone a lot being an auctioneer and Mom had to do a lot of chores. Then Dad hired someone to help and a little bit later my new little sister was born. Dad wasn't there when Melody was born and my Grandma was really mad about that. She clucked her tongue a lot. But Mom seemed very happy. Her back felt better.

(Still enjoying...!)

Me too.