My kids in the kitchen, 2009

My mother neither taught me to cook nor encouraged me to learn. She cooked for the family because she had to, but she never enjoyed it. And she never invited her daughters to cook with her. If I ever did any cooking at all at home, it would have been to open a can of Campbell’s soup, add the requisite can of water, and stir it until it was ready. From Campbell’s I progressed to Lipton’s, where you actually had to measure the water and then put the ingredients in when it was boiling, but that was the extent of it.

I realized there is nothing very hard about cooking as long as you follow the recipe (and don't pick a recipe with too many steps).

In seventh and eighth grade, the girls at my school were required to take Home Ec. It was not just cooking, it also included a unit on sewing and one on childcare, but the cooking unit was the best, because we got to eat what we made. Assuming it turned out edible. Since my high school was on a college campus, we used the college facilities, which included a Home Ec “lab” with multiple shiny, well-equipped kitchens. However, I have no memory of what we actually cooked, and I certainly didn’t take any of those recipes with me past eighth grade. (Btw, the boys had one semester of Nutrition in seventh grade, and then for a year and a half they had a free period. We girls were pretty frosted about that!)

A few months after I graduated from college, I went to work for the US Department of Transportation, and moved into a house in Inman Square, Cambridge. To celebrate my first venture at living on my own, my mother gave me two cookbooks. The first, a large hardcover book, was The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer. This has been a classic for generations. In a parody of Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas, she had inscribed it “Happy Homemaking and Merry Cooking! from December 1972 on, whenever you’re in the mood.” This book has been surprisingly useful over the years, and I still consult it from time to time.

The second cookbook was The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken. This book was written in 1960, when of course women had to cook all the time whether they liked it or not. It is full of easy recipes, with humorous commentary sprinkled generously throughout. (It also has wonderful illustrations by Hilary Knight, the same artist who illustrated the Eloise books.) I actually made many of the dishes in the book during my early years on my own. Once I progressed to recipes that didn’t involve using things out of cans, I stopped looking at it. I have written about it in two previous stories, Green Onions and one actually called The I Hate to Cook Book, so I won’t repeat the hilarious recipe for Skid Road Stroganoff here.

In both of my marriages, it has been my husband who has done most of the cooking. Currently I am responsible for making dinner on Thursday nights, and one night a week seems like plenty. When Molly is home, I generally get her to cook with me, and in fact, she frequently finds interesting recipes online that we try out together. During the times when Sabrina has been at home too, the three of us actually had fun cooking together, and Sabrina contributed a lot of British recipes, as described in the Green Onions story I referred to earlier.

At some point I realized that there is nothing particularly hard about cooking as long as you follow the recipe (and don’t pick a recipe with too many steps). I admire people who can just make it up as they go, but to me that seems like a recipe for disaster.

NOT my family – we didn’t dress like this for flying, or play checkers

I took my first airplane trip long before my first train trip, unless you count New York subways as trains, which I don’t. But I love trains so much more.

I took my first airplane trip long before my first train trip, but I love trains so much more.

Planes

My first airplane flight occurred in the spring of 1961, when I was 9½ years old (wouldn’t be 10 until the end of August). My family went to Fort Lauderdale for spring break, as described in Remember (Walking in the Sand). I’ve heard about people getting dressed up for flying (as in the featured image), but I don’t think we did. My mother, sisters, and I may have been wearing skirts, because it wasn’t that common to wear slacks then. And my father might have been in a suit. But my mother certainly didn’t have a corsage! Note that the father in the picture is smoking a cigarette. It’s certainly possible that my parents were smoking cigarettes on the plane. I was used to the smoke and didn’t mind it. My father switched to a pipe after the Surgeon General’s report came out, but that wasn’t until 1964.

Newark Airport was tiny at that time, and parking was easy and close. Of course there was no security, so you only had to arrive a few minutes before boarding time. You walked out on the tarmac and up a metal flight of stairs to get onto the plane. I imagine we checked our luggage, I don’t think anyone carried it onto the plane in those days, but I don’t have a specific memory of it – I was only 9½, and I’m sure my parents handled all that. I may not have even had a separate suitcase. Of course we were served a meal on the flight, with real silverware. We might have complained about the quality of the food, not realizing that some day we would wish we could have that lousy airline food back again, instead of just a package of pretzels.

After that Florida trip, I flew to Michigan for three summers in a row, in 1961, ’62, and ’63, to go to summer camp. This trip involved changing planes in Detroit, because there was a large plane from Newark to Detroit, and then a smaller plane from Detroit to Traverse City. The first summer, when I was about to turn 10, I went  with my sisters, who were 15 and 17, and were also going to the same camp. That was the last year they went though, so the other two years I was on my own. I don’t remember whether I was nervous about traveling by myself or not, so it couldn’t have been too traumatic. I probably didn’t have much luggage on any of those flights, because we always sent a big trunk to camp ahead of time with whatever clothes and other items we would need.

As a result of all these trips, I was pretty blasé about flying before I was twelve. I do remember though, that I always sat in a window seat and enjoyed watching the propellers as the plane was taking off. (As I recall, there were men who came out and gave them a spin to get them started.) Then at some point there came a trip where I noticed that there were no propellers on the wings of the plane I was in, and I got a little panicky thinking that the propellers had fallen off. I’m not sure when that first jet ride was. Someone reassured me that we could make the trip safely without propellers, and they hadn’t fallen off, they just weren’t needed any more.

Trains

My first train trip was a long one, four days from Vancouver to Montreal, in August 1970, just before my 19th birthday. This was described in my story Planes, Trains, and Automobiles on the Hitchhiking prompt, because I hitchhiked from San Francisco to Seattle before getting a ride to Vancouver to take the train across Canada. I fell in love with train travel then, despite sitting up for the entire four days and three nights. It would have been more comfortable in a sleeper car, but probably not as much fun.

Since that time, I have taken many train trips in Europe. Two of them are described in On the Road Again (England and Wales, and then Brussels to Athens) and a third, through Spain, in Livin’ La Vida Loca. Train travel in Europe is so much better, and more prevalent, than in the US.

My only unpleasant train memory occurred in the ’90s, on an overnight train from Vienna to Florence. We did have a sleeper compartment, but we were informed that we were not allowed to lock the door because the conductor had to be able to come in during the night to check our tickets – maybe when we crossed the border from Austria into Italy. I had our Traveler’s Checks (remember those?) in a bag that was under my head like a pillow while I slept, and somebody came in and stole them! Didn’t take the whole bag, just took the checks out and left the bag. Guess it’s not always good to be a sound sleeper! It was pretty creepy to think about afterwards. But we didn’t lose any money, we just had to spend much of our first day in Florence at the American Express office while they contacted our Sacramento bank, which was tricky with the nine-hour time difference.

Here is the only train photo I could find, from a much more recent (2011) trip to England. We were traveling from London to Norwich to visit Sabrina, who was studying at the University of East Anglia. We had been flying all night to get from Sacramento to London, then had to hustle from Heathrow to the Liverpool Street train station to catch the train we had reserved.** That’s why two of our party are sound asleep! Trains are great for sleeping!

And finally, for those who have read the Harry Potter books, or seen the movies, here I am at King’s Cross Station on that same 2011 trip, trying to run through the barrier to Platform 9¾, which is how the students got to the train to Hogwarts.

** In the UK, it is MUCH more expensive to buy a ticket at the station than to buy it in advance. But if you buy it in advance and you miss your train, you are out of luck. You can’t transfer the ticket to a later train. Thank you British Rail!

What follows are two fairy tale endings to stories I wrote last month.

Here are two fairy tale endings to stories I wrote last month.

Favorite Teacher

As you know, I wrote a letter to my first grade teacher when I got her street address from the funeral home that had handled her husband’s funeral four years ago. She wrote back to me, and also sent me a picture from her wedding. I wrote to her again to ask if I could publish those portions of her letter that are about me, but I haven’t heard back from her. I will paraphrase and say that she did remember me, she was pretty sure that I was the child in the wedding picture wearing the coat with white buttons [I am], and that she was proud of my becoming a lawyer, although she had thought I might become a doctor like my father. She also said that I was such a smart child that she took me to an eighth grade classroom to read to them, showing off that I could read eighth grade books as a first grader. I don’t remember that, but I thought it was pretty cool that, at 89 years old, she still did!

Priciest Purchase

As you also know, last year my husband and I attempted to buy a painting from his cousin’s wife, an established professional artist, but the painting was crunched when their car was hit by a truck on Interstate 80 on their way to our house for Thanksgiving dinner. Almost a full year later, she has painted another picture, not the same but similar, and we have just bought it and hung it in our living room. This one is called Trade Secrets. Is that a less risky name than High Jinx? I’m not sure, but it did arrive here safely. Here it is hanging on our wall.

Two “happily ever after” stories, don’t you think?

I have no particular memory of having fairy tales read to me when I was small, or of reading them myself when I was older. But I certainly knew all the classic fairy tales, whether involving princesses or motherless children, fairies or elves, or various animals (wolves, pigs, bears, goats), so I must have absorbed them in some fashion now lost in memory’s haze. I don’t have a favorite, but here are two that have special meaning to me for different reasons.

I can't think of one fairy tale that is my favorite, but here are two that have special meaning to me for different reasons.

The Princess and the Pea

This fairy tale seems sillier than most, and the last line of Hans Christian Andersen’s version – “Now see, that was a real story!” – suggests that he knew it was hard for even young children to believe. The plot goes like this, if you’ve forgotten. A prince is ready to get married, but is told that he can’t just marry any old princess, she has to be a “real” princess, as defined by various characteristics, depending on which version of the story you read. He travels around to other kingdoms, but all of the princesses are unsatisfactory. Back at his home castle, one night there is a terrible storm, and answering a knock at the door he finds a very wet princess standing there seeking shelter. So of course he invites her in. To find out if she is a “real” princess, the queen puts a pea underneath twenty mattresses, saying that only a real princess will feel it. The next morning when the princess comes downstairs and they ask her how she slept, she says she couldn’t sleep a wink because there was something hard in the bed and she is black and blue all over. This shows she is a “real” princess, so they get married, and presumably live happily ever after. The pea is put in a museum.

Why do I like this fairy tale? Because it resulted in a wonderful Broadway musical comedy.

Once Upon A Mattress opened in May 1959 and ran until July 1960. It turned the Hans Christian Andersen tale into a hilarious comedy, and featured the Broadway debut of a new young talent named Carol Burnett. She plays a brash, unrefined princess who comes from the northern swamps. She arrives at the castle dripping wet, not because of a storm, but because she swam the moat to get there. Her name is Winifred, but she goes by Fred. She is the opposite of what the queen is looking for in a “real” princess to marry her son. The queen, who has devised different tests for twelve previous princesses, calculated to make them fail, decides that for this one, it should be a test of her sensitivity, and thus comes up with the idea of a pea under twenty mattresses. At the end of the show, after Fred qualifies to marry the prince because she had a sleepless night, the court jester is shown removing weapons and other sharp objects from beneath the mattresses, which had been placed there, unbeknownst to the queen, to ensure that Fred would pass the test.

Seeing this musical when I was eight years old, I fell in love with it, and with Carol Burnett too. We got the original cast album and I learned all the songs, many of which I can still remember, including the one that provides the title to this story.

The Ugly Duckling

As I’m sure everyone knows, in this story a swan egg gets mixed in with a bunch of duck eggs. When it hatches, it doesn’t look like the other ducklings, so everyone hates him and is mean to him. He gets chased away from many different places, and when finally he finds some wild geese who are willing to accept him even though he is ugly, they all end up getting shot by hunters. (That scene is not in most children’s books, but in the original Hans Christian Andersen version, the water turns red with their blood.) A couple of miserable, lonely years pass, but finally he sees some beautiful swans. He thinks they will hate him too, and he expects to be pecked to death, but it turns out they welcome him, and when he looks at his reflection in the water, he finally realizes he is a swan.

I don’t know if this tale had any particular impact on me when I was a child. But for the past fifty years I have described my transition from high school to college as the ugly duckling becoming a swan. In junior high/high school I was not popular. I had braces for some of the time, and glasses for most of it, I was too tall and too skinny, and worst of all, I was too smart and too outspoken. Even at a school which was entirely college prep, girls were expected to be more decorative than intelligent. I never had a real date until senior year of high school, and even then it was a boy from outside, not from my school. I didn’t think I would ever fit in. And then I got to Radcliffe, and all of a sudden I had lots of friends, and lots of boys asking me out, and I didn’t have to hide that I was smart in order to be popular. I truly felt like the ugly duckling who had turned into a swan!

4 pieces of the 5-piece set

The summer before my senior year of high school, my mother decided to redo my bedroom for me. She bought a five-piece set of teak furniture (wide dresser, tall chest, night table, desk, and desk chair), plus a 6′ x 9′ Rya rug, and also had teak bookshelves mounted on one of my walls. The dresser, chest, and night table all matched. Those with a keen eye will notice that the desk had a different kind of drawer pulls, recessed in instead of sticking out, but the wood matched very nicely, as did the wood on the desk chair. I don’t know if she found a killer sale at a Scandinavian furniture store or what, but she bought all these beautiful pieces without even consulting me. Of course I was delighted with it, they were much better than the childish furniture I had been using all my life. But it did seem odd when I only had one more year of living at home full-time before I went off to college.

Teak chest was 5th piece of the set

Just before my senior year of high school, my mother redid my bedroom with a 5-piece set of teak furniture and a 6' x 9' Rya rug.

Many years later, when my parents decided they didn’t need their piano any more, and I was the only one of the three sisters who wanted it, they rented space in a moving van to take it from New Jersey to California, and since it was the same price whether they sent one item or many, they sent me the whole 5-piece teak set (which is why I was able to take pictures of it now). Four of the pieces are in my daughter Molly’s room (which used to be my older daughter Sabrina’s room, so she was the first to use the furniture), and the tall chest, which was in my son Ben’s room for a while, is now at the end of the hall, and being used for storage.

When I went off to college, I had dorm furniture all four years, of course, although I decorated the walls with posters – a combination of art reproductions and political slogans. At the beginning of sophomore year, my roommate Kathy and I decided to buy matching bedspreads and throw rugs and maybe even curtains, to class up the room a little bit. So we went off to Filene’s basement in Boston to see what we could find. Her favorite color was purple and mine was orange, and we didn’t think combining those colors would work, so we ended up compromising on a lovely forest green. Wish I had pictures of our room, but nobody had a camera in those days.

When I got my first job after college, and was moving into an unfurnished house in Cambridge, I needed my own furniture for the first time. For my bed, my mother took me to a little old mattress-maker in Nutley, New Jersey, and he made me a mattress by hand. It was a work of art. I still have it FIFTY YEARS LATER, and it is still comfortable. Here is a picture of it in my son Ben’s room, although not on the original platform that we bought in 1972. My roommates were impressed that my mother was progressive enough to get me a double bed instead of a twin – my father said “what does she need such a big bed for?” and I have no idea what my mother’s response was.

Two last items of furniture that have feathered my nest since I moved to Sacramento deserve to be mentioned. The first is this set of two wonderfully comfy chairs that are mushroom-colored and sort of mushroom-shaped. They were called Zurich chairs when I bought them, and that’s how we’ve always referred to them. But when I searched for “Zurich chair” online just now, to see if there was a definition, the pictures I found looked nothing like my chairs. So I just don’t know. But here they are. I have had them for more than forty years, and while they look a little beat up, they are still the most comfortable chairs in my house.

Finally, before I had my first baby, I bought a La-Z-Boy rocker-recliner. It was the perfect chair for nursing, and I often fell asleep in it along with whichever baby I was nursing. Sometimes I slept in it for half the night. We kept it for years after all three babies were grown, but we didn’t really have a good place to put it since none of the kids wanted it in their rooms. We ended up with it in our bedroom, but we were just piling clothes on it. So a few years ago we gave it away, courtesy of the Craigslist “free stuff” section. And now, writing this story, I’m wishing I had it back. Here’s what it looked like.

When it was upright, it was a rocking chair, great for rocking babies to sleep. Then, if you pulled on that handle on the side, a footrest would come out and the back would go way back, so that you could be almost horizontal. Very comfortable either way. I feel nostalgic for it, but in truth, if I had it back now, I still wouldn’t have a good place to put it.

♪ And I’m one step ahead of the shoe shine ♪
♪ Two steps away from the county line ♫♪
♪ Just trying to keep my customers satisfied, ♫
♫ Satisfied. ♪
— Paul Simon

Nordstrom is famous for customer service, including taking back a pair of automobile tires even though they don't sell tires.

On October 20, 1989, Nordstrom, the Seattle-based department store, opened its first store in Sacramento. It was three days after the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area and shook up Sacramento a bit as well, so it was nice to have some good news. The Sacramento Bee covered the Nordstrom opening, saying “If there is indeed a heaven, and if it has a department store, it’s probably a Nordstrom.” There was a black-tie event the night before the official opening, where 2,000 people paid $100 each as a benefit for the Junior League of Sacramento. My husband and I, at home with a four-year-old and a one-year-old, were not part of that exclusive group, who “snacked on caviar and salmon and admired the shoe department’s 50,000 pair collection,” according to the Bee.

We were not familiar with the merchandise Nordstrom carried, since they hadn’t ever had stores anywhere that either of us had lived, but we quickly learned that they were famous for customer service. There was a legendary story about a customer who went into a Nordstrom store wanting to return a pair of automobile tires, and even though Nordstrom has never carried tires, they took them and gave the man a refund. I was never sure if this story was true or not, but now, thanks to the internet, I have confirmed that it is. Apparently the tires had been purchased at a different store that had previously occupied the same location, and when the man had bought the tires there, he was told that he could bring them back at any time. So the Nordstrom clerk called a tire company to find out how much they were worth, and paid him that amount.

We were following the news coverage about the Nordstrom opening pretty closely, and especially all the promotional offers they were making to entice customers to come to the store. One promotion, in the children’s department, was that you could get your children’s portrait taken for free by a famous photographer named Sorenson. (I haven’t been able to find him online while writing this story, but he was alleged to be famous at the time.) We dressed up our children in their nicest clothes, and drove to the shopping center where the Nordstrom store was. We didn’t even have to wait too long, and the photographer was wonderful, took lots of pictures, and didn’t ask for a dime, as promised. However, when we went back to look at the proofs, a week or so later, that’s when we learned the sad truth – the sitting was free, but the pictures were not. Of course that was our misunderstanding, and we couldn’t convince them that we should be entitled to a free picture based on their offer. We did get to keep all the proofs though. We only bought one picture, but we splurged on an 11″ x 14″, with a finish that made it look like a painting. We took it to an art store and had it matted and framed, which probably cost more than the photo itself. It was, and is, a work of art, and I still cherish it now, thirty-three years later.

Getting back to the customer service that Nordstrom is so famous for, I have taken back a pair of my daughter’s sandals a full year after buying them, when they had clearly been worn for an entire summer, and they still gave me a full refund. I have returned other shoes, and occasional articles of clothing, with no problem. So I have no complaint with their customer service. Sadly, the Sacramento store that opened in 1989 closed in 2020 because of Covid, and later announced that it would not be reopening, so I can’t shop with them any more unless I take a long drive.

Note: Many people mistakenly refer to the store as Nordstrom’s, with an apostrophe S, and that is incorrect. The store’s name is not a possessive like Macy’s. Just so you know, because you wouldn’t want to get it wrong if it ever comes up in conversation.

At first blush, writing about a history of drug use seems risky. But I am not running for public office (remember when Bill Clinton had to say that he didn’t inhale?), and now that my kids are grown, I don’t mind them knowing that I was a little wild in my youth. Can’t imagine that anyone else would care. Six years ago, when the prompt “Altered States” came up, I wasn’t ready to publish a tell-all, but now I’m okay with it.

Seems like we had much more fun being in our twenties in the '70s than we do now that we are in our seventies in the '20s!

I was first introduced to marijuana at a summer program I attended at Syracuse University before my senior year of high school. (See With a Little Help From My Friends, and  A Whiter Shade of Pale.) I thought smoking dope was great, much better than drinking alcohol. Also easier to get, because you didn’t have to show proof of age, like you did to buy alcohol. I continued smoking senior year (although only at my friend Amy’s house, because her parents were never home) and all through college. In college, everyone I knew smoked, if not when they first got there, certainly before they graduated. Absolutely everyone. No matter how straight they were when they arrived in Cambridge. Grass, and occasionally hash, were present at all the parties I went to, and made everything more fun and more intense. Ginger Baker drum solos were the best thing to dance to stoned. Movies were better stoned too, especially ones like Yellow Submarine and Woodstock. I occasionally tried mescaline and LSD and enjoyed them too, although they were a little scary because you took one pill and you never knew how wasted you were going to get or how long it would last. Once, when I was tripping, a friend invited me to go for a motorcycle ride with him, but I had the sense to decline. Even in my altered state, I knew I might decide it would be fun to let go of him and just go flying through the air, which would have landed me in the hospital or the morgue.

Internet picture, not mine

It wasn’t until I was in law school that I was exposed to cocaine. My first experience was like something out of Hollywood — we actually snorted it off of a mirror, through a crisp rolled-up hundred dollar bill. I loved cocaine because it made me so wide awake and aware of everything around me. Getting stoned (or getting drunk) usually led to my falling asleep, but with cocaine I could stay up all night. Once I graduated and got a real job, I gravitated to the other people in my office who were into drugs. It was a small but fun group to hang around with, and made the transition from school to work much easier. One of the interns had a side gig as a coke dealer, so he could always get some for any of us who wanted it. However, after I had known him for a couple of years, we were talking on the phone one night, arranging for me to buy some coke from him. All of a sudden, he addressed me by my full name, and then said “so I will bring it over to your house, which is at [my street address] at 7:00 tomorrow night.” I felt a chill go through me. Why did he say all those facts so clearly? He must be setting me up for a bust! So I said, “you know what? I changed my mind. I don’t want to buy anything after all.” He said okay, and we hung up. And after that, I never snorted coke again. I will never know for sure whether I would have been busted if I had gone through with the purchase, but it seems likely.

After getting married, my (first) husband and I would generally get stoned when we went to parties, and always when performing with his rock ‘n’ roll band, but once I had children I stopped. I missed it, but I knew I shouldn’t be in an altered state while caring for babies and then toddlers, or even school-age kids.

Heavy metal band Gwar

Over the next 25 years, I only smoked a handful of times, all of them on my trips to Cambridge. Unforgettably, at a Lampoon party with my son in 2010 (along with the heavy metal band Gwar). Also, starting in the 2000s, every five years at my college reunions, where there was always someone with a few joints at the dinner-dance.

Now, of course, marijuana (or cannabis, as they seem to prefer to call it) is legal in California and Massachusetts, the two states where I spend the most time, as well as 35 other states. There are billboards everywhere advertising dispensaries. I have done edibles with two of my kids, but I’m not a big fan, because it takes a while to know how high you are. Reminds me of acid and mescaline in the old days. You wonder, should you eat a whole cookie (or brownie), or just a half? And if it seems like a half isn’t having any effect, and you then eat the other half, will you suddenly regret it when it hits you over the head? Smoking – or vaping, which I have just done once – seems much more controllable. But in truth, I don’t do anything mind-altering very often any more. It doesn’t have the same appeal it did when I was young. As the t-shirt says, being twenty in the ’70s was much more fun than being seventy in the ’20s!

I don’t actually have this t-shirt

Houses and cars, cars and houses. That’s all that comes immediately to mind when I think about pricey purchases. I have bought four houses and six cars in my lifetime, and nothing else I have ever bought even comes close to the prices of those. . . .

This painting, called High Jinx, would have been a dramatic centerpiece for our living room, which has light blue walls.

The featured image is a painting that I almost purchased last year. The artist, whose first name is also Suzy, is a relative by marriage – her husband and my husband are second cousins. She was going to give us the “cousins discount” of 20%, which would have made it affordable, but just barely. The painting, called High Jinx, was 38 inches high by 58 inches wide, and would have been a dramatic centerpiece for our living room, which has light blue walls.

We had seen High Jinx in her studio when we visited in October and I fell in love with it. After we got home, she sent us a photo so that we could keep looking at it and thinking about it. We had never spent that much on a piece of art, and were a little nervous about it, but the more we thought about it, the more we loved it. Suzy and her husband and daughter (who is one year younger than Molly) were going to be coming to our house for Thanksgiving dinner, and we decided that they should bring the painting with them so we could hang it and see how it looked before making a final decision. We cleared the space on the wall. We were very excited!

However, on their way to Sacramento from Berkeley, this happened:

Their BMW was hit by a tractor-trailer and dragged 300 feet. They think the driver was changing lanes and just didn’t see them. Nobody was hurt, thank heavens, but the car was totaled and the painting was crunched. Ironically, the pumpkin pie she had made for our Thanksgiving dinner survived the collision unscathed. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to eat it, because they were pretty shaken up, and after the car was towed away, they went back to Berkeley in an Uber. They did send us a picture of the pie though, so we could see what we missed. As you can see, she’s an artist on food as well as on canvas.

We may buy another painting from her, but we haven’t yet. So I guess this story is about the priciest purchase we almost made.

Look for Paul Weller on youtube singing Shades of Blue, with daughter Leah harmonizing. He’s been recording since 1972, originally with The Jam, then with The Style Council, and since 1990 as a solo artist.

First grade class photo, 1957-58

When I recall the teachers I had in nineteen years of schooling — elementary school, high school, college, and law school — there is only one person who leaps out in my memory. Miss Carolyn Garcelon, my fabulous first grade teacher.

Miss Garcelon decided, for whatever reason, that she was going to teach a bunch of six-year-olds about the human body.

She was tall (at least she seemed so to a six-year-old), and thin, with bright red hair, which was about shoulder length, although she generally wore it pulled back in a ponytail. She was young and enthusiastic. I’m pretty sure she had just graduated from teacher’s college and we were her first class, so she must have been about twenty-two. Most of the other teachers at my elementary school were ancient and rotund and had purple-tinged hair because they used bluing in their white hair. So she really stood out.

I don’t remember too much about what I learned that year (I could already read and write, having been taught by my sisters), but I vividly remember our science lessons. Miss Garcelon decided, for whatever reason, that she was going to teach a bunch of six-year-olds about the human body. So she borrowed a model from the local high school, since they apparently weren’t using it, a human torso that opened up and you could see all of the organs inside. Our first surprise was that a human heart wasn’t shaped like a valentine heart. Also, the heart wasn’t way over on the left, like where you put your hand when you are saying the Pledge of Allegiance — even though that is called putting your hand on your heart — it was actually right in the middle. Further discoveries amazed us. And she taught us a song, to the tune of Witch Doctor, that went “Esophagus and heart, windpipe, stomach and lungs.” Try it, instead of “Ooh eee, ooh ah ah ting tang, Walla walla, bing bang.”  It works!

The featured image is our first grade class picture. Miss Garcelon is at the far left, and I am at the far right. You can see on the bulletin board there are two cutouts of the human body, one showing the veins and arteries, and the other one showing the organs. In between them, on the shelf, is the plastic model from the high school, which I think we kept all year.

I realize it is hard for you to read what the posters on the bulletin board say. Here is what the one underneath the numbers 3 and 4 says:

Body Pictures
We made these pictures.
They show what we think
is in us and how it looks.
Now we will study to see if we are right.
[spoiler alert: we weren’t!]

Here is what the one underneath the numbers 6 and 7 says:

close-up of right side of class pic

Mr. R. Blood
This is Mr. R. Blood. We
cannot live without him.
His home is in our heart.
He came to show us how
our blood goes round.

Here is (mostly) what the one underneath the number 9 says:

Mrs. Organs
This is Mrs. Organs. She
can show us the organs
in our body. We can [obscured]
where they are [obscured]
how they help [obscured].

Part of this poster is covered by the head of that little blond boy, whose name is Harold Roach. I know the names of everyone in the picture, because my mother wrote them on the back of the matting. (And yes, I’m the one standing on the far right, facing Harold.)

Notice that all the children are wearing medical headwear – either a nurse’s cap, white with a red cross, or a black band with a silver circle on the front which is supposed to be a head mirror, something doctors used to wear. All the nurse’s caps are on girls, although some of the girls (including me) are wearing the head mirrors. I wonder if we were given a choice. Even at age six, I certainly would have wanted to be a doctor rather than a nurse if I could choose!

Two years later, in June of 1960, Miss Garcelon got married. She invited all of her former students to the wedding. I was so excited to go! It was my first time at a traditional white wedding. (My aunt Daisy had gotten married a few years before, but it was a second marriage, somewhat low-key, and she wore a regular dress, not a bridal gown.) This wedding was in a big Catholic church, and I had never been in a church before either. Beautiful long white gown and veil, lots of bridesmaids, and lots of pomp. I only realized years later that there must have been a reception somewhere else, which all the former first-graders were NOT invited to. At the time, I thought this was the whole thing, and it was enough. When we came back to school in the fall, she announced that she had a new name, and we must now call her Mrs. Fuscaldo. I remember thinking Garcelon was a much nicer sounding name than Fuscaldo, and I wished she hadn’t changed it. But in 1960 it would have been unthinkable not to.

For the past few weeks, since we scheduled this prompt, I have been trying to track her down, wondering if she was even still alive. With most of my elementary school teachers, in their fifties or sixties – or even forties – back then, it would be unlikely to find them still alive, but if Miss Garcelon was twenty-two in 1957, she would only be eighty-seven now. I spent a lot of time online looking for her. I finally found the funeral notice for her husband, Thomas Fuscaldo, who died in 2018. The notice mentioned he was survived by his wife Carolyn. I left a message on the condolence page asking her to contact me and waited a while. Then it occurred to me that more than four years after his death, she might not still be looking at that page. So I sent an email to the funeral home, saying you conducted this man’s funeral in March 2018, could you possibly put me in touch with his widow? This past Tuesday (which was actually my birthday), they wrote back and said she had given them permission to give me her address. A street address, not an email address. So I wrote a letter to her, telling her how much she meant to me, and that I was writing a story about her for a prompt called “Favorite Teacher.” I enclosed a copy of the class picture. I hope she writes back.

Monday:
Let’s see what prompt is next

I really need to start writing this. But first ... gotta to check facebook ... play a move in 18 WWF games ... plan dinner.

Tuesday:
Maybe I should start thinking about what to write

Wednesday:
Time to find a title song (✔ thanks, Dolly Parton)
and featured image (✔ thanks, Salvador Dali)

Thursday:
Okay, I really need to start writing this. But first . . . gotta check facebook . . . play a move in all 18 Words With Friends games . . . figure out what to make for dinner (Thursday is my night to cook.)

Friday:
I’m writing the story now!

I’ve always been a procrastinator. In college I got an extension on every paper I wrote. I’m getting better with Retro stories — but not much.

RetroFlash / 100 words (excluding notes)

Notes
(i.e., things I thought of at the last minute, after I had perfected my RetroFlash):

1) When I was in high school, my mother typed all my papers for me. Sometimes she would be typing the beginning while I was still writing the end. When I was finished writing, if it was late (and it almost always was), she would tell me to go to sleep and she would finish typing it. Occasionally I think she stayed up all night to get it done. Does that mean she was an enabler of my procrastination habit? Can I blame it on her?

2) I conclude by sharing a poem I learned in childhood, and have never forgotten. Author unknown.

Procrastination is a crime
That often ends in sorrow
I can stop it any time
I think I will — tomorrow!