My Grandmother's Second Lap

 We called our grandmother Baba--rhymes with "Gramma".  My sister, the first grandchild, called her that, and it stuck for the rest of the family for all time.  When we got older, we sometimes called her "Babs", but whatever we called her, she was the Grand Dam of the entire family.  We all adored her.

I'm not sure why she was so adored.  Looking back, it wasn't her actions but her aura that attracted us.  Her children (our parents) revered her, and so it was with all of the rest of us.  She was steady but authoritative.  Such a dignified and graceful woman!  Still, there were occasions to tease her, in good faith.

One of the things I teased her about was that she had two laps: the regular lap on which all of the grandkids sat at one time or another, and the other lap a bit higher up, on top of her ample bosom.  Putting a napkin on her lap never, ever caught dropped food bits, but her second lap did.  It got to the point that we encouraged her to put her napkin on her second lap in order to save her clothes from soil.  (We would NEVER have done that in public, but even she recognized that some "things" stick out just a bit further than others.)  

And you know, as much as I lovingly teased her about her second lap, I am finding that I also have two laps.  The last two times I have been out to eat--fast food, of course--I have soiled my spanking clean shirt by dribbling something on my bosom, right off the bat.  And then I have to suffer from the humility of being in public in a shirt that looks like I haven't changed clothes in a week!

Is this what I get for teasing?  I meant no insult, Baba!  Honest!  Did you have to bequeath me the second lap??? 

Let's Talk Toilet

The crapper.  The potty.  The loo.  The latrine.  The commode.  The wee-wee house.                                If you're going to where it is in any location, the rest of us largely know what you will do there.  The toilet is probably on the top of the list as most-used appliances in the house, and the most private.  (Or should be.)

When I moved into my house in 1992, the bathtub had holes in it.  It didn't leak, but it didn't look good.  Thus, I scraped funds together to have a former relative in the construction biz replace the tub, surround, and toilet.  The old commode worked fine but was heavy on water usage.  The new one was annoyingly shorter in flush time.  Over the years since then, it also became a major user of flushing mechanisms.  The flush guts were replaced and adjusted over and over again.  In the end, the flush handle had to be jiggled 99% of the time, just to keep it from running.  

Sometime in the last five or so years, I blew out the meniscus in my left knee.  I eventually had arthroscopic surgery to fix it, but it was almost two months before I could scream loud enough for doctors to order the correct tests for a diagnosis.  (Don't get me started!)  In the time before surgery, I was using that toilet by hanging onto the doorknob to lower myself slowly and pull myself up again when finished.  In time, I was convinced that I should invest in a toilet with a higher seat that will accommodate people with bad knees.  (Not sure why those toilets aren't standard issue in homes.  Sooner or later, they will be needed!)  Thus, my housekeeper told me that her son, who is a plumber, could bring me the potty I needed and install it for $100.  It took awhile, but it finally happened a couple of weeks ago.  (Turns out that the commode cost him more than expected, and our agreed-on price really wasn't enough.  I will make it up to him, somehow....)

So, how has life been with the new toilet?  

*The new one is taller and narrower than the old one, revealing gaps in the paint job on the wall behind it.                                                                                                                                                                    *The new one is elongated rather than round, so I have to adjust my sitting position, but it is so much easier to sit due to the height.  At least I'm not hanging onto the doorknob!                                                *The new one has two push-button flushes--one for liquids, and one for solids.  TMI!                               *The new one does not require handle-jiggling in order to stop it from running.  It doesn't have a handle.  (Guess I need to figure out how the flush-guts work in case something goes wrong.)                   *The new one is CLEAN!  The old one had hard water/iron stains that would NOT come out.  It looked like it didn't have sanitary care at all.  If for that reason alone, I'm glad it's GONE.

Has anyone else ever felt such joy in having a new bathroom appliance?  I've been in my house for 30 years.  I've replaced the toilet not once, but twice.  Most people don't ever replace a home toilet.  I'm not sorry I did.

How do you spell relief?  T-O-I-L-E-T!

The Spoggy Fart and Other Mysteries of the English Language

The English language is a mysterious animal.  Having snagged so many words from other languages through the millennia, it isn't the least bit consistent.  Imagine being an immigrant who is trying desperately to learn/understand the language!  

I'm not talking dialectic pronunciations, here.  I'm talking words.  Americans speak a different version of English than, say, British do...or Australians.  And unless one is a world traveler--unlike most Americans--the spoken expressions of any English-speaking citizens in other parts of the world can sound foreign. 

I lived in Japan for awhile as a 10-year-old.  I got angry when my Japanese friend's mother--really the only English speaker in the family--pulled out an English Bible given to her by Christian missionaries and asked me to explain passages to her.  I wasn't angry with her.  I was angry with the missionaries.  There are people who devote their entire lives to studying and understanding the Bible with all its translations.  How can anyone expect to drop a Bible into the laps of people who weren't raised in a church or English as a native language and expect them to understand a book not even written in their own tongue??  I'm still not over that...

But back to the point I am trying to make.  I have an online pen pal from South Australia.  They speak English there, and their dialect is recognizable worldwide.  She and I trade comments almost daily; she from her home in the Southern Hemisphere, and me from mine in the Northern.  Obviously, there will be some terms that we don't understand from each location, but who cares?  We both get it.  Except recently.

A couple of days ago, my friend started a narrative about how her husband, who was going fishing with a "mate", disrupted her sleep in the early morning hours as he prepared to depart.  She started her tale with, "Hubby is going fishing at sparrow fart."  It took me a minute to understand that sparrow fart was not a place, but a time.  Since birds sing at dawn, I figured sparrow fart was part of the sunrise experience, but I didn't know whether it was part of Australian English, or one of her own creations.  So I asked.

I was informed that sparrow fart had been whitewashed.  The actual expression, very common in South Australia, is "spoggy fart".  Spoggy is a colloquial term for sparrow in SA  (My Midwestern American grandfather called them "spitzies".  It happens.)  So, a spoggy fart is a time in the early morning.  What we here in the US refer to as "the butt-crack of dawn", or "O-dark-thirty."   

So...I have learned something.  And now, so have you!

  

    

Grandpa's Big Brue Truck

When my grandson, Ryan, was a very little boy, he was smitten with dinosaurs and machines on wheels.  He particularly liked Thomas the Train, and had--at one time--a whole Thomas the Train activity table in his bedroom.

Aside from his father, Ryan's very favorite male was Grandpa Phil.  Grandpa Phil is his paternal grandfather, from whom (among others) he gets his looks and his height.  More often than not, when we were all together, Ryan could be found on Grandpa's lap, looking through books that Grandpa bought for him on their frequent trips to Barnes and Noble.  One really notable evening was the Fourth of July when Ryan was maybe two, sitting on Grandpa's lap in a lawn chair at the local park, watching fireworks.  Over and over again, Ryan would say, "Wow!  That was a big one!"  His childlike awe was so delightful, and Grandpa's patience was monumental.  Special, special moments!

Somewhere along the line when Ryan was very young, Grandpa traded in whatever vehicle he was driving at the moment and bought a navy blue pickup truck.  I don't know brand or model, only that the new vehicle became known to Ryan as "Grandpa's big 'brue' truck".  The truck, along with the rest of us, is aging but it still serves the family, and--to me, at least--will always be known as Grandpa's Big Brue Truck.  It's like a monument to security.  Just as Grandpa has always been.

The big brue truck has helped the family move, several times.  It has stood through the divorce of our children.  It brings sweet corn and home grown tomatoes to me, and carries me to the airport when I'm flying.  It carries furniture to people who need it.  It is a testament to the man who drives it.  When it gives up the ghost, no one will owe it anything.  It has served well and is still in service.

If inanimate objects have a soul, the Big Brue Truck deserves a place in Paradise.  Our grandson will be 18 in November.  He lives far from the big brue truck of his childhood.  Not even sure he remembers all of the treasured moments of watching it pull into their driveway, knowing that "Grandpa and Grandma are here!!  I see their big brue truck!"

Memories can be so special.  Thank you, Grandpa Phil, for the Big Brue Truck.     

    

My Tokyo

 The International Olympic Games are taking place in Tokyo, Japan, as I write.  I confess that I haven't watched the games so far, but not intentionally.  I've just been busy, doing nothing.  I thought, perhaps, that I should watch the games just to see if anything in Tokyo looked familiar to me, since I lived in Japan in the late 50s.  Ha!  What was I thinking??  I was only in Tokyo proper for maybe three days, waiting for Dad's ship to pick us up for the trip back to the States.  I was 10 years old, but I loved Japan.  I had no clue then how much difference even a few years would make!

My father was an active duty Navy Reserve officer.  In peace time, the family went where he went, and this time, we went to Japan.  Then-Lt. Cmdr. Covill (my father) got orders for Sasebo, Japan, on the southern-most tip of the southern island of Kyushu.  

In order to get there, we met Dad's ship in San Francisco in August of 1957, after a long car trek through the desert, then nearly froze for our few days in SF!  When our ship departed, we sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge out to sea where there were no landmarks...nothing to see but water in every direction.  It was unsettling.  Probably the reverse of claustrophobia.  For a few fleeting moments, I felt cut loose...lost and alone.  If we sank, who would know?  I got over it but never forgot the feeling.

Along the way, we stopped at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for 24 hours.  We went to the beach at Fort DeRussy.  I got a blistering sunburn that affected the rest of my journey to Japan.

When we docked in Japan, we docked at Yokohama--a sister city to Tokyo--with Mount Fuji in full view.  Then we loaded on a train for a 24-hr ride to Kyushu, a big part of which was through a tunnel under the ocean.  We had a "compartment" complete with fold-down toilet.  I slept in an upper berth thinking it was a great adventure.  (I have no clue how much my poor parents slept with a 4-year-old, a 15-year-old, and a 10-year-old [me].  I think my parents must have been saints!)

Fast forward to our trip back to the States (or the "stakes" as my little brother called it), in February of 1958.  We spent a few days in Tokyo, waiting for Dad's ship.  We stayed at the Imperial Hotel.  The Imperial Hotel was designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and was supposedly earthquake-proof.  (I was impressed.)  

The only thing I remember that we did there by way of tourism was to visit the grounds of the Imperial Palace.  We couldn't actually get inside to see anything, but we could say we'd been there.  I also remember a couple of Japanese ladies who were following us, reached out to touch my brother's curly blonde hair...then giggled and ran off.  Japanese hair is straight as straight can be, and black.

The only other thing I remember about the Tokyo experience was that, one night, our parents left to go do something on their own, leaving me, my 16-year-old sister, and our 4-year-old brother for a few hours.  Sister Shari had had to leave a boyfriend in Sasebo and begged to be allowed to call him.  Mom caved in and gave her permission, without Dad's approval, in their absence, but with the admonition that it should only be a 3-minute call, (standard for long distance call rates in those days).  Yeah, right.  The whole time Shari talked to her beau, I was the annoying sister who kept reminding her that she was talking too long.  Not sure what the actual charges were, but I do remember that my mother was not pleased.

If I were to go to Tokyo today, I would recognize nothing.  It's a big city but full of charm.  Maybe in my next life, Olympics or not!