Our Life in 1985

Who would think so many memories could be summoned up from my ageing brain just by shredding old credit card statements and receipts? I got into a 'do it now' frame of mind as I looked at 3 boxes of tax returns and decided to do an easy non-thinking dejunk task so that I could procrastinate on clearing the actual important clutter on my dining table.

I decided to shred the credit card statements and payslips because: you only need 7 years of documentation for the IRS. You don't need payslips if they add up to your W2. Don't know if we ever checked if they did. So I started with the box marked 84-89. I didn't think to write my thoughts down till I reached 1985 via 1989 backwards.

January - Febuary shows we bought a ring from Mayors. It was a replacement wedding ring for John. He had lost the first one. He lost the replacement wedding ring too. Hmmm. We bought CD's from Peaches, Camelot Music. We bought books from Dalton's and Walden Books. Tupperware Box Office - Itzak Perlman.

March - A 'lazy-reader'. Rowing machine from Robby's Sporting Goods. Something audio-like from Audio Spectrum. More CD's. Framed Art. More Books. Cloth from Cloth-World.

April - May : More CD's. Car service. A night at Best Western for Patti's wedding.

May - June: Home Depot. Scotty's. Burdines. Kmart. Corning Outlet. Evidence of our move to our first new home.

July: We had bought a piano on a whim. We bought sheet music from Streep Organ and Music.

August: Two Delta plane tickets - can't remember where we went.

September: Didn't appear to use the Credit Card much. Maybe we using the plane tickets.

October: Scotty's, Handy City, Home Depot, Scotty's, Handy City, Home Depot, City of Orlando.

We shopped together a lot those days.

Linens and Things

Today I am working on the linen closet. Thoughts that came into my mind were:

Am I a chronic hoarder?
Can I not let go of the past?
Why don't I ever think of buying new linens. Am I a cheapskate?
Why do I hang on to a lacy toilet seat cover that my aunt gave me?
Why do I still have worn out wash cloths from 20 years ago?
How can I re-use this 20 year old baby crib comforter?
Should I have enough linens to accommodate so many infrequent guests? Twice in 23 years, we've had 15 family members visiting at the same time ... in winter.
Did we really use the flannel sheets in our Florida winter last year? Will my new hot flashes deem them unnecessary from here on?
At least I gave away the electric underblankets that we haven't used in years.

Am I crazy to save some old sheets to cover the crotons in case we have a freeze? Will I be nuts to bag them and label them as 'freeze sheets' and put them in the garden shed? Too bad.

Baby Teeth

Well, there is nothing as eewie as coming across a box of sandwich baggies full of baby teeth.




The Tooth-Fairy story was a part of my boys' childhood. It is one of those myths probably invented to take away the pain of losing a tooth ... a fun parenting ritual that most parents I know always take part in.

For a dollar I got to see the amazement and excitement in my kids' faces early in the morning. Lately, I have seen the Tooth Fairy get more generous, maybe she adjusts it according to the cost of living index. My great nephews are getting $5 a piece.

For a while Andrew and Brian totally bought into Her, writing Her notes and all.

Then when they got older, skepticism crept in. Accusations were made:

'YOU're the Tooth Fairy Mom!'

'Who ME?'



Which then led to their plot to prove Her non-existence, which was a success, when one day, Andrew announced:

'See, Mom? I lost a tooth yesterday and I put it under my pillow,
BUT, I didn't tell you,
and the Tooth Fairy didn't exchange it for a dollar.'

Busted!

Anyway, the teeth are going. I just don't feel sentimental over some bits of bone. I'll keep the locks of hair from their first haircuts.....

Books

My husband went through his book collection weeding out the books he no longer wanted and then limited himself to just one bookcase (down from 3) to house his favorites. He then pointed out all the books he no longer wanted and told me to go through them to see if there were any that I wanted to keep. The rest we'd get rid of.

Most of the books were purchased by my husband. He certainly has the zen of dejunking. I on the otherhand pick up the books, start looking through them, then wonder how much they cost and how much we could get from Amazon or Ebay for them. Of course, new books are pretty pricey, especially the hard cover ones. So I've wasted a lot of time looking them up on the internet, looking at methods of selling them. The truth is, I am too lazy to go through the whole process of trying to sell them on Amazon or Ebay. After weeks of going through the books, and hauling them off to the library or begging friends to help themselves, I have reached my saturation point. I told my husband I didn't want to go through the rest anymore. He had to just box them up and I would not look at them and experience any angst and we would cart them off to the library.

So, goodbye Joseph Campbell, Stephen Covey, Winston Churchill, Shakespeare, Dickens etc.
These people sure had a lot of words in their heads. Truthfully, they go above my head. I am unashamed to say that - I am not an intellectual. These books just have too many words. Can't they just say what they want to say in point form? Which led me to wonder, are intellectuals happier than non-intellectuals? Are philosophers too busy philosphizing to actually be happy? And what about all those Budhists and Taoists? Are they leading productive lives just sitting there meditating and teaching people to be disconnected? Why are there so many religions started by men? Obviously, I went through a lot of my husband's philosophy books.

Well, I'm sure the Friends of the Library will be happy to get the books and we will be happy patrons of the library.

Halloween

When My Sons were little, they had very high standards for their Halloween costumes. They would latch on to an idea of what they wanted to be and what the costume would look like. Nothing from Walmart would do, so we ended up having a wonderful time making our own. This was the case until they got older and the novelty and anticipation of Halloween disappeared which resulted in them donning whatever would pass as a costume just to get out and get some candy.

Some of the costumes I made for them were neatly packed away with the sentimental notion of 'maybe their kids will wear them one day'. I have re-assessed my feelings and have decided: for some reason, the ones I made look pretty hokey now; their kids probably won't want to wear it; their wives probably will want to help pick the costumes themselves; what they wear will be determined by what is the hot trend for the day. I sent the cute re-usable ones away to Cheryl for her grandsons' treasure chest. The rest I threw away.

Here they are, immortalized forever.

1990
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Era. Andrew was Raphael. The pattern came with instructions to make the head, but it turned out looking like a frog (which Andrew used in 1992).

1991
Andrew in his only Walmart costume.


1991
Here's Brian as Batman.

1992
Here, Andrew used the TMNT head and dressed as a FROG. Brian was Robin Hood.

1994
Andrew as a pirate captain. Brian as a ghost. My first hood for the ghost costume turned out looking like the KKK. This one was a little better.

1995
Their very own robot costumes. This was a fun project. Notice the electricity going between the antennae nodes. The dryer vent hose didn't stay up on it's own, so I had to sew them to t-shirt and shorts. See the protective grill?

1996
Andrew was a Bug. He designed the body complete with underwings (see the little white things sticking out at the back). The cap was sprayed green and twirled pipe cleaners were attached. Brian was a vampire bat. He had to correct everyone who thought he was just a vampire.


1997
This year we made paper mache masks for their 'two headed zombie'. We sewed two t-shirts together and they went trick or treating stuck together.

1998
Here are Andrew's very well-designed costumes that had no concept of reality or my abilities.

1998
Andrew dressed as one of Florida's favorite halloween costumes - the tourist. The loud shirt was purchased from a thrift store and Mickey's hat was re-used. We had a blast making the gladiator outfit - actually, I stand corrected, it's a 'longswordsman'. It was made out of heavy duty bubble wrap and duct tape that we spray painted gold. The helmet was a regular toy race car helmet that we spray painted and to which we glued some upholstery fringe. We used masking tape on the visor to create that effect.
1999
Andrew was a space trooper - he had a helmet and toy laser gun. Brian was a burglar. Easy 5 minutes costumes.

My Boy's Soft Toys

One has to be almost zen-like to let things go. I've been de-junking my sons' things. They don't appear to have too much of an emotional attachment to these things, anymore. I think it's just me. For those things that still seem special to me as a reminder of their childhood, I find it very difficult to just send them to Goodwill. I want to be able to hand them down to family or friends. That way it doesn't feel like I've sent special things off to an unspecial place.

Two huge boxes of soft toys were in the garage for ages now and The Boys haven't missed them. One might wonder, now how can two boys accumulate so many soft toys? Well, every time we went to Sea World or the Science Museum, we couldn't leave until we'd satisfied BoyB's desire to end the trip in the gift shop. Inevitably, they ended up with a huge collection of soft toy creatures. In addition to that, there were the Pokemons, the Disney and the Sonic the Hedgehog characters. Of course, I am guilty of having added many to their collection as well. They had a lot of fun with them. The soft toys were a captive audience for many of their 'pretend' games. We used to call them their 'pets'.

The pets have been de-junked now. I hauled them all out and gave The Boys (17 and 19!!) one last chance to pick the ones they REALLY want to keep. I am touched that they kept Snakey - the huge snake I made for them out of scraps of fabric. Also spared were: Thumper, Buster Bunny, the Sonics, the Tails and an octopus that BoyB likes to wear on his head. (One Halloween, BoyA insisted I make a ghost costume for Thumper).

We heard that my great nephews (5 and 7 yrs old)were into Pokemon. They were very happy to get them, they don't make them anymore. Then I saved the really interesting ones and shipped them off to my great niece (2 yrs old). I think she might be the only little girl with such strange soft toys like a sting ray and an iguana and a piranha. The rest of the not-so-unusual soft toys were hauled off to Goodwill.

And as the de-clutter books always say to do, I took a picture and let it go.

Feathers in the Hats and Gloves Box

It was time to go through our 'hat's and gloves' box and see what to toss. All the warm accessories we need for our trips up north to Michigan and Canada were in this box. I found warm gloves, fat warm gloves, knitted hats/caps, earbands etc. Plus two clutch handbags that are over 20 years old that I hadn't used in 20 years. (Goodwill, here they come.)

Inside one of the handbags I found a few very old letters from John's mum and from Hannah dating back to 1984 - the year we came to the USA. It was fun reading the letters again: Hannah was about to give birth to her son; Mary was in, then out of hospital with a serious kidney infection; Rich & Cheryl had gone up to Johannesburg with the girls; Mum wanted to find out what to do with John's SA tax return. There was also a copy of a letter from me to Hannah: we had just moved into our first apartment in Orlando; we'd started working at a bank as mainframe programmers; a 5 day pass to Disney was $57 ($246 today). Then I fed them to the shredder.

Another envelope contained .... a bunch of beautiful tiny downy feathers. I don't recall the occasion when I gathered these. What was I thinking? What did I think I was going to do with these feathers? Make a Barbie boa? Barbie Native American headdress? They are very pretty though. Poor little bird must have had a mishap.

I at least had to record this little dejunking effort. So I pulled out my camera and played with the feathers. Here are my efforts with the help of Picassa:











I enjoyed the feathers too much to throw them out. I saved them in a reincarnated Oil of Olay jar. Maybe in 20 years time, I'll come across them and marvel at their beauty all over again.

Knitting

I grabbed another bag of something to dejunk. In it were a few jerseys/sweaters that my Mom had knitted for me, circa 1980. I hardly, if ever, wear them now. They're a little out of date fashionwise, so I can't imagine anyone wanting them. I can't bring myself to relegate them to the Goodwill bag.

I consider knitting a craft. These are handcrafted sweaters. Custom knitted to my exact size from a pattern in my Mom's head. She never used any patterns for her knitting. She knew how to knit those fancy cable stiches. She must have learned it from someone else. I can still picture her now, sitting in the shop knitting while she waited for customers to come in. I'll also never forget the sweater that I roasted in the oven because I HAD to wear it immediately. That was in my teens. Ruined it, of course.

My mother-in-law, Mum, used to knit too. She crafted my sons' beautiful sweaters with 'knit-in' designs. She is 87 now and has just recently de-junked her knitting needles and passed them on to her grandaughter. Knitting is fashionable again, I hear.

My best friend knitted a dress for me. She used a knitting machine. Now that might sound like it made things easy, but I think there is a LOT of talent involved in knowing when to increase/decrease the number of stitches and how to fashion an armhole.

I have a lot of reverence for knitting simply because even though I know how to knit, I've never 'really' knitted. I have knitted 1 scarf and 2 caps eons ago. Rather piddly compared to the sweaters and shawls and afghans some women I know have crafted. When my Mom passed away, I brought home her knitting needles. I have since knitted a 6" square potholder. Let's just say, that I don't have any staying power for knitting anything. After about 10 rows, my interest starts to waiver. And 10 rows doesn't a sweater make.

Sweaters are going back into my closet.

My Mother's Wedding Dress

In the process of clearing out my closet yesterday, I came across my mother's wedding dress. It is a simple lace dress worn over a full length satin slip. I am 5 feet tall and have a slim build. Looking at the dress, I can see she was the same size. I mention that, because all my life, she was a little on the heavy side.


My mom was 16 when she married my father in an arranged marriage. She had to leave her family in Mozambique and go and live with my dad in South Africa. They also lived in China for a few years. All this at 16. She mentioned once that initially she and my grandmother weren't very happy about it, but my grandfather insisted. By the time she was 25, she had 6 children.
I don't know if I could have pulled that off. My parents had their ups and downs but they remained together till the end. My mom's birthday is July 1st 1930 and she passed away July 2nd 1993. After my mom passed away, I asked my dad if I could have her dress. He threw it into the washing machine to give it a good cleaning before he sent it to me. Needless to say, that didn't do the dress any good!

So, what to do with the slightly tattered wedding dress. I'm getting older now. Eventually someone is going to have to pick through my things and decide what to do with them. I don't want the dress to end up at Goodwill or in the landfill. I have this terrible habit of trying to re-incarnate things. So I decided that I will make small heart shaped pot pouri sachets out of it for all her granddaughters. She was a very loving grandmother. They can hang it in their closets, out of the way, but always there. I don't want to make clutter for everyone else.

For now, the dress is back in my closet!