SHE WAS MINE

March 13, 2015 ~ graciej311 ~ Leave a comment

My Granny was friends with everyone she ever met. Before I was even school age, we frequented the local shopping mall. She called this “bummin’”, meaning to wander and window shop. I have never heard that phrase used in that way by anyone outside our family. At the mall, she talked to the clerk at the perfume counter. While waiting for the elevator, she would chat up the young mom with a child-filled stroller. If you asked her, “Who was that, Granny?” She would say, “Oh, I don’t know.” She just liked to talk and be friendly. The highlight of each shopping trip for me was stopping at the center candy kiosk and watching the taffy pull machine. It would spin, stretch and rotate the slick sweetness into a glossy marvel. It was reliable and continuous. Another favorite spot was the ZCMI department store where Granny would smile at the woman behind the counter and ask for a quarter-pound of circus animal cookies. I would watch anxiously as the metal scoop dipped into the sprinkle-covered pink and white treats, which were then shuffled onto the scale, and finally ladled into a small white bag for me to take home.

Granny looked after me nearly every day while my mom worked and my dad finished getting his degree. Most days, she would pick me up at the Challenger School around the block from her house, and we would walk together pointing out favorite trees or barking dogs.

She was the master of games. I learned to play hide-and-seek at her house, avoiding the basement cellar as a hiding place because my Uncle Jay told us that’s where the giant lived. The best place to hide was her coat closet. The coats and sweaters smelled like her embrace and the Wrigley’s gum she always kept in her purse. She taught me how to play checkers and she used sound effects like, “whooop” and “wooooo” as the pieces jumped one another and made their way to the final row to be kinged. One of her favorite games was a memory game called Hüsker Dü?. The board is a large square, and flat blue game pieces cover circular dots which are home to various pictures: pine trees, snowflakes, cars, bells. Once all the pictures are covered, an underlying wheel is rotated to shuffle the pictures, and whoever uncovers the greatest number of matches wins. She was a patient teacher and probably let me win more than was healthy for my competitive nature.

Some of the first nursery rhymes I learned were spoken by my Granny. She would read the cover, “Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes” and then turn the pages to “Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater” or “Hey, Diddle Diddle”. She had the best inflection and would do voices for each character. My sister Melissa and I often talk in voice-over type voices, even today, and it can surely be traced back to sitting in the yellow recliner at Granny’s house and listening to her read to us.

I always wanted my Granny to draw pictures for me. She would sketch little girls with curly hair and tight-lipped smiles, which greatly resembled her own. From a young age, I always wanted to be an artist, so when Granny was in her 70s and took a canvas painting class at a local center, I was deeply impressed when she brought home oil paintings of barns, pink-blossomed trees, and fields of green grass. I would run my fingers over the dried paint to feel the texture.

There was no one who was a better baker than my Granny. She may have used recipes, but I don’t recall ever seeing one in front of her. For family events, which were frequent in our large, extended family, there was always a Texas Sheet Cake with glistening chocolate frosting topped with walnuts. At Christmastime, she would keep soft, iced, homemade gingerbread men in a wax paper-lined, gold Tupperware container. It was always tucked away on the bottom shelf, but sniffing it out was my expertise.

Sleepovers at her house were a coveted event. I loved taking baths in her tub, because she had a large scrub brush that could reach the lowest part of my back and the fizzy salts smelled like flowers. She would often let me sleep in her bed on her silk pillowcases. She made waffles in the mornings, and would let me eat them with Karo Syrup (straight corn syrup). Her freezer always contained Jell-O Pudding Pops and the fridge housed a quart of crangrape juice. If we were drinking orange juice; she would defrost the concentrate, mix it up with a wooden spoon, and then let me use a mini-strainer to filter out the pulp. My parents would never have possessed the patience to let me make my own pulp-free orange juice, so this was a luxury.

One of Granny’s frequent sayings was, “I love doing dishes.” This is apparently not a genetic quality that I inherited, as I view dishes as an endless pain. Granny didn’t have an automatic dishwasher, so she would fill the sink with scalding water, and would scrub the dishes while I rinsed them. She never pre-rinsed any plates or bowls, so dish-doing was akin to fishing in a basin of leftovers. She was unphased by both the floaters and the 120-degree water.

The backyard and surrounding garden was one of Granny’s favorite places. She liked the feel of her hands in the soil, and she would take her orange kneeling pad out to the edge of the grass and trowel in the soil, pulling weeds and planting little flowers. On the west side of the yard, a gigantic lilac bush gave off a fragrance that filled the air each spring. When she would dig up an earthworm or potato bug, she would let out a little giggle when my younger sister Melissa cupped her hands to hold them, something I never dared do.

You learned early in life to never say you were bored at Granny’s house. When that utterance was made, she immediately put you to work. “I’ll give you a quarter to clean out my cupboards. You’re just the right size to get back in there,” she would say. She’d have you clear everything out of her cupboards, hand you a damp, warm rag and you’d have to shimmy to the back corners of the cupboard to wipe it clean. Then a dry cloth was used to wipe some more. Finally, everything was put back into the cupboards. She must have had the cleanest cupboards in all of Utah County. Granny’s vacuum was a wonder to me. It wasn’t an upright vacuum like you’d typically see today. It was a canister vacuum, with the hose and the handle that was pushed to clean the floor coming out of the canister like an elephant’s trunk. I still love vacuuming to this day, and I think it can all be traced back to the days I spent operating this unique-looking contraption at my Granny’s house.

In her bedroom on her ancient-looking dresser, was my Granny’s jewelry cabinet. She must have been extremely trusting, because she would often let my sisters and me go into her bedroom alone and spend time with her jewelry. The little doors to the cabinet would unlatch and little drawers pulled open to reveal the rings and earrings inside. We would try them on, sort them, and pick out our favorites.

In the guest bedroom, there were trophies and books on the shelves. My grandfather passed away about a decade before I was born. He raced boats and flew airplanes. Several of his boat racing trophies were on the shelves, along with a couple bowling trophies from Granny’s triumphs at the lanes. There was an unauthorized Elvis autobiography which I found fascinating and liked to leaf through. My Granny’s sister, my Great Aunt Armanell, had once gone to the Bahamas and brought back seashells. The largest one sat on a shelf among the trophies. I used to prop it to my ear to hear the sea.

I have no recollection of ever seeing Granny angry or upset, but she came from an era where repression of feelings was widely practiced. She lived to be 98 years old. I think about all the changes that happened between her birth in 1913 and her death in 2011. She saw the end of the horse and buggy and the beginning of the automobile. She began life without television and ended it with a TV angled just so in her bedroom. She lived through two World Wars, The Great Depression, the outrageous defiance of the 1960s, and the financial crisis of 2008. She gave birth to eight children, and had hundreds of great grandchildren (and even some great great grandchildren) by the time she passed away. I always visited her whenever I traveled back to Utah. On one of my visits during her later years, she spent a couple hours showing me a collection of old photos. There was a large photo of about 50 people, including her and my grandpa. She told me, “You see all those people in that photo? I’m the only one who is still alive. I’m the last of the Mohicans.” She was also known to say, “I checked the obituaries today, and I’m not in them.”

One of the only times I remember being frustrated at her house, was when the neighborhood kids would call her “Grandma”, because she wasn’t their Grandma. She was mine. But in retrospect, I can see how she was their Grandma too. After all, she was friends with everyone she ever met.

PORTRAIT OF THOUGHTS OF A YOUNG ARTIST

March 2, 2015 ~ graciej311 ~ Leave a comment

From a young age, I wanted to be an artist. I didn’t realize when I was a six year old that being an artist was a difficult, rarely lucrative, profession. I only knew that I loved drawing. What first grader wonders how they’re going to pay the gas and electric bills once it comes time? Some of my clearest memories of early childhood are the hours I spent organizing my crayons by color into slots and rows in the yellow plastic holder. Despite my innocence on the financial milieu, for career day in Mrs. Knowles’ fourth grade class, I dressed up as an artist. A worn apron of my mother’s held paint brushes and pencils that clanked together as I walked the path to the elementary school. I arrived in Ogden in the middle of the school year. I’d spent the first half of the school year in Orem, Utah; which was even more homogeneous than Ogden. Ogden felt like a big deal to me, but I was at a definite disadvantage when it came to being included in the delineations that can be found in each elementary school classroom.

Each kid in a class can tell you who falls into which classifications: the troublemaker, the class clown, the teacher’s pet, the kid who is good at art. In our class, the designated “person good at art” when I arrived, was Synthia. If memory serves, she even wore a smock and a beret to career day. I’d never even heard of a beret. She was French, complete with a lilting accent. Thoughts of France call to mind things like crepes, croissants and The Lurve. How her family ended up in Ogden, Utah from France is a mystery to me. I can only imagine the culture shock of that transition. At the time, Ogden was the third largest city in Utah — a combination of industrial and suburban. In 1986, it was probably best known for having the worst smelling dog food plant that has ever existed and train tracks that no longer carried anything but cargo.

I never saw or heard anything about Synthia after fourth grade, but I didn’t let her amazingness at art kill my dream of becoming an artist. When Picasso was painting, I wonder if he ever thought for one moment that anyone in the world was better than he. Imagine if Picasso had said, “It looks like ol’ Matisse has created some damn good paintings. I suppose I’ll put the brushes away now and be a street sweeper.” Having seen Synthia’s work pushed me to be better.

In the 80s and 90s, the Ogden City School District had a program called E.Q.U.I.P. It was a gifted and talented program, and required good grades, high test scores, and sometimes a separate assessment. The school district often sought out kids to be in the program, because it took place in the inner-city schools. Today, it would be looked at as a reverse zone variance. In fifth grade, I moved to a different school to attend the E.Q.U.I.P. program. This was when I hit my artistic peak. I had a great group of friends, I loved my teacher, and I was given a set of oil pastels for Christmas. They smelled like a cross between Play-Doh and gasoline. They were my prized possession. I spent hours sprawled on my grandmother’s living room floor, sketching my first piece which was a wishing well along a grass-lined, cobblestone path. I took a class during school hours that was specifically geared towards students interested in art. That was where I learned the proper way to draw portraits and how the face is broken into quadrants, such that the eyes are typically a third eye apart from one another, the corners of the mouth typically align with the pupils of the eye. I struggled with drawing ears properly and shading noses so that it didn’t appear the person’s face was covered in dirt, but by the end of that class, I could draw a decent profile. That year, I submitted a piece for the district’s “Reflections Contest”. The theme was “Wonders of the World”, and I received an honorable mention for my oil pastel drawing of the Pyramids at Giza. That summer, my mom sent me to an art camp where I learned that salt could be used to add textures to paint and that there was more to art than just drawing something recognizable.

All I wanted to do was draw, sketch and make creative lettering. Classes like Algebra were just requirements, and I couldn’t see when I would ever use them. (To my daughter: If you’re reading this, pretend like you never read that.)

Art class in middle school was comprised of an interesting array of humans. There were those who took the class to actually produce something and those who were there because it was a laid back and you could get away with doing virtually nothing. We learned calligraphy, how to create 3D artwork and at one point, we made jewelry (which would eventually turn your fingers green). My two close friends, Nancy and Liz, were in the eighth grade art class with me. Some of the jewelry was made with a burning wax and little drills. For reasons unknown, we liked to carefully drip the blue wax onto our fingernails and create patterns with the dots. The heat penetrated our fingernails and made its way to the actual skin underneath. We would gasp and Lamaze breathe as quietly as possible while it dried. At one point, when we were making our fingernail creations — which we were very much not supposed to be doing — the art teacher walked by and asked what was going on. We sneakily hid our hands under the table to scrape off the wax quickly, so as not to be discovered. Once he was gone, the fun continued. The art room at the middle school was huge. There was a regular, well-lit classroom setup with desks and the largest desk at the front was the teacher’s. A gigantic, dimly lit, exterior room lined with cabinets, various supplies, and long tables was where we spent most of our time. When the students were out in the tabled-area, the teacher was most frequently at his desk in the other room or nowhere to be found. I’m guessing he was probably nipping from a flask, because the thought of teaching any middle school class makes me want to have a drink myself. The class was fairly unsupervised, and therefore, one of my favorite times of day.

The summer before I started high school, I went to Washington, D.C. I was able to visit the art museum at the Smithsonian. Even at age 13, I could have stayed there for hours. I drank in the art and wondered what the artists were thinking when they created this painting or that sculpture. I purchased an interesting packet of postcards in which all of the art was abstract; a series of lines, colors and geometric shapes. It was like nothing my 13-year-old, Utah-self had ever seen.

When I started high school, I continued to take art classes; but by the time I was a sophomore, I found my calling in the creative writing department. Artistic drawing and painting, and the thoughts of being an artist in my professional life, fell behind me. On my living room wall, I have two framed pieces I created in high school. They remind me of the gentler days when I didn’t realize what being an adult actually meant, and I recall that first set of oil pastels and the grass-lined path I created.

TOO FAR AWAY FOR ANY OF US TO REACH

February 23, 2015 ~ graciej311 ~ Leave a comment

If my middle school classmates ever think of me, I’m sure the additional people they think of are: Joe, Donnie, Danny, Jordan and Jon — the New Kids on the Block. My obsession may have started when my close friend Cherilyn received a New Kids’ poster. In my life, I take an all-or-nothing approach to everything, and this methodology included boy bands. I couldn’t settle for a single poster. I collected every issue of Teen Beat, Tiger Beat and POP; and in the glossy pages of those magazines were the fold out posters of my lovely heartthrobs. Some of the pictures were of them in tuxedos. Some were of them in torn jeans on a street corner. The theory behind the varied scenes and outfits felt like a “something for everyone” approach. I wore out cassette tapes, and would continuously rewind and listen again and again to the songs in which Joe McIntyre sang lead. The Christmas song tape was a favorite, because in certain songs, each boys sang a separate solo part, and you could listen for that distinct voice that was singing just for you. I stayed up swooning when they were on the American Music Awards. I habitually watched their MTV videos my friend down the street had recorded on VHS. I spent every cent of babysitting money I earned buying neon-tinged pillow cases, pins and t-shirts at Spencer’s gifts. My walls were papered with their faces. Since the grape pellet candy Jolly Joe’s contained the name of my favorite New Kid, I consumed the candy by the gross (even though it wasn’t good) just so I could have the box and cut out his name — over and over and over again.

I dreamed of him as my first kiss, and that was likely part of the problem. Most of the girls my age were going steady with tangible boys at Central Middle School. Cherilyn was with Kip. Shawnee was with Mike. I was pining after a boy five years older than me who was living an entirely different life in an entirely different world. A world so elevated I could only fantasize what talking to him face-to-face would be like. I would fend off throngs of frantic girls, and he would be impressed with the maturity I possessed and want to have a one-on-one conversation.

I wrote letters nearly every day to their fan club. I wish I had copies of those letters now, because I can only imagine the sap dripping from the pages. They were certainly laughable, filled with the mourning and elation of my tween self.

My friend Melanie, who lived down the street and to the left of me, had a huge crush on Jonathan. She also had her own room, something I wouldn’t have until a couple years later. This provided the best and ultimate space for us to listen to music, swoon and discuss what our lives would be like when she was married to Jonathan* and I was married to Joe. I never associated being a super star’s wife with wealth, and fame, and the hatred of every other girl on the planet. I just thought of it as my rightful place in the universe. (*Note: Jonathan came out as gay a few years ago. Melanie never married him.)

It was a well-known fact to New Kids’ fans that Joe’s birthday is on New Year’s Eve. It was also a well-known fact that many of the items received via their fan club were sent to poor kids or given away to charity. As Joe’s birthday approached, I struggled with what I could give him that would be the perfect present. He must have everything. I don’t know if he was truly a golfer or not, but in one of the teen magazines, there was a shot of him putting. His cool blue eyes concentrated as his fingers gripped the club. At the time, I didn’t understand what a publicity shoot was, and how frequently magazines ran those images. My only thought was that Joe must love to golf. My dad happened to be an avid golfer, so I went out to the garage and scrounged up as many golf balls as I could and put them in a small brown box. In the box, I included a letter. The letter admonished the reader that the golf balls should not be given to a charitable cause, but should only be delivered to Joe directly. They were for him. His thoughtful birthday gift of old golf balls from an adoring fan. If they were not going to be gifted to him, this fan would prefer that they were tossed in the trash instead. I didn’t ask for a ride to the post office to mail the box. I knew my parents wouldn’t approve, so I collected as many stamps as I could find and plastered the small brown package with the postage, addressed the box to the fan club, care of: Joseph Mulrey McIntyre, and lifted the red flag to signal for the mailman.

When I talk about this incident now and my persistence with mailing letters and gifts to their fan club, people always ask me if I ever heard back from anyone. I never did, but there was always the hope that one of their mom’s or the president of the fan club would read my letters and think, “These letters contains the most thoughtful, inspiring words I’ve ever read. We must get this bundle to Joe immediately so he can meet this girl! She’s the one for him!”

Sometime in eighth grade, I got the best phone call of my life up to that point. It was an employee from “Teen Beat” calling to tell me that my letter to the editor had been accepted for publication in their magazine. I waited and waited for the issue to come out, and when it finally did, I knew that my fame as a super-fan would be cemented. The New Kids would want to meet me now. After all, my words were well-laid out and heartfelt. I was certain they spent hours reading teen magazines. In my letter, I explained that we could collect all the New Kids memorabilia we desired, but we all needed to face it, Joe and the four others were too far away for any of us to reach. If you carefully read in between the lines of this letter to the editor, you will see the obvious, “Screw all you bitches! I’m Joe’s number one fan and my words prove how smart I am.” One of the only people at my middle school who was impressed with my magazine appearance was a quiet Asian girl named Sirisom. She was also a huge fan, but less boisterous about it. We would often spend time comparing our pins and bracelets, discussing which items we would buy next. We would talk about how our lives would be transformed when we met the guys in person. There was also an unspoken competition. We tried to outdo each other when it came to fan knowledge. This was before the days of the Internet and Wikipedia, so the information we knew about the boys was from interviews, on TV and in print. I knew all of Joey’s eight siblings names and ages. I knew his parents birth dates. Where he’d grown up. What his favorite color, TV show and foods were. I could tell by the look on Sirisom’s face, that my appearance in a teen magazine put me in the lead when it came to my love for this band.

The culmination of my love happened the summer before eighth grade when we found out the New Kids were making our dreams come true by playing a concert at the Marriott Center in Provo, Utah. My mom was kind enough to arrange for tickets through her childhood friend who worked at the ticket office, and was also kind enough to fork over $25 for my ticket, which was a substantial amount of money for my family at the time. My friend Jackie was able to come to the concert with me, and we still had family in Utah County, so we were able to spend the night at my grandma’s house after the concert. On the 75-minute drive to Provo, we sang along to New Kids’ songs, ate Skittles and felt butterflies in our stomachs. I’d never been more nervous in my life up to that point. In a few short hours I would be in the same room with Joe and company. I would be breathing his air and watching his curly hair bounce as he sang to me about how I had the right stuff. Shortly after the concert began, I was throwing up Skittles into a cup, but like a true fan, I stuck it out. I felt faint. I cried. I wished I’d made a gigantic poster proclaiming my adoration. I yelled, “I love you JOE!” at the top of my lungs. We didn’t have floor seats, but we were about ten rows up from the stage on the east side. As far as I was concerned, anywhere in that stadium was the perfect seat. It’s a relief I didn’t have backstage passes or any encounters with the boys in person, I surely would have died. They could have played six encores and it wouldn’t have been enough.

I had been a tomboy my entire life, but for some reason during eighth grade, I decided to take a dance class. The woman teaching the class lived just a few streets over from us and taught dance in her basement. A couple friends were taking the class with me, and all three of us were extremely fond of NKOTB. Our lovely teacher, Denise, choreographed dances for our recital to New Kids’ songs. We even wore our neon tinged shirts and hats emblazoned with their faces and signatures. I do have pictures from this era. My parents liked to take pictures of me during this phase in hopes that one day I would see how foolish I looked. These pictures are hilarious to me now, and provide nothing but the sweet memories of youth.

The summer before I started high school, we moved from the house we’d been renting for the last five years into a house my parents had purchased. It was the first time in my life I had my own room. During that summer, I also discovered bands like R.E.M. and Depeche Mode. I replaced my New Kids’ hat with a Georgetown University hat I’d purchased on a trip to Washington, D.C. I started shopping for t-shirts at Banana Republic. After the move, I’d placed a solitary poster of Joe in my room at the head of my bed. When an older friend who was already in high school came over to see our new place, she informed me that only the desperate girls in high school liked New Kids on the Block. Before I went back to school, I took the poster down and put it in the crate with all my other New Kids memorabilia, which was put into storage (and is still there today). It was the end of an era, but not a period in my life I ever forgot.

Over the years, I followed Joe and Jordan’s solo careers. I watched “Say What Karaoke”, hosted by Joe (who had since decided to go by Joey Mac) to catch a glimpse of those blue eyes I’d stared at endlessly during my adolescence.

In 2008, when the New Kids on the Block announced they were recording a new album and launching a reunion tour, my mom once again offered to purchase us tickets, using her American Express Rewards Points. The ride had come full circle. As my sisters, my best friend and I shuffled into the venue anticipating the performance, I had the same feeling I had when I was 13. These were my boys, who had grown into men. At 31, I felt the same affection for them as I had nearly 20 years earlier. This time, I didn’t eat Skittles before the concert.