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wayback Wednesday: anne mccaffrey

I just read an article by Lev Grossman on the passing of writer Anne McCaffrey November 21. In it, he talks about how much of an impact McCaffrey's novels have had on him, and the same holds true for me. While I can't remember whole passages word-for-word as Grossman claims, I can credit McCaffrey -- and my preacher, Steve Stone -- for my ongoing love affair with science fiction and fantasy novels.

The Stone family moved to Clinton when I was in 5th grade, to lead the congregation at First Methodist. Steve and Mary had four children: Jenna, who was my age; Stevie Jr., the same age as my sister; James, a few years younger; and Audrey, who was maybe 4 at the time. Jenna and I quickly became friends, and soon I found myself at their house on a regular basis. 

The parsonage was fairly large, and it featured both a den and a formal dining/living room. In the den, one portion of the wall was devoted to a large built-in bookshelf; most of the shelves were filled with Steve's scifi/fantasy novels. 

Prior to this, I had dabbled with science fiction and fantasy; I'd read all of L'Engle's Time Quartet, Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, Lewis's Narnia series. But those were all standard children's/middle grades fantasies that had become almost mainstream in how they were viewed by the general public. One day, Steve and I were talking about books and he pulled Dragonflight from his shelves. "Read this." I did -- in just a day or two -- and then came back for the rest of the series. 

From that point on, I became a constant visitor to the science fiction / fantasy section of the Waldenbooks at our local mall. I moved on from McCaffrey to Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, and then on to works by Jennifer Roberson, Tad Williams, Weis and Hickman, Terry Brooks, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Robert Jordan, and more. My relationship with the Stone family -- all of them -- shaped who I am today in so many different ways, including my reading habits, and I am forever thankful.

wayback Wednesday: the family restaurant

I've mentioned a time or two on here that my Papaw (my dad's dad) owned a seafood restaurant in my hometown while I was growing up. He opened it when I was around 4 or 5, I'd guess, and it operated up until I was in middle school. Clark's Seafood Restaurant was one of the few places in the area where you could get fresh seafood three nights a week (Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday). So many of my childhood memories are tied to this place and the people who frequented it. 

• The decor was pieced together from whatever had been in the restaurant when Papaw bought it. That meant threadbare maroon carpet with some sort of black medallion pattern, faded red (almost pink) pebbled vinyl booths, and mismatched chairs with faux-woodgrain Formica tables. The Clark family -- with Mamaw (dad's grandmother) at the head -- always commandeered the table closest to the kitchen. That's just the way it was.
• I preferred the booth in the front window or the booth over behind the cash register.
• The register sat on one of those wooden display cases with the sliding back panels and glass in the front. Inside were lots of odds and ends, including Mentos candy rolls. There was a green glass double-decker bowl of Super Bubble bubblegum that sat on top. I chewed a LOT of bubblegum growing up. (In fact, that's how my Papaw used to bribe my sister and I into giving him an extra hug or a kiss -- until we grew tall enough to reach the gum on our own. Then he upped the ante to a quarter.)
• There was a huge walk-in cooler in the back room where we stored the buckets of seafood -- shrimp, oysters, fish. Once every two weeks, Dad or Papaw (or both) would drive south to Mobile Alabama to pick up an order of fresh seafood at Ralph's. Papaw had a blue and gray Chevy Silverado truck with a wooden box made to fit the bed and a camper on top. They'd fill the box with ice and then pack it full of buckets of seafood for the trip home. 
• We made our own coleslaw. When I got older, my favorite job was to run the cabbage through the hand-cranked vegetable grinder that was mounted on the counter in the kitchen. We also made our own shrimp sauce, and there were these huge bags of ketchup that slid into a plastic holder on the wall. Then you unscrewed a black cap on the side of the bag and the ketchup poured out that way. (It made filling ketchup bottles much easier, but one time a bag burst all over Dad. He reeked of ketchup for the rest of the day.)
• I can't even begin to explain how popular this place was. I've traveled through the state and had people 5 and 6 hours away ask me about the restaurant when I tell them where I'm from or what my maiden name was. It's incredible, really.

Finally, that picture up above? Those are the t-shirts that Papaw had made for the restaurant. I really wish I'd had the forethought to keep one of them. On the front was an illustration that, on the right side, showed a bunch of skinny people walking into the restaurant. On the left side, you see them leaving and they are HUGE from all the great seafood they've eaten. (They didn't have them in kid sizes, so Elisha and I wore adult shirts as nightgowns.) 

wayback Wednesday: growing up on the Gulf Coast

This is one of my favorite pictures of my little sister and me as kids. My guess is that I'm 6 and she's 4 here, so that would make this '79 or '80, most likely. We're standing in front of the USS Battleship Alabama in Mobile Bay. While I was growing up, my papaw owned a seafood restaurant, and Mobile was where his fresh seafood distributor, Ralph, was located. Dad made the trip often, and during the summer we would make family vacations out of it. We always stayed at the Best Western here.

• I love our little terrycloth short sets; Mom frequently dressed us alike (sometimes exactly alike, other times in different colors of the same outfit).
• I love how brown we are; as kids, we were constantly outside, running, playing, building, swinging, flipping, digging.
• I love how you can see our attitudes and personalities in the way we are standing: the little smirk on my face, the sassy hands-on-hips pose that Elisha has.
• I love our crazy hair. You can't really tell it from the photo but both of us had really long hair when we were young -- like down-to-our-waists long. Mom usually put it up in a ponytail, and by the end of the day, all these little wisps and bits of hair would be standing out around our faces like tiny halos.
• I think this might be the vacation where Mom forgot our shoes -- if I could see our feet, I could definitely tell you. Mom and Dad would usually leave really early in the morning for trips like this; 3:00 or 4:00 am was common. They'd just load us in the car in our pajamas, still asleep, and by the time we woke up, we'd be halfway there. They did this one time and Mom forgot to grab our shoes. So when we arrived, we had to stop at a JCPenney's store and buy a pair of flipflips. They were brown, and mine had red straps and a red stripe around the sole, while Elisha's were royal blue.

We spent almost every summer on the Gulf Coast: Mobile, Gulfport, Biloxi, Gulf Shores, Destin, Ft. Walton, Pensacola. There are times when it almost feels like I grew up there. I've only been back once since Dad died; a couple of years ago, Mom and I took the girls and Marilee (Chris's mom) to Gulf Shores for Spring Break. It was bittersweet to see all the same places and realize how much they (and I) have changed.

wayback Wednesday: grandparents

Most of our photos of the girls when they were little have been scrapbooked, although there is still one box of photos that I haven't gotten to; all of this was before the advent of owning a digital camera (meaning=we won't discuss the number of digital files that HAVEN'T been scrapped). Chris pulled this box down from the closet shelf a couple of nights ago and started looking through it. In addition, there's one other box of photos there, mostly photos from my childhood that Mom has given to me. This one caught my eye for a number of reasons.

• That's me (on the right) and my little sister. Don't you love our expressions? I'm pretty sure those are fairly typical representations of our personalities. 
• Elisha and I are 27 months apart in age. Mom used to dress us alike when we were little, and I don't think that we minded. In fact, I think we probably liked it. Sometimes our outfits were identical; at other times, we would have the same shirt or the same dress, except in different colors. In fact, that was pretty common. I know the shirts we had on were velveteen with the ribbon accents across the front and a banded hem. I *think* they were storebought (maybe Garanimals?) but I'm not sure; Mom used to sew a lot of our clothes, so she very well could have made these shirts for us.
• The dog belonged to my Granny and Gramps (that's my mom's maternal grandparents). I don't remember his name at all; I actually remember very little about him, except that after he died, my Granny had a model made of him out of ceramic. (She also had another one of their cat, and I'm pretty sure Mom painted and fired that one at a ceramics class she took when I was younger. Weird). If I remember correctly, I think they buried the dog under the house. They lived on a hillside, so the house was all one floor, but the back had a deck with stairs. Underneath the house was a basement that Gramps used as a workspace -- he did some basic woodworking, if I recall, and the space had a dirt floor, so the dog was buried in a corner. I'm trying to recall his name -- Buddy, maybe? That sounds right, but I'm just not sure.

That's my (maternal) grandmother in the background. This is one of the VERY few photos I have of me with my mom's grandparents. I think Mom may have a couple tucked away in an album somewhere, but the fact remains that there are very few pictures of us together. That's indicative of the fact that, growing up, I spent very little time with my grandparents. Of course, we spent the holidays with them, and I can remember spending the night at their house a good bit, but that was actually time spent with my mom's little sisters (who are 6 and 9 years younger than Mom; Dee was 14 and Denise was 11 when I was born). Truth be told, I've never had much of a relationship with my grandparents. Of course, I love them; they are my family, and I have a fondness for them because of that. But there's just no relationship there with any depth or significance to it.  I don't remember them attending any of my dance recitals or my softball games or my FFA events; I don't remember spending one-on-one time with them, talking and learning and sharing and just being together. 

All of this has been weighing on my heart and mind recently. A couple of months ago, my grandmother was admitted to the hospital with congestive heart failure. She's battled cancer a number of times, most recently lung cancer, for which she underwent a lobectomy and then entered remission. For several days, things were really touch-and-go, and in the end we found out that her lung cancer had returned in the form of a large mass sitting over her heart that can't be treated with radiation, chemo, or other means. Basically, we were told it's just a matter of time.

What's hardest about this isn't the fact that I'm losing my grandmother; it's that I'm realizing that I never really had her to begin with. She was never a big part of my life while I was growing up, and so that pattern has continued into my adult years. I feel like I *should* take the time to go visit her now and take the girls to see her, but there's no emotional imperative behind that feeling. It feels like more of an expectation or an obligation -- like what I *ought* to do rather than what I *want* to do. And the awareness of these feelings -- well, that just makes it worse. I feel terrible that I don't feel worse about this, that there's an emotional void there; I keep thinking that I should be upset and then I'm bothered because I'm not. More than anything, I think there's still just a lot of confusion and regret about how absent they chose to be in my life when I was younger. And I'm not sure how to resolve that, or if it will ever be resolved.

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Wayback Wednesday is a new feature on the blog that replaces What's in my Heart Wednesday. Honestly, it's more like a melding of the two; however, What's in my Heart Wednesday made me just slightly uncomfortable. There are things that I choose not to share about my personal life here because they involve other people who read this blog or who know people who read this blog. Sharing that information crosses a line, so I chose to create a new feature, where I blog about an old photograph and the memories connected to it. I hope you'll join me in sharing your Wayback Wednesday posts.