For Esmé, the Princess Blueberry, and her Knights -- part 2

Dear Esme, Jaedin, Ethan, Preston, Greyson, Massimo, (and your little sib-to-be),

Great-Aunt Amy forgot to tell you another thing, which leads to another story. This will happen often.
I apologize in advance.

Your Grandpa Kirk liked to play baseball on the neighbor's flat lawn, since ours rolled downwards like a little hill, which doesn't make for a very good game of baseball. Even the neighbors' lawns were too small for boys and bats and front windows, though.  He also liked to play soccer, but mostly he and the neighborhood boys would walk down to our schoolyard on the weekends and get up a basketball game on the empty court.

Sometimes your Great-Grandma Ardie would join in. She had played basketball in college, and she rode her bike every morning and could keep up with those boys, in her forties. Even though I never liked to play, I would go to the school to watch and play by the trees. Your great-grandmother Ardie loves to exercise. Even today, while she has bad back pain, she texts me and tells me how she is keeping her legs strong. :-)

G'g'ma Ardie IS strong. Maybe it's because she was born a twin! On September 8, 1930, she and her twin sister, Arlene, were born. They were a surprise!! back then doctors and hospitals didn't have sonogram machines and could only guess if a mother would have twins or triplets.

Their daddy had a little church in Sterling, Kansas, where they were born. They lived in Kansas for a few years, and then moved to Grabill, Indiana. Ministers didn't make very much money back then. The church people gave them a house to live in called a parsonage ( parson is another word for minister), and paid him $5 a week. A week. The church people also brought baskets of eggs and vegetables and fruit to the young couple with the new twins. My mother ( G'g'ma Ardie) remembers that her father would have just five cents, a nickel, left at the end of each week, and every Saturday he would take the twins for a walk to the drugstore and buy each of them an ice cream cone for a treat. Two ice cream cones for one nickel!!!

BTW Drugstores weren't like CVS or Walgreens are now. A pharmacist, what they used to call a druggist mixed up medicines and pills for people and also sold other things like candy, gum, magazines and newspapers. A little bit like a gas station now, but without the gas pumps -- and  usually the drugstore had a soda fountain. No, it wasn't a big fountain with Sprite or Pepsi flowing out of it. :-) People could come in and sit at a long counter and have ice cream and root beer floats and other yummy treats.

Ardie and Arlene had a little sister, too, named Marilyn. They all got along pretty well but sometimes the girls got sideways. Once, a very young Ardie pounded on the window of the back door and a piece of glass cut her arm, and she stopped pounding. That scared them all!

editor's note 8/21/14  it was NOT G'g'ma's twin sister who locked the kitchen door on a recalcitrant sister, causing her to bang on the window and cut her hand, but G'g'ma Ardie, who vexed their mamma. Larene was washing the girls' hair, one at a time, in a basin. Little Ardie got squirrelly, and my high-strung Grandma pushed her out onto the back porch to chill out and regain some decorum, dressed only in an undershirt and skirt. Embarrassed, G'g'ma ( Ardie age five-ish) banged in the window, adding insult to injury to herself -- as well as her wounded pride. Tender-hearted Aunt Arlene has absolutely nothing to do with any of that. It was all Grandma. HA Auntie Amy heard the  story forty years ago, and lost a few details along the way. Correction posted.  Aunt Arlene, I so apologize for implicating you for your twin's misbehavior. 

They saved their pennies as they got a little older, and for Christmas one year the three of them walked to the drugstore by themselves. Children used to do that. They'd go to the store or the post office for their mothers and have all sorts of adventures along the way. Cities were smaller then, and stores and post offices and neighborhoods all fit together better than they do now. The girls wanted to buy a gift for their mother. They had about 43 cents. Someday, Esme, I hope you will see a blue china teapot on one of our stoves. The little girls bought that teapot for their mother with just those pennies! and it has been in the family all this time.

The girls used to take their lunches to school in little tin buckets with a cloth napkin over the top to keep them fresh. Lunches in those days didn't have Gogurt or Veggie Straws. They would each have a sandwich and a piece of fruit, and they could clean their hands and faces with the cloth napkin when they were done and take it home to be washed for the next day.

G'G'ma Ardie learned how to drive when she was thirteen years old, out on her uncle's farm, in a car called a Model T. If you look for old pictures of a Model T, you'll see they were on of the first automobiles built in America. and looked sort of like a  fairy tale carriage, except with an engine instead of horses.

They moved from Grabill, Indiana to Fort Wayne, Indiana, so their father could work at the Bible College. The sisters sang in church often, which made their parents very proud of them.

Girls had to behave like little ladies all the time in those days -- and weren't allow to play sports very much. They always had to wear dresses and stay neat and clean and ladylike. Your g'g'ma Ardie loved sports, though, and she and her sisters played softball and basketball on the weekends with their friends.She knew some girls who played on some of the teams in  All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. 

After she graduated from high school, she and Arlene attended Ft. Wayne Bible College where their father worked. Their mother taught second grade at an elementary school, and also ironed lots of clothes for people, for extra money,  in the evening time to help pay for the girls to go to school.

Nowadays we have clothes dryers that we put our wet washed clothes in, and they roll around and get dry and fluffy and then we put them away. Back then, clothes got washed on a big tub with a crank, called a wringer washer. Hot or cold water got poured into it with laundry soap, and then the crank had to be turned to make the clothes get swished around. Dirty soapy water got drained out, and more hot or cold water poured in, and then the crank swished all the soap out of the water. After the water ran clear, the clothes would go through a wringer, in between rollers, and ANOTHER crank got turned ( hard, to push those wet soggy clothes through the rollers )  to s q u e e z e all of the water out. Then the wet clean clothes had to be clothes-pinned to a clothes line to dry --outside in the summer, down in the basements in the winter.  G'G'ma Ardie said it would take her mother all day Monday to do the laundry, and they didn't have very many clothes.

So while they were in college their mother helped other people with their ironing, and they paid her  10 or 25 cents per item to get all of the wrinkles out of those clothesline-dried dresses and shirts and pants. She would sprinkle a little water on the clothes, which seems funny because they just got dry. I know. :-) The electric iron didn't make steam back then -- it just had a flat plate on the bottom that got really hot, so the water sprinkles made the steam and helped smooth out the wrinkles.

One day when the girls were in college they wanted to go outside in the nice spring air and play a game of softball. The college rules stated that all girls were to wear dresses at all times.

The young men were outside playing ball! Why couldn't they? on a pretty day, the pretty girls got tired of being ladylike, and decided to put on some jeans and blouses and go play, too. Halfway through their game, people from the Bible college stopped them and sent them home. The girls received three weeks on not being able to leave the campus except for church, for wearing blue jeans and playing softball.

G'G'ma Ardie finished college and taught PE, physical education, so she could wear shorts every day and play baseball whenever she wanted to. In 1958, she stopped teaching for a while because she had a baby. Your grandpa Kirk. :-)

Today she's going over to stay with your Great-Aunt Alyson and her family, because she's not feeling well, so I am thinking of her and all the stories she told me about growing up as a twin in the 'olden days'.
She and her sister Arlene will be 84 years old in September! I hope she gets to hold you and your cousin-to-be someday. She's pretty wonderful!

Love, Auntie Amy

For Esmé, the Princess Blueberry, and her Knights -- part 1

Dear Esmé, ( and Jaedin, Ethan, Preston, Greyson, and Massimo, the esteemed knights )

Soon you and your new cousin ( set to arrive a little after you ) will be born and the BailorTale will have a new chapter.

I am your great-aunt, your Grandpa's sister and your daddy's auntie. Like Auntie Holly, and Rachel, and Danielle. One day we will play together on the beach in heaven, I believe...but for now I want to tell you some stories about the people who gave you your last name. :-)You may never know your great-aunt Amy, or maybe I might get to see you when you are also four, as I was on that long-ago Christmas I remember.

A long time ago, I took a train with my parents, my brother, and HIS three sisters to our grandparents' house for Christmas, and we stopped at a great-aunt's home along the way. Icicles hung from the roof, and my great-aunt's Margaret's cheery living room gave warmth from that crystal cold night. That night, 44 years ago, your grandpa Kirk was  already twelve years old.

Grandpa Kirk arrived on May 31, 1958, in Riverside, Ca., in a little bungalow hospital in the shadow of Mt. Rubidoux. To this day, a huge concrete cross sits on top of that pretty little hillside, so you might say your grandpa has always been close to the cross. :-) He lived in two different little houses before he turned nine, close to each other, both surrounded by big palm trees that fluttered in the sunshine while he played outside in the yard. He burned his baby feet on the heater grate in the second house, in the night. Back then the furnaces blew really hot air through the air shafts under houses, and there were pretty iron grates covering the opening to let the hot air would rise up. Poor Kirk --his bare feet met with a red-hot shock in the middle of the night.

We didn't have neighbors across the street in the house we moved to when he was nine, the same beautiful house where your Great-grandma still lives.  Only a big brick wall with ivy growing on it. A little bridge crossed over it so we could walk to our elementary school on a street across the canal. When he was a little boy he liked to play cowboys and Indians, and had toy guns and a cowboy hat. He also had lizards and snakes, in little glass cages in the garage, and sometimes he would let me help feed them wiggly worms out of a little cup full of sawdust and wiggly worms.

As he got older he liked to put together models of race cars and rocket ships. One time, he had left his model project on his desk in his room.

I loved that desk with a big surface as big as a table, and a writing board that slid out from a secret slot, and big, deep drawers. We passed it down to each other as the years went by, and it was already 60 years old! G'Grandma still has it at her home. Maybe someday you can play under it, like my sisters and I used to.

Anyway, Kirk left out a little jar of turpentine, which he used to clean the paint brushes used on his models,  in a small glass. Always curious, I sniffed at it and maybe put my mouth to it to see what it tasted like. Either your future grandpa discovered me in his hallowed space, and called for help, or someone else did, but the story is that they rushed me to the hospital to get my stomach pumped. Hopefully your brothers won't leave out anything dangerous for your curious self to discover. Blech. Turpentine. Like nail polish but so much worse.

When your Grandpa got older, he had a paper route. Back in those days, the paper got printed two times a day. Teenage boys and some girls had paper routes in their neighborhood. They would ride their bikes early in the morning or after school, roll up lots of newspapers in rubber bands, and then ride through the neighborhood to which they were assigned and throw them on the steps, like people do now from truck in the night. We didn't have the internet back then, or cable television or satellite dishes or anything like that. The news reports aired in the morning and afternoon too, and once more late at night. If you stayed up too late with a stomachache or the chicken pox, there was nothing to watch on television after midnight. the TV went fuzzy until the morning time, and we didn't have DVDs back then. We watched movies at the theater, or on Saturdays on television. But most of our news and advertisements were in the newspaper.

He loved to go backpacking in those days.  Loved the trees and the lakes and the mountain views, and time spent with his friends among the beautiful trails and evening campfires. He had a big green backpack that sat in the corner of the garage waiting for summer to roll around, next to his old baseball bats and fishing poles.

Your grandpa was the oldest cousin, so when he graduated from Riverside Poly High School in 1976, on Victoria Avenue where all the orange groves grew,  lots of  the relatives from came to Riverside to celebrate. We had a pool, so we spent lots of time out there. We also went to Knott's Berry Farm, which only had three big rides and a little Western town back then -- but we still had lots of fun together that season. That summer was the Bicentennial, America's 200th birthday. Lots of big parties and celebration went on that summer. Turning 200 is a pretty big deal! That summer, and every summer before and afterwards, they set off fireworks from the top of the mountain with the Cross. The fireworks would light up the Cross for seconds at a time with bright colors...and then the falling sparks would land in the dry brush below and little fires would burn all over the hillside. Sometimes BIG fires, so the firefighters were waiting on the roads to quickly put them out.

Not long after that, your future Grandpa Kirk moved into a little apartment by the big hill where our house sat along a canal(which watered the orange groves farther away). They didn't do fireworks on our hill, so we never worried about fire much, and we didn't have neighbors across the street. Just a big brick wall with ivy growing on it. A little bridge crossed over the canal, so we could walk to our elementary school on a street across the canal and down the next block.  In the springtime you could go outside and the whole city smelled sweetly of orange blossoms. ( One time, before he graduated, he and your great-aunt Karen babysat me and your great-aunt Alyson while our parents went out for dinner. The house at the end of the block sat up higher than the rest, and you could see over the top of the wall along the canal. That day my brother and sisters helped me and Alyson over the wall and we "played in the creek". We didn't ever get to do that, so we had so much fun -- until our parents found out. :( We spent a lot of time in our rooms for a while, after that.)

Train tracks run alongside our big hill. All during the day and at night the train whistle would blow as it came along, warning to clear the track in the little canyon. It must have been a little rumbly and shaky in his new apartment, but he didn't seem to spend much time there. Every time I went over to his apartment, he only had Ritz crackers in the cupboard. HA

 I always felt special when he would  to come to my church youth group and play his guitar for us, while we sang songs. All of my girlfriends had a big crush on my brother, and all the young boys were jealous.  HA

Your grandpa learned how to operate a backhoe, which is a big tractor with a big scoop and a deep bucket for digging lots of dirt. ( I forgot to tell you that we had a two-story playhouse with a sandbox underneath it, and when he was little he had a toy backhoe and lots of other big toy trucks he liked to play with in the sand. When he grew up, he did the same thing in real life.)

Later on he moved up to what we call The Valley. Our other grandparents lived there and our aunt Yvonne and Uncle Dale and our cousins. We went there for Christmas a few times too. Aunt Yvonne and Uncle Dale had a yearly contest of who could make the best Christmas candy, so their kitchen table overflowed with fudge and divinity fudge ( white fluffy goodness ) and other tins of delectable goodies. They had a big garden too, and grapevines, and a German Shepherd named Princess. Uncle Dale was a truck driver for a moving company, and always had a gazillion Girl Scout cookies in the big freezer in the garage which the cookie company gave to his company for delivering the cookies to the Girl Scouts.

Aunt Yvonne was my daddy's big sister. She had a big happy laugh and loved to tell stories about our family. Their other sister Aunt Barbara lived far away in beautiful Michigan, so we didn't see her so much. She had a big happy laugh too. I will tell you more about them in another story.

Kirk loved the valley. Big oak trees and rolling hill and wide open spaces where Uncle Dale and he and cousin David could ride their motorcycles. Sometimes they took me with them and we'd seem to be gone all day roaring along endless roads through the green and gold Santa Ynez hills.

That's where your grandpa met your grandma Christi, and suddenly, after a long time of seeming sort of sad, he was happy. I will tell you more about that next time too.

love,

Auntie Amy

Feelings...♪whoa whoa whoa...♪feelings...

.

"Feelings...whoa whoa whoa...feelings..."
Young ones, Google it for that reference. Or take an elevator, anywhere. It will pop up eventually.

Feelings. Our very soul consists of them, invisible, powerful, ephemeral. The soul lies housed in the body, which creates endorphins, or enhances toxins, depending on how the soul disseminates the environment shaping the emotions. 
Your heart races at the sight of your lover, or it pounds at the sight of a nemesis. 
You can spring up in joy after winning the championship game!! or sink down to the depths at the death of a loved or respected one. 
Our body and soul literally function at the whim of our emotions.
Yet, from the time we can sit up, we begin receiving stern admonition to suppress, appropriately express, not regress to, and only address in private the very unseen mechanism that fuels our existence. 

Feelings house our memories, guide our decisions, shape our judgments.

As a society, we have no idea how to manage this mechanism emanating from others, save for social mores and norms. It varies with the generations. Kingdoms won and lost over a disagreement. Dynasties ruled by indifferent rulers, following a strict code. Puritanical views on emotion and sin shaped this country. " BE strong. " " Don't let the devil get you down." 'Idle hands make devil's work" In other words exhaust yourself to keep from thinking about how you feel.

A generation ago, we still taught our children to contain themselves, at least in public. Now public has lost all boundaries, and everyone, everywhere, has the right to free speech on social media. True. Awkward, but true. We communicate a thousand more times a day than folks did one forty years ago, and so our feelings receive a thousand times more speculation and assessment, causing us to doubt who we are and what we believe. 

Therein lies the dilemma.

Fervent emotions and passions have zero tolerance in "the real world" of business and commerce.( Unless, of course, you loathe your competition and pour your energy into either dismantling or surpassing his kingdom. At that point you have wielded passion into a profit margin and achieved the American dream by nefarious means, as opposed to the long-suffering way of planting and waiting for harvest. Either way takes passion.)

Emotions, generally perceived as weakness, don't get tolerated so much in the great big bouncy world of organized religion either -- unless it's the divine ecstasy of revelation, singing praise at the top of your lungs, or joyful tears in the richness of blessing. 
Crying in worship, sharing doubts, showing anger tends to be sshhhed! in the hallowed halls of the great sanctuaries. "Not here! This IS THE HOUSE OF THE LORD. No one wants to see you crying. God Loves you, honey! Cheer up! . < hmmm...I thought He loved me as I am??>

Every mainline church, and several rogues, should post a huge sign with this at the top

Only Happiness and Holiness Allowed
( experience not needed, will train )



Not to say we should share our life story at length, in church or elsewhere, but we do not exist in a vacuum. 

Our essence, who we are, lies in those very emotions. We sentient beings have that inherited right, as it gave us courage in the Neanderthal days to survive. 

We remain hard-wired to feel, not behave serenely in the face of distress. Even Queen Elizabeth, a lifelong model of stoic decorum, did not sip tea and sit princess-like, gazing demurely out the palace window as the bombs fell on London -- she raced through the streets of her bombed out nation retrieving soldiers as an ambulance driver. 

We certainly have social and civil requirements in interacting with others, addressing issues, sidestepping toxic waste -- and a certain self-responsibility in avoiding self-toxicity. 

Nothing hurts a loved one more than to hear their beloved loathing themselves. However, experiencing pain is not " from the Devil". Dispensing it, maybe. ( Don't want to give negative forces any credit, so let's get back to the so-called "sin" of emotion).

The Bible says we are created in God's image. Right there in the first few pages of Genesis, chapter 1, verse 27. The rest of the Bible references a God who floods the earth, sends meteors to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, lets His people wander in the desert for 40 years, slays a vast civilization with plagues, and then changes His mind to offer redemption. Sounds like every dynasty, kingdom, or corporation, ever...minus the redemption clause.

" We are made in the image of God." Seems we have been indoctrinated, over the centuries by the early Church ( formed in secrecy under oppressive governance), to believe/know that God is a remote judge who will hypocritically sent eye us to the depths of hell us for a) not attaining sainthood and b) by possessing the same emotions which we inherited from Him.
Indoctrinated to believe that emotion does not dovetail with devotion. Indoctrinated to believe that the same Creator who spent eons painting the universe in exquisite detail would condemn us for being the very creation formed in His hands. Indoctrinated to believe that an ancient "headstrong woman" condemned all women to pain and to bear the curse of humanity. Indoctrinated to believe that other people, who existed on earth at that same time, were somehow out of the realm of His creation -- not to mention the dinosaurs -- and that all of the angst of humanity hinged on one "sin" of eating a forbidden fruit. God is love. Absolute love. Love forgives, sees past mistakes, stills the waters.

Surely there has to be more to the story. Surely the tribal nomads who passed along the Judeo-Christian chronicles around the fires of their kinsman could have left out a f e w things over the years. Surely the coming of Messiah did not mean the end of passion. Surely it meant the onset of it. .

We possess intuition and perception for a reason -- not extraneously or something to be feared, like some emotional appendix buried deep within our gut, out of sight out of mind. Certainly not suppressed, simply because we have chosen to believe in God. The true meaning of salvation does not equal excision of emotion. 

It means celebration of it -- eternally! Beware of suppressing the authentic you. Everyone knows what happens if you ignore an inflamed appendix...

...so allow feelings into your heart, but don't let them build up. Bottlled emotions muddle the mind. Panicked minds shut down the frontal lobe, which in turn lead to attack mode at perceived enemies. Remember, our cache of emotions did not come equipped with an arsenal, so making prison shanks out of the ones you possess also has zero tolerance. Not cool. If you are in prison of any sort, it is by your own hand. Don't stab the ones who come to visit.

Abundantly allow feelings into your mind, combining them with the facts at hand to make informed decisions.Great theologians, especially the ones with the big auditoriums on television, will tell you that your feelings gain strength from the devil "whispering in your ear", and so you should " ignore your feelings... clear your mind... so you can hear God and God alone." Not bad advice. However...

...if the devil is close enough to you to whisper, you have more problems than your emotions.

God gave you those feelings. You inherited them from Him. Don't deny your inheritance by ascribing to "church face theology" in which no negativity is allowed. God had, and has plenty of negative emotions. Anger, sorrow, jealousy, remorse. He also abounds in joy, which counteracts all of those. You are a unique creation, and your emotions make up your spirit. 

That spirit DOES lead the flow of your thoughts, yes, so examine your negative feelings as though you would a splinter -- or more serious injury. Evaluate what need to be done to heal the wound, and give it the air and time it needs.


Let not others tape down unnecessary bandages which keep it festering, simply so your pain is out of their sight. Feeling sad, angry, jealous and vengeful is in your DNA. So also joy, excitement, charitable and gracious. Day-to-day emotions ebb and flow like the tide. All were given for a purpose, to help us learn of the wonderful creation that is us.


Be real. Do no harm, but be real. It's your divine inheritance, and also the crux of one of the greatest emotion of them all. Love.