Having cleared up any thought that I was just going to wax nostalgic about the past, I begin my posts on fun and games with a consideration of shoe strings. These long cords, capped with eglets(a word only useful in crossword puzzles) were a constant irritant in my childhood. If I tied them too quickly they came undone and threatened to trip me. If I tied them too tightly I ended up with a knot I was unable to undo. I clearly remember believing that I could never be a mother because I could not get a knot out of a shoelace.

But shoelaces were just right for the hand game of “cat’s cradle,’ pictured in the illustration above. The game took two people, both of whom needed to know how to make the moves and both of whom were willing to play at any given time. I rarely found another girl to play this with, so I usually only got through the first steps, the one’s I could do alone.

One summer, however, when we spent six weeks at my grandparents’ home in the country, my mother was unusually relaxed. She patiently went through the whole process with me with a grand flourish of “ta da” when we finished. After that she showed me “Jacob’s Ladder,” another string design. I was amazed at this playful side of my usually harried mother. I remember the game with fondness as I see the two of us under the large sycamore tree playing with a shoestring.

I have started to blog again after a week off and I realize I want to write quite a bit about the past. But I want to make a distinction between remembering and nostalgia. Nostalgia connotes a longing for the past, an often idealized past. Remembering, on the contrary, takes account of the whole spectrum of experience, both good and bad. Even when many of the memories I share in my blog are joyous or humorous ones, I have no desire to go back to that time. I harbor no illusion that the past was any less complicated or complex than the present.

I love this portrait of my great-grandmother Florence Hiltman Carpenter and the first six of her children, including my grandfather on the right in the back row. While Florence has managed a half smile, the baby is complaining, two of the siblings are grumpy and the others are beyond bored. Despite her probable desire to have this formal studio picture show her growing family in all their fancy clothes pleased to be photographed, the picture instead reflects the reality of life in a busy household.

So as I begin to share a new series which am calling “Fun and Games,” I invite my readers to join either in remembering or learning how it was many years ago. We did have many ways of being entertained before television or electronics and I love thinking about them. But we had polio, diphtheria, small pox, measles, chicken pox, and scarlet fever too. We were worried about nuclear war, watched many of our war veteran fathers drink themselves stupid, saw many of our mothers discouraged by the demands of large families, and have trouble knowing why anyone would long for that time to return. There’s no nostalgia on my end.

I have been writing sporadically for a couple of weeks as I got ready for surgery which I had on Tuesday. All looks good; it was a preventive measure. I am still pretty wiped out and will take a couple of days longer to recover before I rejoin the wonderful community I have come to know and love.

So Merry Christmas or solstice or mid-winter or mid-summer wherever you are. May you experience the awe I show in the picture when I was one!

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For most of my life I followed an academic schedule. The year began at Labor Day and ended mid-June. I had an ingrained sense of time from that routine. After I retired and began attending the Catholic church pictured above I learned to move to a different schedule. There the year begins in Advent, the time leading up to Christmas, usually late November and runs until the next November. This new calendar has now been imprinted in me and I am comforted by the predictability.

Which brings me to the sense of being completely out of sync during this year. We went into isolation in mid March and missed the great feasts of Easter and Pentecost. We are nearly through Advent and are still unable to gather for worship. After Christmas season we will enter what the Church calls Ordinary Time, but there will still be nothing ordinary about it for us.

Catholic worship is very physical. While we joke about standing, sitting, kneeling, repeat, our bodies are quite accustomed to the practice. And the pinnacle of worship is a walk to the front of the church to receive Communion, a physical wafer in our physical hand. And much physical action happens before and after the service as we greet one another, often with a hug. We are an embodied religion and we experience much of our faith through our body.

While I watch Mass streamed on television, it becomes a listening experience rather than a fully embodied one. I am not surrounded by music: I can’t smell the incense or oil used at special times; I can’t take the bread and wine into my body. While seeing and hearing the Friars is much better than no contact, much is missing. That makes my worship feel as out of sync as the calendar.

Here’s hoping that enough Americans get vaccinated that it is safe to return to church or any other activities that people need to feel grounded once again. It turns out that routine is underrated. I miss it terribly.

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Reading about the possibility that Donald Trump would refuse to leave the White House(on the right) to allow President-Elect Joe Biden to move in, I thought back to 1955 and the house on the left. Our next door neighbor’s aunt had died and left him her house. It was an enormous place, filled to the brim with her hoards including ceiling high piles of old newspapers, and the neighbor wanted nothing to do with the place. Meanwhile with my mother expecting her fourth child and us living in a small two bedroom house, my parents were willing to buy the place, hoards and all. He only had two stipulations. He didn’t want to have to go in the house himself. And we had to continue to let Norman live there.

Norman, an odd man in his late 30’s, occupied a bedroom on the third floor. Perhaps he was the last resident of the boarding house that our neighbor’s aunt ran. He was a small man perpetually smelling of cigarette smoke. My desperate parents took up the offer and we acquired a new house and a new boarder. He paid no rent and made his own meals.

Norman gave me the creeps, though I couldn’t have told you why. He regularly baby sat us, apparently having earned my parents’ undeserved trust. One evening as we sat on the sofa watching television he bent over me and started kissing me. No fool I, even at seven, I pushed him away in disgust. Then I told my mother. Norman left. The house was ours for the first time.

Let’s hope it takes much less than that appalling scene for Trump to move out!

Two winters had passed with little or no snowfall. People began to talk as if New England was the new mid-Atlantic with a milder climate. Fortunately, for those of us who like New England, the snow delivered overnight, dumping 12 inches in our neighborhood. The little window thermometer reads just over 20 F degrees, but it is next to the kitchen window so is a little warmer than the real outside reading. Thanks to their overhangs, the three feeders in the picture continue to feed the visiting birds.

We have one neighbor who always likes to be the first on the street to clear a path. This morning I looked out and saw that there was a path clearing half of the sidewalk next door. He and my husband take care of that widow’s walks and driveways, so I knew he had been out. My husband commented that the man has a “little snowblower,” hence the half done job. At my encouragement, my spouse had purchased the Cadillac of snow equipment–a much larger machine. In the middle of a pandemic you take your bragging rights where you can!

If we can’t celebrate in any normal way this Christmas, at least we have snow. We can truly say “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” around here.

Most of my reading of late has been nonfiction. I seem to be sitting either with long biographies or serious histories. The biographies center on authors, the histories on immigration. But occasionally I find a novel that is worth the time it takes to read it. (For me, a lot of them aren’t) The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, written this past August, passed my test.

The premise of the novel is intriguing, and it is no spoiler to reveal it here. From the start of the book we learn that Nora is about to die. (If you really need to be completely surprised, stop reading now.) When she does, she finds herself in the midnight library, a place between life and death. There she finds the very helpful librarian who allows her to relive any part of her life about which she has regrets. Suddenly she finds herself back at those junctures.

While I often wonder “what if” about various times in my life, as do most I imagine, I have never encountered such a witty treatment of the questions. The book comes closest to the classic movie It’s A Wonderful Life, but departs from it in an intriguing way. Here Nora ends up time traveling and remaining both her old self(her root self) and the new one. My mind enjoyed the conundrums that arose thinking about that dual consciousness.

Great literature? No. But neither is it completely formulaic. If you need to depart from the crazy pandemic and political chaos surrounding us, you could do worse than to spend it in the midnight library.

Above is a screen shot of the Kara Walker exhibit at the New Britain Museum of American Art near our home. The site allows a “walk through” of the exhibit. At least it maintains that it does. The upper left corner shows the full room and the larger picture one view of it. The large white spots on the floor are places to stand or place your cursor or something. I never could figure out what I was doing as I scrolled around on the page. I looked too long at the ceiling and managed to get motion sickness trying to move from one print to the next.

I am grateful that museums are trying very hard to create “museum tours” at home. Sadly most of the technology reminds me of the very early days of video games. Do you remember the game Pong installed in some movie theater lobbies years ago? In essence for 25 cents you could hit a white spot back and forth on a screen. Pretty exciting at the time, but no match for the elaborate games now available. I imagine that the museums may improve their “virtual” experiences too some day.

But just as ping pong is much more fun than Pong, so going to an actual museum is a deeper experience than any “virtual” imitation could ever be. The space itself, the smell, the feel of the floor under your feet, the ability to peek into the next room, the chance to move in a pattern you choose, the bench to rest on and stare for minutes at one painting. Most importantly you can see the actual scale of the work of art in comparison to your own body.

I will be back in the actual New Britain museum as soon as I can. And I can guarantee I won’t spend any time staring at the ceiling or getting motion sick.

For a long time in the 1970’s I had either no money or very little money. In the early part of that decade we received “commodity foods,” basically surplus goods packaged by the government in generic black and white cans and boxes. It included dried eggs, canned tomatoes and a block of what Keb Mo the singer refers to as “government cheese.” His song is the only good thing about that block of plastic-like cheese.

But in the mid-1970’s the government found another way to support agriculture by issuing food stamps (they came through the Department of Agriculture.)These little coupons could be exchanged for food while gaining one the critical stares of customers using cash. Fortunately we ate very low on the hog already, so those noisy people could find nothing to complain about. (Steak? Cola? Potato Chips? How dare they?”) No, my basket was filled with ingredients for the extremely helpful recipe book pictured above. And central among them was canned mackerel.

I could buy a pound of the canned fish for 59 cents and make a variety of filling dishes thanks to the booklet. Looking through the pages this afternoon I see a check mark next to every dish I prepared. Baked Fish Loaf, Creamed Mackerel, Baked Mackerel with Lemon, Fish Cakes, Mackerel Puff, Mackerel Fritters, Mackerel Turnovers and Mackerel Roll. Our favorite, as I recall, was the roll, a mackerel mix wrapped up in biscuit dough. Hearty and cheap.

Eventually the government went to issuing plastic cards which look similar to credit cards. It is harder to judge other shoppers I hope. But by that time I was again employed and I was able to buy a wider variety of food. I haven’t eaten canned mackerel since, but I am forever grateful for its place in my life. It was nutritious, filling and nearly tasty!

By now you probably have realized that all the canned seafood I ate as a child came to us from Bumble Bee. I actually hadn’t noticed that myself until I added this third image to write about canned shrimp. Sure enough, there is that little cheerful bee on the label.

I wrote last year about my mother’s insistence that I learn how to make white sauce, one of the three skills she thought every girl should master before marriage. The other two, by the way, were how to iron a man’s shirt and how to make turkey gravy. I taught my own daughters none of these things. Anyway, white sauce was the key addition to the drained canned shrimp. Mixed with cooked spaghetti noodles they became “shrimp wiggle.” I liked this dish more than creamed tuna, but shrimp were more expensive than tuna so were served less often.

Needless to say I had no idea what a real shrimp looked like for many years. The only other time I had the shellfish was at a Chinese restaurant we used to go to a couple of times a year. Here we were treated to fried shrimp dipped in hot mustard. We each got one and learned to discard the end sticking out from the batter. I never even realized they were related to those tiny things swimming around in shrimp wiggle.

Many members of my family have deadly allergic reactions to shellfish, so they haven’t featured in my adult life. I am afraid the recipe for shrimp wiggle may lie dormant for years to come along with instructions for white sauce.