Personal: January 2005 Archives

This has been doing the rounds a bit, and as usual I am a little late to the party. I believe the originator can be found at Nake-id Knits

Grooming Products

• Shampoo: Modern Organic Products Lemongrass and Chamomile for Fine Hair
  
• Moisturizer: Origins Balanced Diet (supplemented with a number of other Origins white tea products)
  
• Perfume: Most of the time, none. But when I do use, my current bottle is Fresia-scented cologne from Fragonard
  
• Razor: Venus
  
• Toothpaste: Crest Whitening (when you're a coffee drinker you need all the help you can get)
  

Electronics

• Cell phone: Kyocera 7135 -- If it doesn't have a Palm OS on it, don't even bother to show it to me.
  
• Computer: Chuckle. Which one? My laptop is a Gateway m505 widescreen that every now and again gets confused with an Apple PowerBook
  
• Television: Dukane D-ILA projector and movie screen. Not my doing, but I enjoy it. How did we live before HDTV?
  
• Stereo: my iPod and my laptop provide most of my stereo. But we also have a mix of nice components to go with the projector
  

Home

• Sheets: In the winter, flannel. In the summer, jersey or cotton. I have very little color or print preference, but I do tend to find what I like best at Eddie Bauer and Pottery Barn
  
• Coffee-maker: Saeco Magic Deluxe. The one device that my husband knows better than to mess with. The one device that will leave my house only over my cold, dead body.
  
• Car: 1999 Mercury Cougar in a forest green color (the sporty little coupe, not the big behemoth). Fully loaded and with a manual transmission. (As my dad would say, if you don't have a stick, you're not driving, just steering. I'm definitely a stick girl.
  
• Stationery: A little from Cranes, the rest eclectic. And most definitely electronic paper.
  

Beverages

• Bottled water: I have no religion with bottled water, but will tend to pick Evian if given the choice.
  
• Coffee: Peet's, Major Dickasons's Blend or Intelligensia's Flo Blend (a blend they make for my favorite local restaurant).
  
• Vodka: Yes. Stoli if possible.
  
• Beer: Microbrewed ales. Goose Island's IPA is one of my all time favorites. I'm also partial to a well poured Guiness
  

Clothes

• Jeans: Gap, Long and Lean if I can get 'em.
  
• T-shirt: Gap, Eddie Bauer, J. Jill, whatever I can find at CostCo
  
• Briefcase or tote: I have an awesome backpack from Eddie Bauer for my laptop and my current favorite tote is a blue suede number that I bought from Levenger.
  
• Sneakers: None, if I can avoid them, I think they make my feet look strange.
  
• Watch: When I wear one, which is much less than I used to, the Movado my husband got me for Christmas the year before we were married.
  

Favorite Places: my home; Chicago; Sydney, Australia; the John Muir Forest; the big island of Hawai'i; Seattle

Extravagances: Food and dining out, tech toys and computer games, yarn (I suppose that goes without saying), books

I hadn't really expected to be blogging about what I was doing last Friday. Some events are really just about family, and, while important, not something I choose to talk about. If you've come looking for knitting, this post will be decidedly light on that subject.

Early this week I found out that my grandmother on my mother's side had passed away. If she had lived another month, she would have been 85 years old. To say that I have mixed feelings about my grandmother is an understatement. I have not seen her in many years, she did not come to my wedding, in spite of my mother's best attempts. She was not an easy person to be with or to love. She had a tendency to push people away, and, probably not to my credit, I kept my distance. I do believe that people make their own decisions about what they want their lives to be about. Hers did not always encourage her family to gather around her.

But to be fair, not all in her life was easy. She was born in 1920 and grew up in the Great Depression. She married her first husband in the early 40's, just before the US entered the war, I think. My mother was born in 1943. His plane was shot down over the English Channel (I think some time in 1944, but I don't know the exact date). He did not come home. She married again and had my uncle 8 years after my mom, and then my aunt 2 years later. Her second husband died before my mother was married to my dad in 1964. She spent much of her life as a single mother working as a housekeeper, which can't have been an easy thing to do at the time.

My grandmother wasn't an easy person to get to know. To be honest, I couldn't tell you much about her that would help me give you a good picture of her. She loved her garden, enjoyed reading Ann McCaffery, and watching basketball. She was a diabetic and she probably smoked too much. She was frugal and kept her home neat. When I was little, there were always cookies in the cookie jar on her counter, and a set of well-used Lincoln Logs to play with and some ancient Archie comic books in the bottom drawer of her desk. When I got older, I can remember her going through an old trunk, showing me the Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor that had been awarded to my mother's father.

As I got older, the distance grew. I won't explain the reasons here, but just as she wasn't an easy person to know, she wasn't an easy person to like.

Recently, she moved from her home to housing where she would have better access to medical attention and she had to pare down much of what she had carried with her through life, and make decisions about what had enough value to her to take with her. My mother and her brother and sister went through her belongings before my brother and I arrived on Friday for the funeral. My mother gave me these:

I had never known she did any needlework, she'd always complained of bad arthritis even when I was little. Yet these hooks and needles were important enough to her to keep, even when she cast many other things aside. They must have meant something to her. In spite of what I had thought, she and I did have something in common.

I wonder now if she and I might have had something to talk about. What if I had gone up to Northern Michigan with my parents and pulled out a knitting project? Or knit her a scarf for Christmas? Would it have made a connection? Given me a chance to see her in a different, more sympathetic light? No doubt, it wouldn't have changed everything. I guess I'll never know the answer now.

Goodbye, Grandma. May the next world or your next life treat you better than this one did. And if we should ever meet again, hopefully I'll have remembered to bring my knitting.