O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

Happy 253rd birthday, Robert Burns! My Scottish grandmother Agnes Greig (Ross) Rennie used to tell me his poems “To a Mouse” and “To a Louse” as stories. She always had a framed picture of him prominently displayed, and her frequent fond references to Rabbie Burns gave me the vague notion that he was a relative or old family friend she knew as a child back in the Old Country.

If I had any Drambuie in the house, I’d raise a proper Agnes Rennie toast to him tonight! But I don’t, so I’m settling for a cup of tea in one of my grandmother’s Scottish teacups, and listening to my favorite poems from the Librivox’s wonderful Robert Burns 250th Anniversary Collection.

When I was a little girl, I used to love to rummage around in the drawers of my father’s desk or in various little boxes around the house where there would be random small objects like buttons, which didn’t interest me, and foreign coins, which did. I don’t know where most of these coins came from, other than the ha’pennies my grandmother brought back from a trip home to Scotland. But I loved touching the coins, studying the words and images, feeling the foreignness, dreaming of travel.

Now I have accumulated a lot of foreign coins from my own travels, and they’re completely disorganized, all mixed up and sitting in various small containers. I still like spilling them out, and looking through them, remembering past trips and dreaming of new ones.

On Remembrance Day, November 11, we had just boarded a train in London and were still in the station when we heard the announcement that it was 11 AM, and that the country was now observing two minutes of silence. Everyone on the train, staff and passengers alike, immediately stopped what they were doing and remained still for two minutes. It was really quite a beautiful thing.

[Reposted from 2008]

I have often wished that I had a photograph of the Dover Country Store as I remember it from my childhood, so I was happy to discover this postcard on CardCow. This was a favorite place of my family’s in the days when we lived in Westwood and Dedham. In the front part of the store, they sold random household stuff, lamps and dishes and decorative items, if I recall correctly. (I was never much interested in that sort of thing.) They also sold penny candy, including candy sticks, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Mint Juleps, paper strips with candy dots and my personal favorite then and now, red Swedish Fish. They also had old books, which we all loved, especially my father. Many of my parents’ old books that I still have came from there. In the back of the store, there was used furniture, which my mother loved. We bought a big, beautiful round pedestal dining room table there for $5 or $50 or something like that — I was seven or eight and don’t remember the details of the sale, I just remember how pleased my mother was with her bargain.

We used to like going for family drives in those days, and more often than not these would end at the Dover Country Store, followed by a stop at the Bubbling Brook for ice cream in season. My father died when I was nine and we moved to Worcester. My mother would still take us to the Dover Country Store once in a while, but it just wasn’t the same.

Happy memories, though, and seeing this picture really takes me back to that place and time. I look at this picture and can see my family standing out in front of the store — the kids with little bags of candy, my mother holding a lamp or ashtray, and my father with a pile of books — PhotoShop of the mind.

I love this Smithsonian photograph of Elizabeth Lee Hazen (1888-1975) and Rachel Brown (1898-1980.) It was taken in 1955 when they won the first Squibb Award for Achievements in Chemotherapy.

Women like this were my role models when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s. I knew they were out there. I wanted to be a microbiologist. I dreamed of curing cancer. I wanted to wear a crisp white lab coat and pour mysterious substances from a beaker into a test tube. I got a little toy microscope when I was around five years old and a real one a few years later. I had a Bunsen burner and I feel bad about lighting the curtains on fire. No serious damage done, though, and I continued dreaming of my future career in science.

About halfway through high school, I sadly came to the conclusion that science required a level of focus that is just not the way my brain works. But when I look at a photograph like this, I can’t help but think, “Well, maybe if I had just made a little more effort…”

Links

• Elizabeth Lee Hazen and Rachel Fuller Brown — “E. R. Squibb bought the rights to the patent, conducted clinical trials, and licensed the production and marketing to a wide variety of drug companies. Royalties from these activities were funneled back into the scientific world by the Research Corporation via the Brown-Hazen Research Fund, which gave grants to scientists in the life sciences during the life of the patent.”
  [From the Chemical Heritage Foundation website]
• Inventor Profile: Elizabeth Lee Hazen — National Inventors Hall of Fame
• Inventor Profile: Rachel Fuller Brown — National Inventors Hall of Fame

Strawberry Fields was very popular that year, and I remember it as part of the soundtrack of the hospital, along with Red Sox games on the radio and the endless “Paging Doctor So-and-So” announcements on the PA. I heard Strawberry Fields drifting in and out of rooms as I was wheeled down the hall on a gurney going back and forth for various tests and treatments. It was the first thing I remember hearing when I was coming out of the anesthesia after surgery. I wasn’t sure if I were dead or alive, awake or sleeping, and I remember just floating along with the song for a minute or so until I heard someone ask if anyone knew the score and I knew I was alive and awake. 1967 was a big year for the Red Sox, and the whole hospital staff seemed to be listening to every game. The hospital is close to Fenway Park, so for home games you could practically hear the cheering crowds and people were always joking about possibility of a home run ball coming through the window and knocking someone out.

The psychedelic dreaminess of Strawberry Fields seemed perfectly suited to the hospital, where we were having our own drug experiences, though not by choice. Even when the song wasn’t actually playing, I used to hear it in my mind, intentionally replaying it over and over, drifting along in my mind’s own music video.

I’d close my eyes and send myself far away.

“Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It’s getting hard to be someone
But it all works out
It doesn’t matter much to me”

One thing I learned at Children’s Hospital was how to deal with medical treatment and many other problems in life: Just do what needs to be done, and don’t ever complain or feel sorry for yourself. I was in an orthopedic unit, and we knew we were lucky, because although we lived in all sorts of casts and braces and traction, we weren’t actually sick and were unlikely to die from our conditions. We were aware of other units of the hospital, filled with children and teenagers with much more serious conditions.

So I tried to make the best of things, and instead of feeling sorry for myself, I’d distract myself. Strawberry Fields was perfect for this, filling my mind with music and beautiful images. Music is still my first choice for managing pain, anxiety and depression, and it really helps. For that, I’d like to thank The Beatles and Children’s Hospital.

Also Apple, because when I got my first iPod I started creating custom playlists that really help me cheer myself up, calm myself down, or otherwise keep myself moving forward!

This was a large, noisy family group, and no one seemed to hear the boy or respond, but I thought that was excellent advice!

I love the dandelion; it was my first favorite flower. In our neighborhood, fathers tended the lawns in a casual manner and dandelions were plentiful. We learned young that you were supposed to ask before you picked flowers from the garden, which made it impossible to pick them as a surprise. But dandelions were free — kids could pick as many as they wanted from anyone’s yard. They were easy to pick, too, no knives or shears needed for their soft, hollow stems. We’d run into the house clutching a fat bouquet of sunny yellow dandelions and surprise our mothers, who would profess delight and stick the bunch in a small bottle and put it on the kitchen windowsill. I loved those little bouquets when I was a child bringing them to my mother, and years later as a mother when my own daughters were bringing them to me. Now I am looking forward to the day when a visiting grandchild will run into my house calling out, “Grandma! I have a surprise for you!”

I have great memories of looking through my mother’s Christmas card list. Looking through those names and addresses was part of the Christmas ritual.

We had old family friends named Helen and Henry who lived in the town with the lovely name of Maple Shade, New Jersey, on the street amusingly named Forklanding Road. We sent cards to Uncle John and Aunt Bessie who lived on Rochambeau Avenue in the Bronx. Uncle John was my grandfather’s brother but I have no memory of actually meeting him and Aunt Bessie in real life. Still, I marveled at their exotic address. Why was it “the Bronx” and not just “Bronx?” And how elegant Rochambeau Avenue must be! I pictured it as French, with ladies walking poodles past sidewalk cafes. My mother’s Christmas card list was a family history document, a collection of names and addresses of relatives near and far, old and new friends from various phases of their life.

I sometimes feel defensive about clinging to the habit of sending out paper cards. A lot of people think that sending Christmas cards is a waste of time, paper and postage, and that it’s totally unnecessary in the age of electronic communication. Every December, newspapers, magazine, blogs, etc., are full of articles about how to simplify Christmas, and it seems that reconsidering the sending of paper cards is always one of the first suggestions.

And I’m just fine with that — if you take no joy from sending Christmas cards, don’t do it. I remember the days when the sending of Christmas cards was a social obligation, and people worked hard to maintain their Christmas card lists. I remember people checking off names as people received cards — if someone who you didn’t send a card to sent you one, you were supposed to quickly send one out to them, and if someone you sent cards to didn’t reciprocate for two years, you could safely drop them from your list. Or at least this was what the advice columns said: my mother was not the type to be checking lists and dropping names. But in those days, the same kind of people who today care about how many Facebook friends they have measured their popularity by the number of Christmas cards they received.

But it doesn’t need to be like that. We should all send as many Christmas cards as we want, which might be fifty one year, zero the next and twenty the following year. Who’s counting? We should all graciously receive whatever cards we happen to receive, and send whatever we feel like sending — which for a lot of people is none. When you see Christmas cards as obligations, and associate them with pride on the one hand or guilt on the other, you’ve lost the spirit of the season.

I’ve always liked sending cards as a small way to keep in touch with people who are important to me. This includes some people who I see all the time or perhaps communicate with frequently via e-mail, Facebook, etc. There are also a few people who I mainly keep contact with through the annual Christmas card — sad, perhaps, but better than nothing, and just writing their names and addresses once a year reminds me of the good times we’ve shared. I wish I could say that I individually select cards for each person and wrote thoughtful little notes on each card, but I don’t. I just buy UNICEF cards, sign them and send them, most years anyway, and I hope that people I care about don’t sit around wondering why they did or didn’t get a card from me this year.

And whether by card, e-mail, Facebook, or just a good thought, I wish all my friends a merry Christmas and/or a Happy New Year!

The poem I remember best from her class was October’s Bright Blue Weather, by Helen Hunt Jackson. Although it appears in many anthologies for children, it’s pretty long and the language is challenging. I don’t think we had to memorize this one, but I remember sitting at my desk in our classroom on the second floor of the Charles J. Capen School, dutifully copying the poem on composition paper.

I copied the first verse, hearing Miss C.’s poetry voice in my mind:

O suns and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October’s bright blue weather

I paused for a moment after writing the line “October’s bright blue weather,” and looked out the window, and there it was — a dazzling blue October sky! This was a thrilling moment for me, literature and nature coming together. And every October, that phrase sings in my mind, every time the sky is blue and even when it isn’t. I think it’s a beautiful line, but I don’t know if I would have appreciated it as much if Miss C. had not read it to us in her dramatic poetry voice.

I remember a few other of Miss C.’s favorites. In the spring, she read us Wordworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” still one of my favorite poems. She did a great reading of this, pausing slightly after dreamily reading the first two lines, “I wandered lonely as a cloud, That floats on high o’er vales and hills…” and switched to her surprised voice for the next two, “When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils!” There isn’t an exclamation point in the original poem, but that’s how she read it. Every time I see daffodils, I hear her voice in my mind.

I also remember her reading us psalms every morning after the Pledge of Allegiance. Hard to imagine such a thing now, and I don’t remember any other teacher reading from the Bible. Her favorite was Psalm 24, King James Version. The first few lines she delivered in a matter-of-fact, almost sing-songy fashion:

The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof;
the world, and they that dwell therein.
For he hath founded it upon the seas,
and established it upon the floods.

But then she’d switch to dramatic mode to ask the questions, placing emphasis on the word who:

Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place?

And then to her teacher voice to clearly state the answer:

He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart!

She recited this as if there were an exclamation point, and I always expected her to add, “That’s who!”

And now that I know she’s gone, that’s how I picture her, on top of the hill of the Lord, standing right next to his throne, inspecting the hands and hearts of incoming souls to decide who shall pass and who should fail. It would be a perfect role for her — she had standards and knew how to enforce them, and I can’t imagine her ever wanting to rest in peace.