Trash Day

Today was trash day. I like trash day, and not just because it means I can stash Boogie's "offerings" in someone else's to-be-picked-up trash instead of hauling it all the way home to befoul my refuse either (although I do walk him extra early for specifically this purpose as trash pickup is at 8 or so).

I haven't had a neighborhood neighborhood since I moved from the south. People here stay local in terms of friends, even if they move. If you didn't play pee wee hockey with them, it's seemingly pointless to even try. Still, people fascinate me and trash day is a little voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of people who are probably more interesting than they even know.

These are the things I discovered just today:

• The people who live next door to Old Mrs. Hurvitz (the second) either lost a hamster this week (the cage was in the trash, not the hamster) or upgraded one to better digs. I find this funny because they are the one house that complains when Boogie poops on their lawn (I ALWAYS pick up -- it's the law, and it's conscientious). Seriously? You have a rodent living IN YOUR HOME, and my dog's poop for a split second on your lawn is gross? Whatever.....
  
• The old threesome who lives at the end of Union St. has not died. They do not have a car, and I worry about them. I haven't seen trash since the summer began, and I wondered. Today, finally, they had one bag.
  
• The people who live just before the trashless old people on Union street (who are very nice and have the funniest looking terrier mix I have ever encountered -- and I'm the sister of a vet who collects and passes on the motliest of the motley dogs you can imagine) must have either a much more vivid social life than the Crimefighter and I, or else they are RAGING alcoholics. They had 2 recycling tubs filled with half gallon whiskey bottles. Then again, the economy is harsh right now, and sometimes drinking at home is the most one can afford. My suspicion is the former.
  
• The old guy who plays his banjo on his porch on summer nights (and reminds me of my grandfather who often did the same thing playing the same songs) buys Vienna Sausages in bulk. I do have to wonder what kind of person does that.
  
• The kid on the corner of West and Union (the one with the swing set I have to drag Boogie by quickly for hygienic reasons) has graduated from diapers to pull-ups. Yea for you, little man.
  
• The Crimefighter and I are not the only ones in the neighborhood who produce more recyclables than trash. With the exception of my delusional neighbor, almost everyone on all 5 streets Boogieman and I traverse had at least twice the amount of recycling containers as trash containers.

Which begs the question..... why the hell aren't our taxes going down?

Kiddie Lit and a Rainy Tuesday

The calendar says it is June 9th, but apparently someone forgot to tell the weathermen in New England because I'm still in my old Crossroads for Kids sweatshirt which now seems to be my summer uniform and wondering just what that third pot of coffee (The Crimefighter was home for a time this morning, so I can't take credit for more than half the first pot. The second pot, however....) will do to a girl my age.

It's also raining and is scheduled to be just that way from now until forever, so I'm trapped inside with just me, my books, and two quite stir crazy animals. Not as much fun as it sounds. The Crimefighter is also on hiatus from the office for a few hours, and this always throws my schedule for a loop. I know I waxed all poetic about taking it easy this summer, but it's still hard to look at a man who really is busting his ass from over the top of a book I don't have to be reading. I'm escaping to my office for a time. I love my penniless freedom, but flaunting it during working hours seems a flavor of ass-hattery I wouldn't enjoy being on the receiving end of, so there you have it.

I've reached a reading lull this week. My brain feels sort of fried from all the stuff I'm trying to force into it (Book by Book by Michael Dirda and The Foie Gras Wars by Mark Caro) and all the stuff I'm trying to let seep out (The Devil's Own by Sandra Brown -- whoever recommended that one to me.... really? What did I do to offend you?).

I have a plan in place for when this happens though -- kiddie lit!

Note: I also retreat to kiddie lit when I'm feeling especially put upon by the process of being an adult. Bill paying days and health insurance calls always send me scampering for a little Tamora Pierce, Louis Sachar, or, in happier days, J.K. Rowling. There are others, but these are the names I can read from where I perch at this moment.

I have not only an obsessive history with books, but also a long one. I'm the child of a PhD in Reading who professed (professored?) during the heyday of the emerging young adult market. Unlike most kids, I all but shoved my mom out the door on "business trips" because, unlike my Dad's business trips back to Connecticut which only meant the family was eating out every night he was gone (we'll save the story of my mother's relationship to the kitchen for another, significantly shorter, entry), when my mom returned from her conferences in children's lit, I got swag.

My absolute fondest memories of my childhood would be when my mother returned from those trips. See, this was a different world. I have a cousin who is a children's book author now, and she views conferences as ways to increase sales. They are the literary version of movie press junkets. She sets up a booth and judges her success by the sounds of the cash register and how sore her hand is from signing copies.

In he 70s and even the early 80s, the children's book market was a different animal entirely. My mother returned from these semi-annual jaunts absolutely loaded down with editor's copies and pre-releases of all the greats, most of which she received gratis. Some of my earliest deities, the men and women who would help shape the woman I have become as surely and completely as my folks or any teacher (for good or for ill), would be in attendance. When you have a big old dork for a daughter, as my mother did (and does), shooting the shit with Betsy Byars, Judy Blume (yes.... THE Judy.... I KNOW!!!!) , or Paula Danziger can produce more awe than going up on the space shuttle.

She would arrive home with bags upon bags of books, and I would dump them all over my bedroom floor. Hours would be spent ranking them and piling them into stacks in order of necessity. My parents knew that for the next weeks, no amount of calling would bring me to the dinner table any faster and that it was probably a good idea to put the oldest sheets on my little twin bed because odds were that I was going to burn a hole in them with my flashlight.

These were the days when kids were expected to read and were considered as wide and diverse a market as their adult contemporaries. We had all the types of lit that our parents and teachers had at their fingertips -- from the very very good (yes, I received a first edition of Forever by Judy Blume -- the one with the locket on the front -- at age 8. That might explain some things.) to the very very not so good (Harlequin put out Caprice classics, a line of formulaic romance novels, and Silhouette had a junior readers romance line as well -- in the end, the girl got her boy and her first kiss, thus becoming a woman). I even know that the very first Silhouette series romance was called P.S. I love you and featured a girl vacationing in Palm Springs who gets the bumper sticker (p.s. meaning Palm Springs) but has a romance with a guy named Paul Something-that-starts-with-an-S who gets cancer or something and dies, but she'll always remember him..... there was a sequel too where she meets someone new and falls in love again, but that didn't happen for many many books.

The point is that while many of these books were bad (oh, so bad, and taking up space still in my crowded head), it didn't matter. They were new adventures. I had a lot of advantages as a kid, but my most treasured possessions are my autographed copies of The Cat Ate my Gymsuit and There's a Bat in Bunk Five (which actually says, "Suzy, I'm so glad you liked Cat. Hope you like this one too -- Love, Paula" .... if you just got jealous..... I KNOW!!!)

The closest I can come to that kind of brush with people I admire is a ten minute chat with Pat Conroy (contents of said chat are unmemorable) when my Mom took me to a professor thing when he came to speak at her school when I was in high school -- neither of us impressed the other since his glory days, I even knew then, were over, and I was, you know, a high school kid. He'd written all the weird out of himself, and I knew it even then. There was also my cringe-worthy gushing when I met Greg Mortenson at Northeastern last fall. I think I might have scared him a little -- but then again he was kind of wearing that look whenever he talked to anyone in the room, not just me. I think he wanted all of us to stop talking, take out our checkbooks, and send him the hell back to Pakistan so he could build another school.

Anyway, these were the magicians of my childhood. Danziger taught me to accept my flaws (and to care about others as much as myself, at least some of the time) and Blume taught me what it meant to be a strong woman. The truth about Forever.... is that it doesn't last forever, and you have to be able to look at the girl in the mirror when Forever is over.

I've read some older children's lit and some written recently and tried to see what has changed. Turns out, a lot. A lot of people complain that books today treat children like adults, but I've come to realize that isn't the problem. Books today DO place children in very adult situations and claim to be "writing what the kids live," but books of the past come far closer to treating children like ACTUAL adults, and they are, often, stronger for it.

First I should say that I'm not talking about the best children's books out there. The best have literary merit all their own, and I believe they will hold up and speak to future generations. What I'm talking about is the mediocre books of this generation versus the mediocre books of my generation. This is where comes the great imbalance. The crap of today is truly crappier than the crap of my youth.

So, if a kid reads the best, they will have the same advantages as the kid who read the best of any successive, or probably future, generation. The problem with the top of the heap is that it is, always, a loosely populated area. Not too many books get to live in the poshest literary zip codes.

The ones who suffer are this generation's kiddie dorks, much like myself a few decades ago. We cannot live on a half dozen books a year. We might as well try to live on a few breaths a day.

Perhaps there is a place for the gritty realism found in much of contemporary mediocre fiction. The formula for today's mediocre books seems to be the poorest of the poor neighborhoods or the richest of the rich. I guess that's always true, a popular literary device for children, but the Deus ex Machina always present in the formulaic doesn't seem to work when the starting place is so dire or exclusive. There's a disconnect I'm still trying to piece through (so bear with me -- I concede I'm still trying to grasp it).

Let's take the ever popular arena of boarding school -- popular throughout time for it's reliance on the classic Home - Away - Home Again tool. By necessity, much of children's lit must take the child out of direct supervision of the adult world in order for him or her to come into their own. Becoming an adult most often occurs away from the eyes of actual adults.

The Boarding School (Mediocre) fiction of my youth may be seen in The Girls of Canby Hall series, while today's is in the Upper Class, It Girls, or Private series. In the eighties, the boarding school device was solely to separate children from their parents (how do we relate to each other when there is no adult to set the rules? How do we make decisions that are good when we won't get busted for making bad ones? Do we do the thing that is right or the thing that is easy?). Today, the focus is on the financial meaning of boarding school (I am in boarding school which means I have money and power, and I don't have to be nice. Let's talk about how hard it is to be so rich.) Sure, in the 80' boarding school addressed the issue of money -- we met the scholarship girl, and we learned that good people like people for who they are rather than what they have. Then we moved on to the next installment which might feature a girl who parties too hard who either learns her lesson or suffers. Then, we moved on to something else. The issues of money, drugs, and sex are the ONLY things boarding school books today focus on. Over and over with the same issues interspersed with shopping trips and girl-on-girl backstabbing.

I'm not saying there weren't problems with Canby Hall and other series of my youth. Mediocre books of my youth were always overly moralistic, for one thing. Good girls didn't have sex because sex always had negative consequences (one of the reasons girls of my generation passed around copies of Forever until the damn glue came off the binding). Good girls never drank or they would automatically be shunned for their destructive behavior. They were also a little bit too Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm at times -- once the three girls became friends at Canby Hall, they never had to question each other. Best friendship was a vow that equalled the call of the convent. We all knew that smelled a bit like old fish.

That said, the pendulum has swung WAY too far in the other direction. In today's boarding school books, your best friend is, dollars to doughnuts, going to be your worst enemy at least once before it's through. Best friendship vows are now ALWAYS trumped by a cute boy. The lessons of feminism have, to say the least been taken out to the woodchipper never to be heard from again.

In Canby Hall and others of that ilk, the bitch got hers, and you cheered when she did. By the end of the book, you could rest assured that karma would out. Then, you lay back on your Strawberry Shortcake sheets, grabbed your Cabbage Patch Doll, and tried to figure out how you could be the nicest person you could be because SHE was the one good things happened to.

Today, the winner is simply the one who gets the stud. You COULD try to be the nicest girl in the bunch, but the more efficient route is just to go to the gym and beauty parlor. You know, and then put out.

I just finished the memoir Restless Virgins about the oral sex scandal at Milton Academy in 2005. It reads kind of the same. I don't think that's a coincidence. I haven't read nearly enough to determine whether it correlation or causality, but I know, for darn sure, it isn't happenstance.

So, our books were mediocre, and today's books are mediocre, which leaves us to ask which kind of crap is preferable. I gotta hang on to the well-aged crap. Maybe it sent me out into the real world with an overly sunny view of what I was going to encounter, but it didn't turn me into the kind of girl, like those of Milton Academy 2005, who believed that bad behavior towards your best friend was just the way things were, and that giving 5 boys blowjobs at the same time was just their due, "part of the social contract" (the authors' words, and they went to Milton).

I could care less about the behavior of the girl at Milton Academy. If you want to give 5 blowjobs to 5 guys, more power to you, but the culture that says boys determine your place in the social soup line is ludicrous. I may have had to learn the painful lesson that no boy on the planet was going to be as sweet and perfect as the boys in my books, but no one ever had to sit me down and tell me that boys didn't necessarily deserve to get whatever they wanted from me simply because they had a penis, and the penis ruled the world.

Know what? Boys in the books of my adulthood are still better than the boys I know in real life (yes, even the Crimefighter, sad to say, although he's closer than most). That's why I read! If I wanted a thoroughly normal type of good boy, I'd hang out with one of my many really awesome male friends or spend time cuddled up to the Crimefighter. When I want more than that (and more than I could ever expect) I open up my books and meet once again Roarke or Daemon or Heathcliff on the moors. I don't expect real men to be the men in novels, as they are the epitome of what could be. Experience shows us what is possible and what is fiction, but starting high and always keeping an eye on that ideal means somewhere in our heads, we always know we DESERVE the ideal, and settle for the close.

That's not available if your formative romantic heroes are those found in today's teen mediocre boarding school literature. There seems to be a desensitivity to what girls deserve. If the prevailing ideology they learn is not to aim for the stars (yes, only to be crushed when they realize no man is Rochester, even Rochester himself) but simply to embrace the popular, what can they hope to wind up with?

The unavailable types of boys of my teenage books grew up to be the unavailable types of men in my adult books. THAT is why the juvenile lit of my youth, even the stuff that was just average, treated me more like an adult than the average young adult novels of today.

There will be more later, I'm sure, but right now there seems to be a ruckus downstairs...... so I bid ado to Mr. Darcy and go see what the hell has the Crimefighter using bowling words in the house......

Consequential Endeavors

It's smack in the middle of the day on June 4, and I'm wearing a sweatshirt and drinking from my second pot of coffee because it's too chilly to drink anything cold and too early to be mixing a drink, even for me. There's something unholy about that, but I won't complain. I believe there's a limit to the amount of complaints the world can hold in a given day, and I seem to be the source of so many that I'm afraid what adding one more will do to the planet.

When I embarked on my little quest to be the housewife from the 50's (with a boyfriend playing the role of "husband" while not actually supporting me and a Boston terrier, Siamese cat and a parade of fish in the role of "the children," mind you) this summer, I expected there to be a good bit of ribbing. That's sort of the role I play in a lot of my relationships, and I'm good at taking it on the chin (or, more often, tuning it completely out).

I think I'm pretty good at taking minor criticism in the form of snubs. When friends from high school give me the sad eyes filled with pity because the Crimefighter and I aren't married, a mutual decision arrived at by two people who set their stock in the path of least resistance, I let them think what they will. When a family member who needn't be mentioned by name feels the necessity to qualify a reference to Ernest Hemingway with "you know, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises" despite the fact that I've had pretty near close to a quarter of a million dollars worth of literature education pass through if not become lodged in my head over the years, I say nothing. There's a modicum of resentment, yes, but I fight the battles that can be won, most of the time, and this is a field I abandoned years ago.

Still, what I didn't expect to find about my self-imposed/ self-selected hiatus from the working world is the anger it would inspire. I truly get the feeling that an awful lot of people find it personally and morally reprehensible that I've chosen to explore, for a limited time, the me aside from the me that punches a time clock (well, OK, not literally) during the school year.

First off, I should say that I don't consider myself entitled to this summer off. Most people in my profession have summer things they do. The fortunate have summer things to do that aren't demeaning and degrading. For two summers, I hauled my butt out of bed five and sometimes six days a week at 5 or sometimes 6 to drive the reverse commute (still a drag) down I-93 to the South Shore and the Cape to register little kiddies into summer camp so they wouldn't be stuck in the hood all summer starting fires, joining gangs, or being glued to the television set. I did it with a song in my heart because I felt there was a purpose. It helped others at the same time that it kept me in Iced Coffees and other niceties.

That came to an end as the economy ground to a halt, and I no longer had a summer thing I felt made a contribution to my state or my world. I don't think I could muster the same commitment to getting people fries with that. I'm not too good to wait tables, but I'm also not good at it.

I also realize I am fortunate in that I have a certain situation that allows me a financial freedom most people don't have. I gave up an $850 a month (my half, mind you) crappy flat in the city and hauled my cookies to the burbs for the sole purpose of not contributing thousands of dollars a year to the conglomerate of Nordblom management who seemed intent on using my money to turn my apartment into a bat sanctuary. (I know the bats might have been an endangered species, and I don't care. Maybe they BECAME endangered because they refused to roost in a place they were wanted. At the risk of sounding all 1979 Camaro, ass, grass, or cash, no one stays for free.)

And, no, I don't pay The Crimefighter rent at this time. The reason is not because I'm a freeloader. The reason is because smart women do not move in with men they are not married to and then become financially dependent on them. I needed a few more years to become truly free and clear, debt-wise, as private education and graduate education is never free, even when you are on full graduate assistantships (which I was), at least not in the Humanities. Timing didn't allow me to wait, and our agreement was that I would break the rules and use what would be rent to get to my position of financial independence that much faster. That and I would take full responsibility for cleaning the tub, cause DAMN.

I won't even bring up that The Crimefighter owes me and the Manda a solid from a time way before this when he needed digs in Boston and didn't have to pay for a hotel room for three months. I will also not bring up the fact that I donated way more than he would have charged me for two years of rent in his name when I moved here. I had, what some might call an obsessive amount of stuff. The Manda gets her ceiling fans installed, and I get to claw my way out of debt.

I think there are some parts of his life that are better now that I'm here. He had the typical bachelor's food stores when I moved in, and he hated going to the grocery store. He no longer has to do that. One of the things I've discovered over the year and am trying to hone now is a love of cooking. I'm a little more experimental than he cares for, so sometimes my dinners hit the metaphorical wall like Mr. Magoo playing Jai Alai, but for the most part he has a meat and some vegetables waiting for him when he comes home from work. This is a far cry from the steady diet of granola bars and goldfish crackers he used to subsist on.

The tub looks better. A LOT better.

The dog only rarely spends the whole day in the bucket, and usually gets a walk and a dog park visit every day, so he isn't a little freakazoid when Daddy gets home.

The fish get fed so steady that they are breeding. REALLY breeding. Seriously. Anyone want a cichlid?

But as usual, I digress.

What I never expected was to make people angry when they ask me what I'm doing, and I say I'm not working. I wonder if stay-at-home moms get this too. I bet I'm an even bigger sinner in the eyes of the workforce, because a Boston Terrier and a Siamese cat really don't need my constant presence to survive.

Still, it isn't like I sacrificed a virgin to the Underworld to be able to take the summer off, and it isn't like I'm living off Gerry. I did it the old fashioned way. I spent nine months asking myself every time I was in a store whether I wanted whatever it was I wanted more than I wanted the summer off. For the most part, I always wanted the summer more. Now, I have it, and I'm a pariah to some.

I still buy all the food for the house. I do conserve it a lot more and use leftovers when I can, but aren't you supposed to do that all the time? I have more time, so I shop at farmer's markets and rely on fruits and vegetables rather than meat, which also lowers my bill. To me, it's a matter of choices and priorities. I made these, and I don't know why that infuriates a few folks.

It's opened up a whole way of looking at my life, by making me defend the choices that most people say they would make "if only they had the time." I HAVE the time, I made the choices, and I must say I'm happy so far with the outcome.

Here's what I get to do:

• I spend a lot of time with my pets. The dog was expensive, and when I'm working, I never get to just hang out with him other than on the weekends. He's a better pet for my troubles. The cat was free, but he's getting up there in years (I lost his sister in March), so I'm happy to have time enjoying his company. He's on a dog cushion just by my right shoulder at the moment. A little writing, a little nuzzling my cat. That is what life should be.
  
• I'm growing vegetables for the first time in my life. It's thrilling to watch my tiny little seeds become tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and peas. So far, I'm really thrilled I don't suck at it.
  
• I write. This is something I used to do all the time, and it got lost along the way. Getting back into writing, just for myself, will actually make me better at my job; at least I hope so. My plan is to do a NANOWRIMO (50,000 words in 30 days) month in July. Maybe I'll do June 15th through July 15th. I kind of have an idea now. It's the same feeling as having a crush on someone you think might like you back. You walk around all day thinking about it and smiling.
  
• I clean my house. It really isn't that bad if you only do it a little bit a day (and refuse to let the Crimefighter into the rooms you just cleaned -- pretty soon, he'll be relegated to the half bath downstairs!). The house, right now, looks pretty damn good.
  
• I give myself projects and force myself to do them. I'm in the process of digitizing my past, and it is fascinating! My family is really cool. I know that now in ways I didn't before.
  
• I go to yard sales every Saturday morning. Gives the Crimefighter and I time to miss each other, and sometimes I get something cool for a dollar. I also do a little volunteering in the process. My aunt works as part of a Historical Society that raises money through a Christmas bazaar every year. They take donations of people's used Christmas stuff and sell it. I collect it from people who don't want to haul it back into their attics or basements when it doesn't sell at the yard sale.
  
• I teach an online class to 6 students. It doesn't even feel like work. I have time to help each and every one of them the way I wish I had time during the school year. These folks can write some business memos -- and their resumes will be phenomenal. It reminds me what teaching could be if it weren't a business.
  
• I read. This one I actually do a lot of during the year too, but I'm averaging more than a book every two days. It amazes me that people tell me they don't have time to read. Yes.... you do. I will concede that children and jobs may mean you can't take your dog to the dog park every day or grow vegetables in your backyard, but you CAN find time to read. The Crimefighter works ridiculous hours, and he still manages to get through a little Clive Cussler (ew... yuck... I know! But what are you gonna do?) every night before bed.

I guess my larger question is why I even feel the need to justify this? I've gathered a real appreciation for the things we could do if we let ourselves while I'm out of the rat race this summer. It probably does take a hiatus from a job to be able to do everything I get to do (and I do feel fortunate), but every person could find time to do one of these things, if they wanted to. Even after I go back to school in the Fall, I know I'll keep reading, if slower. I hope I'll keep writing. Gardens and Yard sales die with the snows, but the dog walks can continue, if I force myself.

It isn't laziness. It's a realization that your self-worth should not be judged by how much you contribute to the gross national product. I'm made far better by my learning to have patience with my dog than I would be getting someone a drink before dinner. I'm made a much better person by reading Charlotte Bronte (or Nora Roberts for that matter) than I would be ringing up sales in some store somewhere.

We seem to collectively think that our worth is determined not by our productivity but by our financial productivity. I no longer think that is the case. There may be something noble in working, but that work needn't be something others can see.

And I do think we could all do this. How will I be able to take my dog for a daily walk during the school year? By getting up 30 minutes earlier, foregoing checking my email in the morning, or (most likely) by giving up one television program a week. In some ways, DVR is the greatest gift to man since..... the invention of television.

So, I'm done apologizing. I love my summer life. I miss my students a bit, but I know that, come September 9th, I'll be in a better place to help them than I would be without this summer. I fully intend to spend the next three months doing nothing of "consequence," and I think it might just be the most consequential thing I could do.

About a Girl

I'm starting to feel like the narrator from About A Boy. My day is also beginning to be divided up into units that seem to repeat themselves, although mine have a tendency to be lengthier than his. As a shout out to one of my favorite writers, here is my day, or some of it, in units:

• Wake up, 1 unit
• Let the dog out; make coffee; unload the dishwasher, 1 unit
• Drink coffee; plead with the dog to be quiet while the Crimefighter (who actually goes to work these days rather than working from home) catches the end of his slumber, 1 unit
• Walk the dog, 2 units
• Feed the dog; Load the dishwasher; clean up the kitchen from the night before, 1 unit
• Check email; kick ass in mafia wars; general computer assing around, 2 units
• Check in with my summer school class; grade papers; send emails asking where the papers due last week are, 4 units (only 6 students in this class)
• Read in a thoroughly useless but fun book, 1 unit
• Scan next set of family photos, 4 units
• Dedicated cuddle my cat time, 1 unit
• Read another chapter in useless book, 1 unit
• Something domestic, 1 unit
• Break for lunch

Most of this is self-explanatory, and I'm doing much better now that I've tried to carve some semblance of a structure into my day. My house even looks better now that I've decided to do something but not everything every day. Most of what's left to be done requires some assistance from the Crimefighter before I can get to it anyway, so I feel kind of off the hook.

Scanning pictures seems to be the most interesting thing I'm doing these days. Several years ago, my Dad and Uncle decided to rent out my grandparents' house after my grandfather passed away and my grandmother, who has since passed away, moved permanently into a retirement home. It was kind of a funny experience that highlights my dad's family quite well. They had to force me to take the small television, because no one really wanted it, but all the grandchildren went 20 rounds over the paper turkey my grandmother used to put on the table every Thanksgiving. There was a lot of nice stuff in the old house, but my prized possession was the old wooden board my grandmother used to have with her at all times. One side for baking and the other for playing solitaire or doing the daily crossword puzzle (which she finished every day well into her 70s).

Although my grandparents were not very sentimental people on the surface, I'm starting to realize they may have been a little more so than they appeared. I was shocked to discover just how well documented my father's family is, at least in photographs. When we cleaned out the house, I took all of the family photos and promised to put them together in some sort of order.

Yes, that was years ago.

I did actually do SOMETHING with some of them. My dad's people were farmers right up until, well, my Dad. This means that there are some very interesting pictures of a new England farm (and my family with all the animals you might find on a New England dairy farm) spanning, literally, generations. It all started with a hilarious picture of my great great grandfather standing in a suit, chomping a cigar, and watching a horse drink water. Somewhere in that image, an idea began forming.

My sister is a veterinarian. I've mentioned before that this is something she always knew. I don't remember her ever wanting to be anything else, except for that brief summer she discovered hot rollers and wanted to be a cosmetician. After seeing that picture of my father's great grandfather, I began to think that maybe having love for animals in her blood wasn't altogether that strange.

I went through the photos and found 6 generations of Richards (from that original photo through my sister's kids) all surrounded by various animals. This was pre-llama, so the pets don't range to the exotic or semi-exotic, but I bought one of those pre-made collages and filled it with these photos for a Christmas gift for her. I thought it would look good on her office wall, sort of make her look bona fide or something. I even went through old photos of my mom's side of the family. They aren't as multi generational, but while the love for animals doesn't span so long, it is no less intense. Let's just say I'm glad there was never a situation where my Mother's father had to choose whether to save his dog Heidi or me from a burning building.

The grouped photos were meant to be something to hang in her office. I swear I didn't mean to make her cry on Christmas morning. I can't tell you how much it pleases me that those two photo groupings hang on her wall in places of importance. They even survived her move to Virginia and found a place on her new walls.

When I discovered that I would have much time and little money this summer, I dusted off all those boxes of photos (I did at least store them well) and decided to do something about them. So, for the past weeks, since Mount Ida let out, I've been scanning not just the pet photos but all of my family history. I'm almost through the Richard side, and hope to be done with both sides of the family before the leaves change. My eventual plan is to burn multiple copies of DVDs and give them to everyone for Christmas.

Somewhere around photo 200, I realized something. No one is going to appreciate it. None of them will do more than, MAYBE, look through them once. They will grasp the amount of time it took to gather them and transfer them to electronic format, and they will say thank you, but they will all, somewhere in their hearts, consider it a colossal waste of time and one of those things that Suzy places too much importance on. A frivolous thing, really, and not at all important.

Around photo 250, I realized it didn't matter. This was when I started to realize that it would be their loss. There's nothing I can do about that. Let them eat cake; I'm enjoying learning what was never spoken of in my family.

To sum up my families: Richards don't fight. Cables fight about everything, none of it of substance. Richards don't really talk. Cables snipe and gossip. Richards don't complain if their legs fall off. Cables blame others for a hangnail.

It's not really that bad, but sometimes it seems so. I grew up knowing there was nothing that was going to make the Richards get outwardly angry with me, but there was nothing that was going to make them more gregarious with me either. Spartan stoicism through and through. I also grew up knowing that, at some point, I would be an outcast among the Cables, but it didn't really matter because we were all a round robin of whipping boys, and the scorn passed to another if you just kept your head down and did nothing.

These photos are telling me I might have had it all wrong. I haven't gotten to the Cable photos yet, but I'm hoping to find a similar situation there. Here's what I've learned about my Father's family through photos:

• They were not poor. I grew up hearing stories about tough times, but even Depression era pictures show my Dad in new and fashionable clothes. No one was fat, but no one grew leaner either, probably caused by self-supporting and back breaking farm work and a lack of knowledge about the existence of the stock market.
• They were joyful. I never thought of my Dad's family as ever having fun, but they really did. While I might find pictures of my Dad's father and mother behind the King and Queen Neptune facades at a cheesy tourist spot in Florida mildly disturbing, they truly seem to be having a ball. That's not something I ever saw all that often.
• My grandparents were in love with each other. I met them when they were already an old bickering married couple. Other family members often claim that my grandfather was an ass to my grandmother all the time. Still, pictures on their wedding day show two people giddy in love with each other. Crusty old Swedes are not actors. They couldn't have been faking it. They were gone over each other.
• They were a tight and loving extended family. My grandmother remained incredibly close to her sister and brothers throughout their lives. I see them grow up and grow old, always together. My grandfather always lived within a mile of his siblings. I love my sister and her family, but I'm not sure we could live in peace that close for that long.

It's hard sometimes to remember that we meet our grandparents when they have already lived an awful lot of life. Douglas Coupland once said something about our parents living entire lives without us. It's hard, he says, to imagine our mothers smiling in the arms of a man who isn't our father. Same goes for our grandparents; something I'm just now learning. But it is true, and somehow I find comfort in it.

So, if no one appreciates the hours I put in and doesn't care to look at the product, that will be OK. For now, I'm enjoying my mornings with coffee getting to know some really interesting people who lived and loved long before I.