Pondering Lost Things and a Memory I Can’t Shake

Carolyn J. Rose

"You Can't Have Everything. Where would you put it?"

Comedian Stephen Wright

When I was about ten and visiting my grandmother, I fell in love with a tiny metal grooming implement—a nail file attached to a tweezers. It was small and cute, and I wanted it. Never mind that, in those days, I used my teeth on my fingernails and couldn’t understand why anyone would suffer the pain of plucking their eyebrows. The point was, as I said, that I wanted it.

So I did what most ten-year-old kids do, I cajoled and pleaded and whined. I promised to use it and take care of it. I promised not to hurt myself with it. After what seemed like hours, my grandmother caved and gave it to me.

I put it in the pocket of my shorts and took off to show it to a friend, my fingers touching the cool metal now and then while I trotted along the summer-baked asphalt county road. As I hoped, she had nothing like it. She was envious. She intended to ask her parents to buy her one just like it.

And so, mission accomplished, I jogged along a dirt road, climbed across a stone wall, and cut through a field on the way home for dinner. At the far edge of the field I slid my hand in my pocket. To my horror, I discovered my treasure was gone.

I checked my other pockets. I backtracked along the faint path, hoping to see sunlight glint off its silvery finish. I stooped low. I cocked my head. I riffled the grass with my bare feet. I crawled and combed it with my fingers.

Nothing.

I returned the next day and the next one after that.

Nothing.

I never told my grandmother I’d lost that little tool. I suppose I knew she wouldn’t sympathize or offer to replace it. And, when I got older and spotted similar items in stores, I never purchased a one. They no longer seemed unique and I never felt the need to experience the thrill of ownership.

In the past sixty years I’ve lost plenty of other things—money, tickets, papers, books, and even—now and then—my way. Recently I’ve spent far too much time hunting for socks gone astray, pens I was sure I put on my desk, and keys I was positive had to be in the kitchen where I “always” put them. Some lost things I’ve found and some I haven’t. Some I’ve replaced and some I haven’t. Most things lost in my youth I have only vague memories of.

But the memory of that tiny implement hasn’t faded. It flits across my mind when I see a field of tall grass or file my nails or declare war on the rogue hairs in my eyebrows. I have no idea why the mental video of my ten-year-old self searching for it remains so clear and firmly embedded.

The mind is a strange and wonderful thing.

You can't have everything. Where would you put it? Steven Wright
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/steven_wright

CANDY

Carolyn J. Rose

My mother was a nurse and read many books on nutrition. When we were kids, she planned meals that contained all elements from the food pyramid, with an emphasis on vegetables.

Potato chips, cola, and white bread didn’t make many appearances at our house.

Neither did candy.

Sure, it turned up around Halloween, at Christmas, and in the bunny baskets at Easter. But desserts or sweet snacks—and those snacks were pretty darn small because of that pesky food pyramid—consisted of fruit in a pie, or fruit in gelatin, or just plain fruit.

My grandmothers, however, often had cookies or cake, and they had candy every day of the year. They had it right out in the open, in their living rooms, where anyone who came to visit could see it. One kept butterscotch bits and caramels in a crystal dish with a heavy lid. The other stored mixed candies in an inlaid box someone had brought her from Brazil. The top featured butterfly wings pressed beneath glass.

That lid often seemed more enticing and interesting than the contents of the box. The candy wasn’t what I considered to be prime. Oh, there were mints, and sometimes spicy gumdrops, and almost always chunks of black licorice. But digging through the box in search of chocolate was usually an exercise in futility.

It was also an exercise in learning about manners, hygiene, and how germs spread. “Are your hands clean?” I’d be asked. “If you touch a piece, take it, and eat it,” I’d be told.

It was also a lesson in playing well with others. My brothers and cousins all knew about the box and all hit it on a regular basis—sometimes as a group. “Don’t be a pig,” we’d shout at the person who got there first. “No fair taking the best ones,” we’d whine.

I imagine there are many people who still have candy boxes or covered dishes in their living rooms. I’m not one of them. First, Max the entitled Maltese would no doubt sniff it out and find a way to get to it and thus require me to make a frantic race to the emergency clinic to have his stomach emptied. Second, I don’t trust myself to pass a dish of candy without relieving it of some of its contents. Passing a dish two dozen times a day would expand my waistline. And it doesn’t need expanding.

This is not to say that candy isn’t welcome in our home. We buy dark chocolate bars, stash them out of sight, and take segments now and then. On low-stress days, I may not eat any. On days of higher stress—particularly those when I’m subbing for challenging classes—a single segment isn’t enough.

On those days I think of my mother. She loved chocolates and, after we were all grown and gone, often indulged. When she found a good deal, would buy a pound or two. She’d eat a few and then ask my father to hide the rest for a few days and save her from herself. He’d do his best, but she was as experienced at hunting as he was at hiding, and she often said, “He didn’t do a good job. It took me only an hour to find them.”

Their house has been sold twice since they died, but sometimes I wonder if there isn’t a bag of chocolates hidden behind a baseboard or stashed high on a rafter. I like to imagine my mother is still searching for it, and my father is smiling and shaking his head when she asks if she’s hot or cold.

The Peril of Ancient File Folders

As part of the annual mid-summer "we gotta
get rid of some of this crap” campaign by the love of my life, I cleaned out my office. While going through my file cabinet, which has probably lingered untouched for the best part of twenty years, I found all kinds of interesting/nostalgic/embarrassing stuff. Back in the day that I believed I’d be the next John Steinbeck (Or at least Freddy Steinbeck his less talented cousin), I wrote all manner of literature/ noodling/inane drivel.

Here’s one such for your appraisal/scrutiny/testing of your gag reflex. It’s instructive of what happens when you combine a bored writer, a word processor and an abundance of free time.

I sat down to write an epic poem

You know the kind, something Beowulfesque and

Gilgameshic, an adventure odder than the odyssey and

Iller than the Illiad, a tale filled with grandeur and

pathos on a glorious scale, preferably featuring

Vikings storming a Norman castle, flinging

explosive clumps of pyrotechnic peat moss over

moat encircled stone walls. Think “The Song of Roland”

being lip synched by a cover band.

“Ayeeeeee!!! I’m on fire!!!!” the cry would fly from the circling serfs and

pandemonious peons whose faux pas was zigging

when they should have been zagging. “Ayeeeee!!!”

Or, perhaps the saga could chronicle the exploits of a

sleek-cheeked Nubian princess, gyrating a voluptuous hootchie-coo and

curling her finger to summon a drooling sheik and as he

zooms in like a moth to a flame neatly plunging a dagger into his heaving breast, payback for an earlier transgression like failing to leave

a sufficient tip or calling her “babe!”

So, I prepared. Made time to rhyme, stacking up reams of clean white paper and laying out cups of bitter dark coffee and my trusty thesaurus; I set out

accompanied by Miriam Webster, the Sancho

Panza to my impossible literary dream-seeking Donny Quixote.

Infused by my muse and

Inspired by my aspirations I

Squeezed my eyes tightly closed

Vowing to not reopen them until my

masterpiece appeared, fully realized

on the screen. My fingers lingered over the keys as I

let the words flutter out of my brain like

so many frenzied birds escaping a just opened cage.

An hour passed and then two which spiraled into a third.

Fulfilling my promise to myself, I dared not peek and

behold the molten metaphors and throbbing narrative that

flowed like red hot lava from the Vesuvius of my

roiling mind. The clatter of keys and the drumbeat of the

vast armies I’d created joined the siren song of a

galaxy of nymphs and the grunts and roars of the

strange and wonderful creatures becoming

the soundtrack to my fever dream philosophizing.

In a flurry I combined iambic whatever-ameter with

great swoops of onomatopoeia, tongue tantalizing

alliteration and certainly a healthy dose of symbolic

polygamy spiced with a dash of lateral lyricism.

Nouns, verbs, past and present participles and malodorous

modifiers were flung from my fingertips onto

the waiting pages of the virgin Word document,

a future classic destined to be required reading for

a platoon of semi-snoozing high school sophomores.

Finally, as the morning sun beamed through my

office window I applied the thundering climax to my

magnum Opie, the fruit of my all-night encounter with

the divine and mischievous. I detected a sound at my elbow and opened my

eyes to the sight of my worldly muse examining

my sprawling masterpiece, my piece de something, something. (Hey, I was exhausted, I’d emptied the tank of my voluminous vocabulary).

“Very nice” my wife crooned and smiled and patted the top

Of my still humming head. “But, think how much more smoothly it might have

read, had you started with your index fingers over the F and J instead of the G and H.   

Journey Into The Past

By Mike Nettleton

We've been talking about an expedition to Fossil for a long time. Or rather I've been talking about it and Carolyn's been muttering under her breath "why don't we just do it?" 

This is about my mama, really. She's been gone since 1983, (can it really be 35 years?) but I still hear her voice in my head. Anytime I'm about to do something silly, or stupid or inconsiderate she pipes in. "Schmuck!!!" Oh, wait that's someone else's Jewish mother. We were lapsed Protestants. No, mom's voice is saying "Michael Alan!!!" (The only time I ever heard my middle name was just before or after I'd screwed up.)

So we set off for Fossil, the small Northeast Oregon farming community where my mother grew up. All I knew of it were snatches of remembered stories about 5 year old Jo Eleanor Lewis and her 3 year old sister Ruth being put on a train in St. Louis, bound for Oregon in the mid-early part of the last century after their mother died. They landed at their Uncle's ranch, where life was hard and the winters mean. 

Carolyn and I, after meeting my sister Lana in Bend for a catch-up lunch, set out on the twisty road from Madras, through the ghostly Shaniko, into Antelope (where the ghost of the Bhagwan lingers) and S-turning our way down the canyon on a trek we shall call our

 This is a part of Oregon I hadn't experienced. I'd imagined a flat or gently rolling farm landscape where wheat fluttered in the breeze and cows mooed the daily farm gossip over abundant grass. What we encountered was more reminiscent of Arizona or New Mexico.

As we slid down the canyon into Fossil, I recalled stories my other sister Birdie shared about mom being sent out with a shotgun to go after marauding coyotes (I'm guessing she was older than 5 by then, but who knows?) and how she loved to see the wild horses galloping through the canyon. It was easy to imagine given the landscape we saw. 

Although I couldn't pin down the exact location of the farm they'd lived on, we passed several that would have fit the bill. The town itself, all four hundred fifty or so souls of it, had a lot of charm.

 Small as it is, Fossil is the county seat of Wheeler County. (population 1358 according to the 2015 census) The courthouse, pictured below was built in 1902 and still carries out it's function every weekday. 

The consolidated high school serves about 40 students and the elementary school about the same number. There are fossil beds up behind the football field and for a $5 per head donation you can go up and dig to your hearts content. Here's fearless fossil hunter Carolyn holding what we believe to be either a bone from a 20,000 year old arachnid or a 50,000 year old fossilized bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.  
 

Since there weren't any obvious overnight accommodations in Fossil, we moved up the road 20 miles to the bustling community of Condon. (population 720) Luckily, there was a vacancy in the town's only motel.

The rooms were inexpensive, clean and had everything we needed. Namely beds, a table, a microwave in case we needed to nuke something a refrigerator and wifi. (Although, honestly, checking your e-mail when you're time traveling seemed a bit incongruous). There was also a shower I had to hunker under to get my whale-body wet but Carolyn, being an official short person didn't have that problem. 


Having grown up in Bandon, Oregon before it became chi-chi golf central I have an abiding love for small towns and here's a shot of Condon's downtown that says it all. 

Being habitual early risers, we rolled down from our motel in search of breakfast at about 6:30a. There were 2, count em, 2 cars on the entire main street. We were drawn into The Condon Diner by its signage,

there to be greeted by Al, coffee pot in hand, and joined the locals in choosing from the tantalizing choices on the breakfast menu. Also on hand were a gaggle of construction workers who we'd met the night before in the bar next door. Being unable to finish our pizza, we'd told the barmaid to ask if "the boys" would like to finish it and they said. "Sure, M'am, anything we can do to help." The next morning in the diner, they urged us to order the Full Monty breakfast as they were pretty sure we couldn't eat all of it and they were fond of ham, pancakes, sausage and eggs.

 Carolyn settled for the two egg and toast special and I scarfed up the "secret recipe" cinnamon French toast as prepared by the chef de grille David. We'd recommend the Condon Diner  not 
only for the food, but the friendly service and unique decor.

Fully fed and ready to roll, we ducked back to Fossil for another heapin' helpin' of nostalgia and a look around, and then set off North to make our way home. 

The landscape along highway 97 was, in it's own way as unique and interesting as the twisting canyon drive from Shaniko to Fossil. If you're a fan of wind farms (and I am) this part of Oregon and Southern Washington is Nirvana. What's especially novel is watching the tips of the propellers flap past the tops of hills, without seeing the column that supports them. A little eerie, still fun. There's also a great view of 5 snow-capped Cascade mountains, including Hood, Adams (below) the stub of St. Helens, and Rainier way off in the distance.  

We jumped onto I-84 at Biggs Junction and crossed over to Highway 14 at Hood River after ponying up $2 for the toll bridge. A little more than an hour later, we arrived back home to pick up Max from doggy day care.
 
It was a bit of a let-down to return to our hum-drum life in Vancouver. After all, once you've been to Fossil and Condon, nothing else can compare. I accomplished what I'd set out to do, which was spend time in the environs that nurtured the unique lady that was my mother. And, once home, lounging in my easy chair, I could hear her soft and patient voice chiding me. "Michael Alan! You should have left some of that french toast for those nice construction workers."