Rocks are here to stay

[lauradi7dw]

Not everything in the house is papers. (although really, why were there tax documents from the 1990s on a shelf in the garage? I found them when I was moving some tools around). I liked stones/rocks when I was young, and they keep turning up in drawers. Also shells, pieces of brick, and small chunks of coal, which I acquired by climbing under a building at my elementary school. Made me think of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-qBsFRJcgg
I have the LP somewhere at home, but I'm not there, and youtube is faster, anyway.

Comments

[squidgiepdx]

My mother wasn't a hoarder, mostly... But when my sister was going through mom's things, she found odd stuff like rent receipts from the 1950s, my old report cards, and other odd things. I'm sure they meant something to my mom, but none of us could figure out through the obscurity fo time what sentimental value they held.

[lauradi7dw]

I feel that I've learned a lot, even as I shake my head. I acknowledge that I am their child and maybe I'll spend the fall trying to make sense of my own attic.

There is a famous story in the family (three people mentioned it at my mother's funeral, including me). When my parents had been married a couple of years, they were living in a ground-floor duplex apartment. They built a two person kayak from a kit (wood frame, canvas cover) in the living room. They couldn't get it into the hall to go out the door, so they pushed it out the window. The other two people told this as a funny story. It was, but I said that the backstory was more important to me. Daddy had wanted the boat for a while. Mama was a clothes horse. Unusually for a couple married in the 1950s, they had separate bank accounts their whole lives, but budgeted together. My mother wanted an expensive dress for some special occasion. The agreement they made was that Mama would buy the dress and out of financial fairness, Daddy would get the kit. Sweet story, egalitarian for its time.
Then last night I found Mama's accounts book for the first years of their marriage, in which she itemized almost all of their expenditures. She bought clothes nearly every month, often dresses. And then there it was, two lines on the same day:
Evening dress [cost, about four times a regular dress, almost a month's rent*]
Boat [a little less than the dress]

My goodness - Archival evidence.

* My memory is so random. Probably twenty years ago (yikes, closer to thirty?) I had an email exchange with kshandra, who was complaining about how much money rent ate up. I quoted my father, who I think was quoting the post-war boom advice he had been told, who said (when I was first sharing a rented apartment in the 1970s), that rent should be about 25% of income.

[squidgiepdx]

I wish I had some of those rent receipts, just for posterity. And dang - yep it's been almost that long. The Duchovniks have been around for 29 years!!!!

Report cards

[lauradi7dw]

My mother had them. Now I have them, and I will tell you that I am feeling disgruntled seeing my 6th grade teacher say at the end of the year that my organizational skills were OK. I had her for 5th grade too, and she kept me after school most days both years to re-do incomplete or untidy homework. That's the way I remember it, anyway. It can't have been *every* day, because I had Girl Scouts and piano lessons on some afternoons, and it's possible that I had some non-slacker homework days.

Also, my first grade teacher said I had a good attention span. Did she know me? Or maybe all first graders in the 1960s were easily distracted. Kindergarten was not required (or offered in public schools) in NC at the time, so all first graders were at the stage of what the heck am I doing here?