Christmas Gift Shows and Mother Hens

Saturday I went to a Christmas gift show with three of my friends from the Gathering Girls. It was held at the gardens and sculpture park and I’ve been hearing about this show for years. It was huge and hiking in from where I had to park put over 2,000 steps on my Fitbit! It was shoulder-to-shoulder women inside and as I tried to keep track of my companions, I felt my mother-hen persona come out and my baby chicks were getting away. We’d already established at our designated meeting place that none of us had programmed each other’s contact information into our phones and I was mildly panicking that we’d get separated and never see each other again. What? It could happen! Someone with a fetish for mayhem and murder on his mind could have snatched one of us. Our nightly news has been filled with details of a trial going on of a guy who had done just that to a couple of women in town. He’s waiting sentencing now so we were probably safe at the Christmas gift show. That and the fact that none of us are young and cute anymore. Well, a couple of the Gathering Girls are cute but kidnappers usually don’t do ‘old.’ There are very few perks that come with having lots of birthdays, so we need to identify and celebrate them all. But I digress.

Alas, no one got lost although at one point I was seriously worried about one of the ladies. After lunch she and I went to the restroom but she didn’t come back for the longest time. She says she gets lost while driving and she would have gotten lost walking to the restroom if I had not been with her. I kicked myself for leaving her after my business was done. I did tell her I was going back to the restaurant, but what good would that have done if she had gotten lost in the 158 acres of the gardens and sculpture park? Guilt! Thou are my inner voice, my voice of shame. I beat myself up one side and down the other until she rejoined our table. 

Why when I’m hanging around with my posse of Gathering Girls do I feel an overwhelming urge to be the mother hen? They are all fully formed human adults not children or my post-stroke husband who needed my momma-hen persona to survive. I need to kill that ‘hen’ before I turn into a control freak! Why did I have to volunteer, for example, to stand in the long, snaking line to pay for purchases at the show as the others shopped the last few vendors? Was it kindness or was it a passive aggressive way of saying I was ready to leave? I asked that question of my inner voice but I received silence for an answer. Maybe Guilt developed laryngitis? Next stop on the Control Freak Train: Why did I have to volunteer to get our coats out of the coat room downstairs when the others took my place in that pay line? (I didn’t buy anything and I didn’t need to be there.) Was that kindness or controlling or was I being the mother hen again organizing her chicks? Please tell me it’s possible to be all three---a kindly old mother hen looking out for her flock. Doesn’t every group need one?

We had a good time but most of us agreed we’ll never go to a show that large and busy again. We expected more upscale, artsy-fartsy gifts and there were some but also plenty of plants, toys and specialty foods. We sampled chocolate covered everything but ants, drank tiny cups of coffee and I got a kick out of being tagged with a bright green bracelet proclaiming me to be “OVER 21” so I could sample the wines. When I got home I didn’t want to take that bracelet off. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone anywhere where the management couldn’t look at me and take a chance that, yes, she’s old enough to drink. That’s my spin but rules are rules and gray hair and wrinkles don’t count when free alcohol is involved. But seriously, do they really think someone would put on an old people mask and wig just to chug down a few ounces of wine? 

We had lunch in the park’s main building and it was spiced with our classic brand of easy and free conversation. We had planned to stop someplace else on the way back to our end of town and I jumped at seconding the suggestion that we stay there instead. I knew the walk back to the car would do me in. On future outings our newest member wants us to go to a few traffic congested places I avoid like walking barefoot on hot coals. If we do, she’d better take on the role of mother hen so I can be the chick who follows her out of my comfort zone…or into a tragic traffic accident resulting in several of us getting our driver’s licenses taken away. Oh, dear! There’s a law being introduced in our state congress that will require a driving test and a health review of any senior citizen involved in a fender bender. Double oh, dear if it passes! ©

Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Answer: I don’t know, let the chicken mind its own business.

1967, a Year of Lost Innocence

Re-reading copies of letters I wrote back in 1967 I hardly recognized that starry-eyed, flag-waving girl I was back then when 'she' was on a mission to write to as many guys stationed in Vietnam as she could. Troops over there, that year, increased to a total of 475,000 and peace rallies turned into war protests erupted around the world, becoming more and more intense and frequent. I was clearly on the side of Uncle Sam and by the end of the year the country and many of us in it had lost our innocence---me in more ways than one.

1967 was also the year when Twiggy was a fashion sensation that started women on a path of viewing our bodies in an unhealthy and unrealistic way and we are still dealing with her legacy all these years later. It was also the year when 7,000 National Guards were sent to Detroit to put down the race rioting and looting in the streets and those scenes were repeated across the nation, including right in my own back yard where one of my co-workers couldn’t go home for nearly a week because her whole neighborhood was blocked off by the police.  

In 1967 the Beatles came out with their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band album and I have two hats in my closet, bought in the ‘60s that I affectionately call my Sgt. Pepper hats. One hat is white fur and the other is red velvet and the latter one is what I wore when I got my picture taken so I’d have photos to send the servicemen I was penpals with. By the second or third letter I received from a G.I. a picture was usually requested. Also requested was the name of the perfume I sprayed on my envelopes. It was Avon’s Unforgettable and I could probably write an entire essay just quoting the various comments I received about that perfume. One guy said at Mail Call the guys would pass my letters around before he could even open them. Another guy said any girl who "smells like that and has such beautiful handwriting has to be pretty." Several guys said they carried my letters around in their helmets so they could smell the perfume---in one case, when the smell of jungle rot got too much and in another case, the guy wanted to “remember what girls smell like.” One guy said he was charging ten cents for a quick sniff---probably a joke since the guys don't use cash in the military.

Yes, I’ve been staying up way too late reading the letters I’ve decided to send off to the Center for American War Letters. The servicemen’s letters are in good condition, but unfortunately my letters will all have to be redone because they are carbon copies on cheap paper that did not fare well over time. But since the curator of the legacy project said they will welcome the back and forth of pen pals, and since they do accept copies, that’s what they’ll get from my side of the exchanges---if my fingers hold up with all the typing I’ll be doing over winter.

After I read a complete set of letters between me and a particular guy, I look him up on the index of names listed on the Vietnam War Memorial. What a heart-pounding task that’s turning out to be! With one guy out of the thirty I've read so far, I took it a step farther and found him on the internet living about fifty miles away. We had a brother/sister like exchange of eight to ten page letters about every subject on earth including Twiggy. He had a girlfriend back here in the States who was planning their wedding and he had his whole life plotted out. Near the end of our letter exchanges, he was giving me dating advice. (I wasn't give guys a fair chance. Who knew.) Re-reading his letters brought on an urge to send him a note with no return address on the envelope. I’m not sending it until Christmas---IF I do it at all, a full circle kind of thing since our penpalling started at Christmas 1966. I can’t decide if a note could cause trouble for the guy, or not. What do you think? I’ve never been the jealous type so it’s hard for me to predict how a wife would react. If I do it, this is what I'll say:

"If you’re not the ______ _______ who was stationed at Da Dang in 1967 please disregard this note. If you are, you may (or may not) remember a brother/sister type penpal friendship we had back then. Either way, recently I went to a lecture about war letters and it reminded me of our exchange and that I’ve owed you a letter for the past fifty years. That war was a defining era for so many people. I hope the plans you had for your post-military life came to pass. As for me, I found my soulmate a few years later and as they say, we lived “happily ever after.” I hope you find the intended humor and sentimentality in me sending this note all these years later. Sincerely, Jean _______ (the floral designer)"    ©

 

P.S. 8/2025 I decided against trying to connect with any of the guys I'd been pen pals with, this guy included. I look some of them up on the Vietnam War Memorial though to see if they made it home or not.

 

s

My Sgt. Pepper Hat, 1967

Halloween, Ghosts and Cracker Jack

I may be the only person on the planet who doesn’t like Halloween. Not one single thing about it. Not the black and orange color scheme that take up several isles in the stores for weeks ahead of November 31th and is draped around neighborhood yards. Not the greedy little kids who when you say “take one” they take one handful. Not the costumes that way too many adults seem to think are fun to dress up in and scare the heck out of me when they show up at my door. Not the Zombie Walks held downtown that grows larger every year. Not the candy itself that puts me on a sugar binge that lasts until New Year’s Resolutions are made. Is there such a thing as a Halloween Grinch like there is for Christmas? Google has an answer: Yes, there is and my picture appeared when I did the search.

So why did I go to a lecture billed as Ghost Stories? They weren’t ordinary ghost stories. These were legends and spooky mysteries that center around iconic buildings in our downtown buildings. I’ve seen this speaker before and she's good, no matter the topic. She gave an entertaining account of all the tragic deaths of people in those buildings who supposedly wanted to hang around earth to haunt the places. Although I’m not fully vested in the premise of souls sticking around, I do think my husband’s did just that for a couple of weeks. Everything has a scientifically based explanation; that’s my story and I’m sticking to it to explain why my wedding kept falling off the bulletin board where I'd hung it on a pin.

When I was a kid I liked Halloween and there was one house around the corner from me that we always hit before the rest. The elderly couple who lived there gave out boxes of Cracker Jack and I still have the plastic prizes that came in those early boxes. I’ve added hundreds to my collection since then including a tin horse drawn wagon circa 1916 that I paid a small fortune to acquire. That’s a different story for a different day but in case you’re curious I still love the collection. When you collect anything you learn interesting facts. For example I learned about how the Cracker Jack’s waxed box was a pioneer in food packaging that revolutionized the food industry and I learned how baseball became connected to their product. The story behind the latter is that a vaudeville entertainer who’d never been to a ball game wrote a song on a train and that song---Take me out to the Ball Game---with its iconic line “buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack" was a godsend to the company’s sales. And before you ask, it didn’t come from any deal or compensation the entertainer got. 

Throughout 1914 and 1915 the company offered baseball cards in Cracker Jack boxes and a complete set today is worth over a $100,000. Needless to say, I don’t have a set or even a single card. If I did it would go up for sale so fast my nose would bleed. I do have several sets of the replica cards the company put in boxes (1991 through 1993) for their 100^th anniversary which aren’t worth enough to tempt me to sell---a set might buy me a nice steak dinner. I also don’t have any of the forerunners to the toys put in boxes in between 1910 and 1912 which were coupons that when you collected enough could be redeemed for things like silverware, watches and sewing machines. I wish I did. They are rarer than bunions on fresh water fish.

Oh, yes, I do have Halloween to thank with my obsession with Cracker Jack. That and the fact that in the early years of being with my husband we went to a lot of antique malls and flea markets where he often found pricey things to add to his collections and, as a joke, I decided to add to my childhood C.J. toys and wooden nickel collections which at the time I could pick up for under a buck a piece. It was a game we played that took the thrill of the hunt to a whole new level. As my knowledge grew and the years went by, of course, so did my willingness to pay more. In the meantime I had a lot fun teasing Don that I could spend two hours at a flea market, spend $1.00-$2.00 and have as much fun as his $100-$200 hunt.

So ya, I’m probably more attached to my Cracker Jack premiums than I should be and it does bother me that I’m at an age where I should let go. But most of those little toys represents good times spent with my soulmate and I still can’t let go of those memories attached. And what would I do if I downsized my entire life yet again to live a minimalist life-style for another five, ten or twenty years? Stare at the sterile walls wishing I could buy back my memory triggers? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust but in between I collected too much. ©