Lydia Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Lydster: Ten Candles

our 25th anniversary present

This past spring semester, the daughter’s final project for her sculpture, mold-making, and casting class involved ten candles. Although the project had to include making molds and casting, it was otherwise open-ended, so one could use whatever material they wanted. It didn’t have to have a theme, but it should be a cohesive project, not random.

She decided on the topic for this project: her parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. In each piece was a bit of wax from our wedding candle. the project took about 30 hours.

Candle #1: a wedding cake to represent the marriage in 1999. The scent was vanilla, sugar cane, and almond.

Candle #2 represents my wife’s and my honeymoon in Barbados in 1999. The scent was rum cake. Why? Because our daughter asked us to give her specifics. Rum cake was one of the most tangible objects we remember from that period; it was delicious, and we brought some back home.

Candle #3 is a standard house because we bought our home together in 2000. (My wife had purchased a house earlier, and we lived there for a year, but it wasn’t OURS.) The scent was coconut, citrus, and amber.

Candle #4 is the steeple from our current church, which we started attending in 2000. The scent is golden apple and Honey Drizzle.

Candle #5 is three candles tied together, representing the three of us. The candles are three different shades of green in honor of our surname. The scent is vanilla, buttercream, and marshmallow, which she feels smells like a newborn.

Candle #6 is an adenoid. The daughter had an adenoidectomy at the age of two and a half, which was very traumatic for her parents. That candle is unscented because the procedure involved her nose.

Felines

Candle #7 is the cat Midnight, who we got in 2013. The scent was sandalwood and clove, which smelled like fresh kitty litter. At this point in his life, Midnight was always covered in kitty litter, so she thought it was very fitting for him.

Candle #8 is the cat Stormy, who we got later in 2013. The scent is called Warm and Welcome. Both cat candles use the same mold by casting them with different colored crayon waxes. Neither of them came out exactly how she envisioned. Midnight was too gray, and Stormy needed stripes, so she painted them, giving each more texture.

Candle #9 is the daughter graduating from high school and attending college. The scent is warm spring sunshine. The wick from our wedding candle was used as the tassel.

Candle #10 commemorates my wife and my 25th-anniversary trip to Chautauqua Institution. This is the CHQ tower; she made it before we went. The scent is sparkling sugared berries.

Unfortunately, the box of candles was lost when she moved back home at the end of the semester. Nevertheless, it was a wonderfully inventive effort. I LOVE these SO much.

Lydster: driver’s permit

wisdom teeth

It was an interesting summer for our daughter. For one thing, she got her driver’s permit and decided to learn how to operate a car. She enlisted her mother in the teaching experience. I don’t think this was something that my wife was particularly looking forward to doing, but our daughter has skills in this area.

She won’t have time to get her license over the summer, as she still has to take a five-hour course, but she’s a quick learner. I’m getting this from my wife and daughter because, to date, I have not ridden in the car with my daughter operating the vehicle.

The daughter has a great deal of spatial recognition. This became obvious when we went to Alexandria, VA, in July. She instantly recognized that there couldn’t be a second bathroom in our place because there would not have been sufficient space. This was her third trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, though her parents’ first. We also went to the Jefferson Memorial and passed the Capitol. More about that trip soon.

She’s been going through a lot of her stuff as part of the family purging, whittling through stuff we may not need anymore.

Jock

She’s also been exercising a lot at the local Albany YMCA and is very good at learning how to use some of the equipment, so much so that she’s been teaching her mother how to do so.

This has been interrupted by the need to get her four wisdom teeth removed on August 14. They weren’t hurting yet, but removal was highly recommended based on the dentist and the specialist’s assessment. Annoyingly, because of a scheduling snafu, my wife had to drive her to Queensbury, about an hour away, rather than the closer Latham office. The day after, she had a lot of mango juice, mac and cheese, and chocolate pudding.

She goes back to college soon. It was nice having her around.

Lydster: Dancing Many Drums

Kykunkor

My daughter worked on two papers about people portrayed in the book Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz.

The first was about Kyundor, or the Witch Woman: An African Opera in America, 1934. Maureen Needham writes: “Versatile, multitalented as an opera and concert singer, dancer and choreographer, and teacher of African culture, the great but virtually forgotten Asadata Dafora made a huge contribution to the birth of African dance and musical drama in the United States.”

John Perpener wrote several dance biographies for Jacob’s Pillow. Of Dafora, he notes the performer was born in Sierra Leone in 1890 and moved to NYC in 1929.

His breakthrough was Kykunkor or the Witch Woman, “which opened in May 1934… Sparked by a positive review by John Martin of the New York Times, impressive audiences began to attend the dance-opera at the Unity Theater, a small performance space on East Twenty-Third Street in New York City. Martin effusively described Kykunkor as ‘“one of the most exciting dance performances of the season’ Not only did his critical imprimatur stimulate interest in Dafora’s work, it also forwarded the artist’s objective—to prove that the art and culture of Africa was equal in importance to that of the world’s other cultures.”

On YouTube, you can find videos of others honoring Dafora’s works, such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater showing the dance of Awassa Astrige or the Ostrich, Dafora’s 1932 work.

Check out the Wikipedia page for this innovator who died in 1965. I was unaware of this man.

KCH

My daughter’s other topic was Katherine Dunham (1909-2006). From the Institute for Dunham Technique Certification page: she “was a world-famous dancer, choreographer, author, anthropologist, social activist, and humanitarian.

“She translated her vision of dance in the African diaspora, including the United States, into vivid works of choreography that show a people’s culture. During her ‘World Tours’ period (1938-1965), her company was one of the few major internationally recognized American dance companies that toured six continents. The success of the dance company was also due to her artistic collaboration with her brilliant designer husband, Canadian John Pratt, who was the costume and set designer for the Katherine Dunham Dance Company.

“However, during this period in her own country, she also encountered many instances of racial discrimination, both in accommodations for her company and in segregated theaters where blacks were either relegated to the back row balcony or not allowed in at all. Dunham always fought against this racial discrimination, bringing several lawsuits and using her celebrity to bring attention to the African American plight. During this period, she created a repertoire of over 100 ballets for concert, Broadway, nightclubs and opera.”

The book features a chapter by Constance Valis Hill: Katherine Durham’s Southland: Protest in the Face of Repression. Read about this production in the LOC and Dance Magazine. The piece was performed in 1951 abroad, but not in the United States until 2012.

Check out a page in the LOC page, which shows videos of her work, as well as Wikipedia and the IBDb. I knew about her from the 1983 Kennedy Center Honors she received.

Vaudeville

Nadine A. George wrote about “Dance and Identity Politics in American Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters, 1900-1935.” She’s also written the book The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville. She’s quoted here that “these four Black women manipulated their race, gender, and class to resist hegemonic forces while achieving success. By maintaining a high-class image, they were able to challenge the fictions of racial and gender identity.”

The LOC notes that the sisters, ” Mabel Whitman (1880-1942), Essie Whitman (1882-1903), Alberta Whitman (ca. 1887-1963) and ‘Baby’ Alice Whitman (ca. 1900-1969), comprise the family of black female entertainers who owned and produced their own performing company, which traveled across the United States.. to play in all the major cities, becoming the longest running and highest-paid act on the T.O.B.A. circuit and a crucible of dance talent in black vaudeville.”

Besides Wikipedia, there’s a lot about these siblings here. Here’s a brief audio essay.

While my daughter did not write about them, they were fascinating performers and entrepreneurs who influenced many. I did not know of them.

My wife is a good mom

drive

My wife is a good mom. There, I said it. As I’ve noted, we came to parenthood from different perspectives. She seemed confident in knowing that this was something she wanted to do and likely would do well at. Conversely, I’ve been consistent in thinking that I have no idea what I’m doing.

Here’s something my wife did. After spring break from college, on a Sunday, my wife drove my daughter back to college about 100 minutes away. My wife picked up my daughter’s besties, Kay and Tee, whose college breaks were inconveniently set for that following week. Tee stayed at college with my daughter. My wife drives Kay back to Albany, taking her home.

Six days later, my wife and I pick up Kay, drive back to the daughter’s college. the five of us went out to a lovely Guatamalan restaurant. Then we went to a campus craft fair. We said goodbye to the daughter. My wife drove us back to Albany, dropping off Tee and Kay.

This is not the first time my ife has made round trips in successive weekends, despite her very busy work schedule.

As I’ve noted, my wife has taught my daughter about first aid. The daughter’s interest in cooking stems from my wife, not me. My daughter doesn’t drive yet, but she’s noted my wife is a great example of a conscientious operator of a motor vehicle. And I’m sure there are plenty of other examples.

Sandwich

She’s also helping to tend to her mother, who moved into a senior independent living center in our county a year after my FIL died. My wife takes her mom to some doctor’s appointments, does occasionally shopping, and helps sorting out papers.

My wife is not precisely in the sandwich generation in that she’s not tending to her mom for her day-to-day living, it is a commitment nonetheless. Yet she does it well.

Happy Mother’s Day, dear.

Lydster: two decades

cleaning the wound

This is the second part of the daughter at two decades extravaganza.

One of the mild life frustrations I’ve had is that my daughter didn’t get to know my birth family nearly as well as she related to my wife’s family. My father died in 2000 before she was born. While she did meet my mother a few times, most recently in 2009, she didn’t get to know her well. She had seen her cousin Rebecca on the TV show Wipeout but never in person until my mother’s funeral in 2011. In part, that’s why she and I went to Carnegie Hall in 2022 to see my sister Leslie sing, before which we experienced an … interesting… taxi ride.

But it’s nice that she has seen my wife’s family regularly. Though my wife’s brother John died in 2002, my daughter has gotten to know her grandparents before her grandpa Richard Powell died in 2020. I think my daughter “supported” John McCain in 2008 for President because he vaguely looked like Richard. Her grandmother now lives in Albany County.

She knows her mother’s other two brothers, their wives, and their three daughters. One family, with twin girls, lives in Catskill, about an hour away, though one of the daughters is now in NYC. The other family lived in Massachusetts, but now in southeastern Pennsylvania, a fair distance but a lot closer than Charlotte, NC, and San Diego, CA. She’s attended several Olin family reunions.

Self-advocating

She became more confident in many areas. It used to be that when we went to a restaurant, she wanted one of her parents to tell the server that she had a peanut and tree nut allergy. Then, about five years ago, she insisted on doing it herself.

During COVID, she would spend hours in her room. It was difficult to ascertain whether this was a function of the pandemic, the phase of being a teenager, or both. This eventually passed.

Early on, I wondered how to introduce issues of national and world events to her. As it turned out when she was about nine, I’d be watching the TV news in the living room; she was paying attention while in the dining room.

Her parents talk with her a LOT about whatever she asks, including issues of race. It’s impossible to protect one’s child from bigotry. When there were vigils after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, she organized a regular event in our neighborhood for about two months; as it was her gig, I only went once or twice.

Column A or Column B

There is a loose demarcation of what she will ask which parent. Her mother tends to get questions about cooking, cleaning, and first aid. Indeed, when one of her friends was mildly injured at college, she used tips her mother taught her to clean the wound.

I tend to get the music, movies, and politics questions. Also, because I am a librarian, she asks me college-related questions about finding citations, attribution, and the like. Both of us might field questions, such as relationship issues and money, though I tend to be more available as a retiree.

In her first year in college, she’d call or text now and then. This year, she phones more often. She called just to talk recently, and we were on the phone for an hour and a half.

We tell her we love her, and she reciprocates, which is very nice.