Tag: Lydia

The Lydster: meeting at Mickey D’s

The Daughter was going to go on a school field trip to the state capital building and the state museum for the bulk of a school day in the middle of December. The opportunity was available only to the students who were doing well in their classes.

When I used to work downtown, I used to donate blood at the Empire State Plaza, fairly religiously, every eight or nine weeks. Though I’d been back working downtown for over a year now, I had fallen out of the habit until mid-December.

After I had donated for the 159th time, by their records, I stopped at McDonald’s. The odd ritual I used to have was going to Mickey D’s every time I gave blood, and there’s one in the ESP concourse, not too far away.

I’d ordered my food, but I hadn’t received it yet when this horde of kids show up. It’s my daughter and her classmates! The line is so long that I figure I’ll be done eating by the time they get their food. I DO bring her some French fries and ketchup while she was in line, which she appreciated, though her classmates, I’m told, ate most of them.

However, a lot of her classmates weren’t ordering food, just standing in line with their friends. So the Daughter and two of her friends sit down and ate with me. But what happened to the turkey and cheese sandwich The Wife had packed for the Daughter? The girl hands it to her father to schlep home, naturally.

I finish eating and kiss the Daughter goodbye on her forehead, as one of her friends rolls her eyes. I walk away, but double back behind that friend, who I know better than any of my child’s buds, and make a sound right behind her approximating a belch. The Daughter and her other friend laughed hysterically.

What a rare, and serendipitous, midday meeting with my girl.

My parents, and my career choices

Did we HAVE scheduled meetings with guidance counselors?

les-trudyMy good friend Carol, who I’ve only known since kindergarten, has some follow-up questions about the Lydster’s career choices, which were really about My career choices.

Two questions based on this… why did you not go into law?

Because I did very poorly in a pre-law course at New Paltz. I loved the subject, but Bill Dunn didn’t love my answers. Or maybe it was because it was an 8 a.m. course and I was late sometimes. This failure threw me into a tizzy, because that was my intended life path, and then I had NO idea what I wanted to pursue.

Do you wish your parents had made more suggestions, not along the lines of pushing as much as of possibilities?

Not really, because it just wasn’t in their skill sets. My mother was not one to push us, because that was not her nature in much of anything. She was a “go along to get along” type.

She was very good with numbers and was a bookkeeper or teller for most of her adult life. But she didn’t really think of it as a skill much as, say, her husband arranging flowers or playing guitar or painting or doing all sorts of things. I dare say that he could be a bit intimidating.

For his part, my father, according to his military record, had only three years of high school. I think that part of the friction that I had with him was that I was not very good at working with my hands, the things he excelled in. But I was book smart – would you accept that analysis, Carol? – and he was not as adept, but figured things out as he went along. He was outwardly gregarious, and that wasn’t me.

We did have some areas in common: watching sports together, especially the minor league baseball Triplets and the NY football Giants; playing cards, particularly pinochle and bid whist; and most especially, thank goodness, music.

So he was not likely to offer me career advice because, and I say this without a lot of remorse, he wasn’t always understanding me very much at that time. He certainly didn’t grok what motivated me, and this became even more acutely true in my early twenties when we didn’t talk, at all, for nearly six months, before I relented. This is odd in some ways because my antiwar, and other, activism was molded in no small part by his civil rights activism.

I said two but here’s a third – do you think as I do that our HS counselors were useless?

I actually have no recollection of ANY HS guidance counseling whatsoever, except one passing conversation with Allan Cave, who was the assistant principal at the time, and that only because I knew him from church. Did we HAVE scheduled meetings with guidance counselors, because if we did, I never received the memo?

Just as an aside you wrote about a few math/science awards Lydia received but there’s no mention of any options related to those. Is she just not interested?

Actually, it has determined what level courses she has in 7th grade, and that could lead to courses she could take in 8th grade that could get her high school credit. So it puts her on a more rigorous academic track in several subjects than she might be otherwise.

 

The Lydster: very grave situation

hickey-gravestoneThe family went to this fair at a church in Claverack, NY, SSE of Albany. The Wife sees a friend who connects with that one time a year. The Daughter played on the swing, but I headed for the adjacent cemetery.

My maternal grandmother Gert and her sister Adenia have no gravestones. Gram died on Super Bowl Sunday 1982, and my aunt Deana a decade and a half earlier. So I decided to check out the condition of the memorials.

I noticed right off that many of them have a covering of green substance I believe to be lichen. Some are more prone than others.

The Daughter, finished on the swing, joined me in the cemetery. I started cleaning off the lichen with the back of a plastic fork I happened to have, and she used an old pen to clean out the letters. I wish I had taken a “before” picture, but one could barely see HICKEY, and the names below were not visible. As you can probably tell, there is still plenty of lichen there, but at least it’s readable.

Ah, Mildred Rowe was a couple of years OLDER than her husband, but outlived him by a couple of decades.

duntz-gravestone-before duntz-gravestone-after
Pleased with our work, we went onto another grave. Headstones tell interesting stories. The Duntz couple had two kids. Emily died before she was 40, and Azano didn’t make it to his 18th birthday. The parents buried both of their children.

Interestingly, there are separate little headstones at ground level for AZANO, EMILY, and MOTHER (Edna Alger), but not for the father, Ellis, because others evidently made that determination.

Later, with friends, I’ve had several conversations about making plans for that time after death so that family members don’t have fights about it. I speak from experience in this matter.

shook-headstone-before shook-headstone-after
We had almost run out of time – the Wife was calling us to have lunch at the event – but we thought this one headstone needed our help, not so much from the lichen, but from some other growth. Even together, we could not pull out the weed obscuring the view, and I didn’t have a knife on me to cut it away. Instead of removing the obstruction, the Daughter took a weed and tied them down, then found a rock, an adventure in itself, to keep the mess down.

We did relatively little lichen removal on this one, but it needed less work. This headstone was next to another stone I suspect marked the sister of the woman noted here.

The Daughter thought that she might like doing this kind of work for a living, or maybe do it as a hobby to get away from her busy lawyer career. We found it very relaxing on a perfect, sunny November day (67 F, 19.4C), a day before it snowed!

First Friday competition for attention

MAYBE I’ll have time to rush over the half-dozen blocks to the Cathedral.

dec2I have a conflict December 2 on First Friday. Our choir will be singing at First Presbyterian Church, at the corner of State and Willett Streets in Albany, music we’ve been rehearsing for some weeks.

In the very same time frame – 6 to 8 p.m. – I’ve only recently discovered that “City School District of Albany students of all ages will take part in an art exhibit and holiday concert. The events will take place at the Cathedral of All Saints, located at 62 South Swan St. (behind the New York State Education building).”

I’m less interested in the school musical performance than the artwork since the Daughter has at least one piece in the exhibit, which I have not seen. MAYBE, when our concert ends, I’ll have time to rush over the half-dozen blocks to the Cathedral.

Family health report: usual, or not so much

Blueberry, cherry, five-fruit, some lemon custard thing, pecan, pumpkin

cortisoneFamily health report, but no news about the Wife, which is good news.

I woke up early the week of Thanksgiving with about a dozen scratches on my upper back, at the shoulder blade level and above. I didn’t really notice the wounds until I realized how much it itched back there. They’re deep enough that I’d think I’d notice when they happened, but apparently not.

Did one of the cats do this? They remain the prime suspects; Arthur knows about cat scratches, though none of mine was nearly that long. The Wife wondered if she could have done so in her sleep, but it seems highly unlikely; talking in her sleep, yes, but not scratching. And it’s virtually impossible for me to have done that to myself, as I can barely reach the area.

The Wife treated it with some topical lotions, including cortisone and Eucerin, and it feels SO MUCH better.

Too much pie, even for a dozen of us. Blueberry, cherry, five-fruit, some lemon custard thing, pecan, pumpkin, made mostly from some Amish folks. Surprisingly, no apple. With vanilla ice cream. I ate only the first four over the two days, but it was enough to make Friday night dinner totally unnecessary.

The Daughter and one of her cousins were playing on Thanksgiving day. Trying to climb a wall, she got an abrasion on her abdomen that apparently looks worse than it feels.

Her cousin somehow hit The Daughter’s foot with her elbow(?) on Thanksgiving Day, and it remained bruised into the next day. We took her to the urgent care place about 9:42 a.m., maybe 15 seconds after another guy showed up. HE needed two 20-minute sessions, so we got pushed back to 11:20 a.m., as the earlier slots were also filled.

We left, then came back. No, the foot isn’t broken. But it still hurts. She SHOULD be taking an NSAID such as ibuprofen or naproxen, to relieve the inflammation, but she’s not the best patient.

Ramblin' with Roger
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