The Crab Chronicles

My Linguistic Secret Weapon

I was talking to a lady the other night who grew up here in Georgia but then moved to Los Angeles for career reasons. I remarked that she didn't have a southern accent and she said "I hope not. I've tried to lose it."

I was startled by that but I decided not to dwell on it just then because we had other things to discuss. 

It got me to thinking though. What would I do if for some reason I had to move to Los Angeles, or Chicago, or New York? Would I try to hide my southern roots? I recalled that years ago my best friend move to New York City right after college, and lived there several years. I went to visit her several times. One time, we went to dinner at a really nice apartment and there were a number of folks there who were all southern ex-pats. They had all moved to NYC for work, but they socialized with each other as only southerners can - over things like pimento cheese and grits, talking normally, praise Jesus. I was so glad my friend could socialize with folks from back home. 

I like to think that I would talk in my normal accent if I moved away. However, if I was hearing Yankees [or Californians, or Chicagoans] all day long it's quite likely that I would lose my accent and mimic theirs. I have a tendency to do that - I have a musical ear and I pick up on and subconsciously mimic whoever I am speaking to -- and it can be embarrassing. I used to have a friend from Michigan and after a long phone conversation I would have a Michigan accent for a while. If I watch a movie in which all the characters are British, for hours afterwords my inner voice sounds like Hugh Grant or Emma Thompson, or whoever is the main character.

When my uncle was a young man he got a job in upstate New York, Utica, and he and his wife had their children up there. So my cousins were not raised in the south. They lived briefly in Louisiana, and then moved to Chicago, where they lived for years. As far as I can tell, they have literally no discernible accents. My brother doesn't either, but except for when he was in the Army he has lived in the south his entire life. Go figure. 

I think the way one should actually view a southern accent is not that it's a hindrance, or a huge red flag that outsiders will hear and think OMG A KNUCKLE-DRAGGING COUSIN-MARRYING TRUMP SUPPORTING MORON WHO PROBABLY CARRIES A GUN! Outsiders may think that, bless their hearts. We don't care, most of us. (In fact, I think it's hilarious.)

I like what this blogger had to say about the south -- The Real South: More Like Andy Griffith, Less Like the Beverly Hillbillies.

We are the majority. 36% of all Americans are southern. Hell yeah! Go Dawgs! Wanna argue about it? Hold my purse.

I grew up watching Andy Griffith playing Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith show. The premise of many of those shows is this: an outsider comes to Mayberry and thinks Andy is an idiot. Tries to pull a fast one. Andy figures it out easily and foils the evildoer. Why is Andy perceived as an idiot? Small southern town. Matlock -- same premise. Country lawyer, aw shucks type of guy, always wins because his opponent doesn't see his brilliance.

I view my southern accent as a Secret Weapon. You want to think I'm an idiot? Let me show you my transcript from graduate school. Yep, I was an honors student. Still want to think I'm an idiot? Go right ahead. I will quietly and methodically kick your behind [metaphorically] and smile while I'm doing it.

I'm proud to be southern, proud of my accent, and if you think it marks me as an idiot, that's on you. Dolly Parton is a media mogul and she's southern. George Clooney's from Kentucky. Blake Shelton. I could go on and on. We are everywhere and we take no prisoners.

Check out this hilarious video, if you want to know how we really talk: Shit Southern Women Say

A Few Thoughts About the College Cheating Scandal

The latest headlines seem to all be about how the Hollywood actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin spent a lot of money to ensure their children would go to good colleges. What they did was dishonest. I would call that helicopter parenting in the extreme.

I was not raised by "helicopter" parents.

When I was in middle school we lived about a mile from school. I was allowed to walk home from school if it was a pretty day, by myself usually. I walked to piano lessons by myself. My piano teachers lived in the neighborhood. My brother and I roamed around the neighborhood on our own. We drank from the garden hose. We built forts and rafts from mud and dirt and sticks and got our clothes filthy. We had to save our allowance for extras.

My mother didn't make any effort to keep us entertained in the summertime. She would take us to the library every week, and sometimes out to lunch or to the pool, but most of our time was our own. 

My brother was always bored in school and my mom supervised his homework and made sure he did it every day up through 8th grade. When he got to high school she finally realized it was time to let him go. She told him he would have to be responsible for keeping up in his classwork and studying for tests. She was available if he needed help, but she wouldn't micromanage him. He had to motivate himself. He could choose to be a ditch digger or he could choose college. Either way, he would have to live with the consequences of his choices. (Just FYI, he did finish college and then went in the Army.)

I was always a comparatively "good" kid and did my homework and made good grades by myself.

What disturbs me most about the college cheating scandal is this notion that children have been so heavily monitored and directed that they didn't have to learn to motivate themselves and manage their time. Then they get into a college where they don't belong, due to cheating. 

I've seen parents micromanaging their kids in the extreme -- although not much in recent years since my kids have grown up, thank goodness. I have also been heavily criticized by people I know because I didn't micromanage my kids enough, in their eyes. 

My daughter never needed to be micromanaged.

My son always hated school and was bored. I helped him, but he still hated school. He went to a school which had once been one of the best public schools in Atlanta, but when he got there, it had gone downhill. There were lots of fights, teachers let kids get away with talking in class and even cheating, and he had lost respect for his school. I let him leave high school after his sophomore year. He really wanted to drop out. He went into a program called Gateway to College and started college, but unfortunately the program got canceled. He got a GED. He also went to college for two semesters and did fine, although he dropped out. I tried my level best to motivate him to finish college but to no avail.

My son's choices and personality were molded by his early experiences in Kazakhstan, his birth country. He came home at age 10, already a person in his own right. I could influence him somewhat but his personality was already formed. So yes, my parenting experience is different than it would be if I had given birth to him, or even adopted him as an infant. 

I struggled mightily to NOT be a helicopter parent to him. I inherited my dad's control freak tendencies, unfortunately. Michael has always been his own person, however, and only allowed a little bit of managing. Forget micromanaging. 

His stubbornness and intelligence served him well when he was small, with his alcoholic birthmom, but later, not so much. I had to learn to let go of trying to force him to do anything.

However, I was chatting with a friend this morning whose grown daughter just came through a medical ordeal and nearly died, and we agreed that prayer works. Secular studies have proven it. Diehard skeptics won't ever accept it, however. 

I prayed a lot when my son was in school, prayed he would make good grades. He did, with some help.

I mention prayer because what strikes me about the cheating scandal is that those parents could not "let go and let God" when it came to their kids going to college. They were willing to cross the line, pay thousands and thousands of dollars, for their children to get into college and have some "guaranteed" measure of success. 

What do you do to a child, though, when you show them they can cheat on the SATs or be listed as playing a sport they don't play, just to go to a particular school? Those parents are sanctioning cheating. They are saying do whatever you need to do and damn the consequences. 

That doesn't teach those kids anything good. It teaches them basically win --whatever it takes.

I think as a society we are promoting this more and more. We are judging people whose children don't go to college, or who go and drop out. We are saying, in essence, if you don't go to college you are lesser than. That's appalling. 

My son is working at a restaurant and learning to be a cook. He may never go back to college or even to culinary school. I am okay with that as long as he is happy. If I won the lottery and suddenly had the means to say to him "You can go to any college you like and I will pay all the bills," I still don't think his mind would be changed. 

You see, HE has to want to go to college and succeed. He has to be willing to work hard. I can't go do his homework, or take his tests. No parent can do that. So in the end, whether a parent cheats or not, the child still has to do the work and motivate himself or herself. 

Parents have to let go, and let the child learn what is most important about the college experience -- teaching oneself how to organize time and budget, and study. Balancing partying with studying. Choosing friends who boost you up instead of tempting you to screw up. So many things that were critical about my college experience had little to do with books and studying. 

My parents were available to help me with homework but they pretty much left me alone when I was growing up. I had to figure out how to succeed in grades 1-12. That was on me. So college didn't come as a rude shock to me. 

So what I would say to Huffman and Loughlin if they were sitting in front of me is this: your getting caught cheating is the best thing that could happen to your kids. Truly. They are experiencing the consequences of bad choices.

The Huffman and Loughlin kids will have to navigate a hostile world that is not gentled and softened for them unnaturally -- just like the rest of us. It's better for them this way. They will have to motivate themselves and work hard.

The embarrassment of what their parents did will haunt them. Learning how to deal with that will build character, however.

I just hope and pray they don't turn out like their parents... Beautiful and successful and unwilling to put their faith in their children, or in God...

Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe

Every once in a while I will be looking through a box in the garage and find something I haven't seen in years. When it's a photo, particularly a professionally made photo, I get excited. I love old photographs. I love them ten times more when they are photos of people I know. 

At that time, the Paramount Hotel in New York was the home of Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe, a famous place. Here's more about it:

"Whether you were a tourist from Iowa or a head of state, if you passed through Times Square between 1938 and 1951, chances are you ventured into the Diamond Horseshoe, a glittering dinner theater and club in the basement of the Paramount Hotel. The brainchild of Billy Rose, a groundbreaking Broadway lyricist and producer known for his work with the Ziegfeld Follies and Oscar Hammerstein II, the West 46th Street venue featured themed shows that mixed wholesome vaudevillian acts like barbershop quartets with leggy showgirls dressed in little more than flower bras and filmy skirts. Gene Kelly got his start choreographing one such performance, Betty Grable and W.C. Handy were among the star entertainers, and the house was filled with guests like Orson Welles and Sugar Ray Robinson. The club even inspired the 1945 film Diamond Horseshoe, starring Grable."

I found the photo below in an old trunk in the attic sometime when I was a kid. I wasn't all that interested in it, except that the name Billy Rose was on it. I know who he was because I had seen the movie Funny Lady many times, about comedian Fanny Brice's marriage to Billy Rose. 

Mom explains the photo below, which was made in the late 1940's in New York City at Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe, thus:

"They [my grandparents, Bob Hasty and Wilma Butler Hasty] had been saving up money for a trip up north for some time. Mother was working and she was saving a lot of her money. They had been to New York many times and loved it."

My grandparents drove up to Washington DC with Mom, who was around 15, and my uncle Don, who was 4 years older, and toured all the touristy sights, then they headed to New York City. Mom and Don had never been to either city. My grandfather had been a professional baseball player in the early 1920's [for the Philadelphia Athletics] and knew both cities well. The family stayed at hotels where he had stayed in his playing days.

My uncle Bob Hasty Jr. was grown and working, and he stayed home and worked.

They got to the nightclub and were seated at a crappy table, way in the back. Due to Mom's age they almost didn't get in. Patrons were supposed to be at least 16. One of the waters recognized Papa from his baseball days, however, and sent out for a box of baseballs. Papa spent the rest of the evening autographing baseballs, and the family was moved to a great table right up front. 

It's not a great photo of Papa or Mom, but it's a wonderful photo of my grandmother and my uncle. Many years later, Don would work for General Electric and live in Utica, New York, for several years.

The photo was made by a professional photographer at the club and it cost $1.50 -- seems crazy cheap, but today's equivalent price would likely be $15 or thereabouts. 

What We Are Made Of

I have been thinking a lot about what makes up a human body. We are in the time of Lent, when we should be thinking about faith, and thinking about how better to honor God.

In the Episcopal Eucharist, which honors Christ’s sacrifice on his last night on earth, we receive the sacraments of bread and wine while the priest says these words: “This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

I was thinking about that this morning as I ate my non-holy scrambled eggs.

“This is my blood which was shed for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

We eat the wafer and we drink the wine, and we receive Christ into our bodies. [For a more complete explanation, check out this page.]

This is what I personally believe: we should fill ourselves with everything Christ represents, every time we put food into our mouths. We should fill ourselves with love. We should fill ourselves with forgiveness. We should fill ourselves with tolerance.

We are what we eat. It may sound simplistic but those words represent so much more. We are made from the water that falls from heaven. We are made from the earth that nurtures the plants. We are made from the bodies of animals who are sacrificed for our sustenance.

Eating may seem mundane or even gross, but it’s so much more than that. We are part of the land. We are sustained by the place where we live and the people who raise our food. This is not mundane. This is profound, and even sacred.

Should we eat food that comes from food factories? Should we fill ourselves with fruits and vegetables that have been forced to grow, with a lot of help from science?

Should we fill our bodies with “foods” like fruit rollups, or should we eat fruit?

I think we need to eat real fruit, grown from water and sunshine and the miracle.

Yes, you read that right. I used the “M” word.

Life is a miracle.

What we sustain our lives with becomes part of our bodies. Our bodies are proof that miracles exist, and they occur every day.

Science has its limits. A doctor can add a sperm to an egg and a zygote may result. What truly starts life, though? I don’t think they really know that. For all the knowledge and science we have, we really don’t know that spark that ignites a new soul. Only God really knows how that miracle occurs.

I have been thinking a lot about how to renew myself. Easter is a time of promise and renewal, and it’s not far away.

Filling my body with Love sounds like a fine way to renew it.

Eating foods grown by small farmers who love what they do, and who nurture their crops sounds like a good recipe. One day, when I can get it, I want to be able to fill myself with meat that was raised by farmers who cared for their animals and who slaughtered them humanely, like my friend Jon Jackson over at Comfort Farms.

We are what we eat.

Let’s choose to become Love. Let’s choose to fill ourselves with real food, and by doing so honor God, honor our bodies, honor our parents who raised and nurtured us, and honor the small farmers who try to feed us the right way.

Let’s fill ourselves with miracles.

Just as a postscript - my friend Stacy over at Down South House and Home invited me to write a guest blog, and I was delighted to do so. Check it out here: LINK.

The Awkward Questions

I did 23andMe genetic testing a few years ago at the same time as I got my son tested, and I reviewed the results with interest, but then left it alone. Mom and my brother recently got tested, and so I have been looking around on the website again.

The Ancestry composition was most interesting to me. Not surprisingly, I am 58% British and Irish, 21.8% French and German, 17.9% Broadly Northwestern European, 1.3% Scandinavian, .2% Broadly European, and .5% Sub Saharan African. 

I can almost hear my ancestors flipping over in their graves. One half of one percent AFRICAN?!? Yep. Blue-eyed, auburn-haired me. [and it's noted that 67% of my relatives are likely to have some red hair...]

Of course, if my lily-white ancestors could return from the dead and observe my life they would likely be shocked that I have a number of black friends and 3 of them are married to white spouses, which was illegal until the Supreme Court decision in the Loving v. Virginia case in 1967. 

My immediate next door neighbors are a family from Indonesia on one side, and a mixed race couple on the other side. All very lovely people, and wonderful neighbors.

I don't know what Ancestry or the other genetic testing companies do, but I was looking at  the list of DNA Relatives on my 23andMe profile and I started to Google and look up folks and I found, much to my surprise, 3 fairly close [2nd to 3rd] cousins who are black. These folks are on both sides of the family, fyi,.

One of them is a lady in her 30's who is a nurse, who lives in Florida. I have messaged her several times and gotten no response. 

So here's where things get tricky. 

I would very much like to know how I am related to these folks. I have always been a very curious person. I also enjoy learning about genealogy.

There's no way to really research, though.

Of all of my great aunts and uncles, and my great grandparents and great great grandparents, nobody on either my maternal or paternal side was ever married to someone black. Nobody. So that leaves me with only one conclusion. 

Somebody back there in my ancestral line [or actually several folks, most likely] had sexual liaisons with black or mixed-race folks, and produced children. Given the fact that birth control methods were unreliable in the mid and late 19th century, this raises a number of interesting questions. Were these liaisons love affairs?

I like to think my black relatives are the result of love affairs, not rape or some horrible slave/master forcible situation. I do know some of my ancestors owned slaves, though.  I have to go back 4 generations to find slave-owning ancestors.

The one cousin I've reached out to has ignored me. Should I try reaching out to the others? They haven't reached out to me. The 23andMe website lets you send messages to your DNA relatives safely and [if you want] anonymously. 

If I do reach out, how awkward is it to say "Hey, looks like one of my ancestors got a little somethin' on the side! What do you know about that?!"

What makes it truly more awkward is that some of the liaisons probably occurred well over a fifty or a hundred years ago. 

I wish I had more answers to these questions. 

I tutor a child who is black, helping him to improve his writing and English skills. We have some interesting discussions. He is very bright. He is working on a research paper about Thomas Jefferson. I felt like I had to tell him about the Sally Hemmings connection. I try to have him write about history topics -- getting a two for one deal, I like to think. I read a book years ago about Sally Hemmings and I believe the relationship she had with Jefferson was consensual and a love match. She was the half-sister to his dead wife, and her mother was also half white. Two of Sally and Tom's children were freed by him and went to Washington D.C. to "pass" because they looked totally white. So the Hemmings story raises a lot of thorny but interesting questions. 

There's a moving page on the Monticello website about Sally and you can see it here. Her story is told through the words of her son Madison. He clearly didn't think too highly of his biological father, Thomas Jefferson. Did Jefferson essentially bribe her into leaving France with him and returning to slavery in Virginia, or did she go for other reasons? There is no way to know. I like to think she left freedom behind because of love, but I don't know that.

I was trying to explain to my student that history is a messy thing, not all neat and clean. Human beings do awful things sometimes. It's complicated. Great men are seldom morally perfect. That's life. The man who wrote "all men are created equal" probably didn't believe that the same way we do today. Jefferson likely meant "all white men who own property" are created equal. But Jefferson was a product of his time and place, so is it right to condemn him?

Is it right to go back and judge and condemn people who lived decades ago, or centuries ago, based on our modern sensibilities? 

There is no way for me to know if my black relatives' ancestors were the product of love or rape. A harsh truth, but one I have no choice but to accept. Should I reach out to them and put them in a very awkward position, of trying to go back and trace their ancestor who had a relationship (I hope it was more than just an encounter) with one of my ancestors? There is likely no white person on any birth certificate, to prove paternity. That was illegal, remember. So was there a story written down somewhere? I don't know. 

I can tell you this for a fact. I am looking at old photos and wondering now, wondering what happened, and trying not to condemn my forbears. Who knows what really happened? [BTW there is no evidence anyone in the photos below were responsible for my black relatives. I just don't have many photos of my dad's ancestors...]

What else should I do, if anything? Questions, questions...

 

Hip To Be Square

I grew up in the suburbs, middle class, the child of a banker father and a SAHM [stay at home mom]. We went to church and Sunday school every week. We went to the beach every summer.

I didn't know until I grew up that we were very square. 

Most everyone I knew had a daddy who worked and a mom who stayed home. I only knew one family during my childhood where the parents got divorced. I sort of envied the daughter, who was my best friend. Her dad took her out to dinner and did fun things with her. She got his undivided attention more than I got that from my dad, who was a workaholic. 

I think that was the first non-square thought I ever had, jealousy of my friend whose parents were divorced. 

The older I got, the more odd/weird/original thoughts popped into my head. 

My cousin sent me a link to some film footage shot by her dad at a family reunion weekend in 1970, when I was 8 years old. I am all over the place -- dancing around, turning cartwheels, yelling out questions at the adults every two minutes. I always think of myself as a child as that kid in the corner with the book, quiet as a mouse, eavesdropping on the grownups. I was that bookworm, sometimes. I was also a hot mess.

I asked my mom about that the other day and she smiled. "You were a handful, just like your brother," was her reply. "You were always busy. Music, cooking, writing -- you were talented in so many areas."

What made me think of this, you're wondering?

I was reading about an online magazine and how to pitch articles for them. I read a couple of their published articles. I realized that I am probably too old to write for them. There was a photo of all their editorial staff standing around outside, looking hip. Nobody had gray hair. 

So is the AARP magazine the only one I should aim for?! Dang. 

So here's the thing. I don't feel all that different from that cartwheeling 8 year old in the home movies. I don't do cartwheels any more because.... well, I'm too old and fat. Just keeping it real, here. I would love to, though. 

I still feel passionately about things, however.

It seems like this decade of my life has been about being invisible. The ages from 50-60 are weird. We are not young, for sure. That's okay. We are not really old either. Feels wrong to say we're "middle aged" -- that's only true for those of us who live past 100. I doubt that will be me.

So we're in a no-man's land, neither young, old, or middle-aged.

We are not young and hip. 

We are also not old and hip, like Betty White, or Ron Wood, or Dolly Parton. 

I'm kind of jealous of my friends who have grandchildren. Then again, I hate changing diapers.

I'm a bit jealous of my friends who are able to travel. I am pretty much stuck here, for the moment. Then again, I just bought a new 50 inch smart TV, and I can watch Travel Channel and feel like I've been on vacation without ever having to hire a housesitter or pack Immodium.

I have a cousin who will retire soon, after working at the same library for more than 40 years. I sort of envy her, and I'm sort of worried about her. I hope she doesn't decide to just go off and live in Costa Rica, far from the rest of the family, but then again, maybe she should?

Retirement must be scary, especially for us spinsters. I doubt I will ever be able to retire. Maybe a career as a Walmart greeter will yield enough material for a book of pseudo-hip short stories.. 

I keep thinking, I've learned a lot about life in recent years. Maybe I should write about that. When I was a twenty-something or thirty-something I wouldn't have read such a book, though. I remember dating a much older man once, in his early 50's and thinking he's like, stuck in a time warp. Not young, and not quite grandpa in the nursing home. 

Remember the old Huey Lewis song, "It's Hip to Be Square"? I hope Huey was right. I've got the square part down. I'm just waiting for the hipness...