"I Can See Their Memories!"

One of my favorite Mother's Day (perhaps THE favorite) was in 2019, when everyone was out of the house except Timothy and me.

I spent most of the entire day listening to Timothy tell me the story of "Cornell Dyer and the Never Robbers."

And I was just enthralled and eagerly waited for the next word, all the while taking notes, so I could draft the story later.

Although I am the official author for all the books in the BryonySeries subseries "The Adventures of Cornell Dyer," Timothy is the creator for most of the story concepts (except for the last book in the series, which he is writing).

In each book of the Cornell Dyer series, Cornell Dyer has a supernatural mystery to solve.

But this simple mystery story for kids (and the young at heart), "Never Robbers" addresses some very existential topics, including the role memory plays in the existance of people, places, and things.

First, the story summary. And then some thought-provking quotes about "memory" from story.

After a band of robbers steal the motor home of supernatural super sleuth Cornell Dyer, time becomes strange and unpredictable. Events replay themselves with variations. Watches and light sources can’t be trusted. People disappear, and a man who claims to know everything suddenly appears. Cornell is certain soot, a tire swing, and his first unsolved case are somehow connected. But will he solve the mystery before he fades from memory?

The quotes:

"We've all experienced something that is, but not anymore, with people remembering it in various ways. But we're stuck with the original memories, all of the original memories in all their different forms."

Danny Tyler placed a gnarled hand on Cornell's shoulder. "Imagination and memories are a potent combination. In my day people said I was wise. So I've formulated this theory. I think Bishop, Mike, and I are in this situation together because we share a similar memory. And I think we're aging fast today because we're disappearing from memory."

"But even for the people who remember Madeline, she lives only on the tip of their memory, jut out of reach. These people have collectively lost their memories. A memory that, as group, they cannot remember."

"Here's the strange part, Professor," Mike Olsen continued. "It felt as if we'd always been together. Not long after that, we started changing people's minds and memories. And we've been doing that for a really, really long time."

Each person, as they walked, left behind soot, which slowly vanished as they walked.

Cornell gasped. "I can see their memories!"

"If you go back, all the good you've done, and all the bad you've done will become undone," Cornell said. "You will return to the places you belong, and you will have no memory of each other, and you will lose the ability to alter memories."

Cornell shook his head. "That's not how the Madeline effect works. I think you're aging because people aren't remembering you. When memories of people fade.."

"...the people stop existing," Danny Tyler murmured.

Mike frowned. "I know we've changed a lot of memories, but how do you have my watch? And why does it look so old?"

            "Your watch?" Cornell said. "This is not your watch. This was my Grandpa Mo's watch!"

            Danny Tyler stroked his beard. "Mo? As in M.O.? As in, maybe, Mike Olsen?"

            Mike Olsen's eyes grew very wide. "Professor, I'm your grandfather?"

            Cornell ignored the question. "Bishop Cafferty had a watch, too. Where did he get it."

            "Don't know," Danny Tyler said, still looking at his own watch. "We never thought to ask."

I have to tell you, I have never looked at footprints - or even photographs - the same way again.

Look at this photo of these footprints.

Every piece of this is a memory.

This photo from 5:32 p.m. September 22, 2018, preserves all these footprints in the sand, the memory of all the people who left their marks, marks that no longer exist, shoes that likely no longer exist, and (maybe) some of people who no longer exist - or, at the very least - no longer exist in the same way.

The moment I took this photo is just a memory - and less than that, because I don't remember taking this photo.

Furthermore, even I have changed since I snapped this phot.

And yet, something of that moment and all those people who contributed to it, still exists in this way somehow, simply because they left something of themselves behind and a random photo captured that.

Are your eyes roaming this photo, too - wondering?

Coffee With Bertrand the Mouse

Good morning!

I found an old coffee photo of Bertrand the Mouse the other day, which made me think of all the coffee memories we've made together.

I'm sharing seven with you this morning, with the last photo also featuring Uncle Barty. I hope you enjoy them.

Happy Monday! 

Letter From Camp

So when I was eleven, my parents sent me to Camp Pokanoka in Ottawa, one of my last Girl Scout events.

I learned to swim at Camp Pokanoka and (apparently) how to sum up one day at camp on a greeting card.

My mother texted me this photo the other day and asked if I remembered it - and then offered to mail all the cards to me. 

Of course, my first thought as a home-schooled mom was, "Where's the cursive?"

But maybe I was writing for posterity. The printing is probably easier to read.

Enjoy!

"HOME , is where your heart is" by Holly Coop

Today I am sharing a link to a wonderful poem that WriteOn Joliet member Holly Coop recently wrote about the experience of living in Joliet.

However, anyone who has lived anywhere will find the deeper meaning among the lines - and maybe, just maybe, will call to mind (or feel inspired to immortalize) the place and memories that lives in the heart.

https://hollycoopauthor.wordpress.com/2024/05/26/home-is-where-your-heart-is/

Condensing a Life to Three Short Pages

Yesterday I took a day off work to finally write my father's obituary.

He died on Jan. 11, so, yes, I didn't get on this immediately. But since he was a business owner, I oddly feel he would understand the delay. Whenever something came up in the family, he immediately consulted his planner to see what else was going on that day.

I took that day off because I had eight pages of material (all chronicled by him) detailing his education and work history, so I really needed a day to focus on just that. Somehow, I managed to condense all that information to three short pages, which is long by most obituary standards and too short to really tell the stories behind those accomplishments.

As I wrote his obituary, I learned my father was a creative and forward thinker, which I didn't know to the precise details until yesterday because he rarely talked about himself.

Now about this photo.

My sister recently posted this photo on social media. I have hazy memories of this particular scene and clear sharp memories of all the elements in it, especially feeling the tug of my kite in my hands under the large eternal sky. 

We lived at 2108 Belmont Ave. in Joliet, which looks very different today. But this photo was taken back in 1964 when the space felt wide and very, very open, mostly due to the lack of trees and houses in this very new development.

I remember my father teacher me how to fly a kite, how to let the string out, how to steer the kite, and I remember this particular kite.

I remember playing in that sandbox.

I remember the white car.

I remember the house before he installed the privacy fence and the metal shed that people thought was a barn on the first glance - but every house must have a shed, he used to say.

I remember my sister as a baby.

The side of the house had an outside thermometer and the mercury measured more than 100 degrees that summer. 

I recalled being amazed that the temperature had reached all the way to one hundred when my mother opened the side door and announced it just as I, who was playing outside, came traipsing up the concrete driveway.

If you had visited this house a few years later, you would have seen the fence, the shed, the rock garden, the honeysuckle hedges on both sides, and the lush green grass without a single dandelion.

You might hear him call you over to him to see a large green grasshopper (large brown grasshoppers were scary) that he had caught in his work gloves and you'd watch in delight as he fed it a blade of grass and then taught you to do the same. Seriously, you really haven't lived until you've hand-fed a grasshopper.

He spent most weekends in good weather with yard work. Late in the afternoon, he'd take a break and sit on the back porch with one ice cold beer. And sometimes, I could persuade him to remove his thumb, a amazing trick to a young child.

We had three wading pools in our lifetime at that house (we moved to New Lenox in the fall of 1974): a round inflatable we used a few times in the front yard, a rectangular one with a hard plastic triangular seats in all four corners (I remember him taking it out of the box assembling it, and I remember my excited anticipating of getting into that large pool), and (later) a three-foot wading pool that sat where the white car is sitting the summer before we moved.

That end of the driveway where the concrete meets the grass was also the place where he'd set up the charcoal grill on weekends. And I got to help shuck the fresh sweet corn.

I often tell my children that time doesn't move for me. I say this because some people might say this happened a long time ago.

But it doesn't feel like a long time ago.

It doesn't feel that long ago at all.

61 for 61

My mother sent me a check for sixty-one dollars for my sixty-first birthday with the stipulation that I use the money for myself.

Yes, a gift with strings attached.

So I bought something I hadn't bought in probably twenty years. 

The cost was more than forty dollars - and I gave the rest to Rebekah as a gift for her half birthday, which was July 7.

I ordered a bag of Claire Burke's original potpourr and two packages of scene blocks.

My godmother Marie Sherry brought me some of this potpourri as a gift nearly fifty years ago. I've loved it ever since, and I've since associated lovely scents with her.

In fact, when I was fifteen, I had a dream that she and I were wandering a lovely, old, wooden type of shop that sold candles, incense, potpourri, and all sorts of lovely things. It was a vivid dream, full of color and richness and wonderful frangrances, and the dream is one of my favorite memories of her.

Marie used to own an antique store, and she created minature diaramas that she sold at craft fairs and special orders. She was adventurous, too. 

At age eighty, she drove to California herself by visit friends. She stopped at a service station before venturing into the desert and was told one of her tires was bad and she should buy another.

Marie got out of the car, examined the tires herself, and decided nothing was wrong with them. She drove through the desert without buying a new tire. 

When she reached the other side, she stopped at another service station for a second opinion. And she had been right - her tires were fine.

At age eighty-three, she moved to a wonderful two-story apartment in Nashville, Indiana, to be closer to friends. She had never married or had children.

At age ninety, she stopped driving at night, because she lived close to a rural area and was tired of dealing with the deer.

She was proud of the fact she had never taken any medicine in her life except for aspirin for a sore knee.

Of all the potpourri I've had in my life, Claire Burke original potpourri remains my favorite.

The potpourri even inspired a detail that is intimately woven into my BryonySeries: the speically bred bryony that world-renowned pianist and composer John Simons had bred for his bride, bryony that, like the vampire plant that it is, wound itself in, about, and around, every plant and edifice on the Simons estate.

I was walking my colicky newborn Timothy in the fall of 1990, mentally the writing the story I would never officially write until seventeen years later, when my gaze fell upon a dish of that potpourri in my bedroom. And - so!

But forty dollars worth of potpourri is not an expense I can justify in my life right now. So getting a check with strings - rather, dried plants and a woodsy-musky scent - attached to it was really a wonderful gift.

And Marie was my maternal grandmother's first cousin, my mother's second, and my third. Naturally my mother liked the way I spent the money.

Two Sweet, Surprise Gifts

A few days ago, I received a drive-by gift from my oldest son Christopher.

Rebekah and I were upstairs working when she received a call to come downstairs.

When she returned, she had these items and said Christopher was on his way to an appointment and dropped them off. 

Rebekah also said Christopher pointed out the purple in the "flowers," an implication of the purple roses, a motif in some of the BryonySeries books.

I don't know the back story on these yet. From what Rebekah understood, the mother of someone Christopher knows has cancer and makes beautiful items to pass the time because she stays home a lot.

Scroll down for four more photos of the flowers. The detail is breathtaking!

I'm humbled to receive such lovely gifts and inspired by someone I haven't met that's so positive, she can use her own challenging times to create beauty for others.

I hope this post inspired you, too.

Leftovers

"Leftovers" is a word that often has negative connotations of not being as good as the original or not being good enough to make the first cut, as if only new and shiny have value.

"What are we having for dinner tonight?"

"Leftovers."

"Oh."

But leftovers can have great value, too. Spaghetti sauce, for instance, often tastes better the next day. So does lasagna and macaroni and cheese with bacon.

Doubling portions when cooking on Monday means having "leftovers" for Tuesday and extra time for other projects.

Cutting elements from a story and then putting those "leftovers" into a separate file means you have a fresh persepctive later. You can decided if they should go back in - or if they are better served in another story - or they are simply evidence you know where to cut (pat yourself on the back).

Stories that were "leftover" from my schedule last week means I don't have to go hunting for ideas this week.

Leftover materials from one craft project can be stored for another. I used to run a Sunday School at a church, and I saved everything and accepted donations from the church members of everything. I had a wonderful supply closet - and those leftovers were just the thing when I purchased large, trifold cardboard for every student to recreate the "John of the Ladder" icon. They could use every and any form of media stored in the closet. The kids loved it.

Memories of great experiences are another type of welcome leftovers, ones that stay fresh in our hearts long after the experience itself fades.

I have three boxes in my closet of "leftovers" from my attic office in Channahon - tangible memories of the "Ron" years, spent in the home his parents built, years that dementia robbed from him.

Circling back to food, Rebekah and I did not cook this weekend for the Sue's Diner page on the BryonySeries website.

This means that if you didn't try her chocolate chip cookie recipe from last week, you can still try it this week.

I love chocolate chip cookies fresh and warm from the oven.

But they also taste great the next day.

Vintage Christmas Commercials

Before the Dawn

We all have different definitions of "sleeping in."

For some, starting a weekend before noon is unthinkable. For others, it's past the time they might rise for work.

For me, it's any time after the sun is up. In fact, a part of me feels I've lost a significant chunk of the day if I waken after the sun does.

I blame early childhood experiences.

Before my maternal grandmother died the summer I turned seven, I spent quite a bit of time at her Chicago home. My grandfather had to be out the door by four o'clock in the morning for work, so she rose around three to prepare breakfast for him, and I invariably rose with her.

The memories are vivid: sitting at the table in the tiny kitchen that used to be a porch, gazing out the little window at my right into darkness, a silent contrast to her bustling in the lit room. I can smell the sizzling bacon and the coffee; I can hear the hiss of the percolator.

After my grandfather left, my grandmother and I headed back to bed for a couple hours.

As a middle school student and a teen, I suffered from insomnia. I often woke abruptly around one in the morning, never drifting back to sleep (i.e. a short nap) until five or so, a problem when one began school at seven-thirty!

I passed those hours reading (middle school) or reading and listening to music (high school).

For the first decade or so of motherhood, I was a nursing mom, so waking up one or more times at night was simply part of normal routine.

Those days merged into my single motherhood days shortly after my youngest turned two. And thus began a dozen years of rising before midnight to deliver newspapers, a job that grew from being responsible for ninety-nine papers to several thousand per night.

I met my second husband during that first year and moved to his childhood home in Channahon during my second year. He and I started our church's first and only youth ministry and remodeled outbuildings on our property to host meetings and events for up to fifteen youth of various ages.

He also set up a coffee pot with a timer in the game room since our kitchen was tiny and had no extra room for a coffee pot. Each afternoon, I'd prepare and schedule the coffee for the next day.

Every morning, shortly after awakening I took the dog outside (by morning, I mean shortly after midnight). He'd wander behind the buildings while I unlocked the door, the warm scent of freshly brewed coffee greeting me, especially welcome on chilly winter mornings.

Then Scooter and I would head back to the house - him for a snack and a nap, me up the metal ladder to my attic office to check email, social media, and slowly wake up. About an hour later, I'd wake up the kids so they could do chores, grab a snack, etc., while I did some housework and packed our lunches.

Yes, lunches. Breakfast was after the route.

The routine today is similar: I wake up in the dark, head downstairs to feed the cats and make coffee, and back upstairs to check email and schedule social media with darkness around me. Gradually, the sun rises and so does my level of alertness.

The biggest decision I make during those initial moments is which coffee pod to choose (Daniel buys a variety of dark roast) and which mug to to choose (as I've been gifted with many from generous family and friends). Here is today's choice.

Good morning! :)

"Middle School Reading Lists 100 Years Ago vs. Today:" A Response

Last week on Facebook, I posted a link to a 2016 article called "Middle School Reading Lists 100 Years Ago vs. Today."

Here is the link: bit.ly/30PU5Br.

Although some of the Facebook comments supported classic reading material, most felt classic was boring or irrelevant and felt modern works were best for modern young readers,

Back in our homeschooling days (I'm talking about me and my six children), we read a large variety of material.

In fact, although reading was my main occupation as a child, those two and a half decades of homeschooling were incredibly rich for me, too, in terms of reading material, in volume, variety, and enjoyment, so much that I'll never experience anything like it again.

Although we read nothing on List Two of the 2016 article, we did read Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longellow and we did read Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson.

And although we did not read the rest of the exact selections cited on List One, we did read other works by Rudyard Kipling, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

On the other hand, we had a unique approach to reading these works, which would be hard to replicate in a classroom. And all six adult kids still love reading today.

Here's what we did.

1) We steeped our lives in reading.

By the time a baby showed interest in a board book, we spent about an hour a day in reading, although not all at once, perhaps fifteen minutes scattered throughout the day. Until the child could read, I did the reading. And we always read at bedtime.

We also read at meals. The kids brought books to the breakfast table. During lunch, I would read a chapter at a time from a book we normally would not read on our own. This is how we got through titles such as Treasure Island (twice, in fact), The Wind in the Willows, Mrs. Mike, and The Mysterious Island (to name a few). One chapter and no more. This gave us time for discussion and to anticipate the next day's chapter. The kids also got to hear how reading should "sound."

For the record, we never finished Pride and Prejudice, although we did try really hard. But the writing made us squirm in irritation until we finally dumped the book and moved on.

We also couldn't "get into" Tom Sawyer. But that was just us.

During dinner, we had several books at the table: Bibles, church history, lives of the saints, a bit of catechism. We read and talked together (in ways many would find irreverent, but kids process things differently than adults, and I gave them the freedom to do so), and dinner could last a couple hours.

All this reading was over and above the "fun" reading, and reading that was part of our curriculum.

One th flip side, the kids were also terrible at remembering where they set library books (or where a sibling who swiped the books to read, too, had placed them) and returning books on time. Their library fines could be staggerings.

Side note: the kids paid their own fines, especially once we lived in Channahon, and the library was a couple blocks away. The only time they did not was if the book was borrowed from a library a distance from the house, and I was did not drive them there before the book was due.

2) We read a variety of literature - and we were free not to like it.

We're grateful to Abeka for their outstanding selections, for they assembled many happy hours of reading in their "readers" (which went through twelfth grade), along with stories the kids still pick up to re-read.

Although we did not like every selection, we did read them all, and we did not have to like them. I remember Markheim by Robert Lewis Stevenson being a dreadful read until I read it for the last time. Somewhere in the six reads (once with each child), I'd developed a grudging appreciation for it.

I approached many selections with "I'm sure I won't like this," only to find I did like it. I had never read Sherlock Holmes and was fairly certain the stories would be dull (they weren't). We read folk tales, and poetry, and many of the books also included a huge variety of art (one illustration of a hare is truly creepy).

I think what gave my kids an open-minded approach to the stories is that we read them together. I never handed them an intimidating book and said, "Go read it," while I did something else.

We sat together at the table, or lay across the living room carpet, and we read together, usually just for fifteen minutes at a time, four days a week. We read each paragraph aloud, in alternating paragraphs, which meant sometimes one person would get a line, and the next might get a paragraph that stretched for half a page.

We shared thoughts as we read. If the entire selection didn't resonate with us, we commiserated together. But we also laughed (and sometimes cried) together, or we marveled at certain elements of the characters and story lines. Sometimes one person loved the selection, and the other couldn't wait for it to be done.

Rebekah and I still reference one story, and neither can remember the name, that was so bad, we kept waiting for the author to pull the "Aha!" and make it better. But that never happened. It was horrible, all the way to the end.

We also, usually, skipped the boring questions at the end of the reading.

Along the way, we gained a knowledge and appreciation of an enormous variety of writing styles and subject matter, along with learning about the people who wrote the selections and (perhaps very important for today), the place in time and culture in which they were written, which gave us an extremely wide perspective and provoked many open conversations.

3) Most of the modern stuff was read on our own time.

So, yeah, we didn't lock ourselves in this quaint little alternate world. Both my mother and sister worked as booksellers for many years (the first at Barnes and Noble, the second at Borders) and always gifted my kids with lots of books on birthdays and Christmas.

My mother used her discount to let the kids pick out what they liked ($50 worth for the younger kids, $100 for the older ones). My sister just came with books, sometimes bags of them. Often, she brought titles she had enjoyed (that's how we read Mrs Mike and Fahrenheit 451), with one of them being The Giver (my kids loved it, I loathed it).

My kids introduced me to Foxtrot and Goosebumps; I introduced them to Doonesbury, Tales from the Far Side, and Peanuts.

The read volumes of books with titles I'll never know. I have only read the first Harry Potter and found it to be OK. I tried the second one twice and could  not make it past the second chapter (The kids have offered to summarize it for me so I can read the rest. Maybe someday).

I have never read Pendragon (yet).

We have memories and inside jokes and taglines that will last forever.

BTW, Daniel recently came home with a DVD of the last Peanuts movie. We all watched it (and loved it together).

Illustration by Kathleen Rose Van Pelt for "Bryony."

TurnAbout Tour: Topher Gleason

So while I didn't quite hit all my goals, I had a productive weekend.

Book No. 2 of Before the Blood is edited, but I never progressed as far as chapter 17 of the fifth book and doubt I will accomplish anything more until the weekend.

On Wednesday I am speaking to a group of retired teachers about self-publishing and needed to prepare for that this past weekend. On Thursday and Friday I have events related to the retirement of Herald-News sports editor Dick Goss. So it's a tight week.

I also had breakfast with friends on Saturday and then again on Sunday. Bertrand and I (with smoe of the kids) spent a couple hours at Taste of Joliet, the first time I really ever went.,

I created text for the Art of the BryonySeries flyer. I made updates on the website. I sent off eight pen pal letters to grandchildren. And I wrote two work stories and caught up on some other related work.

So as you see, very productive.

I am wrapping up the BryonySeries TurnAbout Tour with postings today and tomorrow. My plans is to archive the entire tour on the website, but that might not happen for a couple weeks.

And now: Topher Gleason.

On his LinkedIn page, Topher describes himself in the following way: "I strive to ensure excellent service for clients with no objection to traveling a majority of the time. Seventeen years sales experience, eight years sales training experience and seven years management experiences, makes me a very well rounded game changer.

"I am an excellent communicator with the ability to do both online and in-person demonstrations to one or five hundred plus.

"I have a fruitful sales track record with ability to bond effectively in all mediums."

His artist biography says: Topher’s art is normally reserved for family and a few close friends, but after the suggestions of those close to Topher, he has decided to share his work. Gleason is currently working on two novels. Topher uses watercolor and ink as his medium. 

He is available for commissions. Contact him at Topher@artworkbytopher.com.

Here are three posts I really liked:

The Importance of the Baseline In Today’s Dealership

Although this post is directed to people in a particular industry, its overall message applies to any project we tackle.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-baseline-todays-dealership-topher-gleason/


Are You Blooming Where You Are Planted?

A post that echoes advice I've given my kids (and myself!): don't turn down an opportunity, even if you think it's something you don't want to do.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-blooming-where-planted-topher-gleason/

My Memory is Flawed

A wistful post on childhood places that shaped us and are now gone - with a reminder that all of our life experiences shape us

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-memory-flawed-topher-gleason/

Illustration by Topher Gleason

Why I Didn't Record It

With images becoming more important to media of all types, I thought back today to Christmas Day 2014, when our church traditionally gathers in the small hall after liturgy to sing Christmas carols.

As we began singing in the kitchen (less of us every year, and that is where the coffee is) i started to instinctively reach for my phone to record it. Then I stopped.

Sometimes, it's simply more important to enjoy the moment than to capture it. Next year, I might feel differently, wish I had, and then record it. Certainly, I'm happy I have photo albums full of pictures I snapped through the years of special and ordinary days, especially during those years I was raising a houseful of children.

But this past time, I just wanted to be part of it, instead of the onlooker preserving it. Not every moment is a Kodak moment or even (GASP!) and Facbook or Snapchat moment.

Just a thought...