Posts for category ‘nostalgia’

I am so glad Election Day is finally here, and we can vote, get the results, and move on with life. The ads, the robocalls, the real calls, the months and months of analysis and speculation…I’m over it.

Speaking of ads, here is what was one of the most annoyingly lame local spots we had here in Utah. I nominate it for “Worst iPad Bandwagoning”, “Poorest Imitation of Apple Marketing” (“elect differently”?), and “Most Lamely Confusing”. (I can vote from an iPad? Is he going to throw that rock? “Join me. In stoning the incumbents!”)

Anyway. It will all be over soon. And then in a few weeks the 2012 presidential campaign will gear up.

Let us speak of happier things! Such as: The San Francisco Giants winning the World Series! I will admit that I’m not the most dedicated baseball fan. As in: I really hardly ever watch until the playoffs, and then only if it’s convenient. This year, though, I dedicated myself wholeheartedly to the Series, because I grew up in San Francisco and have a lot of great memories of going to Giants games.

Here’s the thing about baseball (at least, this is how it was in the 70s): economically challenged families such as mine could make a day of a baseball game for relatively little money. We didn’t have a car, but we’d get on the MUNI Ballpark Express out to Candlestick. I remember this as a trip that didn’t seem to bad on the way there but felt eternal on the way home. I wonder how our little family looked to the other fans on the bus, who I mostly remember as being middle-aged men with Giants caps, stubble, and heavy coats quite possibly concealing multiple cans of beer.

Then we’d head to the bleachers and get comfortable. And by “comfortable” I mean “freezing cold.” The cold didn’t keep my sister and me from our favorite concession, though: Carnation Chocolate Malted Ice Cream. It came in a waxed cardboard container about the size of a coffee cup, and had a peel-back top, and you ate with a wooden “spoon” which was really just like a short, wide popsicle stick with a little curve to it. Mmmm, woody. Players I remember rooting for in those days: Vida Blue, and…actually, only Vida Blue. That’s a darn memorable name. Oh, later in high school, there were Will Clark and Dave Dravecky.

Other than Vida and the ice cream, I remember post-game fireworks you couldn’t always see through the fog, and that one time a fox ran across the outfield in the middle of a game and the crowd went crazy. And that one of my best friends in high school, John Perry, wore his black and orange SF cap every chance he got. Then there was the 1989 Series, during which the Loma Prieta quake hit and chunks of Candlestick came down, while I was at SF State working in the student union. That was the last time I paid attention, until now. What a fun week it’s been. (Sorry, Texas friends!)

Thanks for all the virtual high-fives regarding the National Book Award stuff. I’m excited.

I also want to give a shout-out to Bullitt Central High in Shepherdsville, KY, who had me visit the Spring Reading Fling via Skype to talk to a group that read Story of a Girl. Thanks so much for all your great questions and thoughts!

Around the o’sphere…

- Team Babymouse at Provo Children’s Book Festival tomorrow (plus Ann Dee Ellis and me on blogging panel, many other great local authors).

- Caroline Langston writes a beautiful post at the Image blog about her adolescent crush on a teacher that was both truly sexy and truly innocent.

- The schedule for the Summer Blog Blast Tour is up at Chasing Ray. Looks like a good one, as usual.

- The Quo Vadis blog comments on Virginia Heffernan’s Demise of Datebooks column (I have a Quo Vadis planner – a Minister – love it. I also use Google calendar synced to my iPhone. Are you a paper calendar person, or strictly high-tech?)

- 21 Jump Street, the awesomely, awesomely bad series from the late 80s, is now available on Netflix Watch Instantly. You are so welcome! I have to say that before I re-watched the pilot, I would have only called the series “awesome” without the “bad,” but…wow. TV has come a long way since 1987.

(Note Johnny's headpiece - a forerunner to Captain Jack Sparrow's 'do?)

- Man am I glad I got out of Facebook when I did. Though Twitter attempted to explain Diaspora to me, I’m not quite there yet.

Have a great weekend!

(Written with Levenger fountain pen & ink in Clairefontaine cloth-bound Basic notebook.)

http://www.penaddict.com/

http://coffeestainedmemos.blogspot.com/

http://www.paperpenalia.com/stationery.html (I have no idea if this person is even still in business, but it’s nice to look.)

http://exaclair.com

http://www.rhodiapads.com/

http://doanepaper.com/

http://pennington-on-the-paper.blogspot.com/2010/03/review-moleskine-folio-notebook-a3.html (next purchase!)

http://www.gouletpens.com/

(Tools of the Trade, the first.)

Let’s see, where were we…ah yes, subscribing to hard copy journals, and buying actual books as holiday gifts. As you may know, all of this Living Life Not Through Screens stuff is something of an ongoing project of mine. When I asked myself awhile back, “Self, how did you spend your time before the Internet?” I came up with a list and have been endeavoring to replace a healthy chunk of screen-time with some of those artifacts of habit from my old life.

I re-subscribed to a physical newspaper. To my surprise, this might be my favorite new old habit. The newspaper is portable and lightweight. It does not require a good phone signal. It has a pleasant smell. It leaves evidence of its existence on your fingertips. It can be spread on the bed on Sunday morning and not burn your thigh. If I read an article I want to share or save, I can always find it online and use the actual paper to line Peanut’s cage.

I started listening to whole CDs at a time again, not as background music but as a discrete activity that involves full engagement. There are different ways to do this: lying on the floor with your head positioned between speakers L and R is good, especially for Led Zep. If it is Richard Thompson, turn out the lights. Or shoot them out. You can also just put your feet up and read liner notes, study lyrics. Oh, wait! You can only do that if you buy the CD rather than a download! Yes. Exactly. Hold it in your hands and feel assured that you own it, and it can’t be taken away by angry Internet gods or a twelve-year-old hacker in Des Moines who creates a hard-drive-eating virus.

I write letters, delighting in my paper and fancy pens. Not a lot of letters, but a few, here and there, to people who like to write back. Imagine getting something in the mail that is not a bill or advertisement. Feeeels goooood.

What else did I used to do with my time, before 1995? I spent at least some of it feeling bored and lonely, two highly underrated states of being. More on that later.

As part of its Tween Issue, Time Out New York has a great feature by Rebecca Stead (author of the wonderful When You Reach Me), which you can read here. (Thanks to Mitali Perkins for the link.) I’m about the same age as Rebecca, and love her story about working at the Subway for 40 minutes a day, during her lunch break, when she was 11. (A memory she uses in her book.) That’s totally a scene that could have come from my life.

I’ve often thought about all the stuff my sister and I did around San Francisco at seven, eight, nine, ten years old, and I look at the kids that age I know now and am sure their parents would never give them the same freedom. I’m talking about, say, 1975-1980. Specifically I remember:

…riding all around town with my sister, or alone, on the MUNI system. Our family didn’t have a car. Once every couple of weeks my mom’s boss would let her borrow his car to take care of errands, but otherwise it was all bus, all the time. Involving transfers and waiting on street corners, cold and hungry, with no cell phone or iPod. Oh the humanity!

…walking to school by myself. My grade school was about four blocks away, then in fourth grade I moved to one nine blocks away.

…playing out on the streets with other kids until dark.

…playing out on the streets by myself until dark.

…walking to Golden Gate Park with neighborhood friends to hang out on the playground. My friend Rachel and I buried coins in the woods surrounding the Rose Garden and went to dig them up, later.

…going to Mountain Lake Park with my best friend, Christine, and playing forest primeval, and hanging out in caves in the foothills around her dad’s place, pretending to be super-sleuths. Totally isolated.

…in sixth grade, my school was more like 20 blocks from my house. We’d walk home at a very leisurely pace, up Geary or Clement, stopping for pork buns or piroshki or a Boudin roll, and to look at Hello Kitty stuff, and maybe get home an hour and a half after school was out.

…laundry duty! My sister and I would load up the cart (the kind old Eastern European ladies push/pull home from the grocery store) with dirty clothes, walk the five blocks (uphill!) to the laundromat, and attend to the laundry for a few hours. One thing that made this fun was the wearing of rollerskates, inside the laundromat—until the day my sister fell and busted her chin open, and a KINDLY STRANGER drove us home (I think).

…taking the bus to and from ballet theater performances, two little girls in stage makeup…eyeshadow and lipstick.

…walking up to the community garden by myself and staying there until dark, living out whatever little fantasy game I was playing: the play structure is a ship, or the sand is hot lava, or the basketball court is the Land of the Lost fog pit.

Sometimes my sister (four years older) was with me, but often enough I was alone or with friends my age. We weren’t stupid. If we sensed a car slowing near us we’d ignore it and walk faster and start looking for an adult. Once or twice some random man on the street exposed himself. But, you know, I’m not scarred or anything. It wasn’t like the world was safe and children weren’t being molested and cars weren’t running over people. I was semi-sort of beat up a couple of times on the bus. And I do understand that a city is different from the burbs—with more people on foot and using public transport, you get the panopticon effect (thank you, E. Lockhart, for teaching me a new word!).

In Stead’s article, she quotes Susan Linn: “…these ['tween'] years are a time of great intellectual and creative flowering.” I so buy that. I read more books between the ages of 8 and 12 than I’ve read in the last 20 years, I bet. My imagination was at its very ripest and I distinctly remember that the times I most richly explored it were when I was free from adult supervision or peer judgment. The era, and my mom, gave me the freedom and independence to explore it, and without that I doubt I’d be a writer.

All of this is one of the many reasons I so enjoyed When You Reach Me. Reading it made me feel like I did on those days living my independent little life in the city.

If I had kids I would totally read this book by Lenore Skenazy:

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But I don’t, so you should.