Just a little fluff and reminiscence...
Music
For those who remember the 1980s fad for Irish traditional music of all genres, as I do, here's a documentary about one of the Irish bands that started it all in the 1970s.
Miranda Lambert has a song about the emotional damage that a nomadic life does to children.
The charity she's sponsoring, in the sidebar? ??? Good intentions tend eventually to be exploited by people with bad intentions. We need more places where at least small, harmless animals can roam around as they like, not more places where they can be hustled into cages. We also need more space for no-kill shelters. This web site takes no position.
Nomadism, Continued
I don't remember ever feeling that my parents' nomad phase did me as much damage, as a young adult, as just being socialized to groups of overcrowded hostile children did. But I remember feeling that more was lost than was gained by every move. I remember feeling that it was no use to learn names or directions since they'd be relevant to my life for only a few months. I remember feeling that nature had given me a home, and the places we rented were not it. And I remember the satisfying feeling of closure I have about two places we rented that were reasonably close to my home--the one I could still walk out and visit if I wanted to, the one that I remember so well that burned down--and the lingering bewilderment of not remembering which of the other houses I half-remember was which. Children do not see places in the same way adults do. A three-year-old remembers that at some time in per life person lived in a place where the bathroom had colorful tiles on the wall. An adult wonders "So, which place was that, exactly, and how long were we there, and was that the same house that had the fireplace that I grew too big to stand up inside while we were living there?"
I remember the address of one rented house. I don't have any desire to go back there--it was a neighborhood where everyone was only renting, so no old friends would be likely to be there, now, even if we'd had close friends there, which I don't think any of us really had. People got along but didn't plan to know each other long and didn't bond. Anyway I was able to look up the address online. The house was up for sale or rent again so I could take a virtual walk through the rooms. They looked just the way they had before we moved our things in; it was nice to see that I'd remembered the house where I spent most of a year very much the way I see it as an adult. I'll probably never have that experience with a few dozen other places where I spent a night or a week or a month or a year.
Have you readers gone back to places where you were children? How accurately had you remembered those places? Did long-lost memories rush back and make you smile?
(The bathroom door, in that house I virtually revisited online, used to lack about half an inch of meeting the floor. My natural sister did her "toddling" phase that year, and used to toddle up to that door, when someone was in the bathroom, and stick her fingers in under the door, trying to peer in. It became one of our family jokes. We sang a little parody of a once popular song, "Put your fingers to the door, what d' you get? Bony fingers!" I couldn't see, on the virtual walk-through, whether that door had been replaced with one that fitted better.)
Status Update: Teeth
I know people are wondering, because my mother never drank soda pop and I drink soda pop daily, and because Mother had beautiful, straight, even teeth and I had ugly, crooked ones...I lost my front teeth on exactly the same schedule Mother did. (Not counting the vampire fangs, which were removed to give the others a chance to last when I was thirteen.) The incisors didn't crumble painfully away, as Mother's back teeth were still in the process of doing, thanks to lots of expensive refillings, in her eighties and mine are starting to do now; they just loosened and popped out, painlessly, like the incisors of six-year-olds. One of mine was chipped, one perfect except that it was no longer attached. They fell out in 2021 but a lot of old acquaintances haven't seen me since then.
The difference is that Mother was staying with a patient out of town and wasn't seen in Gate City until she'd had a "partial plate" fitted, and I don't have the money or--considering the inconvenience it was to Mother--the inclination to bother with a "partial plate." Dad wasn't altogether happy with the choice he made unnecessarily early, but on the whole I think it was the more frugal and successful...live with the demise of ugly teeth until only a couple of them need to be pulled out of the way of your pretty new store-bought teeth. I expect to have pretty teeth, for the first time, the way Oogesti had, at some point in my late sixties.
I do not feel that having a second chance to sing "All I want for Chrithmith ith my two front teeth" looks much worse than my original front teeth always did. Mother looked beautiful with her "partial plate" because she was born a Beauty. I look like the child whose unfortunate paternal genes just prevented her being a Beauty because I was born, well, that. But, looks apart, my teeth are behaving just exactly like Mother's. Youall didn't notice that, because Mother, being a nicer person than Kamala Harris, did not grin like a possum and expose the bad back teeth to the world. Now you know.
But let me add one more generally unknown bit of truth to restore yourall's impression of Mother. Her teeth started to need all that maintenance when I was earning good money. She told me all about the pain of living with brittle old teeth and having them artificially repaired, but she never once took money from me to cover the cost of all the dental work. Not from Dad, either, and not from her emergency back-up mother-figure, my Aunt Dotty. She paid for every bit of it all by herself. She was not always as perfect as you might have imagined, but she was, by and large, as valiant.
So, if evenness/crookedness and soda pop consumption don't explain how natural teeth can be held up strong and solid for sixty-five years, what does? DNA probably has some influence. Also, paying attention to the balance of minerals in the diet. Mother would add, watching fat consumption. People who actually digest saturated fat use a lot of calcium to digest fatty food. Saturated fat tends to pass rapidly through skinny celiacs. And, of course, exercise...Walking tells our bodies to maintain solid bones, at least if we ingest enough calcium to make that possible. People who drive everywhere, don't keep gardens, don't do a lot of heavy house and yard chores, generally live out the lifestyle the TV sells us as "ease and convenience," start to have reasons to be afraid of falling down in their fifties. People who walk and carry weight do not. Chewing carrots and whole almonds is a workout for teeth and jawbones that helps maintain them in good condition right up to the point when they're genetically programmed to go into bad condition.
Sigh. I do miss carrots and almonds. But I was cheated out of them by glyphosate for years when I still had the ability to chew them.
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