Category Archives: family

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Lullaby of Birdland

Today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt is flute.

I have played flute since fourth grade. This pastel was done by my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, in 1980. We lived in Alexandria, Virginia. I am playing flute and Johnny Johnson is on trumpet. My father played trumpet too. Johnny was trying to teach me to improvise. I had not listened to much jazz and was not very good at it. I was well trained in classical flute and could read music. Johnny said, “No, just LISTEN.” I did learn it and can still play it.

One night the three of us were playing. We had a knock on the door. It was an Alexandria policeman. “We have had a complaint about the loud party.”

We looked at him blankly. My father says, “Well, you are looking at it.”

“Three of you?” says the policeman.

“Two trumpets and a flute.” says my father. “We can make a lot of noise.”

“Hmm.” says the policeman. “Well, um, could you keep it down a little?”

“Yes,” says my father, “It is after 10, so we will play more quietly.”

The policeman left and we did.

My mother’s pastel is titled “Lullaby of Birdland”.

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adult doll house

When mom leaves in the car with the kids, dad gets trashed on beer and destroys the living room. Yes, there is an enormous black panther in the background. Will it eat dad? Maybe it will wait until some of the alcohol wears off. He won’t taste as good drunk.

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: Tiger.

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saved

when your parents die
you will find what they saved

you will find things in the house
that you do not know why they saved

you may find linens carefully folded
and papers from the past

the linens embroidered by ancestors
but you cannot ask which ones

photographs of people you don’t know
and which are not labeled

a reference to a ring that your great aunt had
but she has been dead since 1986

when you go to your parents’ house
ask them what they have saved

ask them why it has been saved

ask them now
because when they are gone
it is too late

to ask about what they saved

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There are also families estranged, where they have cut ties or emigrated or escaped abuse, and have reason not to save anything or speak about it.

We want freedom but we want love too. For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: freedom.

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Skookum Smithsonian

I forget how BIG the Washington, DC Mall is. On my last day visiting out east over the winter holidays, my friend B and I went to the Mall. Above is the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (DINOSAURS!), then the National Gallery of Art and then the Capitol Building. We went to the National Gallery first because they opened late at 11 am, while the Smithsonian was opening some buildings at 1 pm.

Looking the other way, the Washington Monument, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the National Museum of American History.

The museum buildings are each two city blocks long and a city block wide. They are enormous. We only went through part of the National Gallery and then ducked in to Natural History. There are now 23 buildings, including the National Zoo, in the Smithsonian. It is amazing and wonderful. And there are other museums as well, including the National Gallery of Art.

The Smithsonian: https://www.si.edu/museums.

The National Gallery of Art: https://www.nga.gov/.

cast of a triceratops skull

They are SKOOKUM museums.

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out of the ooze

Over the winter holidays, my daughter and I flew to see family in Maryland. We stayed in a very small circle of people. It snowed and the Smithsonian was closed for a couple days, but I went in on my last day before returning home.

I like the confusing reflections in this picture. Maybe the skeletons are confused about being on display too.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: ooze.

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acoustic bicycle

Over KwanChunChrisSoliday, we discuss bicycles. We now have a plethora of electric bicycles, so we need a phrase that describes the “old” style bicycle. We came up with acoustic or analog. I like acoustic bicycle, because it sings.

My friend B-from-Arlington (BfA): “But they don’t make noise.” He didn’t approve of either idea.

“Well, we had spoke bells, and playing cards. My bikes make noise.” Sometimes it’s me making it.

We are riding on a rails to trails path in Northern Virginia. Seven of us and me on oxygen. It’s only my second bike ride since March 2021, when my lungs fell apart. We are all on acoustic bicycles.

I feel pretty strong for most of it, 14.5 miles. It seems flat, though it is a very gentle downgrade, until the last 0.5 mile, which is gently up hill. Oh, my lungs don’t like that bit at all and by now my muscles are saying Why are we doing this? I am relieved when we get to the coffee shop destination. Three of us will stay there, while the other four will ride back and get the cars. I hang out with K-f-A, BfA’s spouse, and their son. Their son examines my phone, asks why it has four camera eyes. I have no idea, so he proceeds to figure it out. We play with the slow motion camera for a while.

We know what a penny farthing is, and safety bicycles and tricycles. The early safety bicycles did not have brakes and had wooden rims and wooden spokes. My brother outlaw has one, from the 1880 or 90s. Another friend collects penny farthings and has one that is entirely of cast iron. It would be a little bumpy and the seat is pretty hard. It is also massively heavy. So now we add acoustic bicycles to the electric ones.

Go, google, spread the word.

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Dang, others have come up with it too. Traditional bicycle sounds too fogey.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ebikes/comments/hp2l30/can_we_please_stop_calling_traditional_bicycles/
https://www.bikebiz.com/what-shall-we-call-the-non-electrified-bicycle/

My battery just exploded
byu/speakeasy-aus inebikes
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Covid-19: aftermath

I am thinking about the roaring twenties a lot. I think people went a little nuts, not because of the war, but because they had difficulty being emotionally honest about the influenza pandemic. I think we humans will do it again to forget the deaths, to go into denial, to refuse to grieve.

Yes, that is my prediction.

Be very quiet, I am hunting wabbits.

Be careful in our future roaring twenties. Money will flow like honey and people will go nuts. Hold fast, hunker down, don’t go out without your macintosh, wear clean underwear. Remember what your mother told you, remember what your father tells you. Because that was followed by the Depression and that is one risk.

I don’t know if it will start this spring or next spring. Ok, I AM hoping that my son and future daughter-in-law can get married in early May, since they’ve put it off for two years. But. The 1918-19 influenza was really three years, not two. It tailed off. Half the people in the world got it. In Samoa, half the adults died, or was it 70%? They had little exposure to infection but a ship brought it. They KNEW they were high risk, but a sailor didn’t know he was sick yet.

Why a roaring twenties? Because we want to forget this pandemic, as the last one was forgotten. Our history books say that the Roaring Twenties was about the end of World War I. We teach lots about that. We barely mention the influenza world pandemic. I am reading a book about the 1918-19 influenza pandemic published in 2018. The author says that it is only now, 100 years later, that we are starting to really tell the stories of that pandemic. She gathers stories from all over the world, including stores of different infection control strategies in two cities. One guessed right and one guessed wrong, and in the wrong one, way more people died.

I read about that 1918-19 pandemic after influenza nearly killed me in 2003. I was 42, healthy, a physician, a mother, an athlete. I had NO risk factors except stress. Now it looks like it was a PANS reaction, but at the time, neither my doctor nor I could figure out why I was short of breath and tachycardic walking across a room for two months. Fatigue, chest pain, tachycardia, shortness of breath. Hmmm, what does that sound like? My partners thought I was faking and I was so sick that I could barely communicate. The stresses were my mother dying of ovarian cancer in May 2000 and my marriage being pretty on the rocks and me working way too hard. My psychiatrist said I should take time off. I said, I can’t. He said, you’d better. Then I got flu. “See?” he said. The body decides, not the conscious brain. He was correct, damn him.

The book I read in 2004 looked dry and medical from the outside. It had pages and pages of footnotes. It had photographs of Los Angeles. They knew the influenza was coming towards them like a wave and they tried to get ready. Bodies under sheets were stacked five deep in the hallways of the hospitals. It hit that fast. People, usually age 20-50, turned blue and fell over dead. WHY? It was the immune response. The 20-50 year olds had a better immune response than the 50 and older and their lungs would swell until there was no airspace left. Even then, that pandemic death rate was only 1-2 % in the US. But it was so fast and spread so quickly that everything was disrupted because it was the workers that were deathly ill and at home and there was no one to work.

People wore masks in public, except for the mask refusers, but not in their homes. So entire families would get ill. I don’t think they had figured out viral loads yet. If you are the last one standing, and you are trying to take care of a spouse and six children, you were high risk from viral load and exhaustion.

The Roaring Twenties WAS a way to grieve, it’s just a dysfunctional one. The stages of grief: denial, bargaining, anger, grief and acceptance. My sister said that acting out and revenge ought to be added as stages of grief. She died of breast cancer after fighting it for 8 years. Roaring is denial and bargaining and acting out and revenge, all at once. Everyone grieves differently, remember that. There is not an order to the stages of grief and you don’t do them once. You do them over and over and over.

I am a Cheerful Charlie, right?

War is one way to forget/deny/act out. Let’s not do that. Let’s not have a civil war of forgetfulness and denial.

Let us remember clearly and lean on each other.

Playing for change: lean on me

I think this fits the Ragtag Daily Prompt: inflammable.

My sister’s blog: https://e2grundoon.blogspot.com/2009/01/chemo-not-in-vain.html . She died on March 29, 2012. The start of the blog is here: https://e2grundoon.blogspot.com/2002/02/ .

Blessings.

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I got Cheerful Charlie from Pogo comics: read the Albert Alligator section. https://comicstrips.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Pogo_characters
More recently, Downton Abby used Cheerful Charlie. https://downtonabbey.fandom.com/wiki/The_Cheerful_Charlies