dianaschnuth

Thunderstorms

I was still small enough to be held, but no longer a baby. Or maybe that’s just how I’m remembering it. At any rate, I felt cocooned and safe with my mother beside me.

“It’s so pretty,” she’d murmur as we stood together at the screen door. “Look how pretty the clouds are.”

It was always dark — but the dark of an encroaching storm, rarely of night. The mist would barely brush our faces, along with a sweet, cool breeze.

When I got a little older — say, school-age, or close to it — we’d watch for the flashes of lightning, then count: one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand (which I later learned is backward from how most people do it), then either nod knowingly or jump, startled, when the thunder finally rumbled or cracked its reply.

“That must have been close to the high school,” said Mom one time. Usually it was much farther away: nine miles, about.

I grew to love thunderstorms. The smell of them, the sound, the beautiful contrast between the clouds and the land. The beauty, the drama. When we moved to Florida, I discovered that it would thunderstorm every afternoon during part of the year. I would sit in my bedroom, listening to music or reading, smelling the rain and watching it sheet down the open casement window.

Later on, I learned that my mother had purposefully instilled in me that love of storms, because she had been made so afraid of them by one particular incident in her childhood. Even so, I’m glad she did.

Thunderstorms, to me, are moments when I can stand at the open door, or sit on the front porch, or gaze out an open window, and let my senses take over. I breathe in that clean-smelling air, feel the mist on my face, and I’m four years old again, and there’s nothing but me and the rain.

TV Nostalgia: Barnaby

When I was very, very young — around 4 or 5 years old — I remember watching Barnaby. It was a children’s show, locally produced, as many television stations did up until about the late ’80s. (As I understand it, the local children’s show in Toledo was Patches and Pockets.)

Barnaby talked to an invisible parrot, Long John, and had a few puppet and human character friends. During his show, he also cut to Popeye and Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon segments, and I think those are really why I watched Barnaby. His bits just weren’t engaging to me as a child, not even in that mild-mannered children’s show host kind of way.

At the end of every show, as he was leaving his “house,” his parting line was, “If anybody calls, tell ‘em Barnaby says hello. And tell ‘em that I think you’re the nicest person in the world! Just you.”

The above clip is the end of Barnaby’s final show, in 1988. I never saw this clip before tonight, and now I find it so sad. Not just that a children’s show did its final wrap — that inevitably happens, just like children inevitably grow up — but that he was so obviously sad to be ending it.

It turns out that Barnaby (a.k.a. Linn Sheldon) was a talented early-television-era actor-comedian in the Cleveland area. He also wrote an autobiography, Barnaby and Me, which I’m unlikely to find locally (but I might be able to find in Cleveland) is available used on Barnes & Noble if I really want it.

Linn Sheldon died in 2006, eight years after retiring from television, in his Lakewood home.

You don’t see locally-produced content like this anymore. People just five years younger than me probably don’t remember watching shows like this (or, a little later in life, waking up in front of the TV to the Star-Spangled Banner or a test pattern). YouTube is great for trying to convey these memories, but today’s 20-somethings can’t really relate to this any more than I can really relate to sitting around the radio set and listening to audio dramas or radio plays.

Christmas Blog Recap

Since I’ve been writing this blog for over seven years, the subject of Christmas has already come up a few times. So, to keep from repeating myself as much as any other reason, here are some of the highlights:

From Christmas Aftermath, 26 December 2003:

Aaron’s grandparents’ house is a completely different experience than mine. At any given holiday, depending on who shows up, there’s between 9 and 17 people around the table. I’m really unused to that kind of massive family gathering, but I’m growing to enjoy it more each year. It’s like Aaron said: over at Mom and Gary’s, it’s kind of fun and relaxing, with lots of quality time with just them, but after a while you get bored — especially if they’re watching TV or talking on the phone. At Poppa and Grammie’s, though, it’s exciting and fun to be with so many people at once, but after a while you get frazzled and just need to leave.

Back in 2004, this was what our street looked like on the day before Christmas Eve (thankfully, I had Christmas Eve off that year):

I’ve also recounted the story of my Santa Claus deconversion:

I remember the day well. I was six years old, and it was December 1982. I was sitting at the kidney-bean-shaped table in the front of my first-grade classroom, with the five or six other kids in my Advanced Reading group.

Mrs. Henighan asked us, “How many of you believe in Santa Claus?”

I raised my hand, of course. What was there not to believe? I didn’t realize there was any believing or not-believing involved. Santa had magic keys to my apartment, and brought me toys on Christmas Eve. End of story.

Only one or two other kids raised their hands.

Oh, hey, here’s my first Christmas!

A few years back, I compiled all of my Christmas childhood memories (or the most vivid ones, anyway) into one massive blog post:

We had fantastic 70′s ornaments, too. They were all either orbs or pointed oblongs or bells, in pastel green and yellow (and blue?), with this great crystal-like coating, almost like large crystals of salt were glued to the outside of the ornaments. They made a neat brushing tinkling sound against the tree when they moved. There were also ornaments I’d made in school, like my handprint in plaster and things like that. We also had strings of lights, of course, both large blue indoor/outdoor lights and small indoor blinky lights, which would all be strung on the tree together. The blinking strands had to “warm up” first, but they’d start blinking a minute or so after you plugged them in, and would make that distinctive *buzz-tink* as they blinked on and off.

If you’d like some video fun, you can check out my high school choir (with a solo from yours truly) from the 1992 Holiday Concert, or my step-brother Philip and I trimming the tree in 1999 (ten years and fifty-plus pounds ago for me). Or, if you’d prefer some musical fun instead, download Aaron’s 2001 compilation, Christmas Music That Doesn’t Suck!

Hopefully this gets you (and me) into the Spirit of the Season.