I started out 2012 as the mother of a tiny infant, and ended it as the mother of a rambunctious toddler. That in itself has made 2012 one of the most dynamic years in recent memory. Add to that some unexpected changes in my fitness plan, dealing with the death of a loved one, and getting more focused on my job, and you can probably guess that this has been one hell of a year.
Category Archives: memories
light the corners of my mind
2011 Year In Review
One of my photography professors once said that the only truly profound things in life are birth and death. If that’s the case, 2011 was the most profound year I’ve had in quite some time.
Normally, I summarize things like what music I listened to (Daft Punk still steady from last year at #5, Stenobot barely missing my top ten), what restaurants I ate at, how my weight fluctuated, that sort of thing. This year will be just a little different. I still have some fun and frivolous stats to report, but some of them fell by the wayside over the course of the year, due to me focusing on more important things.
I started back on the Pill in the Fall of 2010, due to some female issues I was having. As promised, it regulated my cycle and lessened my cramps and fatigue. It also made my periods lighter, and by January, they seemed to have nearly disappeared altogether. In fact, it was so light for January and February that I started to worry that something was amiss, so I called my OBGYN.
Long story short, I was pregnant.
2010 Year In Review
Last year, I thought I’d join the infographics revolution and show my Year In Review in all graphs and numbers and stats. As it turns out, that doesn’t even work for me very well — it’s difficult for me to really pin down what happened and when, with everything aggregated to such a degree.
This year, I’ll be mixing text and graphics to spice things up. Hopefully it’s a little more engaging than either alone.
It’s also going to be a bit lengthy. You have been warned…
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.