dianaschnuth

Would you believe that I have old e-mails in my inbox dating back this far?

I’ve started on the quest for zero, and opted to go to the oldest first. Seems counter-intuitive, I know, but I know how I roll — most of it is probably to-do lists and music I wanted to remember to download, so all I’ll need to do is consolidate everything into to-do lists, then do them.

This, though, was interesting: I had obviously intended to post this to my blog, and never got around to it. I didn’t know it at the time, but this “process improvement” at my job at Sky was ultimately a precursor to me and James developing a full-blown Access database. That database was a pivotal part in both James and myself getting our current jobs; of this, I have no doubt.

Let’s take a trip back, shall we, to the Loan Corrections Department of Sky Bank…

Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 4:54 PM

I got to do some slightly more fun stuff than usual at work yesterday. We’re working on process improvements for our department (i.e. figure out what’s a pain in the butt and then figure out ways to fix it), and I volunteered my assistance for some Excel function fun. Granted, I never thought it was all that fun in CS 100, but anything that makes my brain work is keen by me these days. I had to figure out how to show time elapsed from when we log in a request to when it’s completed, and it was harder than I’d thought. I had to convert date formats to text and all that jazz, then subtract and reformat the result. Took me a couple hours to troubleshoot, but it was worth it, getting to use my brain. Whee!

Actually using my brain at work. What a concept!

If someone would have told my sixth-grade self that everyone’s awkward at age eleven, I would have thought they were just trying to make me feel better.

I was the new girl. Not only that, but I was chunky — almost 5’7″ and 160 lbs, just barely starting my growth spurt — with no sense of style and what seemed like a bumper crop of acne. I also got placed in the advanced class with the smart kids, as I had in the two previous elementaries I’d attended. Add to that my love for music class and choir (which were more of a stigma than being in the supplemental advanced art class in the afternoons), and I was one seriously dorky kid.

I felt like I only had one friend in the whole school (although I later learned that I was mistaken, at least from others’ point of view), and even she didn’t consider herself my “best friend.” I felt taunted and persecuted and awkward in so many ways. I heard people talking about me when they didn’t think I was listening, calling me fat and lazy and stuck-up.

That’s why the unannounced Scoliosis Screening ultimately gave me such sweet and silent satisfaction.

For those who don’t know or don’t remember from middle school or junior high, scoliosis is a condition wherein the spine develops an unusual curve, described to us sixth-graders as an S-curve (although it can be more complex). As it often develops or becomes more pronounced during adolescence, we were the perfect age group to screen.

Screening involves standing in front of a qualified medical professional and bending forward in a deep bow, so the nurse or therapist can clearly see the spine.

The shirtless spine.

They took the girls to the girls’ restroom — I forget what they did with the boys — and had us each stand in an open bathroom stall, so only the nurse could see, for privacy’s sake. Then we removed our shirts, leaving our undergarments on, and bent over as instructed.

However.

The skinny girls? They had no boobs at age eleven. Unlike me, who did. For them, wearing a bra was more of a grown-up novelty than a necessity. For me, it was starting to become necessary.

One of my very few sweet moments of karmic bliss that year was listening to the snobby popular girls twitter amongst themselves in the girls’ bathroom about how they couldn’t believe this was happening to them, how they didn’t wear a bra today! And they had to take their shirts off for the creepy nurse ladies!

It didn’t make me any more popular or more accepted, but I sure was glad I’d worn a bra that day.

Don’t worry ’bout your laundry
Forget about your job
Just crank up the volume
And yank off the knob

—Weird Al Yankovic, “UHF”

I know it’s not quite what Al had in mind, but whenever I think of this lyric, I’m reminded of the television my Mom and I had when I was in early high school.

It was a small color TV, maybe a 12-incher, circa 1982 (or before). This was the last TV we owned that had actual knobs to change channels, and a smaller knob below the channel selectors, labeled “Pull On / Vol.” This was how you turned on your television in the days before remotes, kiddies: grab the knob and pull. (Unless it was a twist-knob instead of a pull-knob, in which case you clicked it to the right to turn the TV on and then adjusted the volume, like the black-and-white TV we had when I was little. But I digress.)

The only problem was, by the time I was in high school — actually, long before that, now that I think about it — the power knob had made a break for it. All that was left was a small, black post with one flat side, barely protruding from a round hole in its wood-grain housing. To turn the TV off, we simply unplugged it. To adjust the volume, we carefully pinched the post with our fingertips and turned it, usually levering against the flat side of the post to make for easier and more precise adjustments. If we accidentally pushed the post back into its housing, into the “off” position, that meant getting the tweezers out of the bathroom and spending a few minutes way too long coaxing the post back out of its home.

Eventually, one of Mom’s boyfriends visited our apartment and was aghast at the outdated television we were watching. He bought us (among other things) a brand new twenty-some-inch newfangled TV with a remote, and we finally entered into the 1990s with the rest of society.

I think it’s funny, though, how I never really thought about how ghetto our old TV was. I mean, I didn’t really care that it wasn’t new or fancy; I was just glad that it served its purpose, like my bed (a frame salvaged from a discarded sleeper sofa) or my desk (an old sewing machine table).

We just made do with what we had.

I was sitting at my desk today, eating some grapes and reading a training manual, when my mind started to wander. I remembered being about ten years old and visiting my Granny in Florida, and eating the grapes that grew wild on her property.

My extended-nuclear family (myself, Mom, Memaw, and Aunt Sammie) had moved to Florida, ostensibly to be closer to Granny and Uncle Charlie (Memaw’s mother and brother). So, for a three-year stretch in the mid-80s, while we lived nearby, we would visit Granny and Charlie on a regular basis — maybe once a week? We’d make the half-hour drive south from Riverview to Ruskin, passing retirement communities and various small towns and orange-packing plants and long expanses of nothing but sandspurs, until we finally took a few turns down overgrown back roads in Ruskin and made the left-hand turn onto Granny’s weed-choked driveway. I still remember the sound of the tall, dry weeds smacking the underside of Sammie’s car as we rumbled up the long drive, following the tire tracks through the overgrown palmettos and vines and other various semi-tropical underbrush.

Charlie’s old blue truck would be parked by the shack, and we’d pull into the front yard (which looked like every other front yard I’d seen in Florida: mainly sand, with a few sparse patches of crabgrass and prickers and sandspurs). Granny and Charlie were always glad to see us, and they’d come out of their shack to greet us with big ol’ grins on their weathered faces.

Granny and Charlie’s shack wasn’t really appropriate for company — the floorboards were oddly spaced and rotten, and there was no plumbing — so we mainly stood outside and talked; looking back, I don’t even really remember what we talked about. I was young enough that I still enjoyed playing with Granny’s thick, leathery skin; and I spent lots of time contemplating her long wispy white hair, always pulled up into about half a dozen tiny buns, each flattened to her head with a single bobby pin. She and Charlie both dipped snuff, so our visits would be punctuated with occasional spitting, either in a coffee can sitting on the ground or just right in the dirt and weeds, and they both smelled of tobacco.

I always had to be careful not to wander off; not that I was really tempted to go exploring, since everybody always made sure to remind me about all the snakes that lived in the weeds. Sometimes, though, Granny would take us back to see her garden. I honestly don’t remember much of what she grew, but I’m sure it was typical garden fare, with some southern stuff like okra thrown in for local color.

One day in particular, she took us a different way, opposite from the way to the garden. Just around the corner from where we’d parked our car in the yard, there grew a wild grapevine with ripe fruit. Granny picked a few grapes for us, and I remember how delicious they were, just for being wild. The skins were a silvery-lavender color and were thick; and there were seeds, of course. But I still remember those few grapes as being the best grapes I’d ever had, before or since.

We moved back to Ohio in the summer of 1987, and the last time I saw my Granny was during a summer vacation we took when I was in junior high, a couple years later. She died just after Thanksgiving, the fall of my Freshman year of high school, at age 79.

Funny, isn’t it, though, how we can look back on something that seemed so normal and commonplace at the time, and find such joyous details in the memories?