Nostalgique A Deux

This was an ad that appeared in the paper this past weekend. Click to embiggen.

I know. Hard to believe in this day and age. I also love the absence of phone number, address and website.

As if everyone should know where they are.

I might just head myself off and do some fishing with their rod and their bait.

After my breakfast, of course.

who knew there was so much fun to be had for a total of $10?

Nostalgique

My front garden, at sunset

Well, it isn't really a word used by us English speakers, is it? But I do like the sound of it.

I think back to the days in Ontario when I knew a few female alcoholics and when they introduced themselves thusly: "Je suis un alcoolique", I would think to myself: that sounds so much more fun, so much more glamorous, so much more carefree than "alcoholic".

A couple of web friends have kicked the bucket. One out of Limerick who died in January (of a brief but unremitting cancer) but my FB feed has a mind/agenda of its own. Posts normally at the top of my lists get subsumed by the bots at whim to the nether regions. This is what happened to my friend John's obit news. He was one of Ireland's foremost atheists, a never ending battler for women's rights, a wit, an artist of some renown and a scholar and a gentleman. We'd had some pleasant exchanges over the years. Some Irishmen just make me proud. He was one of them.

Mike I'd followed for many years due to his online magazine, his documentaries and a radio show. He ruminated on many topics - ranging from oil as a finite resource and the underlying conspiracies of corporate interests in political affairs. I had been an admirer of his for about 13 years and befriended him in his transition to FB. Since he has died - by his own hand - some troubling facts have come to light in regard to his declared sobriety (he wasn't), a sexual harassment charge, and his extreme paranoia resulting in a self-inflicted gunshot wound when he'd wrapped up his last radio show. So my opinion of Mike, and now his political slants, have taken a jolt.

Sometimes I do wax nostalgic for simpler times. But were they ever simple? I look at the pictures of Old Cork, a new group on FB that has brought such richness of historical experience to my home city via these thousands of old photos and movies. Many now vanished train stations and trams, unsullied strands, majestic ballrooms, shoppers in hooped skirts, all looking innocent and almost childlike. But I also remember the slums of Cork, now thankfully no more, where lonely old women ate meagre food on tin plates with the damp running down the walls. As "Children of Mary" in secondary school, we would have to visit these old people in their tenement rooms and bring food and clothing to them.

At times like these, I need to step out of Nostalgique, a fine place to visit for sure, and pour myself a stiff cup of reality laced with a hit of cynicism.

Back to normal, in other words.

Writerly Thoughts

I saw this on the web today and related so very well.

I was musing on this and thinking back to yesterday and some good memories, you know how that is, some lovely memories that are spoiled and tainted by subsequent events with the same people. I do this kind of thinking in the car where no one can see me. For sometimes I cry and think how did something so lovely go so very lopsided, how did such happy times become so overshadowed?

Even writing about it later stirs up the same thoughts. And the writing is poorly formed, too emotional. How do others manage damaged memories? Do they allow the scarring to overpower them or compartmentalize it? That is, just remember the goodness in completeness or believe it to be a false front in light of later nastiness or poor behaviours?

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

The Rest of It

I wrote about him here never knowing that the saddest part of his story was yet to come.

Another friend emailed from my home city of Cork. It seems for the last few years of his life JG was homeless. One of those sad and embarrassing unfortunates who beg on corners and subsist on the leavings of others. He had two adult children who had washed their hands of him years before.

He got so ill on the streets that a hospice took him in and cared for him till he died.

It was through the kind services of the hospice that he was buried.

I remember his charm, his exquisite sense of style, his ebony black eyes and hair, his smile, his joie de vivre on the dance-floor, his silly pink Consul car with its one royal blue door and the warmth of his arms.

We just never know, do we.

Chills

This weird thing has happened more than enough times for me to feel a chill when it does happen.

Yesterday, Grandgirl and I were discussing being in love when she asked me about my great loves and we started chatting about it. You know, why was I attracted, what happened, where are they now kind of thing.

I mentioned there was another fiancé, back in the day, before I got engaged to her grandfather.

And we talked about him for a while. He was an extraordinarily good-looking young man and one of my stellar memories is of him dancing me to the middle of the London Rivoli Ballroom and going down on one knee and proposing to me. He had his dark side too, though. I've often said in hindsight if I had married him it would have lasted a year, maybe two. There was a wild unsettled streak in him. He had sailed around the world a few times with the merchant navy and knew of things he wouldn't share with me. A wild unsettled streak in me too, I hasten to add, which was not completely visible then and he had unfortunately pedestalized me as a madonna. Not a healthy thing.

Grandgirl and I moved on to other matters and then today, I get my daily email from my long time friend in Dublin in which she tells me that JG had died and was buried, well, yesterday. He'd spent the last six months in a hospice in Cork.

Goosebumps? Yeah, for each of us.

And a yearning nostalgia in me tonight. For what, I couldn't tell you.

Just an old box

I hesitated to throw out this box. These trays were all the rage in the seventies and eighties. Daughter was at a disposal of household contents event last year and was given this, unused, in its original box. I remember giving a few of them away as gifts in my time but lawdy knows what happened to my one, it could have worn out or got lost in one of the moves. I was delighted when she gifted me with this wee treasure.

It speaks to me of simpler times, fondues, stuffed tomatoes and green peppers, basic salads, corning ware. These hot trays would keep everything warm on the sideboard or counter. I was one who used corning ware for everything, stove top, oven, serving, baking, frying, broiling, roasting, coffee making, - even my tea-pot had the traditional cornflower emblem.

Back then, as young twenty-somethings, our crowd would entertain each other every Saturday night. It was cheap and fun and everyone brought something or other. We were all broke, living from paycheque to paycheque and our little ones ran around and guitars came out and we sang and told stories and passed the odd spliff and shared big jugs of cheap wine.

In my move to a zen existence, this box has to go, but I thought to capture it, its essence so to speak, before it winds up as a fire starter in my wood stove.

Nostalgia swirls like a fog sometimes around the most unexpected artifacts.

Laundry Observations

What is it with me and laundry anyway? And here too.

I have two very fancy machines here for taking care of the dirties. Frontloading beauties.

With portholes for observation if you are so inclined.

When they were new I was so inclined. I spent a good month or two singing the praises of a deceased beloved aunt for leaving me a small but rather tidy inheritance in her will a couple of years ago. So I beamed beatifically and gratefully at the machines in their efficiency. Prior to then I had gone all primitive with a pair of manual elbow-grease intensive little guys.

This windfall has eased my life considerably by providing the funds to buy such swish and environmentally green machines and the services of an electrician (several actually, long story) to wire them up. Along with some other necessary but formerly unaffordable life enhancing items.

I like to hang my clothes outdoors in the stiff sea breezes but wonder why in Maude's green earth we still haven't invented a proper clothes pin. My spring loaded ones break and drop off the line at an alarming rate, so I use the old fashioned wood kind which can be hard to wield and a challenge to buy in our disposable society.

Whatever happened to washing soda? It would do a powerful job on cleaning clothes but I can't find it anywhere.

Like wise bluing – anyone remember bluing?

I remember my grandmother's ceiling clothes-drying rack that could be lowered or lifted in front of her big open fire by means of a complicated pulley on the wall. She would fit a huge amount of clothes on the long wooden dowels and then raise it up so you wouldn't run into it.

Whatever happened to airing cupboards? We had one in our house when I was growing up and each shelf had a label thumb tacked to the shelves identifying what was in there (it was very deep). I would love taking out my warm clothes in the morning.

Waxing a little nostalgic for the way things were today. In spite of all the labour - not to mention the downside of the soot and steam from the fires.

On second thoughts, we've never had it better. I just remembered my mother boiling my father's handkerchiefs. Ew.