Nerd Roots

Argh, an extended absence and now a blank slate.  It's like writing my first post all over again.  I'm still trying to catch up after spending ten days around Thanksgiving at my parents' house in Arizona.  I went because my mom had knee replacement surgery (actually a "revision," I learned, since the surgeon was replacing an old artificial knee).  Mom needed a couple of extra days in the hospital, so I got to spend a lot of time with my dad, which got me thinking about my nerdy origins.
My dad never watched "Star Trek" or read Arthur C. Clark novels, but I trace my nerd-dom directly to him.  He had a cool Lego gear set that I envied (this was back when Legos were just colorful bricks).  It was his toy, not mine - he'd owned it before I was born and I'm his first child. We moved several times when I was growing up and each place we lived, we were the only family in our neighborhood with a compost pile.  Even at the retirement home where he and my mom live now, my dad saves banana peels and coffee grounds for the petunias.  I'm not sure whether the nerdiest thing my dad has done was teaching himself to knit so he wouldn't get bored on business trips (this was way pre-9/11) or spending a week studying soybeans at the University of Illinois (my mom will point out that this was when they were serving on our church's Hunger Action Committee, but he's been both an unapologetic meat-eater and a soybean enthusiast for as long as I've known him).  It is from him that I get my tendency to pick objects up with my toes, my preference for solitude over socializing, and my suspicion towards whatever the latest craze happens to be.

One of the things I admire most about my dad is his blatant disregard for what everyone else will think. Even as a teenager, I got a kick out of telling people that my dad had knit the sweater I was wearing, although I did slink down in the passenger seat of our Travel-All so I'd be out of sight when he stopped on a particularly tree-lined street to steal bags of leaves for his compost pile.  For the most part, though, it's hard to think of a time when I haven't appreciated his uniqueness and resourcefulness:  We had the coolest swing set in the neighborhood, made from an I-beam supported by 12-foot steel legs, because a store-bought piece of junk wasn't safe enough (or good enough) for his kids.  He made sourdough pancakes and bread from starter he'd had since 1964.  And when the antenna snapped off of my first radio because I threw it down in a fit of anger, he skipped the lecture and fixed it with a thick piece of copper he just happened to have lying around.


Either my appreciation of parental eccentricities is a family trait or my children aren't yet old enough to have outgrown it.  My fourteen-year-old recently told me she doesn't miss watching TV, and neither she nor my eleven-year-old have any qualms about taking weird leftovers to school for lunch; in fact my older daughter enjoys grossing out her friends.  When my parents visit, my eleven-year-old enjoys the four mile round-trip walk to the grocery store with my dad, and fondly remembers the time they walked home in the rain.  She maintains that they would have been just fine if I hadn't shown up with the car to rescue them.  My fourteen-year-old looks forward to the violin-viola duets she and my dad play because "it's nice to play with someone else who really cares about how they sound."  While they only barely tolerate my dad's puns, they both appreciate his kindness and positive outlook on life, which although not exclusively nerdy traits, may partly explain why my mom has put up with my dad's quirks so willingly for the past 48 years.

Ribbons and Saints

Warning:  This is not a particularly nerdy post.

Several weeks ago, I received three dusty boxes of ribbon and bows from my father-in-law, who was widowed for a second time last February.  Unlike my late mother-in-law, I am merely adequate when it comes to wrapping gifts - when I can't find an appropriate gift bag to re-use, I'll drag out our one roll of birthday paper (currently a unisex blue striped pattern) or choose from one of several jumbo rolls of Christmas paper we've had since our children were in preschool.  I don't mind the wrapping process and can usually get the corners nice and square, but rarely embellish beyond a hastily scrawled: "To _, From Mama and Daddy" or a bow recycled from a more conscientious wrapper - until recently, usually my mother-in-law, Vernilea.  

I tell myself I'm being "green" by not bothering with ribbon, but my laziness may also have something to do with it.  So when my father-in-law offered me three boxes of ribbon and bows, I wasn't about to refuse - how much greener can you get than rescuing stuff from a landfill, or at least using it once before sending it there?  And even someone as lazy as I am can retrieve a roll of ribbon and a matching bow from the basement.

Admittedly, when Don handed over the boxes, I felt disappointed and a bit overwhelmed.  There were several little plastic spools of ribbon like you buy at Target, but mostly there were cardboard reels 8 1/2 " in diameter, each originally holding 250 yards' worth - probably enough for me to host a neighborhood Maypole dance every year until my 11-year-old graduates from high school!  

All photos courtesy of the Nerd in Chief.  He can make anything look good!

Adding to my ribbon angst was the uncharacteristic dustiness of the boxes and their contents.  Vernilea and I weren't quite polar opposites when it comes to housekeeping, but she was at the far right end of the tidiness Bell curve, while I am at least one standard deviation (maybe two) left of center.  Receiving something dusty from my mother-in-law just felt wrong, so I did what I always do with items I can't immediately face - I piled two of the boxes at the far end of our dining table, set the third one under the kitchen table, and refused to make eye contact with them.

On Thursday I finally forced myself to sort through the ribbon - maybe because it seemed preferable to cleaning out the freezer.  I found a box of glittery pine cones and ornaments that cheered me right away, reminding me of Vernilea's elaborate bow arrangements on Christmas gifts.  I dusted the spools and reluctantly threw out stuff that was too faded or that I knew I'd never use, including gummed gift tags so forlorn they could only have come from a solicitation for a charitable organization.  At the bottom of one box, I found four gold gift tags that were heavy when I picked them up.  I realized they were thin metal Christmas tree ornaments like the ones my husband's parents had given him as a child - how cool that Vernilea's family had gotten the same kind!  Then I examined the first one and found my brother-in-law's name, Michael, and the date1978.  The next two were dated 1979, one for my husband and one for his brother.  The last one bore the name of my first mother-in-law, Margaret, mother to my husband and his brother Michael. 

We're lucky to live in a community where both All Saints Day and Dia de los Muerto are celebrated.  Tomorrow, when we go to a Dia de los Muertos celebration at our local art museum, we'll take this photo to put on the altar in honor of both my mothers-in-law, Vernilea and Margaret.  The two of them couldn't have been more different from each other, but a love of Christmas and gift-giving was one thing they shared.