A couple of contrasts at the YMCA, where I swim a couple of days a week: I was accosted in the lobby by a woman I vaguely recalled, but she recalled me enough to button-hole me and announce that I had sold her the first Round Barn book two years ago for her farmer father and told her if he didn’t like it she could have her money back. Now she wanted her money back, he hadn’t even read it. I said, “But you could read it. It’s a good book.” She replied, “I don’t like big books.” I returned her money — all of $15, she’d had a discount – and I refrained from any caustic comments. In contrast, the next day a retired judge who’d bought all three books at the Y was waiting for me with the money and with that big first book all thumbed and 5/6 read, telling me that this was the most fantastic book he’d ever read! Go figure.
All posts by Jackie Jackson
Uncle George’s teeth
How ‘bout a joke for this last blog entry of 2014; it may be apocryphal. But for a period, my Great Uncle George was a Methodist minister in the Beloit, Wis., church around 1895. He was reputed to be preaching so vigorously that his false teeth flew out and landed in the lap of a parishioner in the front row, whereupon he said, “Would madam please pass the plate?” Now I would have expected this from my Uncle Bert, who was a clever jokester, but Uncle George? Uncle George?? I believe it because I want to. And it’s a family legend!
Boxing Day…Boxing Day…Boxing Day
The year I lived in England, we celebrated Boxing Day. Everyone did. I don’t have much to say about Boxing Day, except that they played a recording in the Unitarian Universalist Church last week to a familiar Christmas tune that included lots of things, like “I wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kwaanzai etc etc AND Boxing Day.” It was sung in a round so it always came back on a high note to “Boxing Day, Boxing Day, Boxing Day,” which really stuck out and was so funny to me. I suspect most of the church had no idea what Boxing Day was, but since I have read so much English literature and, as I’ve said, lived in England for a year, so that I experienced Boxing Day, I could have told them. It was really when the landed or richer families presented their Christmas presents to the help and to the poor – maybe it’s on Downton Abbey and you all know this anyway. 🙂
Christmas lullaby
My mother, Vera, wrote this lullaby for my oldest sister, Vera Joan, on her first Christmas, 1925.
Sleep, little baby, the daylight is fading;
Dim yellow stars the dark heavens adorn;
Once, long ago, in a Bethlehem manger
The little Lord Jesus was born.
Lullaby, lullaby, sleep, little baby, sleep.
Sleep, little baby, my arms are about thee,
A circle of love which enfolds thee secure;
So Mary cradled the wee baby Jesus,
The little Lord Jesus, so pure.
Lullaby, lullaby, sleep, little baby, sleep.
Sleep little baby, thine eyelids are drooping,
Thy warm, tender body relaxing to rest;
Jesus thus slept in the arms of sweet Mary,
His dear little head on her breast.
Lullaby, lullaby, sleep, little baby, sleep.
Lullaby, lullaby, sleep, little baby, sleep.
Click here to download a full page .pdf of Vera’s original score.
Mommy’s Orange Cookies
Lately it’s been circulating around the family, “Where is the orange cookie recipe?” Not that these are particularly Christmas cookies, but were the family’s favorite cookie. Turns out my sister Jo and I both have the recipe, and Jo wrote me that when one of her boys told Scottie Cook, who was helping Mother, that Scottie made the best cookies he ever had (the orange!) that Mother was quick to say that it was her recipe and not Scottie’s. Question: where did Mom get it? Anyway, here is the famous Orange Cookie recipe some of you have been asking about and others of you who read this might want to try.
Mommy’s Orange Cookies
1 C sugar
1 C shortening
2 eggs
1 C orange juice
grated rind of one orange
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp soda
3 C flour
Put together in the usual way: (Cream sugar, shortening, add eggs, sift flour, b.p., soda together, and add alternately with o.j.) Drop spoonsful on greased cookie sheet, not too close together. Bake in a preheated moderate oven (I think that’s about 350° – 375° in today’s language). Frost with powdered sugar moistened with orange juice, to which the grated rind has been added. Makes four dozen or more.
Note: Jo has our grandmother’s much battered (pun intended) cookbook with Grama’s famous Thanksgiving cookies in it. When I get a copy of that recipe, I’ll add it to this blog.
*edited to warm up the oven temp!
My bicycle, tea, and a bum
In my last post, I talked about Watership Down by Richard Adams. One of my England trips, with 24 students, was for my course, British Children’s Lit. The year previous, I was alone in England on my bicycle and pulled up to Richard Adams’ doorstep. When he answered my knock, I told him how much I liked the book, and he invited me in to have tea with him and his wife. We had a grand time and I asked him if I could bring my class to meet him. We did – and he actually climbed Watership Down (a big breadloaf-shaped chalk hill) with all of us. On that earlier visit, he told me to bike on down to Arundel and call on Rosemary Sutcliffe, a famous writer of British history for children. I did; she served me tea graciously, and the next year, served tea -– each cup and saucer beautiful and unique — to 24 students. When she died a few years back, her ceremony was at Westminster Abby and a disreputable bum sat in the back waving and singing. She would have loved it.
In the depths of the Honeycomb
When I meet former students, the class I hear most about — and even from students who never had the class — is what I did when I taught Watership Down by Richard Adams in “Fantasy.” The class wasn’t let into the room until exactly 6pm when they found they had to crawl under a black curtain into a black room and underneath all the tables in the room, which formed the “Honeycomb” where the rabbits lived. We conducted the whole class in the dark, eating carrots and lettuce. A remarkable discovery: When we discussed the book, the students who rarely spoke up in class talked freely in the dark – I could tell them by their voices!
Recording family materials and memories
When people ask me about my writing all these family materials and how they should go about it, I tell them, especially kids and young students, to start right now keeping a journal and putting in interesting bits of what’s going on around them and what they think about these bits (their own thoughts and activities included, of course). Create scenes of action and speech. Also, ask their folks and sibs and neighbors and anybody old 🙂 THEIR memories and get them down. Of course, especially sibs won’t agree on details, but that’s part of the fun. And my dad always said, “Never spoil a good story for the facts.” So I confess, when I get conflicting stories, I choose the most likely or the most interesting, or as the author Robert Maxwell advises in his book Ancestors, “I use them both!”
More bread, please
My last blog mentioned bread. My mother didn’t bake bread, but we would walk over to the Big House for Gramma’s bread. Once, Craig, the youngest, got sent over just before supper; we waited and waited and waited for his return, and finally I was sent out to see what had happened. I found Craig midway between the two houses; he had made a hole in the side of the loaf and eaten out the entire insides.
Home for the Holiday
I have a story about Thanksgiving at the Big House: Grampa wanted everyone to know that everything on this table had been raised at the farm (we had three lovely baked chickens instead of a turkey). The squash, the potatoes, the milk and cream, of course, and the apples and pumpkins for the pies, etc. — Except my little brother made a comment about the salt, pepper and coffee; nobody paid him any attention. We did all our own baking from the flour, which came in huge sacks and made us sneeze when it was poured into the flour bin. The flour bin was important because it was where we all sat to watch the goings-on in the kitchen; my father would sit there and argue with Grandma about evolution until she was wild, waving her spoon and screaming, “We are NOT descended from monkeys!”
