MLM: Who?

One day at college I got the following certificate in my mailbox.


I don't know who nominated me, what meritorious accomplishments I achieved, nor who voted to include me. But, gosh, I was elected to Who's Who Among Students in American Universities & Colleges! Once again my name was misspelled so I'm not sure that it really counts.

I passed up the opportunity to buy a copy of the book that included my (misspelled) name. I haven't regretted that decision for a moment. I could have submitted a biography (for a fee) but I passed on that opportunity, too. I could have included this honor on my resume but I forgot to.

I wonder who does the fact checking on the biographies the honorees submit for themselves.

MLM: NOT (thank God!) Another Priest in the Family!

Peggy tells me when I was very young that I was introduced to one of our relatives on the religious side of the family. She exclaimed "Another priest in the family!" I have no idea who that was but she must have been disappointed. Religion and I never got together.

I went through the motions for a while because I didn't have much of a choice. When you are born to a Catholic parent you are raised a Catholic.

The best thing about growing up Catholic (until Vatican II changed the rules) was that I couldn't eat meat on Fridays. I got to eat more peanut butter! Yay, Friday! (Oh, my! I just checked and apparently it's a myth that Vatican II let us eat meat on Friday! Oh, well.) I went to Neil Gardner's birthday party one year that happened to be on a Friday. Mrs. Gardner served hot dogs. Later that day I realized that I had committed a mortal sin. I was terrified. I wonder if I confessed that. Was Mrs. Gardner trying to send this Catholic to hell?

One of the worst things about growing up Catholic was having to go to catechism class every week after school. Didn't they know that kids would rather play after school?

In our early years we got to memorize the answers to many questions so that we could prove to the priest that we deserved to take our First Communion. Later, we got to memorize answers to many questions to prove that we deserved to get our Confirmation. One of the things that we do when we get confirmed is take the name of a saint who is special to us. I didn't know one saint from another. (Did they teach us about saints? Did I miss that lesson?) Beth had been appalled that none of the boys in her group had taken the Archbishop's name so I took the Archbishop's name. What was the Archbishop's name?

I think that this is one of the tests I took that prepared me for confirmation. I aced it!

The catechism teacher gave me a good assessment (but she couldn't spell my name).





When she sent us off to summer vacation, she gave us a little card with reminders of what to do after we were released from her care.
There is no record of my going to mass on First Fridays or any other times. And my parent or guardian didn't attest to my fulfilling these duties. I'm off to hell.


Sometime during my catechism career, I was taken from class to be a model in a photo shoot. I have no idea what the pictures were going to be used for but I got a copy of one of them! I'm fiddling with a little model of an altar or something. How inspiring!
I'm the one on the left. I don't know who the others are. I don't know what I did to deserve this honor.

Another honor I had was to have my birthday fall on the Feast of the Ascension, a Holy Day of Obligation, a couple of times. Geez! I had to go to church on my birthday and it wasn't even a Sunday! NOT FAIR!

Around the seventh or eighth grade I somehow got to make the decision that I wasn't going to go to church anymore. How did I get to decide that? Children can't decide things like that for themselves.

Except for weddings and funerals, the last time I can remember going to church was when we visited Tucumcari and I went along to let our grandmother see that she had good grandkids following the right path.

MLM: Taking a bye

I'm tired and won't dredge up a reminiscence this week. (Please see my three previous posts to see why I'm tuckered out.)

MLM: Edmund Scientific

I loved the Edmund Scientific's catalog when I was a kid. It was filled with all sorts of fascinating stuff. They had scientific toys and fun pseudoscientific stuff (I got my Pyrex crystal ball from them). They had magnets and iron filings that let you see magnetic lines of force.

They had stuff that was way out of my reach that I could only dream about. There were the motor-driven Celestron telescopes with equatorial mounts! There were the oil immersion microscopes.

How I wished we were rich so I could have all of neat things in the catalog.

But it was a thrill getting less expensive things. It started with filling out the order form. You'd enter the quantity, the item's descripton, the catalog number, the unit price, and the total amount for the quantity ordered (usually just the unit price, darn it!). You'd add up all the lines and Mom or Dad would write a check (thanks Mom and Dad!) and send it off.

Then you'd wait.

Some time later the mailman would deliver a package and you'd get to live your dreams!

One of those packages had a set of fluorescent crayons.
I had a black light. This was back in the age of DayGlo posters that lit up spectacularly under black light. But those were for Hippies. I had better use for my black light. I had rocks and minerals that fluoresced (after all, the word comes from fluorite!). But while I was at it, do-it-yourself black light posters were a fun thing to make. Thus the crayons. Cool, huh?

You'll notice that three of the crayons are missing. Well, either Pough or Dough got into my box of fluorescent crayons and ate some of them. This made for an exciting tour of poop patrol duty. Crayons, you know, don't digest. They come out pretty much the way they go in. With a long extension cord and my black light, the bits of crayons in the Pough poo-poo (or the Dough doo-doo) made for easy pickins.

(By the way, I convinced Mom to throw that black light away instead of giving it to Casa Mesita. It had only a little cardboard taped to its back to keep little kids from being electrocuted.)

MLM: How I Make My Home a Happy Home

In third grade we seem to have had an assignment to write an essay on how we make our homes happy homes. We seem to have had to illustrate it as well.

I got a B.

(This really doesn't qualify for a memory lane outing. I have no recollection of this assignment. Mom saved it in my box of memories and here it is.)

For you who don't want to read my terrible writing, here's an edited transcript:

How I make my Home a happy home

April 15, 1964 yours truly

I like to help my mother wash dishes? It's fun, but my hands [get] water logged.

I help clean up [the] backyard. It's not fun.

I clean up my room. It's not easy because my mother puts all the old junk in my room.

I share with my sister's. I don't have any brother's.

I don't believe that I really enjoyed helping with the dishes.

By the way, while I was in Los Alamos a couple of weeks ago, Peggy gave me a recollection of my cleaning the backyard. When we were kids we had poop patrol where we had to clean up the three dogs' poop and sign the calendar to verify that we'd actually done our chore. (Dad was way ahead of Sarbanes-Oxley in accounting for time!) After I did my patrol one evening I came in and announced to Dad, "I cleaned up the Pough poo-poo, the Dough doo-doo, the Chris crap, and signed the shit sheet." (The schnauzers' names, "Pough" and "Dough," are pronounced "poo" and "doo.") Dad, she says, was not amused.

Back to the happy home essay...here is the brochure that accompanied it.

How I make my home a happy home
Take a look inside

Front cover

Inside

I can't figure out the "Cleaning up my room" illustration. That might be my bed but I don't know what the black part of the picture is. Some of the junk that got stored there?

I'm using a rake in the "Cleaning Up the Backyard" part. It looks like a shovel would have been the appropriate tool (see Peggy's recollection above).

I don't know why Peggy is being a grouch. I'm sharing with her. Poss doesn't seem to be excited. Bobbie's happy with me, at least. Karen was only five months old at the time so I didn't have anything to share with her yet.

We had a happy home, didn't we?

MLM: Their Blood For Christ

When I was a kid our grandmother lived with us. She had a wooden box that held glass slides that fascinated me. I remembered that there were some slides showing the mysterious brotherhood of Los Penitentes reenacting the Crucifixion of Jesus.

For years I wanted to see the Penitentes again and to see what other slides were in that box. Mom was sure that they were still in the house since she had a letter where she asked Grandma what things she left behind when she moved to Kansas that she wanted. The slides were listed but Grandma indicated that she didn't want them. Dad said that whenever we found them that I could have them.

For years we searched everywhere but couldn't find them.

Then the Crapture happened. My sisters cleared out the 50-some years' accumulation of stuff under Mom's house. The box of slides was found in a box in a box in a crate. Mom was so thrilled that they'd been found that she called me at work to give the the news.

I happened to have a week that didn't have any events planned and work was in a transitional period so I had the opportunity to travel to Los Alamos and help Mom move more stuff from the old family estate to her new home. And to relive the mythical glass slides.

There were only two slides of Penitentes. One slide showing the Penitentes is basically a halftone picture postcard. Its detail is lost in all the dots that make up the image.

The other is a picture of a morada, the building the Penitentes conduct their business.
I had thought that there had been a series of pictures showing more of the Crucifixion reenactment. I guess I got that impression because the box of slides held a fragment of a newspaper article (apparently from 1937) about the Penitentes' Holy Week activities.
Other slides in the box are:

• scenes from around the world from The National Geographic Society
• other picture postcards published by Candelario Curio, Santa Fe
• holiday snapshots taken in 1934 in Frijoles and Taos including a picture of a woman with Indian children labeled "Penny" (our great aunt?)
• snapshots of Pecos ruins
• undated snapshots around Santa Fe
• snapshots of Wagon Mound dated 1910
• snapshots of Santa Fe and pueblos of Northern New Mexico dated in the early 1920s

I'll get around to scanning these slides some day.

MLM: Such a cutup!

Did you hear about the new DIY surgery supplies chain? It's called "Suture Self."

You may remember a long time ago I posted a How To that told how you can see the backside of the word "Dial" on a bar of soap. In a comment to that post, Bobbers said that she had been unable to use Ivory soap for years because she had eaten a sliver of Ivory that came from a soap carving. (She thought it was pie crust dough.) She accused Peggy of making the soap sculpture but I was the culprit. We were studying Alaska (home of that great patriot Sarah Palin) and had to make a soap sculpture of something Alaskan. I made a totem pole.

I remember that I had to sit in the other fifth grade class and work on my soap while the rest of my class was at the high school swimming pool learning how to swim. I couldn't join them because I had stitches in my arm.

I had cut my arm rather deeply when I was playing with Johnny Showalter at his house. While he was in the bathroom I decided I'd hide from him. I ducked under his bed. When he came back to his room I looked back towards the foot of the bed to see if he had figured out where I went and noticed an odd bulge on my arm. I crawled out and there was a nasty gash. It hadn't hurt and scarcely bled. I have no idea what I might have caught it on.

His father hustled me home and I was taken to the emergency room. I got twelve stitches!

Being a somewhat odd child, when it came time to get the stitches taken out I asked the doctor if I could keep them. He put them on a piece of gauze and put it in a little box. I cut a hole in the box's lid and made a window out of Saran wrap.

I still have the stitches.
As consolation (or to keep us from suing him?), Johnny's father got me one of those newfangled Super Balls (they were compressed under 50,000 pounds of pressure!). They got banned from Mountain School's playground after they went through several windows. They were a great toy.

But I'd rather have not been cut.

MLM: Memory Lane Monday, First Edition

Back on The Saddest Day, I said that I had found some souvenirs from my youth that, like it or not, I will be sharing with you. Later, I posted some memories of some nice ladies I didn't marry who told me "I Love You!*" and that reminded P-Doobie of the nice Jamaican woman I didn't marry who has Two Lovely Pairs of Eyes. In a comment to that post Colleen suggested that I could have a regular feature where I post these remembrances of things past.

So I am embarking on a stroll down that old memory lane. Like Ina's stroll down the Santa Fe Trail, this can't be done in one, uninterrupted stretch. We need to take this slow and easy. Once a week should be enough.

This First Edition of Memory Lane Monday is really a cop-out. It's a follow-up to an earlier post where I remembered being embarrassed by a shop project where I made a comedy mask and the teacher wondered where the tragedy mask was. I didn't know that they were supposed to be a set. I just wanted to make the happy mask.

During The Crapture, Izzy found the mask in the shed. Mom had found it a few months ago and told me that she had put it up there. I figured she'd send it to me when she had something else coming my way or that she'd hold onto it till I made another trek to New Mexico. Izzy took it home with her and sent it to me. So I was probably the last one of the family to see my long-lost treasure. For those of you not present at The Crapture, here's my comedy mask!


I traced the pattern from the mask that was hanging on the shop class wall. I didn't come up with its hair (or is it horns?) on my own. The thing looks sinister to me.

On the back I wrote my name. I also wrote the name I've always know "Izzy" as. Did I give it to Izzy as a present? Is it really hers? Do I need to give it back?