My Holiday Masterpiece.

Christmas cards always enlightened my days as a kid...especially if my name was on the envelope and impressively if my name was spelled correctly on the envelope. Mom had a ceramic Santa whose large green toy bag was opened to hold all of our cards, and I carefully stacked them according to size day after day as they would arrive. My favorite card always came from Mrs. Cohenour, my childhood art teacher. While other cards displayed humble images of a quiet manger, joyful children romping in the snow, Jolly St. Nick wiggling his nose, and Christmas trees being dragged across a snow laden field to a country home, Mrs. Cohenour's card always displayed a worldly piece of Christmas art from the Met in New York City. Long after my days of washing her brushes and filling the classroom kiln, I still receive my holiday greeting from Mrs. Cohenour, and I cherish each one a little bit more every year.





While the art displayed on Mrs. Cohenour's cards is from the hands of masters, the art displayed on my card this year is of the hands that raised me. Very rarely do I slow down long enough to take pictures of my life, but back in the fall, I simply asked Mom to sit down and play. I told her she didn't even have to smile, and I snapped this picture. In the time that it took for the flash to fire, I managed to take a picture that really needs no caption.





When I was in middle school, Mom's piano students started filing in and out of our home as she carefully guided their little fingers to play. Carefully, I listened as she encouraged each of them to make a joyful noise unto the Lord with every stroke of a key. As the holidays rolled around, she'd review her record books and order small statues of the great composers for each child. She kept a running list of which students had acquired what masters. To this day, I am convinced Cindy Collins Code must have the largest collection. The statues would arrive from the distributor, and Mom would wrap Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and friends with love in each detail of the pretty paper and bows. I'm now a middle school teacher instead of a student, and the great composers still arrive at Mom's house each holiday season as she assigns each a new home during the holidays.





This picture isn't just about piano lessons though. Those are the hands that raised me. You should put your hands together and aplaud her massive undertaking and success. Those hands hugged me, brushed my hair, tied my shoes, fluffed my dresses, tucked me in, and busted my butt. Those hands taught me how to count, read, write, and pray. Those hands checked my temperature, drove me to Clancy's, made me chicken and dumplin's and led me carefully through all the wonder that a child's life offers. Those are my momma's hands, and they've patted the head of at least a thousand students who passed in and out of her classroom doors through the years, too.





To be her daughter is my life's greatest blessing, and I should have thought to capture this moment long before now. Playing the piano fills her soul with joy like nothing else. After all the papers are graded, Sunday's music is practiced, the piano students are gone, and life falls quiet on the hill....listen very carefully on your porches. Not only should you listen for Santa and his sleigh....you should listen for my momma to play, "When They Ring Those Golden Bells."





Merry Christmas!

Mom...I Mean Santa....Always Knew This Would Happen

Upon first glance at this photo, you might be tempted to notice the doll I'm holding. That's Cher. I remember the eyelashes being too long on that doll. The doll's hair got tangled in the lashes, and that frustrated me. As a result, I cut the lashes off. Perhaps that was a precursor to the cosmetic enhancements Cher would have in the years to come. Regardless, I liked that doll a lot. But this photo is NOT about Cher.

I was five years old when this was taken. Thirty-five years ago, my mother knew this love of writing was coming. Look behind me on the table. See that typewriter? That's the device that launched me on my way to madness behind a keyboard.

If you look to the right of me under the tree, you'll see Ragedy Ann and Andy heads peeking up. One was a pencil sharpener, one was a clock, and one was a pencil holder. These are also known as office supplies...yet more tools necessary to help me learn how to put my insanity down on paper.

From the time I first heard the sound of a fingers flying across a typewriter, I wanted to learn how to do that. The picture shows my first typewriter, but I can count of at least five more that Mom gave to me after this one. I remember running the ribbon from this one under water so I could get just one more alphabet out of it. I remember feeling grown up when I had plain white paper instead of notebook paper to put in the roller. Every typewriter that followed was a little more advanced, but I had no idea then that a computer would ever be part of my daily happiness now.

Just sending this out as a little warning to all you Santas out there. When you buy gifts that encourage expression, imagination, and thought for your small children, those gifts have the potential to create a love of creativity for a lifetime.

"We didn't say those kinds of words."

I have embraced the fact that I'm four decades old, and I find it to be quite an astonishing accomplishment on my part. Must say I'm proud of my mom for not killing me when she would have been perfectly justified to do so. I don't spend a lot of time reflecting on woulda, coulda, and/or shoulda. I teach English and just used those last three expressions as actual words; forgive me. If a human had survived as long as my career, she or he'd be 19 years old and counting. Within those nineteen years, I've noticed a change in the adolescent vernacular surrounding my desk top Disney characters and me. Necessity fosters invention, and perhaps invention fosters our vocabulary. Nevertheless, many of these words have been snuggled up in the pages with Mr. Webster, and they have become popular ramblings of the generation whose thumbs will be more agile than all the digits of Mozart combined. Whether their embrace has formed from texting, social networking, or just using something new....take note of how often these words are thrown about by your tweens at home. Back in our day, we just didn't say these words.

"random" - I remember using it in Mrs. Rutherford's biology class...maybe...something to do with selection and a Petri dish. Tweens use it today to describe little mini-surprises throughout their days, and they use "random" often. I can't decide if the connotation of its new use is negative or positive. What are your experiences with the word?

"beast" - Once upon a road trip, Bridgette and I rode a roller coaster with that name. Today, the cool kids use it to describe encounters or individuals that are above average, or, dare I say, distinguished.

"like" - Our generation used this to refer to how we felt about Clancy's cheeseburgers, roller skate pom poms with jingle bells in their center, Friday Night Videos, and Wiggles blue jeans from the Little Loft. Today, the Bieber generation can seldom speak a sentence without inserting this new form of an unnecessary comma. Omitting its use from their daily discussions would be the equivalent of tying my hands behind my back while I speak. They nor I would manage to communicate very effectively under either circumstance.

"epic" - For us, this described the torture we knew as Homer and the Iliad, and even the Odyssey. Based on today's standards of usage, we should have been using it for the number of Tuesday nights we spent standing in line to buy Top Gun tickets on cheap night at the movies.

"hoodie" - We wore them, but we didn't call them that. I remember, as do many of you, those faded out MHS hooded sweatshirts that rarely maintained a chord through the actual hood. Washers and dryers across our small town devoured the strings along with socks and underwear, so the hoods were left to lie flat on our backs. Sometimes we wore them on test day. Those hoods were excellent hiding places for cheat sheets. Did I just write that? Nah.

"180, 360, 540, 720" - Visualize if you will a math teacher, any math teacher, trying to teach us about how to find the circumference of a circle. Today, kids know all about how many revolutions of a skateboard or MX bike each number represents. We talked in terms of fast, faster, and fastest; they talk in terms of complete revolutions.

"goth" - Upon first impression, that's a term that looks like it might be the name of a bottom dwelling fish, but it's a term used today to describe kids who wear black at every possible opportunity. Black hair, pale skin, black makeup, black clothes, and black shoes. Back when we were kids, we had another word for "goth." We called him Ozzy.

"bank" - I remember the steps inside the lobby of Home Federal that allowed me to climb up and look the teller in the face when I was a curtain climber making my deposit into Homer's Club. My money was kept in a building called a bank. Today, "bank" is used by tweens to describe the monetary possessions of a celebrity.

"stalker" - Maybe when we were teens this word was surfacing with news "reports" published by the National Enquirer but I don't recall us using it as a term to describe people just for being annoying and refusing to accept the rejection they had been dealt. Kids today accuse each other of stalking everything from their lockers, their papers, their phones, and their social network pages. Again, I can't tell if the connotation is negative or positive.

My list could go on and on, and one day, it will. But for today, give my selections a thought and share your observations with me, please. I will never be as bright as the children I teach, but it's important that I always know how to interpret their English compared to mine.

Now, for those of you who thought I'd write about adolescent use of profanity based on the title of this rambling, I gotcha! In the words of Dr. Sheldon Cooper, "Bazinga!"