This is me in '89

You can tell everything about a vacation spot from its postcards. Can't you? In this case, Washington State is all about Really Big Fish.

"Are you sure this isn't Vancouver?" I asked my husband as the rain bucketed down. One grows an amphibious skin after awhile in these climes, but it's still depressing on vacation. 

When it's not about Really Big Fish, Washington is about Really Big Logs, or else the men are the size of ants. Actually, this COULD be a real log. I've heard they have Really Big Trees.

I haven't written about Bigfoot yet, but I'm going to. For a while, two of the grandgirls were obsessed with him, and the whole family would watch Finding Bigfoot to gales of laughter. There are actually people who are Squatchers or Sasquologists, or whatever they call them. Bigfooters? Privately funded, I assume.

Slugs are another feature of Washington, though they're no bigger than the footlong banana-boat suckers we have around here. The first time I saw one, I wondered who had run over an anaconda. There were guts everywhere. This card reminds me a bit of the creepy artwork of Robert Crumb. It's something to do with a Gold Slug Card.

Why did I keep these?

At any rate, here we are in Washington State, in the town of LaConner, home of Tom Robbins. Did I ever look like this? I'm practically a kid, and my kids (now in their 40s) are zygotes.

The atmosphere was fishy, froggy, amphibious. Wet. Wet, wet, wet.

Since Humptulips was mentioned in Tom Robbins' Another Roadside Attraction, I wanted to see if it really existed. It wasn't much, but I just had to be there. The nicest photo, in which I'm kneeling before the Humptulips sign, is gone. I gave it away. I got hooked into a Chain Art thing, a piece of nonsense that operated kind of like a chain letter. I dutifully sent off my poem about Humptulips, with photo, and never heard from anybody. Ever. It was eating lunch alone in the school cafeteria, all over again. 

I do wonder, sometimes (no I don't - I've forgotten all about it) whatever happened to the plans for Humptulips Valley Church. Maybe I should look it up. A lot has happened since 1989. For one thing, I've gained - umm - I don't want to think how many pounds. But I think I was on the too-thin side here and probably boomeranged, or bounced. 

The second-nicest photo of me standing by the Humptulips sign. The other one was discarded like a piece of trash. If you wanted a second print of something in those days, you had to rifle through a whole pile of slippery brown negatives and hold them up to the light, going, "No. . . no. . . no. . . ", until you got sick of the whole thing and gave up. 

And I apologize for any log-disparaging remarks I made: just look at this one! Jesus Christ, how do they MAKE logs this big? It looks as if it could swallow me up.

Romance in LaConner. Both of us looking ridiculously young.

I always try to find the community papers in any new place, because they tell you what's really going on. I kept a few memorable clippings, orange with age, but God these were hard to get into any sort of shape to post. I had to scan them, then sort of cut them apart, and the typeface ended up every different size. I especially like the Police Blotter - sounds like something out of Mayberry - and the lovely birthday tribute to Granmummu. I also like the fact that the Aberdeen News is called. . . 

POST-BLOG BLISS! I found that photo of the Humptulips sign! I must have made an extra copy of it, after all. I wish I had kept the accompanying poem that was meant to fulfill my obligation for "chain art". I got absolutely nothing back, and lost the poem. BUT I STILL HAVE THIS. 

Thinking of you. . . down in Mexico

This is one of my better gif/slideshow presentations, featuring beach portraits from my daughter Shannon's trips to Mexico from 2006 until (literally!) today. I won't get into how fast the grandchildren have grown - where did those sweet little kids go? Gone to grownups, practically, but still beautiful and beloved.

I wish they all could be. . .

I have a ton of beautiful photos from my grandkids' vacation in California (in which they did seven theme parks in seven days!), but I haven't had time to sort through all of them. Meantime here's one of California girl Caitlin, looking particularly radiant, the sun bringing out the hint of red in her hair. Caitlin, the eldest grandchild, whom I watched get born, will soon turn ten. I remember ten. . . The Beatles had their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, my tenth birthday. A couple of months earlier came the Kennedy assassination (a post in itself, I think, because my memories of it are both distinct and very bizarre.) And Grade 5, now there's a topic: I was involved in one of those infamous educational experiments of the '60s in which there was no curriculum and children were supposed to learn everything at their own pace, according to their own inclinations and interests. Needless to say, no one learned anything all year.

The world this California chestnut-haired girl is growing up in is so radically different. Better and worse at the same time. There's a lot I can't help her with because I don't know what the hell it means. I often feel I'm falling farther and farther behind, but behind what? A bullshit system I want no part of. Sometimes I think that if it weren't for the grandkids, I'd turn into a sour old crank.

Not much has turned out the way I thought. Dreams have come true in fragments, fractions (and I was never very good at those). Most haven't come true at all. And I'm not even sure what I did wrong.

Against the odds, in spite of a rotten and sometimes horrific childhood full of every conceivable kind of (completely denied) abuse, I have co-created a wonderful family that now spans into the next generation. This isn't supposed to happen. It's yet another one of those homilies I hate, beliefs or sayings people swallow whole without thinking about them: "You can't give away what you never received."

Horse pucky! You can so, and I am living proof. I'm the best grandma in the world, and I was a pretty good mother considering I had virtually no mothering myself, nil experience, had never held a baby, and disliked children. 

I have however had that hideous experience of "friends" somehow replicating the most soul-destroying aspects of my upbringing, in full knowledge of  how devastating their behaviour is. Then acting as if they don't know what you're talking about.

So this is my life? I guess so. God, that rain out there is hard.

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