Leslie’s Blog

“Mom! I need a jar with a lid! Fast!”

The sun was going down, and it would be lightning bug time soon. I needed to be ready.

Mom always saved the Hellman’s jars for this very emergency.

With a jar in my hand, I would dash out the back door, jump off the last step off the porch and gallop across the back yard to the woodworking shop. There were tools there, and I was going to need tools.

It was after five o’clock, and the shop was closed, but that just meant there was no one working the machinery. All the hand tools were at my disposal. I turned the knob on the shop door and pushed with my shoulder to un-stick it.  I breathed in the smell of sawdust and lacquer finish as I rushed the toolbench.

The woodworking shop was my father and mothers livelihood.

“She lets me be the boss,” my father would say about their respective positions in the business.  It was the quintessential Mom and Pop operation. 

 My father employed at least two workmen full time, and various men part time over the years.  The shop guys all knew that I was comfortable playing around in the  wood shop.  They looked out for me when I was in there, and never shooed me out of the place. The shop was a wonderland and my auxiliary home.

Now, I’m sure my father and his guys would interpret my presence in the shop differently than I do. I thought I was a perfectly behaved little girl.  I probably terrorized the place from their perspective.

I rode my tricycle into finished formica countertop jobs, and dented the edge strips, just before a job was to be delivered. 

 If the guys hid their hammers from … let’s use ’me’ as an example… so that they didn’t have to spend an hour in the morning looking for it, I would use their rubber mallets instead. If I needed to bang nails into the pine wood scraps stacked with incrementally smaller pieces, to make boats to float in mud puddles, I used what hammer I could scrounge.  

I mixed sander sawdust with water to make “mudpies” that I would then leave to mold and turn green in unwanted places.

I would beg the guys to pull the trigger on the compressed air hoses, and make Daffy Duck noises letting the air blow through their fingers.

I would wash my muddy feet and hands in the shop bathroom after my mud puddle fun, so my mother wouldn’t know how dirty I really had been.

It was getting dark, and I needed to punch holes in my lightning bug jar lid, so I could get to the business of catching lightning bugs.

The first workbench was my father’s catch all, and rarely had tools on it. It was stacked with strips of wood showing finish samples, a broken chair leg wrapped in clamps with little white glue drops oozing from the repair, dusty foxtail brushes, stain stirring sticks, and a Playboy magazine in the cubby hole below the benchtop.

The second bench was always a good prospect for finding tools. Al had worked for my parents for years, and knew that I would eventually find where he had hidden his tools. I think he left out his old ones for me to ‘find’, but I can’t be sure. His bench was always neat and swept off, ready for the morning project. He had a coffee can for his cigarette butts on the back corner of the bench, and his coffee cup on the nail. He hung his newest Playboy centerfold over his bench every month.

I grabbed a screwdriver from the top drawer of Al’s workbench. I pulled out the next drawer down, and got the claw hammer.

I hurried across the shop to the table saw, and scrounged underneath it for a wood scrap that I knew would be there, mixed with the sawdust.

The Hellman’s lid always had a round cardboard liner inside the lid. Sometimes they fell out, sometimes they didn’t. I turned the lid over, set it on the wood scrap, and commenced to punching holes in the metal lid using the screwdriver and the hammer.

Bang. Bang. Bang.  I tried not to make the holes too large, because then the lightning bugs could crawl out. That defeated the purpose of capturing them.

Bang. Bang. That looked good to me!

Off I ran into the rising twilight, leaving the tools in a little huddle on Al’s workbench, so that he could find them in the morning.

Leslie

drawing by Leslie D’Allesandro Hawes (c)  white Derwent Artists colored pencil on dark mat board

“Here’s your key. Don’t lose it, or you’ll have to pay to make a new one.”

The landlady handed a key to Mike, then turned and walked to the back of the stairway landing. She unlocked a door located there in the shadow, and disappeared behind it. The sound of a deadbolt from the other side of the door was like a muffled gunshot. A slide chain racked.

There were three doors off of the landing. The door on the right wall, where we stood, was to be our door. The landlady’s door was situated on the back wall. Across from where we stood, behind a wooden rail that guarded the stairs, was the third door.

These doors could have been portals to another dimension, or just closets. There were no numbers on them to indicate that they were anything other than doors.  They were wide and tall in shape. The quarter sawn oak trim around each of them told of the original expense of the building, but the grey paint on the stairs and hardwood floors of the landing spoke of easier measures chosen for care. The ceiling of the landing was high, reducing the closeness of the space. The building was old, but handsomely made.  It had been used its lifetime without abuse, but also without care.

 There was grime along the edge of the door, near the lock, where Mike was fitting the key.

The sharp metallic clack of the door unlocking announced our arrival, and the door swung in.

The old hardwood floor inside the door was shiny but dirty. I stepped inside, feeling like I was being shoved onto a glass lake in a tiny folded paper boat.

 The room felt out of place. It was far too large for a foyer, being about the same size as the entire root cellar back up the holler. The room didn’t seem to have a specific purpose other than to showcase doorways to all the other rooms. The ceiling was high, and seemed to not exist.

Directly across from the entry was a doorway to the bathroom. The light was on.  An iron clawfoot tub sat in view, demurely situated, only showing the foot end of the tub.

I looked to the right, and instead of a door, there was a wide opening joining the foyer to the front room, cased with more sawn oak moulding. Two hazy windows in that room looked down onto the sidewalk. They also gave you view directly into the second floor window of the police station across the street.

I pulled up on the bottom half of one window casing. The window slid up with a small effort.

“Good,” I thought. “At least I will be able to wash the outside of these.” Another part of me was thinking, “Good. At least I won’t suffocate.”

To the left, off the front room, was a small room that I assumed was a bedroom. It had one window, but the light from it was blocked halfway up with a piece of plywood. The glass was badly cracked, yet the shards held tightly in place.

I turned and walked back into the large room that I still hadn’t identified. It was the foyer by location, but too big for ”foyer” to ultimately be its identity or use.

The door into the kitchen was located in the back left side of the unidentified room. It was just a doorway because there seemed to never have been hinges on the jamb. It was a narrow opening, made to feel strange by its height compared to its width. I could have been seven feet tall walking through that opening, and had room to spare, but I would be required to adopt a hip first, sideways movement to enter the room to accommodate the narrowness.

The kitchen was old and worn out. It was as narrow as the doorway, and felt as unnecessarily long as the door was tall. I checked the water at the chipped enamel sink. The pressure wasn’t bad, but the screen on the end of the faucet was partially clogged, and the water burbled out at a funny, sideways angle. A decidedly awful smell came from the drain. 

The tall narrow window on the wall at the end of the kitchen looked out of the back of the building. Perched on a steep hill, running downhill from front to back, the building forced the view from that window to be frighteningly farther from the ground than the view was from the front windows.

I was going to allow the kitchen window to remain hazy, even though it opened easily to let in some fresher air. 

From the kitchen, I could see down to a dirt and weedy strip, the back alley, with a few cars parked front in toward me, and to the hill across the railroad tracks, dotted with randomly spaced houses.

I moved away from the window and stood in the kitchen door frame, looking back into the foyer room. I heard myself sigh.

On my right was another door, opening to a large room I dubbed a ‘bedroom’.  I walked slowly around the perimeter of that room, arriving back at the door, looking out again at the ‘foyer’.

I looked up. There was light coming from directly above me. A square area in the ceiling opened up into a shaft, revealing a skylight at the top. The light coming in was diffuse.

I looked away from the skylight to the painted walls.

Slightly higher than halfway up the walls, was a demarcation line. It appeared as if someone had chosen to paint the top half of the room a darker color of tan than the bottom half. I couldn’t see a tape mark to determine where the painter had stopped one color and had begun the other.

“Are these two colors of paint?” I asked Mike.

He stood in the foyer and looked around.

“No, ” he said, “It looks like that top color is smoke.”

****************************************************

“The last tenants didn’t do much but sit in there and smoke,” the landlady told us the next day, when we asked if we could paint.

“He wasn’t well, you know. Couldn’t do much but just sit there.” she explained.

I had no intention of making this home.

But it needed some paint.

Leslie

 The Lady, or the Tiger ?

Monsoon has begun. Tucson’s blistering afternoon temperatures, combined with moisture that annually makes its way up from the south, creates a meterorologists dream.

As the sun began to go down yesterday, a fierce wind and rain tried to grow over the Rincon Mountains at Tucson’s eastern edge.  We barely got a sprinkle. The wind made 40 mile per hour buffeting gusts that had me laughing at not being able to hold the camera still to take the snapshot.

I was laughing when I took this.

Leslie

voodoolinks:

Maxfield Parrish Colors

A Zillion Skies

Sunrise

Rainbow Bridge

I was going to let this pass.  It has grown larger than I have wanted.

I have to explain something…

I love George Carlin, and all his TV specials, and actually saw him perform in Philadelphia in1970. He said all seven of those words. I have a photo of George Carlin in my database. It has been posted on my blog since last year, in my “about” pages, under the subcategory “TV”.

The photo of Carlin, with my web address underneath,  has made its’ way to the first page of Google Images.

When Carlin died, quite a few people posted articles to their blogs about him.  When they sought an illustration for their posts, the picture of Carlin, standing handsomely in black, against a blue background, looking untypically dignified , was an obvious choice.

Click, insert.   Times 82.

Yep.   I had 82 “hot links” to my database from that photo.

It is not my photo.  It is not in the public domain.  It is a fair use of the photo that anyone can use. It would be nice to know who the photographer is, to give him credit, but I bet he was paid as a “work for hire”,   when he made that promo photo of Carlin, and wasn’t offered to receive any name recognition for the photo initially. That is how it works sometimes for artists and photographers. Ask me how I know.  I’ll be glad to direct you to a whole slew of copyright links.

Anyway…where was I ?…

All of a sudden, my incoming links started going crazy. I thought for a minute I had become quite popular. Not so.  My database was getting “hotlinked” to the Carlin photo file.

The easiest thing for me to do would have been to just delete my file.  *Poof*      

All those hotlinkers would have had that blank box in their blogs where a picture had been. They would have gone back to Google Images to get the picture again, not knowing what had happened, would have tried to link the file again, would have had trouble, and would have probably decided on a different picture. A different hotlink.

My file wouldn’t have been bothered any longer, but someone elses would have.

I decided to be nice. I started to contact the linkers personally, one by one.

I wanted to be discreet in my request to the bloggers to save the file to their own computer. I looked first for email addresses on their blog, to make contact that way, to make the request. The blogs that had no contact information received a comment from me that reads something to this effect…

Would you please be so kind as to save the Carlin photo file to your own computer? It is presently linked to my bandwidth. Right click on the mouse, click “save as”, and then repost the picture. Thanks.

Most everyone was quick to correct the problem. I received lots of prompt responses saying they had saved the file to their own computer files.

It was great! Thank you all you wonderful people out there! oxoxoxoxox Not a problem. I’m not upset. Love ya!

But not everyone.

I have discovered that there is a large portion of the blogging world that is unaware of the condition called “hotlinking”.

It proved to be impossible for me to do a “don’t hotlink”tutorial in each and every persons’ blog comment box, but I did what I could. For those that knew what I was talking about when I contacted them, it was easy for them to say, “Ooops! Sorry!”, and fix the situation.

For those that didn’t know what I meant when I said “hotlinking” or “computer file” or “save as” or “right click”  or “please”, it was more difficult. Some of these folks have become downright unpleasant, and seem to think my second request, when the first one is ignored, is an intrusion on their peace.

Here is a little “note” to those of you who might be just a tad annoyed with me right now…

I did not do the hotlinking. I said please. I followed up to see if the file got changed. I was patient when I could have just deleted my file and left you with a big old hole in your blog, or worse. I went back to your blog. Said please again. Tried to leave quick, non-embarrassing instructions. Allowed that once the file was saved to your computer that you can delete my comments because they would become unnecessary on your blog.

It wasn’t just you.

Times 82.

Here is a great link that explains the netiquette behind  NOT “hotlinking”.

Maybe I just should have deleted the file to begin with, and been a shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits.

Thanks, George. I needed that.

 Leslie

“They’re putting in a beer joint downstairs,” Mike said.

“Great,” I said sarcastically. “It’ll make for some interesting people watching.”

I moved to the window of the apartment to look down onto the street. There were two young men, hippies, unloading lumber and boxes from the back of a truck, and disappearing from my line of sight as they hauled the goods into the downstairs part of the building.

“It’s gonna be a hippie bar,” Mike said, “with food and music.”

All that sounded fine, but it made me irritable. I was already tired of the noise in town. I was tired of feeling like I was being watched. I was tired of being homesick for the land.

************************************

The move away from the land had been both gradual and abrupt.

Mike had been working farther from home with every job. I saw less and less of him. Sometimes he would stay in a motel in Parkersburg while he worked.

I continued my daily routine of splitting wood, puttering with tools in the garden, scything down areas of the meadow to keep the copperheads in view, hauling water from the creek to the house. The highlight of my day was walking to the hard road to check the mail.

 It was a mile and a half of little hills, anticipatory turns, a splashing of a creek crossing. It was hot and summer, but the trees covered the road completely, and the walk was shaded almost the entire way. Locusts buzzed, and my breathing was rhythmic, timed with each footfall.

There wasn’t always something in the mailbox, but that didn’t stop me from making the walk. It was my daily gamble. If the Reader’s Digest had come, I had won the lottery. I would walk slower on the way back, because I was reading. I usually had most of the little magazine read by the time I got back to the root cellar.

“I can’t live back here any longer,” Mike pronounced one day. “It’s too much of a strain trying to get back up this holler to make sure you’re alright. I need you in town.”

I knew it wasn’t for my benefit that he wanted me to move to town.

“I rented an apartment across from the courthouse in Spencer. Let’s go see it,” he announced to me.

We had made periodic excursions into Spencer, “the big city”, to shop at the health food store next to the restaurant on the corner. We could get brown rice, and dried comfrey there, and if it wasn’t all sold, golden seal root powder.  We needed rice, so I agreed to go, less reluctantly than if I had had a full rice jar.

****************************************

We stepped inside the doorway just off of the street. The steep grey stairs led straight up from a tiny open entrance that held two mailboxes that were eye level on the wall. One of the mailboxes was stuffed to capacity. One was empty.

“She said she’d be waiting here for us with the key, ” Mike explained.

He was talking about our new landlord that I was about to meet. I leaned against the inside wall of the entry. I waited. I reached over and slid the mail in the bulging box upward, trying to read the number to which it was addressed. I wanted to see if it was an accumulation of junk mail that had grown while waiting for the apartment to be rented.

“You leave my mail alone!  came a shreiky, scolding voice.  What are ya doin’?  You tryin’ to steal  it? “ continued a harsh, high pitched question.

“Jest whut do yew think yer doin’, missy? ” my new landlady said, with a twisty, accusatory tone aimed directly at me.

The small size of the vestibule, and the aggressive stance of the small, wiry old lady forced me to place my back against the wall.

” I was just trying to see who the mail belonged to,” I offered.

“Well, it belongs to ME ! ” she hissed.

“So, you’re my new tenants?”  she stated, with all the cordiality of a jail warden.

“Follow me.” she ordered, and we trooped slowly up the steep stairs to our new apartment.

Leslie

*for those of you new to Leslie’s Blog and my hippie stories, click on the word ‘hippie’ in the sidebar under categories. That will segregate all the hippie stories, and you can read them all, to bring yourself up to date…*

Spring Creek Natural Foods Tofu

comfrey

 Tanner’s Crossroads

I made this sketch for the blog  Virtual Sketch Date.

Rose Welty  has put together this blog to encourage artists. Come take a look, and join in. Free and fun. Can’t beat it.

Jennifer at  Fuzzy Dragons  provided the reference photograph of the lily.

I did my drawing on a dark green mat board. 

The board dimensions are 5 x 7 inches.   The colored drawing part is approximately 3 x 4 inches in size.

I use  Derwent Artists colored pencils , not combined with any other drawing medium.

These are the colors I used:

• chinese white
• lemon cadmium
• emerald green
• light blue
• orange chrome
• venetian red
• imperial purple

Leslie

voodoolinks:   colored pencil demonstration

Leslie’s Art

Crush.

It is infatuation. Love, as it were.

Crush.

What a sound the word makes!  It’s as if the breath is leaving you in a sigh.  It’s a lowering of the shoulders, a leaning forward of the face, a tilting of your head.

A crush is more than thinking someone is a good actor or actress. A crush is more than liking someone, thinking that they’re “cute”, or holding them in high regard for various reasons.

My experiences with crushes happened earlier in my life than I had realized. What surprises me is that my very first childhood crushes are still intact, not the least bit marred by time.

 I was too little to know what a crush was, but my very first serious crush was Prince Valiant. 

Not the ‘drawing in the newspaper’ Prince Valiant, but the ‘guy in the movie’ Prince Valiant.  I recollect him riding a horse outside the castle wall. That is all I recall of the movie.  I know now that Robert Wagner played the part of Prince Valiant, but I do not have a crush on Robert Wagner.

I had a crush on  Sean Connery in Darby O’Gill and the Little People.  I did not know at the time who ‘he’ was, but I had a crush on him.  I did not have a crush on Sean Connery in any of the 007 movies, just in Darby O’Gill.  Go figure.

I had a crush on Cyril Ritchard when he played Captain Hook in Peter Pan. 

I had a crush on John Travolta when he played Michael, but I think that was the point of the movie.

Same thing with Peter O’Toole in The Ruling Class.  I think the plot required the crush.

I have a crush on Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I think I even like him in real life.

I definitely like Jon Stewart in real life, but my girlfriend is going to marry him. She’s the one with the crush.

Who are your crushes? How do you know the difference between it being a crush or something other?

C’mon. You can tell me…

Leslie

  Online Etymology Dictionary :  Sense of “person one is infatuated with” is first recorded 1884; to have a crush on is from 1913.

My mother didn’t make friends, she cultivated them.

If she took a shine to you, she would “work on you” with attentiveness.

She knew that the best way to have someone hold her in positive regard was to truly listen to them. She utilized this human interaction with me, with her husband, with her family, her friends, and with her antique shop customers.

She was loved.

When my mother died, an unfair, early death at age 59, her funeral was heavily attended. She had cultivated friends of which my father and I had no knowledge. They all were anxious to share with us how my mother had touched their lives in a positive way. I was impressed.

After the funeral, we held a “party” at my parents house for the immediate family and closest lifelong friends. Mom had always made her home the center for festive entertainment…great food, interesting conversation, silliness, thoughtfulness. All the people at the house had been there millions of times before, and knew how great it was to be there.

My Uncle Fred opened the cooler that was out on the deck, took out an iced beer, and handed one to me.

“I keep waiting to hear your mother laughing.” he said to me.

“Yeah. Me, too,” I said back to him.  We stood there quietly for a minute, and looked at everybody having a good time, because that is what they always did at my mother’s parties.

“She would love to be here,” Fred said.

“She certainly would,” I agreed.

******************************************

I have been watching the overwhelming outpouring of appreciation this week, for Tim Russert.  I keep thinking to myself, “He would get a kick out of being here to see all this. I wonder if he had any idea how much people loved and respected him? Look at all the celebration!  He is missing all of it!”

The involved ceremony surrounding Tim Russert’s death brings to my mind something my mother often postulated.

“Why do we wait until a person dies to celebrate?

We should all plan our own funerals, send out invitations, and just have a ball! What are we waiting for?”

I can’t help but think Mom is so very, very correct in her thinking.

How much fun would it be to have your own annual funeral party (I added the “annual” part because, hey, ya never know), with good food, friends, your choice of music, the whole enchilada!

I agree with Fred. Mom would have loved to have been at her own party.

Leslie

Second Line Umbrella

Leslie’s Art

What is hub cap etiquette you might be asking? You haven’t heard the expression before? I just made it up.

Here is my explanation.  Picture this…

You are driving down the road with traffic moving along at a pleasant speed, when you notice a shiny round object tracking beside the car in front of you. It is his hubcap that is in the process of falling off his wheel. You see the hubcap tilt off to the side of the road, and come to rest like a coin spun on a tabletop that finally loses its momentum and gyro. You are not likely to get the attention of the driver in front of you by honking your horn or making hubcap motions to him. He has no idea this just happened. The only person who knows what just went on, aside from you, is the person standing on the side of the road that just had the bejesus scared out of him when he heard the rolling metallic bouncing clang of a hubcap hurtling toward his roadside walk.

Here’s the etiquette part.

The pedestrian will pick up the hubcap from it’s flat resting position on the ground, and will prop the hubcap against the nearest post or tree, facing the direction of oncoming traffic. Sometimes they will lodge them in a fence or sign at eye level.

This is done solely for the purpose of allowing the person who lost he cap to have a half decent chance of finding the cap tomorrow when he drives that same route to work.

There he’ll (or she’ll) be, toodling along drinking the morning java, listening to over stimulating morning talk radio, and they will pass this shiny hub cap propped against the phone pole.

“That looks just like the style of hubcap that I have on this car,” they’ll think to themselves.

They’ll get to work, park their car, and just happen to check all around at their tires, just in case.

Sure enough, there will be one dull black hub sticking out like a sore hub at them.

They’ll say, “Dang!”, or other choice words.

The next morning, they will pull over to the side of the road where their little orphan cap is patiently waiting. They will pick up the hitchhiker cap, hop back in the car,  toss the cap on the passenger floorboard and drive on to finish their day.

When they get a moment at home, they will pop the errant hubcap back on its spot, and say a little thank you for hubcap etiquette.

Lost hubcaps are fairly common. You have a tire changed at the shop, and the tire changer guy doesn’t bang the cap back on just right. The movement and bouncing of the tires ejects the cap somewhere down the road.

What I find most interesting about the apparent unwritten customs surrounding lost hubcaps, is that nobody seems to steal them. 

I have seen caps in their propped up places for months before they finally go to hub cap heaven. Granted, after a month they become anybody’s hubcap, but prior to that they belong to the person that lost it, and nobody takes them until the loser gets a fair chance.

And pedestrians are usually the one doing the propping up of lost hub caps. Most people driving by can’t see them in a flat to the ground position, so it falls to the slower moving, observant, civic minded bipedaled among us to prop the caps.

Oh, OK. 

Prop a cap on your grass.

I said it. Now Burbanmom won’t have to.

Leslie

*please click on the crab*