Renewal

Sometimes just changing things around can make you feel like you have something new or you are something new.  This is one of many good or questionable concepts I learned from my mother.  

For instance, my mom used to frequently rearrange furniture instead of

 purchasing new, 

since she couldn't afford it anyway.   When I was little, it seemed like she did it all the time.  In retrospect, it probably wasn't more than once every 3-4 months.

  

However, in at least one instance I do know she made the move when I was at the neig

hbors babysitting so when I came home late and the house was dark...well I took a flying crash across the room because she had moved the footstool directly into my path.  If you're over 45 you know the kind of stool I'm referring to. It had three bars on one side with the brackets that fit around each level depending on how high you wanted the cushion to be tilted.  

This meant that when you kicked it or fell over it, it made a considerable clang, clang, clang commotion.  This ended up being my very small revenge 

against Mother's inclination to make these wholesale furniture moves without warning.  She and my dad were out in the living room in a heartbeat, he may have even had a gun with him, I don't remember because they thought someone had broken in.  But what did they find instead, li'l ol' me sprawled across the rug, trying to get the bearings to my bedroom.  I don't know if they thought it was funny but to this day I know I didn't.

That living room was the scene of many important events in my young life.  It was where the big Christmas Eve reveal occurred each year when my sister and I got our "big, unwrapped present

s" that had literally just been dropped off by Santa Claus.  (We came so close to catching him so many times.)  There are of course much 8mm journaling of these events.  

It was where I first watched black & white television (probably around 1957) on a big wooden set with a tiny but thick, green glassy screen.  If I were to guess, the actual picture size was probably about 18"x18".  It was on that tv we watched the origination of the variety show and it was on one of these, The Ed Sullivan Show, I first saw The Beatles in 1964.  To be honest, I could not for the life of me understand what all those girls were screaming about.  Here were these four guys with wierd haircuts, singing the same song lyrics, over and over and over.  I was of course in my third year of piano lessons so knew all about quality music at that point in my life, or so I thought.

We also witnessed the first of the animated adult tv show when

The Flintstones (Warner Brothers I think) premiered as an evening series, probably around 1963 or 1964.  Kids liked it because it was animated and adults liked it because it really had adult story lines.  It had something for everyone.

It was also the place where we watched the assasination of JFK countless times as well as the long days of his internment and then his burial procession to Arlington.  I'll never forget those sweet kids, Caroline & John John, just walking wherever they were told, doing whatever they 

were told, holding their mom's hands yet not really understanding what all this pomp and circumstance really meant to them; they would never see their daddy again.  When little John Jr. saluted the casket, I honestly think the entire nation cried.  I never really thought about this much but John Jr. never even knew his dad, not so he could have remembered anyway.  I think Caroline was old enough that she must have some limited memories anyway.  There probably aren't many though.

My childhood is one of those subjects I could talk about forever so I'll call a halt to this for now.