Comb-overs and air guitars

I discovered my first honest-to-john gray hair about 3 weeks ago, just in time for my 55th birthday. This didn't surprise me much since various and assorted events in the lives of my various and assorted children should have turned me gray about 30 years ago. Finding this gray hair didn't surprise me, but the nature of the hair did. It was thick and wiry and curly. My hair--or hairs, I should say, since I only have about 3 of them--is (are) thin and fine and straight as a board. That is, when they haven't been permed into something resembling a cross between a french poodle and Don King.

But my hate-hate relationship with my hair is not a new development. I have been threatening to shave my head and buy a wig for about 40 years now. My hair's been fine ever since I was a child, but when I was younger I had plenty of it. Now that I'm old, it's becoming more and more challenging to figure out ways to cover the bald spots. Or at least the bald spots I can see in the mirror. I take great pains to avoid looking at my hair from the back. I figure if I can't see it, I'm not gonna worry about it. But it does annoy the hell out of me to spend 30 minutes every morning with a curling iron and hair spray and know that in reality, I'm just indulging in the female version of the comb-over. I'm not fooling anybody. It's time to get a wig. But it won't be my first one.

We lived in San Diego from 1981 to 1984 while Randy served as the Naval intelligence officer for HS-8, a helicopter squadron that was based at North Island Naval Air Station and attached to the aircraft carrier USS Ranger. He left us for a nine month WESTPAC deployment in the summer of 1983, and had no choice but to do his Christmas shopping that year entirely through the catalogs that circulated among the guys on the ship. He bought toys for the kids through the Sears and Penney's catalogs and I'm sure he bought me a few things there as well. But a small package that arrived from him for me just before Christmas that year was wrapped in brown paper and bore a singular return address: Fredericks of Hollywood. Lingerie, I thought with a smile, as I tossed the package at the back of the Christmas tree and promptly forgot about it.

Mother and Daddy came down to San Diego that year for Christmas since I was alone, and it was such a treat to have them there for all the Christmas eve and Christmas morning festivities. My Dad played Santa that morning and handed out the presents, one at a time, just like he did when I was a little girl. The kids were having a blast and I was basking in the holiday glow until Daddy spotted the package at the back of the tree. I shot out of my chair to intercept the forgotten parcel, but before I could whisk it out of his hands, he read the label, handed it to me, and disappeared into the kitchen for a much-needed beer. My mother thought it was hilarious.

I opened enough of the package to discern that it did not, in fact, contain crotchless panties or a black lace teddie--it contained a wig. Relieved, I pulled it out and showed it to the folks until it dawned on me that there were still a number of naughty conclusions that one might draw from the fact that my husband was sending me a wig from Fredericks of Hollywood while he was out to sea. I stuffed it back in the package and under the couch cushions. Daddy got another beer. Mother still thought it was hilarious.

The truth was, Randy had been listening to me bitch about my hair for all the years we'd been married and while he might have been browsing the Frederick's catalog that year with other intentions in mind, he really, honestly, did want to try to fix my hair problem. It was a cute wig--shoulder length curls and in a color that was very near to my own. I tried it on dozens of times, but there was no escaping the fact that--on me--it LOOKED like a wig. I never actually wore it.

But my Frederick's of Hollywood wig DID actually see the light of day--on Randy. While we were living in Spain, our tiny little Rota Servicemen's Branch held a "Come As Your Favorite Fantasy" party (yes, you read that right--we had EXCELLENT parties in Spain!). For this particular party, it was perfectly clear what Randy would go as--he went as a rock star. With my wig, his British motoring cap, and a tennis racket, he played air guitar that would have put Van Halen to shame. I even threw a pair of panties at him. And I have photographic evidence (of the costume, not the panties):

After the party, I put the wig in a bag with some eyeglasses and other accessories from the evening and put it out in the carport. Our Spanish garbagemen accidentally took it out with the trash the next morning. I was heartbroken. I never told Daddy. I figured he'd need another beer.

Soothing the savage beast...

When I updated my blog header last month, one of my favorite features ended up on the cutting room floor. In a fit of pique, I got rid of the little embedded music player from Playlist.com when I forgot my password and the site made it extraordinarily difficult to retrieve it.

I admit I kind of miss it. It was fun to link the music that it played with the subject of my blog posts. I played Tom Lehrer's "Masochism Tango" when I wrote about the final, PAINFUL, stages of finishing my master's thesis. I played "Der Fuhrer's Face" when I wrote about my Dad's time in the 8th Air Force during World War II. I played Jimmy Buffett's "A**hole Song" when I posted about AT&T. It was fun. But the music could actually prove counterproductive since the older I get the harder it is for me to concentrate on writing while music is playing. It didn't used to be that way, but along with sagging boobs, disappearing shoulders, and painful joints, I guess it just goes with the process of aging.

But I LOVE music. I always have. There's a reason why every movie has a soundtrack. Music is the soundtrack of our lives. It always amazes me how a single song can instantly transport me back to a place and time that I never think about until those first few notes begin to play. Suddenly it's as if I'm there again--I can hear and see things I haven't heard or seen in decades--things that no longer exist. I can feel the way I felt then. The years simply evaporate and all of a sudden, I'm there.

I get it naturally. Both my parents loved music and I was raised in a home where it was always playing. Ever since I can remember, the stereo held pride of place in our house. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the first thing they ever bought; it was certainly always the biggest. This is a photo of the first one I remember (incidentally, the photo was taken at Randy's and my first apartment--they had purchased a better, bigger one by the time we married, and we were lucky enough to get the old one. We didn't have a couch, but by golly we had a stereo!)

Some of my fondest and earliest memories are of the music that came out of that stereo on Saturday nights. My childhood Saturdays were special. Our next door neighbors, the Joneses, were my Mom & Dad's best friends. They had a daughter, Susan, who was about my age and she was one of my best friends. Saturday nights meant that stereo would be playing at "the threshold of pain" while all the grownups sat around visiting over glasses of beer and whatever munchies they happened to have on hand. We kids got to stay up late and play outside to the strains of Hawaiian music (my mother was a great fan since she'd lived in Honolulu as a child) or Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald or Sammy Davis, Jr. or Glenn Miller. Or Mitch Miller. To this day, the song "If you knew Susie, like I know Susie" takes my breath away--I can still hear my Dad singing it to me.

Once I hit the teenage years, my soundtrack changed. I still loved my parents' music, but now the Monkees, the Doors, Cream, and the Beach Boys took center stage. Later on they'd be joined by John Denver, Chicago, Jim Croce, and many others. Even now, all these decades later, certain songs will stop me in my tracks, reminding me of singular moments in my life.

I hear "Higher and Higher" by Jackie Wilson, and I'm suddenly driving a car for the very first time, long before it was legal for me to do so, because Daddy thought he was having a heart attack and he wanted me to drive him to the doctor. Have no idea how I made it, but I did. And he did too. But I worried about him for the rest of his life.

I hear John Denver's "Calypso" and I'm standing outside a store in Swansea, Wales, smelling the sea air and looking at my first Welsh love spoon--a gift from my first real hearthrob, Lynn Williams. I still have it. (The spoon, I mean:-)

I hear "You Make Me Feel Brand New" by the Spinners, and I'm dancing with the love of my life at Disneyland, wondering if he's going to be "the one." He was.

I hear "Longer" by Dan Fogelberg and I'm struggling up the stairs to work at the Administration Building at BYU, eight months pregnant with my second child, and marveling at my good fortune to be married to my best friend and bringing another healthy baby into the world.

I hear "El Nino Querido" by the King's Singers and I'm standing at my kitchen window, washing dishes and gazing across the Bay of Cadiz at the lighthouse in Rota while my children make graham cracker gingerbread houses on the table nearby. Bliss. Complete. Total. Utterly perfect. Bliss.

Nowadays I have to be a tad careful about the music I listen to. Some of the songs I just mentioned will bring me to tears, so I balance the sad ones with lots of upbeat stuff. I managed to make it through Randy's funeral with a liberal dose of ZZ-Top--again, at the "threshold of pain"--for an hour or so before the service. When I'm lonely and missing the west, I play a lot of Jimmy Buffett. On Sundays, when I'm hanging out with my favorite dead people, my music of choice is vintage 40's stuff with a smattering of the Smothers Brothers for good measure--they were another perennial favorite of my folks.

So here's a photo of my mom sitting in front of that new stereo they bought when it was many years old--you can see the thing is MASSIVE. And, just for ducks, I bit the bullet and put the music player back in. With a few of my favorites. Enjoy!

How do you like me now?

One free blog background + a longstanding desire to have a customized blog header + $35 that I probably shouldn't have spent = MY NEW LOOK. Whaddyathink? I think it's absolutely smashing!

I gathered a few family artifacts (trying to represent as many branches of my family tree as I could possibly cram into one photograph) and clustered them at one edge of my great-great grandfather's (Colonel's great-grandfather's) shaving stand. A photograph of Mother and Daddy leaving on their honeymoon in June of 1946. A turquoise necklace I made for Mother when I was a little girl. Randy's dogtags and his Navy Achievement Medal. Daddy's glasses. The beaded purse that Ruth's mother made for her when she was a little girl. The little wooden Bavarian-style chair that Colonel hand crafted and then carved Mother & Daddy's initials and marriage date on the seatback.

Once I had them all posed properly, I took a few photographs and my darling baby girl Megan spent some time Photoshopping them until they had that perfect sepia tone with the colors of Randy's medal popping right out of the frame.

Then I scanned several letters from my great-grandmother, Maria Ignacia Ramos Robbins, along with a photo taken on my wedding day at the Los Angeles Temple and one of my favorite pictures of me and my brothers, Chris and Mike.

I e-mailed the whole lot to Heather of BlessedLittleNest.com designs, and the rest, as they say, is history. Now every time I open my blog, I see reminders of so many people and places that made me who I am. And I LOVE that.

So maybe it was money well spent. At the very least, I hope it will inspire me to blog more often. So how DO ya like me now??

Searching for Sidney

A chance encounter with FindAGrave.com in June, 2009, was my first real break in solving yet another family history mystery—what happened to my uncle, Sidney Francis Atkins, Jr., during World War II?

I blogged about it when it happened, but it’s time to write “the rest of the story”—or at least the story as it’s been revealed up ‘til now. First, though, I want to express my undying gratitude again to Judy Rogers, the FindAGrave volunteer whose effort to survey the Lockhart City Cemetery in Caldwell County, Texas, set this long, crooked, wonderful chain of events in motion in the first place.

Judy was prompt in getting the photograph of Sidney’s headstone to me, and from the photograph, I was able to determine that Sidney had served in the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne—otherwise known as “The Widowmakers.” Many attempts to locate an obituary in any of the Texas newspapers came up empty, but my request for an obit from the Lockhart County Historical Society resulted in a virtual gold mine of information about the other residents of Sidney’s cemetery plot. Judy had told me that Sidney was buried next to William J. Scott and Willie Atkins Scott. When the Lockhart County Historical Society couldn’t find an obit, the volunteer who handled my request went above and beyond the call of duty (bless her too!) and suggested I check the then-new pilot.familysearch.org website to see if I could locate any Texas death records there. Holy. Frigging. Cow. That website—which I should have been familiar with but wasn’t—turned up records galore on the Scott family AND on Sidney’s father and stepmother.

With dead people coming out of the woodwork, it was hard to drag my attention back to Sidney, but I mentioned my search for his obituary to a colleague at work. His subscription to GenealogyBank.com yielded TWO newspaper articles in about three clicks of the mouse. Resisting the impulse to leap across the desk and kiss him, I printed them both. One was an article printed in 1948 about Sidney's reburial service in the Lockhart Cemetery. The other article was worth it’s weight in gold. Written in July of 1944, it was one of those hometown newspaper gems with quotations from a letter Sidney had written home to the folks about his experiences on D-Day. “It’s a heck of a lot easier to run and kill Jerries than it is to sell chili, only I would rather be a salesman,” he wrote. “We were with the air-borne division that spearheaded the invasion and were the very first to land. In fact, I was the jumpmaster in No. 7 plane, and can also claim the honor of having the first combat platoon to land…it makes me feel kind of big.” WOW.

After I found the newspaper articles, I promptly fired off a standard request to the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis to see if I could score a copy of Sidney’s service record. Not surprisingly I got the standard response—it was burned in the 1973 fire—but they did suggest that I contact the US Army Human Resources Command in Virginia to see if they had any casualty records for Sidney.

I wrote the HRC in late January and received a reply in late February stating that my request could take up to TWENTY-FOUR weeks to process. It did. One day in August, I came home to find a large manila envelope in my mailbox from Alexandria. I almost drove the car through the garage in my haste to get inside and open it.

I can’t even express the range of emotions I felt while sorting through the contents labeled: Individual Deceased Personnel File. A sterile and businesslike label for an envelope full of pain. The papers seemed to be in reverse order, so among the first pages I found a Receipt of Remains stating that Sidney’s body would arrive on Train Number Seven of the Missouri Kansas Texas Railroad. Ironic. My grandfather Jackson, Sidney’s stepfather, worked for the MKT for a number of years while Sidney was part of his little family.

Moving on, I found that Sidney had been buried in the United States Military Cemetery at Champigneul, Chalons Sur Marne, France, but that the War Department had, in 1946, received authorization to “remove at Government expense, to the final resting place designated by the next of kin, the remains of those American citizens who died while serving overseas.” A letter from the Red Cross to the Quartermaster General’s office stated that Mrs. J. F. Arnold (Blanche Atkins Arnold) was Sidney’s next of kin because she “reared the serviceman since his mother’s death when he was a very small boy.”

And then, buried about midway through the packet, there it was—a routing slip bearing the news that “First Lieutenant Sidney F. Atkins, Jr., died on 22 March 1945 due to a mortar shell that fell short.” Mystery solved. It was essentially friendly fire. A training exercise gone terribly wrong. More pages offered more details. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star. More details—some gruesome. The condition of his remains—fractured skull and mandible. The condition of the shipping casket. More details—more poignant. His personal effects. Souvenirs. An autographed $1.00 bill. Some French francs. “Religious articles.” A billfold.

“…his property is being forwarded to you in one package and one footlocker.”

I’m still sorting through those papers and each time I do, I tend to find another detail or two—another piece to another puzzle. Many questions still remain. Blanche Atkins Arnold isn’t buried in the plot at Lockhart. The papers state that she lived with her sister, Willie Atkins Scott, but what happened to Blanche? She worked long and hard to see to it that her beloved nephew finally came home. Her name isn’t mentioned in the reburial notice as a surviving family member. It was Willie Scott who filled out the paperwork requesting Sidney’s headstone. Did Blanche live to see him reach his final resting place?

One day I hope to find a descendant of the Arnolds or the Scotts who might be able to provide me with a photograph of Sidney all grown up. But for now, my father’s big brother will remain this sweet, smiling little boy.

Sidney, Nettie, Jackson, and my Dad, circa 1920

Sidney Francis Atkins, Jr. circa 1920