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Post by Deleted on Mar 21, 2013 7:23:37 GMT
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 21, 2013 16:28:46 GMT
Bixa had already consulted that before writing her #179 to Rikita.
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Post by Breeze on Mar 21, 2013 17:01:59 GMT
Bixa, I sobbed and sobbed at Heidi too, but I think it was while she was in Frankfurt wandering the corridors like a ghost at night. As a child I used to get horribly homesick and I understood Heidi's longing so well.
The other big literary sobfest of my childhood was the death of Beth in Little Women, which I think I got over, but I still get homesick sometimes and it still makes me think of Heidi.
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 21, 2013 17:47:35 GMT
Awwww, Breeze. In my fruitless internet quest to find out about the grandfather, I came across a review of Heidi written by a seventh grader. That child reader was struck with the same deep identification with the book as we were, proving that it's truly a timeless story. Yeah, Beth's death was awfully sad, although even as a child her niceness made me squirm with discomfort. I'm wracking my brains to think what other book I'd have read around that time would have triggered the grandfather-dying thoughts in my little mind. Marginally related in the random memories & heartbroken crying category: Sometime in the early 70s I finally saw Gone With the Wind for the first time. It was shown at a small revival movie house in New Orleans, complete with the original intermission. The moment the lights went down & the first strains of the theme song welled up, a man a couple of rows in front of us started sniffling. This went on until he almost drowned out the soundtrack with his crying when Scarlett swears never to go hungry again. As the screen faded for intermission, the man raced for the lobby, wiping his eyes as he went. But this was nothing compared to his reaction to Melanie's death scene. We could actually see his shoulders heaving as he loudly sobbed.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 21, 2013 18:19:53 GMT
As far as I know, Gone with the Wind is always shown with an intermission in cinemas.
I remember crying during the immortal classic The Trouble with Angels, directed by Ida Lupino. One of the supreme horrors of my childhood was the thought of being locked up in some sort of reform school. There was a local military academy with which my parents would threaten me whenever I was intolerable (I must have been a horrible child) and the thought of this was a fate worse than death. So this movie, about a Catholic boarding school where Hayley Mills did not want to go, was the total equivalent of all of my fears. Hayley Mills had a miserable prisoner friend (June Harding) and they were under the implacable control of the mother superior, Rosalind Russell. What made her all the more horrible was that she was strict but not even evil, so there was no fighting her (the Maggie Smith role in the Harry Potter movies).
Anyway, the girls lived through 3 years of absolute horror (as far as I was concerned) and finally arrived at freedom at the end of senior year. They would finally be able to live their lives freely. And then that horrible disgusting bitch Hayley Mills suddenly announces that she has felt the "calling" and will remain there as a novitiate to become a nun. This was the greatest betrayal in the history of cinema as far as I am concerned and just thinking about it almost 50 years later makes my blood boil.
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Post by rikita on Mar 22, 2013 21:58:58 GMT
don't know which movies i cried at as a child, but as a teenager we watched The House of the Spirits and i cried there (not sure if that was before or after i read the book though) and had a big screaming fit at my little brother, because just at the saddest scene when someone died, and i was crying really strongly, he suddenly interrupted my crying by asking "why doesn't this guy have a beard anymore? he had a beard before."
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Post by htmb on Apr 14, 2013 11:35:51 GMT
As a child, I always loved the way my father peeled oranges from top to bottom in one compete spiral, and I think of him every time I peel an orange today. When I was five I asked Dad to peel an orange for me to eat, but he was too busy grilling dinner outside and told me I'd have to wait a bit. Instead, I went to find the sharpest knife in the house; a fat handled butcher knife that was regularly worked over on the whetstone.
Of course, my plan to peel the orange in one smooth strip went awry as the knife slid through the skin and down to the knuckle on my left hand. I think I was more aggravated about getting blood on my orange, but my poor father seemed really distraught when he saw what had happened. If it had been today I would have probably been taken to the emergency room. Instead, my dad took me to the local pharmacist where Mr. Putney cleaned my wound and bandaged my hand.
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Post by rikita on Apr 18, 2013 21:38:22 GMT
hm, the orange peeling way i liked best, and that my mom sometimes did, was making a flower out of the peeling, like this:
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2013 21:45:37 GMT
That was what my mother did as well. When she gave me oranges to take to school, the outside was pre-cut so that the peel would come right off.
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Post by htmb on Apr 18, 2013 23:03:56 GMT
Wow! I can honestly say I never had an orange peeled like that when I was a child, but what a good idea your mothers had for making an orange easy to eat. After the cut on my hand healed, my father taught me what type of knife I should use and how to peel an orange safely. Here's the way we always peeled oranges at our house:
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Post by Deleted on Apr 19, 2013 4:38:39 GMT
I think my maternal grandfather was the only family member who could do that -- a source of great pride in front of his grandchildren. Naturally, he also performed with apples.
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Post by htmb on Apr 19, 2013 10:13:53 GMT
Yes, there is certainly a bit of performance element to it.
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 19, 2013 16:11:00 GMT
My grandfather didn't make a jack-o-lantern mouth with the orange peel like Brando in The Godfather, but he thought using the foil from a bon-bon to make gold teeth was a hoot.
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Post by rikita on Apr 19, 2013 20:00:27 GMT
yeah i think with apples we tried to peel them like that too. usually didn't work out though. i anyway soon started preferring the apples with peeling on, as i am lazy...
btw, did anyone else use the shell of a soft boiled egg, after eating it out with aspoon, to turn it around in the egg holder and pretend you had another egg?
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Post by Deleted on May 28, 2013 20:46:51 GMT
I have had so many vivid dreams over the last year that I am sometimes having difficulty being sure what was a real memory and what I dreamed. Sometimes I have to examine where the incident happened because I still have a very clear idea of "real" places and "dream" places.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 4, 2013 5:44:53 GMT
When my mother remarried in 1967, there was that rather unsettling situation of presenting her new husband to her parents. A family trip was scheduled to France for June 1968, which would also be the first time that we took a plane, so that was pretty exciting.
As our departure approached, my parents worried more and more about whether we would be able to take the trip at all, and I just didn't understand at all how they could worry about such silly thing -- of course, we were going. There was no way we were not going! Whenever a trip to France was planned, it was set in stone, and my whole life revolved around it.
What I was paying absolutely no attention to for some reason were the student riots and the general strike in May 1968. There was no transportation in France and there was no transportion to France. I have no idea how I could have been so oblivious to all of this because I had started reading the daily paper from about the age of 8 -- true, local U.S. papers are not exactly full of international news -- and it seemed to me that I had all sorts of daily conversations with my parents, so surely the matter must have come up regularly. I have to assume that part of the problem was teenage hormones and part of the problem was something I have encountered with other people -- you can keep repeating things to them, but if it is something they absolutely do not want to hear, they don't.
In the end, everything was back to normal by the time we arrived in France. Even the streets of the Latin Quarter had been completely repaved (and covered with asphalt).
In our little corner of Lorraine, which had mostly ignored those goings-on in Paris (as they still do), I do remember, however, talking to one of my second cousins, and her eyes glowed with excitement as she told me "the fountain at Place de la République in Metz was full of red water!"
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Post by htmb on Dec 6, 2013 3:00:57 GMT
Funny that tonight I remembered how my grandfather, who lived well into his nineties, had a room full of bookshelves. Instead of books, the shelves held mostly issues of National Geographic magazine going back to the 1920s (or really old copies, anyway). Whenever we visited my grandparents I gravitated towards those shelves and looked at the pictures even before I could read. My grandparents later gave me my own subscription, but I always dreamed of inheriting their magazines one day. I suppose I forgot to tell my mother and her sisters, because not long after my grandfather died, and I was well into adulthood, the magazines all disappeared from the house.
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 6, 2013 4:39:32 GMT
And your story triggered a memory for me ~~ My uncle had bunches of old National Geographics in his general store. At the back of the store were some of those metal lawn chairs ( this type). They were there for people to try on shoes, but also a great place to yack or leaf through the mags. I am sorry you missed out on the magazines, Htmb, but remember that by this time they might have become a guilt trigger about h**rd*ng in your home.
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Post by htmb on Dec 6, 2013 4:44:27 GMT
For sure!!! Plus the mold would have probably killed me by now. My father had a collection of Playboy Magazines from the first couple of years. They also disappeared. I bet I could have made some money selling those.
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 6, 2013 5:04:23 GMT
*mental image of Htmb on a street corner, furtively shifting her eyes as she psssssts at a passer-by while unfurling a centerfold*
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Post by htmb on Dec 6, 2013 5:19:06 GMT
He had the edition with Marilyn Monroe. Would have gone for a big wad of cash on the street corner!!!!
Of course, I wasn't supposed to even know he had them, so couldn't very well ask my father where his porn had disappeared to once I realized the magazines were missing. Come to think of it, I bet my brother sold them.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 1, 2014 19:50:51 GMT
I remember how excited I was during a trip to France when I was little when we were in the Alps and were passing through the town of Saint Gervais. "Gervais" was the name of one of the main ice cream brands (which is now called "Nestlé" for some reason), and while I was well aware that that the brand name did not really have anything to do with the town except for my own deduction that Alps = snow = ice cream, I was really thinking that being in the area meant that I would be getting much more ice cream than usual. It did not happen.
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Post by bixaorellana on Feb 1, 2014 20:11:01 GMT
Poor little misguided guy!
I may have mentioned this before, but your memory reminded me ~~
Whenever we were on the highway & passed something like a Stuckey's, my dad would speed up in the hopes he could pass it before we whined to stop there. One of the words always displayed on those kinds of places was "Gifts". We couldn't understand why Daddy wouldn't stop so we could get our gifts.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 1, 2014 20:25:34 GMT
When I was little, we would mention the Stuckey's sign every step of the way -- "10 miles" "5 miles" "2 miles" "next light" -- but for some reason we almost never stopped anyway and if we did, it was because there was a gas station there, too.
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Post by bixaorellana on Feb 1, 2014 21:36:47 GMT
Isn't that odd? You'd think any parent would want to have a child stuffed with sugar in a car speeding down the highway.
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Post by htmb on Feb 1, 2014 22:05:28 GMT
My brother and I never once considered that my father would even think to stop at a place like Stuckeys on a road trip.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 19, 2014 17:36:39 GMT
I remember how offended I was whenever we would visit our aunt and uncle in Biloxi (quite rarely thank god), and my aunt would bring out not even plastic but aluminium goblets for the children to drink Coke. We also had to tiptoe through the unused living room which was only a showpiece and were instantly exiled to the "family room." It made me so happy to have normal parents who treated their children like human beings.
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Post by htmb on Feb 19, 2014 21:40:53 GMT
I have never heard of aluminum goblets. Were they disposable or could they be reused?
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Post by Deleted on Feb 19, 2014 22:24:51 GMT
No, they were "canteen quality" sturdy things that children could not break.
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Post by htmb on Feb 19, 2014 22:33:03 GMT
Yuck! I had an aunt who kept her living room door locked so her eight little hoodlum children could not get inside and destroy her precious junk. Instead they tried setting fire to the crawl space under the house house and regularly snuck out at night to the neighborhood ice cream parlor. I think I've mentioned before that once, when I was visiting, the baby crib went crashing down the stairway. Fortunately the baby was not inside. I seem to remember her kids eating off paper plates all the time. Even THEY didn't drink out of aluminum cups.
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