Throwback Thursday
Apr. 10th, 2014 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
susandennis
This is the photo I posted on Google Plus today for Throwback Thursday and I keep thinkning about it so I thought I'd write about it. That's my sister on the left and me on the right.
I'm thinking this is 1953 or 1954 on the screened in back porch at Grandma's house. Grandma was my mom's Mom. She was The World's Greatest Grandma Ever. And her house was a wonderland for a little kid.
The imaginary friend that my sister and I shared (yeah, I know a therapist's wet dream - this is the sister with whom I have not spoken in a decade at totally my choice). Grandma let us have tea parties with her china tea cup collection (some of which I have in this house now). Our imaginary friend was Miss Sippy Cookie. And, she always came to our tea paries. And we had LOTs of tea parties. Grandma said that she and Miss Sippy Cookie had tea parties when we weren't there but I'm not sure I ever bought that silly scenario.
Grandma made our outfits in this picture. Orange corduroy jumpsuits and before you jump too fast to the jail scene, note the lovey drapes and the upholstry on that chair and know that we got lucky. Grandma's skills were in grandmothering not in decor. (She was also one of the worst cooks ever but she did have cereal/soup bowls with cartoon animals in the bottom "eat up or you won't get to see the frog!!!".)
When this photo was taken, we lived in Kansas City. A few years later we moved to North Carolina. Grandma lived in Oklahoma City so we did not get to see her often. This very probably contributed to the magic that was a visit to Grandmas.
I also learned to love baseball on that screened in porch. Every Sunday was the same. First church. Then lunch at Classen's Cafeteria. Then home to change clothes and watch the baseball game. The announcers were Pee Wee Reece and Dizzy Dean. I thought those names were hilarious.
You had to be real real quiet when watching baseball. If you weren't, you got booted out of the room. My brother and sister never made it to the second inning. I stayed because I knew that at the 7th inning stretch Grandpa would go get us each a Coke a Cola in a bottle and we got to drink it right out of the bottle. (He was the only adult I knew who drank Coke a Cola and drinking out of the bottle was a real no-no at my house.) After the game, win or lose, Grandpa and I would walk to Walker's Drug Store to get him a cigar. I got the paper ring.
Sometimes I cannot even believe how enchanted my live was/is.
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Date: 2014-04-11 05:56 am (UTC)In addition to the drapes, and outfits I am loving the dollhouse!
I didn't have grandfather's after about age 6, but I had a great-uncle who lived with my grandmother. He sat in the "front room" in their row house in DC with a tiny fan in the afternoons in almost dark, reading "True Detective" and not sure what other murder magazines while sipping a cold beer ..out of a dark bottle. Trying to remember the name of it. He was a really nice man, a big guy, and a WWI veteran from what was then "Bohemia"...I guess Czeck Republic. He always had candies for us. Darn, I will have to remember the beer name. He used to keep the "light bill down, because it was so high at three dollars a month!" Ah, the mid 1950's!
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