mcdonnellwrite
He felt like a very modern man because he wore pants without socks. He never talked to a woman who was smarter than him, though, if he could avoid it.
Everything has to be so modern, my grandmother said. We used to laugh about that, because it sounded so funny. She didn't like the modern world much and would often talk about her childhood. It was a hard childhood, because she grew up poor, but she said she was happy. She didn't seem happy about some aspects of modernity.
I remember all those detergent commercials when I was a kid. It was the early days of TV advertising, and the commercials all had snappy jingles that you couldn't get out of your head. They used simple messages and usually a cartoonish character. The housewives all had those beatific smiles on their faces, and the husbands were goofballs.
When I grew so fast in 8th grade people thought it was funny to call me "Stretch". I was embarrassed, and that's when I started stooping. "Your posture is terrible," my mother said. "Stand up straight, don't stoop over." I wasn't conscious of it, but I think I wanted to be smaller, not bigger.
I didn't think much about being an American till I went to Europe. When I went to France, England and Germany I suddenly realized that I was different. My culture, history, language, everything was different. It had never occurred to me before.
I love the grace and beauty of ballerinas, and I could watch them forever. When I was young I thought they looked like angels. When I got older, I learned how hard their lives are. It's like they are angels with bunions and bad knees. But they can still fly.
The controller looked at us and said, "You will stand up now." We thought it was funny, and we laughed. All of a sudden we were convulsed with a white heat that burned all the way up from our toes to the tops of our heads.
"You will stand up now," he said again.
It's so easy to charge things. My mother used to have a charge card, that's what they called it in the old days. My Dad hated it because he hated credit. Boy, how things have changed. We use so much credit, we're drowning in it.
My grandfather used to come and sit on the front porch and visit almost every day after my grandmother died. He did that for several years. I'd come home from school and he'd be reading the newspaper on the porch, and I'd sit and talk with him about his childhood, like when he saw Buffalo Bill's Wild West show as a boy.
Adorable, she said, you look adorable. I never thought of myself that way, I don't think that word had ever been used about me. Really? I said. Hmm. It had a funny sound to it, in reference to me. Shows the power of love, I thought, that someone would use that word about me.
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