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Furniture too hodge-podge-lodge for you? Easy, paint it all the same color, poof, a bit more formal.
Pic, above, here.
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Table with chopped off legs makes me smile. Mom/dad used a round Sheraton'ish mahogany dining room table, with chopped off legs for a coffee table until I was just about thru college. Flew home one weekend, and it was gone. Given to the maid's nephew's, uncle's mom's youngest sister's 2nd best friend. Catch my drift? Given to the universe, NOT ME. Speechless, then my best 2 year old self found her voice. It was my parents turn to be speechless! They had no clue I loved the table, nor thought it should be mine, all mine, some day. Nor did they care, deed was done, get over it, buck-up Buttercup, and by the way your disgusting attitude is an embarrassment to us and yourself. Got the memo.
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Last gasp of entitlement felt. It was the era, graduate college, move out, get married, get a job, pay for husband's master's degree, save money, build a house, get a second degree, horticulture, by age 27. This was the go-go mid/late 80's and I was the failure, so many my age already living in the big homes, blah-blah. Parents always had stories to share, in detail, about childhood friends made CEO or selling their 2 day old company for millions (ha!). My profession a misery to my parents. Until he died, dad tried turning me away from horticulture, into my engineering degree. No worries, at this distance, he did it from love.
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Knew at college graduation I would eat dirt off the sidewalk before asking parents for help, instead missed a lot of dinners. My sister has a knack for sending articles about snowflake millennials that make me call her almost immediately just to laugh together, imagining if we had behaved similarly, we wouldn't be alive now.
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A sweet duality, seeing tables with chopped off legs. A madeleine, a Proustian moment.
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Garden & Be Well, XOT
2 comments:
Tara, that madeleine moment of chopped off legs may have made you smile, and I'm glad it did, but my heart was breaking for you. I'm sure you know it made you stronger and after all, that's the way it was then, had been for generations. And it wasn't a tough love idea at all, that's just what parents did. I often think about the Lindbergh family; how could they have left a small child in the care of servants and staff for 3 months in Europe and travelled back to America--just years after having their first child kidnapped? Why didn't Anne stay behind with the children while Charles went? While he explored air line routes all over the world? But that's what you did. So I understand that time when children were not the center of their parents' universe, especially when fathers had important work to do as your father did.
And I stand amazed at all you accomplished on your own. Still, I've sometimes wondered, as I've read your posts, what if your parents had been different, available, openly supportive?
Please don't publish this if it's too personal.
Oh my gosh, too much of this is familiar, we might be siblings from our parents' cut down round-ish table in front of the sofa to the you're outta here parental plan. I'm still reeling from your introvert/extrovert post, oh the harsh names I get called, then AND now, imagine me the only Introvert/Thinking in a family of Extrovert/Feeling [using MB type indicator-ese]. What we didn't have then that today's youngsters do have is this thing they're so proud of: attitude. Which to me is empty of substance, heavy on veneer. Keep on keeping on, spirit sister!
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