Red roses for a blue lady

 Art class plan for next two Wednesdays
Theme  roses
 rhyming noses
Valentine-zy without being Valentine's
Valentine-ish without smooching or Saint

Please no movie product tie-in Happy Meal toys
A rose by any other name
would smell as sweet
Peppermint tea remember
when white paste was to eat

A dozen for counting
a horse for Robert
the Rose Horse
but No Roses for Harry
that dirty dog

My luxurious gift

what girl can resist
a $313 Buick window regulator
sure beats a push-up bra
from Montgomery Ward



Pull out the old wallpaper sample books
All those princesses pricking their fingers on thorns
Outlook less Gypsy than Grimm

  


© 2013  Nancy L. Ruder

Keep your nose to the grindstone

You can keep your nose to the grindstone, or you can hold my nose to the grindstone.  You can grin and bear it, or knee the bastard in the groin. You can grin and bare it but you better have a gimmick. You might have a millstone around your neck. It would not be a gewgaw, but it might come from France through the port of Galveston in 1851.

I had not properly girdeth up my loins for a long perusal of the Big Red Dictionary. You might say I was groping, and that's not so bad as long as political office is not my goal.  You can stomp on a ground cherry calling it a Chinese lantern or a pop berry.

The historical plaque next to the grist mill stone reads:

THIS GRIST MILL STONE WAS BROUGHT TO TEXAS IN 1851 THROUGH THE PORT OF GALVESTON BY WILLIAM TERRY EDMONDSON.  MADE IN FRANCE, THE STONE WAS ORIGINALLY LOCATED AT A GRIST MILL NEAR THE CORNER OF CEDAR SPRINGS ROAD AND KING'S ROAD.  EDMONDSON'S DESCENDANTS CITE THIS PRESENT LOCATION AS THE NATURAL SPRING WHERE HE WATERED HIS HORSES WHILE ELUDING THE INDIANS. EDMONDSON'S DAUGHTER, ANNE ELIZABETH, MARRIED WILLIAM HARRISON PRATHER, A CONFEDERATE VETERAN AND THE GREAT GRANDFATHER OF HUGH E. PRATHER, JR., WHOSE FAMILY GENEROUSLY DONATED THE STONE TO THE PARK CITIES HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND THE TOWN OF HIGHLAND PARK.            MAY 7, 1995

Here is my nose ready to be kept or held.  Holding someone's nose to the grindstone is far different than keeping your own nose there:

grindstone 

early 13c. “millstone,” from grind (v.) in sense of "sharpen" + stone; meaning “revolving stone disc used for sharpening, etc.” is from c.1400. Phrase nose to the grindstone in use by 1530s; originally to get control of another and treat him harshly:

This Text holdeth their noses so hard to the grindstone, that it clean disfigureth their Faces. [John Frith, "Mirror to know Thyself," 1532]

The main modern (reflective) sense of "work hard" is from 1828.  Don't know about you, but it seems like my nose has been there since at least 1828.  A dictionary diversion is in my budget.

Grin is related to grimace and groan.
Grind is bizarrely or burlesquely related to being a boring study buddy, a cup of coffee, or a striptease pelvic rotation.
Nose to the grindstone is to work diligently and continuously, but a large, heavy
millstone could be around your neck if you have a perpetual problem or responsibility that prevents you from doing what you want.
Grist for the mill means something that can be turned to one's advantage.
Grits are coarsely ground grain, especially corn, related to bran.
True grit is plucky, indomitable spirit, and two movies I've never seen.
Worms need grit in their gizzards, as do birds, reptiles, and some fish.  My vermicompost worms are besides themselves over coffee grounds and smashed eggshells.

Ground cherry is the name for many plants that produce a fleshy fruit contained in a papery husk.  When I was a kid we called them "pop beans" or "pop berries", and sometimes "Chinese lanterns".  We love to stomp on them.


Groin derives from abyss or depression
Groin architectural the curved edge at the junction of two intersecting vaults


This would be Olga Korbut vaulting in 1974.

Then she called to the cat and the duck and she asked, "Now, who will take this wheat to the mill to be ground into flour?"
"Not I", said the duck.
"Not I", said the cat.

"Very well, then", said the little red hen, "I will take it myself".

So the little red hen trudged off to the mill, and in a few hours she was back with a sack of fine flour.

grist 

O.E. grist "action of grinding, grain to be ground," perhaps related to grindan "to grind" (see grind), though OED calls the connection "difficult." Meaning "wheat which is to be ground" is early 15c.; the figurative extension from this sense is from the same date.

gewgaw 

early 13c., giuegaue, contemptuous reduplication, possibly connected with O.Fr. gogue "rejoicing, jubilation; joke, prank, mockery, game;" or jou-jou "toy," baby-talk word, from jouer "to play," from L. jocare (seejoke).

gird¹

vb girds, girding, girded, girt (tr)

1. to put a belt, girdle, etc., around (the waist or hips)

2. to bind or secure with or as if with a belt to gird on one's armour

3. to surround; encircle

4. to prepare (oneself) for action (esp in the phrase gird (up) one's loins)

5. to endow with a rank, attribute, etc., esp knighthood

[Old English gyrdan, of Germanic origin; related to Old Norse gyrtha, Old High German gurten]

Can't play anymore.  Off to the daily grind.




© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

In my salad days I recall...

According to Dictionary.com salad days is a noun: A time of youthful inexperience, innocence, or indiscretion.

Salad days was coined by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra: "My salad days,/ When I was green in judgment, cold in blood."


Perhaps our latest current event could be marked on future middle school history timelines as The Salad Days. It's a scary business out there on the salad bar lines. Spinach has gone over to the Dark Side. Lettuce wants a share of the publicity.

Does this supermarket crisis have anything to do with Baby June, that five foot two bundle of dynamite in the Broadway musical "Gypsy"? Maybe it's a Jimi Hendrix posthumous advertising campaign using the music from "Foxy Lady" like those Led Zep and Jethro Tull car commercials!

Let me entertain you
Let me make you smile
Let me do a few tricks
Some old and then
Some new tricks
I'm very versatile ???




Maybe, just maybe, I need to teach my bifocals some new tricks so I can see that there's only one O! Just recall the cartons, not the cartoons. The terrorists haven't won.

The Three Baffled Goats Gruff

What in the hey-ho is a Billy Goat Gruff?? As a kid, the troll made a lot of sense, compared to the goats. Who was Billy? Was he as cute as Bill Z. in Mrs. Erickson's first grade class? Bill Z. had a buzz cut, and big, dark brown eyes.

And what's up with "Gruff"?
Gruff is much more worrisome than troll!
The definitions say "course, thick, large, rough, surly, brusque, and forbidding."

When my sons were little they demanded that I say, "Who's that TRIPPY TROMPING on my bridge?" "It's just a little billy goat was the answer." You tell it that way once, and you are stuck for the next seven years! Children crave repetition. They need grown-ups to always read or tell the story the exact same way. We gain the confidence to change the elements only when our safe grown-up has given us the firm foundation of repetition-on-demand.

Last week my little students gave me a new insight on this tale first recorded in 1845 by Peter Christen Asbjornsen. "What's a belly goat?" "Do the goats dance on the bridge?" The image lurks just off-stage in the absurd theater of my over-active mind. That poor troll! I'm sure the belly-dancing goats have rubies in their belly buttons as they play finger cymbals on the bridge!

It's an image to keep in mind during long rainy days with small children. I am closing my eyes really tight, but the belly goats seem to be singing, "You've Got To Have a Gimmick"!

Transplanted to 1965

My parents gave me the gift of solitary downtime to daydream and recharge. Parents want to give their children the best of everything, but sometimes the best gift is the time to do nothing.

My parents were strict, thank heaven. They expected us to be out of our PJs and into clothes by noon on the weekend. Until noon we could stay under the covers reading about Laura and Mary Ingalls or Robin Hood, build with Tinker Toys in the living room, or play Barbies if we put on our bedroom slippers. We had some really keen gold space boot slippers. Funny, but the slippers didn't even have a Disney princess or registered trademark movie tie-in on them. We were free to imagine what they might be.... and they were magic.

We survived without adult-organized activites and sports for the most part. Some winter Saturdays I did ride the city bus downtown to my swim lesson at the YWCA, then bought a large Tootsie Roll for a nickel, and checked out some new biographies at the main Bennett Martin Library next door before catching a bus back home.

In the afternoons I could draw floorplans for fantasy homes on graph paper to the background sounds of Celtics/Lakers games with Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain in quite short shorts, or the heavy breathing of Kurt Goudy stalking the elusive trophy African velpdeeloop on "The American Sportsman". I could play quietly while my dad napped on the couch with the newspaper over his face. Often, I tore interesting photos out of old magazines to make into collages or just keep. I still have some of those clippings in my files.

The sounds of my napping dad's slow breathing, the dryer running in the basement, the rain, and maybe my mom's sewing machine gave an underpinning rhythm to my day. I didn't have to accomplish anything or be anywhere, except as I devised. As the afternoon ran out, a calm would settle in. All is well with the world. All is well with the world. The living room would become darker. I would lay on the carpet studying the pictures in books of architecture and art, or Herman Miller furniture catalogs. I could stack three LPs on the spindle of the hi-fi. "Rhapsody in Blue", Prokofiev's march from "Love for Three Oranges", Cole Porter or "Claire de Lune", Mary Martin in "Peter Pan", Ethel Merman in "Gypsy", Lena Horne or Petula Clark, Ray Walston singing either "Those Were the Good Old Days" from Damn Yankees or "There Is Nothin' Like A Dame" from South Pacific. When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way.

Accomplished incredible feats early today--bagged a pair of those elusive trophy perfect shoes, mailed packages to my dad and nephew, swam laps at the Aquatic Center, called a friend and laughed until my sides hurt. This afternoon has been for the rain and the dryer, sorting photos torn out of old magazines, quietly recharging.

In the mid-Seventies I participated in a group listening to classical music with Nelson Potter in UNL's Centennial College. I especially liked the clarinet music of Poulenc. Next winter the Fort Worth Opera will perform Poulenc's opera, "Dialogues des Carmelites". I sense that I'm supposed to attend, so I'm listening to this lovely music, and becoming curious about the French Revolution and religious orders. There's studying ahead!

I'm struck today that the very kind of afternoon that gave me great peaceful and creative energy forty years ago is still the most wonderful sort of Saturday afternoon.

Muu-muu for Mozart

I have expounded previously about the impact of the musical, "Gypsy", on my formative years. I haven't spent enough time on an analyst's couch to really sort out the effects of, "Sing out, Louise!," on a person with Louise for a middle name. I do know that I can't see a woman in a muu-muu without launching into "Dainty June And Her Farmboys":

Farmboys
Extra! Extra! Hey, look at the headline.
Historical news is being made.

Extra! Extra! They're drawing a red line
around the biggest scoop of the decade.

A barrel of charm, a fabulous thrill,
the biggest little headline in vaudeville!

Presenting--in person--that 5' 2" bundle of dynamite--
Dainty...June!
[drum roll]

June
Hello, everybody! My name is June! What's yours?

[music playing]

I have a moo cow, a new cow, a true cow named Caroline.

Louise
Moo, moo, moo, moo.

June
She's an extra-special friend of mine.

Louise
Moo, moo, moo, moo.

June
I like everything about her fine.

Louise
Moo, moo, moo, moo.

June
She likes to moo in the moonlight when the moody moon appears.
And when she moos in the moonlight,
gosh, it's moosic to my ears. She's so moosical.
She loves a man cow, a tan cow, who can cow her with a glance.

Louise
Moo, moo, moo, moo.

June
When he winks at her she starts to dance.

Louise
Moo, moo, moo, moo.

June
It's what grown-ups call A real romance.

Louise
Moo, moo, moo, moo.

June
But if we moooved to the city, or we settled by the shore,
she'd make the mooove 'cause she loves me more!

It was a night made for moosic with Mozart at the Santa Fe Opera! I was sitting on a bench watching sequined elderly ladies wheel their oxygen tanks past, and scarcely-attired voluptuous young women, who must not have received the memo about the cool evening breezes at this outdoor venue, click by on dangerous shoes.

I was not sequined. I was in fairly safe shoes and malachite jewelry. Surely I have told the Sunday School teacher story in this blog at some point. My little sister, Dainty June, raced out of her Sunday School class to report that her teacher was wearing "high heels and pearls!" [Malachite is the mineral "for balance", so I feel compelled to explain that I was wearing clothes, too.]

You can wear just about anything to the Santa Fe Opera. I doubt anyone would be surprised to see the Sunday School teacher. And to complete the fashion picture, there was a robust couple in matching muu-muu and Hawaiian shirt! Tres Butterick! I feel inspired to create some operatic muu-muu animals when I get home.

Early Childhood Influences

Lately, whenever my youngest whines, "Well, what should I eat?????????", I want to belt out, "Have a yogurt, Mr. Goldstone. Is there any little thing that I can do?", in my best Ethel Merman voice. Yes, it's a Gypsy flashback. That's the first indoor movie I can remember seeing. I was four at the most. There I am at the movies with my Broadway musical-loving parents.

I haven't had this prolonged of a flashback since my youngest took up the trumpet for middle school band in the fall of 1998. I refrained from sharing that he should "bump it with a trumpet", but on the other hand, you do have to have a gimmick. And that stands for T, and it rhymes with P, and that stands for pool. And I know all you folks are the right kind of parents... It was probably a forgone conclusion that I would be a librarian if I wasn't a burlesque stripper.

Before Gypsy, I can remember seeing a double-feature at the drive-in. I was probably expected to be asleep in the backseat of the 1954 pea-green Chevy. The first movie must have been something about Sinbad. There were pirates running around in poofy pants, and someone hiding in a rattan chest. The pirates plunged their swords into the chest. I recently viewed a '50's movie of "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad". It had the feel of that early memory, but not the actual sword scene. I'll have to keep searching for my roots.

The second feature presentation was "Porgy and Bess". While I have golden brown, shadowy memories of that movie and the legless Porgy, I still have a deep fondness for Gershwin music and those scooter/dollies kids race on in Phys. Ed.

My parents were shocked when I let my sons, then aged 10-14, watch Steve Martin in "Roxanne". "Good grief," I muttered, while I secretly sang, "You gotta do it with finesse!"