Holy Humor

I wonder if the Presbyterian Church ever holds an awards show (and the Simon Peter for the best homily based on a quote from a pop song, George W. Bush or South Park goes to ...). If they do and they need an emcee, they need look no further. The pastor of this church in Grosse Pointe Woods has been deservedly featured in many articles. The signage outside his church is the epitome of wit. I had to go home and get my camera to capture this message.

I Was Certified

As a teacher, that is. I still have the letter, dated September 13, 1963. It begins:

“The Minister is pleased to inform you that, having completed to his satisfaction a scheduled course of training, you are eligible for the status of qualified teacher.”

Back then there were two ways to become a teacher in England. You either got a bachelor’s degree and went out and taught whatever your degree was in, or you took a one-year teachers’ training course first. The difference in pay was negligible and no-one cared if you took the course.

It was, however, common knowledge that the year could be most enjoyable as long as you didn’t attend classes and the government was footing the bill anyway. So I applied to the University of London Institute of Education.

The methods courses, under the direction of Professor Sharwood Smith and Barbara Hodgeson, were wonderful. The practice teaching was invaluable and we were monitored carefully. I did pretty well and still have the letter of recommendation I received from them.

As for the other classes—the history of Education, the Psychology of Education, Comparative Education—I don’t recall a thing. The only person is our cohort of classicists who did any work for these papers was the only one who failed. He went on to become a respected wood-carver. As I was “organizing” the other day, I came across the question papers for the examination which made me certifiable. Apparently I also took a course in Health Education. You had to write three essays on topics all from Section A or all from Section B. I am assuming that Section B was for students returning to or intending to teach in her Majesty’s colonies, since they addressed such issues as, “What are the various points to be observed in the construction of a village well in order to prevent contamination of its water”. You certainly didn’t need to be able to answer question 10, “What might lead you to suspect that children in your school were infected with hookworm” to teach in Welwyn Garden City.

No, I tackled three from Section A. I avoided the question which asked: “To what extent do you consider that you can make a contribution to health education through the medium of your own subject?” I was going to teach Classics! What did they expect? The outline of a class which studied the history, customs and culture of the three parts into which, in the immortal words of Julius Caesar, Gaul was divided, with particular attention to their attitude to brushing their teeth? No, I answered this question:

What is your attitude as a teacher to two of the following:

1. cigarette smoking
2. sex education
3. accident prevention

Was I for them? Did it matter as long as I argued my point logically? I’ll never know, but the Minister was quite satisfied.

Sides to Middle

I have spent the last year getting to know my new sewing machine. It is both a miracle of Swedish engineering and a tribute to über-grammatical translation:

The flat side of the spool holder shall be pressed firmly against the spool. There shall be no space between the spool holder and the spool.

I salute, sew my seam and reminisce.

I learned to sew on my grandmother’s treadle machine. That’s Nana round the corner. There’ll be more about her later. (You already met Garby down the Lock on Christmas Eve, 2005.) The machine sat by the window in Nana’s dining room/living room/all purpose room. My mother did not inherit Nana’s sewing skills, but she did have her knitting skills. It was my mother’s older sister, my Auntie Doris, who was the sewer. She was, in fact, a professional seamstress. She never used patterns and I still remember some of the dresses she made for me. How I loved my summer school uniform: a green and white striped dress and a green and white checked dress. In fact she made all our dresses, my mother’s and mine, until her untimely death in her early forties.
Here she is on her wedding day to Uncle Bill. I thought he was the handsomest man alive and he was as gentle and loving as Auntie Doris. It was one of life’s cruel blows that he too died shortly after she did.

I do remember gong round to Nana’s as a teenager and sewing some dresses on her machine. It had one stitch and one direction, but it worked fine. What I remember most, however, is the procedure Nana supervised for my mother every once in a while. It was called “sides to middle.”

Remember, these were postwar years and everything had to be purchased with coupons. Nothing could be wasted. Our sheets were cotton and—in the spirit of Henry Ford—they were any color we wanted, as long as it was white. When our sheets wore thin in the middle, my mother cut them in half and sewed the two side selvedges together. Voilà, new sheets.

I don’t know what happened to that old sewing machine. Mine came with a video, fancy attachments and a couple of instruction books. I wish Nana and Auntie Doris could have had something half as nice.

Fort Wayne, IN

I always thought of Fort Wayne as a place we had to bypass on our trips to take Lucy back and forth to Saint Louis University. Turns out it is a city working to become the epicenter of the fashion industry in the mid-west. I got my first inkling of this when Nancy Nall linked to an article in Fort Wayne Observed on an esoteric fashion accessory. That article linked to another piece on the same subject from that bastion of fashion information, Arkansas.

I wouldn’t have paid much attention to the whole phenomenon (even though the subject of these articles, Vera Bradley bags, was one I had written about a couple of weeks earlier ) if it had not been for the piece mentioned in Laura Kluvo’s Blogging Project Runway . There is so much written on this show, but Laura has singled out a long article which appeared in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.

So remember, when the Parsons School of Design opens a satellite campus in Fort Wayne, you read about it here.

One Thing Leads to Another

I’ve always wanted to try patty pan squash, so when I saw some in the grocery store today, I decided to take the plunge. When I got home, I found the cooking instructions neatly typed on the back.

Bring water to boil. Add squash, return to boil. Boil until tender, drain. Add butter or olive oil.

I despise recipes like that. I need a ballpark time: 3 minutes or half an hour? I am sure that my friend at Not a Walking Encyclopedia, she of the peppered bacon and key lime pie, has the answer on the tip of her tongue. Or I could look it up.

I actually started to do so when I discovered the photograph which accompanies my post. It is a beautiful photo (my squash are all yellow and these are prettier) and I was rummaging around the site to figure out an attribution when I came across this.

If that doesn’t make you want to become a vegetarian, nothing will.

The End of (Another) Era

It came in the mail last week: unbidden, but not entirely unexpected. It is a tasteful grey credit card, adorned with a small red star, and it allows me to buy merchandise on tick, as we used to say in England, at Macy’s. It is the result of a corporate buy-out. Macy’s has purchased Marshall Field’s which a decade or so ago purchased Hudson’s. (There was a Dayton-Hudson’s in there somewhere, but I don’t think the credit card was renamed.)

There are many divides in Detroit, mostly geographic. The most famous is of course 8 Mile Road. Slim Shady made sure that this chasm achieved worldwide fame. For the inhabitants of the Detroit metropolitan area, a more important barrier is Woodward Avenue. It separates the “East side” from the “West side.” Drivers who can navigate fearlessly and maplessly east of Woodward have been known to refuse to cross this invisible barrier for fear of getting lost. And vice versa.

There is one temporal divide in Detroit. Those on the far side are the ones who remember the J.L. Hudson Company in its glory days. When we moved to Detroit in 1966, Hudson’s was still a major force downtown. Its structure took up a whole city block. I think there were 13 floors, and one of my first memories is walking into the customer lounge on the top floor where there was a huge bank of phones. I pulled a scrap of paper out of my pocket and phoned the practice of Drs. Clifford, Rogers and Jevons. We were going to be parents!

But I never knew the store at its apogee. If you ask a longtime inhabitant of Detroit about the old days, her face will light up and she will talk of getting dressed up in white socks and patent leather shoes and going on the trolley to Hudson’s for shopping and tea with her mother or grandmother. It was the stuff of legend. That building is no more and we trot out to the mall in our jeans. Now there is a new player on the Detroit retail scene. Welcome!

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I just noticed. They call themselves Macy*s, not Macy’s. Has this stellar punctuation always been their logo, or is it fear of getting entangled with the greengrocer’s apostrophe?

The Doors

No, this isn’t a tardy encomium to Jim Morrison, but an acknowledgement that we now have two splendid entrances to our house. Just like regular people.

The newly refinished front door is still red: a tad more cranberry, a tad less scarlet. So from the street, it may not look too different, but anyone walking up the front steps will see how far we have come from the hideous plywood veneer attached by the previous owner. Now both the inside and out of the door features these attractive panels. Look at the nice pewter hardware! We didn’t have a kick plate before, which was too bad because we had to kick the door to open it, but the door was re-hung and now swings quietly and firmly into place. So that’s what they mean by curb appeal.


The back door hadn’t bothered me too much. When I told Andrew it was installed, he said “So we won’t have a quarter inch crack in the door any more?” I guess I had got used to it. The storm/screen door really wasn’t much use, with holes in the Plexiglas, which allowed drafts and small insects to enter at will. No more yelling at the grandchildren to close the screen door: this one closes all by itself. I hope some of these improvements will pay off in lower heating bills this winter. There’s certainly a smile on my face now when I put the key in the lock.