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Does everyone have those relatives they wish they’d gotten to know better? I suspect that’s a yes, but maybe there are some people out there who are lucky enough to be able to say “no.”
As a child, I think I was afraid of him. He seemed like a huge giant to me and his big bushy beard and tattoos made him look like he’d walked right out of one of my fairy tale books. But he was super nice beneath all the fuzz and his hearty laugh would fill the room.
When I was young, he would let me sit near him at the Sheepshead table and kibitz to me about what everyone was doing and how to play the game. When I was older, we would toast with our glasses of Jack Daniels. One of my strongest memories of Uncle Tom is from my going away party before I went to Zambia. We had a very well-stocked bar that night and my book from bartending. Among the bottles in that well-stocked bar was a tall bottle of Galliano. “What are we supposed to do with this?” “Make Harvey Wallbangers!” Uncle Tom was thrilled; it’d been ages since he’d had a Harvey Wallbanger and it reminded him of when he was in the Navy.
I think about that a lot these days. Several of my younger cousins are in the Navy now. I wish Uncle Tom were still around so they could all share stories together, connect.
For me, I feel like we lost him just as I was getting old enough to actually know him as a person instead of just my aunt’s husband or my cousins’ dad. Now he’s watching down on them and his granddaughters, and I bet sometimes, he’s out there on the lawn, too, laughing as the girls roll down the hill.
Thanks to the internet, we have this new phenomenon of having friends we’ve never met in person. That’s what some people would have us believe. But really, people have had friends they never met in person for ages. They used to be called pen pals. There are even plenty of stories of pen pals having known each other only through written words and pictures deciding to get married, such is the bond people can form without meeting in person.
Today, I’d like to celebrate one of my special never-met-in-person friends. Today is Marques’s birthday.
Marques was one of my first friends on Twitter back in the day. Goodness, we’ve been livening each other’s days now for 6 or 7 years. I think I started following him because of the trombone part of his Twitter handle and because he was a Zune MVP. I play trombone. I had a Zune. Nobody else knew what a Zune was. Nobody even knew what an mp3 player was. I’d have to describe it as a Window’s ipod. Not only did Marques know what it was, he could help me troubleshoot it and learn new things about it.
Zune is long gone now, but our friendship is not. We always have plenty to talk about. Our conversations are often silly and light-hearted, but they’re important, too. When I was going through some really difficult points, Marques was always there. When I’d worn out all my in-person-friend’s ears, his eyes were ready. Real friends aren’t the ones that party with you when you happen to be in the same place; real friends are the ones that are there for you in their best capacity when you need them most. I’m very lucky to have such a good friend.
There’s a lot of us who are lucky. There’s a group of us that’s formed around Marques on Twitter. He sort of brought us all together, people who followed him for different aspects of his life. It’s like a little virtual lunch table. We can tell from his Tweet’s that Marques’s family is vey lucky to have him, too. And his hoards of in-person friends. And Hamachi.
So here’s a toast to a great man, a man with the most encompassing music taste, a man who builds networks and builds people up, a man with a big heart and an even bigger amount of hugs. Happy Birthday, Marques!
Is there anyone who doesn’t like carrying yarn around in their purse? Ok, probably lots of people, including the plenty who don’t carry purses, like Munchkinhead and men outside of San Francisco. I however, enjoy having a nice little knitting project tucked into my bag for all those unexpected or short down times throughout the day.
Most recently, I stuffed a small skein of sock yarn and a size 5 circular needle into my knitting pouch. The skein was one of two given to me by my knitting teacher; the other had been used to make a pair of knee-highs. I wanted to do something special with the second skein but wasn’t sure what at first. Then an idea hit me.
Scarves are excellent pocket knitting projects because they don’t require a whole lot of attention. That’s key for something you may knit on a few minutes at a time. My uncle in California keeps his home very, very cold for inside, and his Anne is not such a huge fan of that. A scarf for her would be perfect. My original thought was that it should be a Christmas present. That failed, but Fourth-Tuesday-in-March presents are nice, too.
I decided to do a bit of a pattern in the scarf so that it wouldn’t be too plain or too boring to knit, but something simple enough to knit a few minutes at a time. The vertical ribbing turned out gorgeous and the seed stitch on the edges helps keep it from curling. I also love the stretch that the ribbing gives the scarf.
The colors look great on my uncle’s Anne and I hope it keeps her just a little bit warmer in my uncle’s ice cube home.
It’s funny, the things that stay with us, the things we remember throughout our lives. When I was in elementary school, sometime between 2nd and 4th grade, we made paper mache ducks in art class.
We built the ducks’ bodies on styrofoam meat trays, added toilet paper tubes for necks and a wad of newspaper at the other end for a head. When the paper mache was dry, we painted our ducks and glued on orange construction-paper beaks.
We were Wisconsin school children, raised in the great Midwestern woodlands. Even though we were all city children, we had seen ducks, at park ponds, at the zoo, in general Wisconsin-y things. Woodland ducks, mallards with their deep green heads and necks and brown bodies. We painted our mallards. Most of us.
There was a girl in our class whose family had immigrated to the US from Laos. She did not paint her duck like a mallard. Her duck was a white duck with little blue feathers on the wings. In addition to her art skills being far superior to mine, her duck was completely beautiful. I was vey jealous. How come she got to paint her duck to be pretty? Why did hers get to be different? Why did she get to be creative?
Every time I see a picture of ducks in a Heifer or World Vision catalog, I think of the girl in my class. Those ducks look like her duck.
Someone, maybe even me in my head, muttered, “doesn’t she even know what a duck looks like?” We were the ones who didn’t know.
