Carolyn Leeper

Uniforms give immediate identification

Today, when it seems that we must never use what they call “profiling”, is wearing, or requiring, a uniform, a bad thing, identifying a person as a policeman or fireman or nurse, doctor, soldier, sailor, etc., etc., by what they are wearing? Surely not. Uniforms honor the profession or occupation, binding the members of that group together.

Sports teams are proud of their uniforms, with their special colors and the team name on the front and their individual name and number on the back. Olympic teams have special uniforms to represent their countries. Astronauts in uniform proudly pose for photo shoots.

It’s not just a formal uniform, though, that creates identity. Fashion shows us who we are. Business executives wear fairly formal clothes, the man in an expensive suit, white shirt and power tie. The business woman may not have a suit and tie, but she does wear identifiable business clothing. A construction worker won’t be wearing that business suit; he’ll be in hardwearing dungarees and sturdy boots. Some private schools still require the students to wear school uniforms.

When we were young, we may not have worn uniforms but we dressed in similar fashion to our friends, with the same style of dresses or skirts and sweaters, the same type of shoes. Not exactly the same, of course, but within an understood range.

An absolute icon of the late 1940s and 1950s was the car salesman, identified at a glance by his well-fitted slacks, white belt and white shoes. During World War II, with all resources going to the war effort, there simply were no new cars. When the war ended car salesman became, for years, king of the hill. Detroit was pumping out cars in ever increasing numbers, with new, bigger and better models every year. The car salesman was busy, he was genial, jovial, outgoing. He won sales contests and got bonuses and incentive gifts time after time, year after year. If you bought a car this year he knew you would be back, if not next year for sure the year after. The car salesman was a happy man.

Fashion can also be particular to an area. You don’t wear the same style of clothes in Florida as you do in Nebraska, for instance.  In the early 1990s, the Business & Professional Women’s group in the San Joaquin Valley and the group in the Santa Barbara area held a joint conference in Santa Barbara. It was a visual lesson in identification. Looking out on that conference room with about three hundred women you didn’t have to be told who was from which district. The women from central California were dressed in beige, black, white, grey, dark blue. The women from Santa Barbara were in pastels: pinks, soft yellow, pale blue, lavender. There was no need to wonder or ask which district a woman was from. It was obvious. 

I do wonder, just what does our present day clothing say about us when every day seems to be a Casual Friday. Is that a good thing? Who can tell? 

Did your family take a lot of road trips?

I never learned to drive a car until I was in my 20s, but I loved riding in any kind of vehicle: cars, buses, trains, airplanes, row boats, speed boats. Several times a year, I would take the midnight express Greyhound bus from Oakland to Bakersfield, California. It would stop for passengers at Modesto and Fresno, and arrive in Bakersfield in the early morning. I would then take the Orange Belt coach to Lamont, where my grandparents lived. I would fall asleep as soon as the bus pulled out in Oakland, and just wake up to take a break at each stop.

My Uncle Ernest loved to take long drives even if it was just for a day trip from Alameda up the northern California coast and back. On his summer vacations, we would first drive to Lamont to visit my grandparents (Aunt Cassie’s parents), then we would head east to Las Vegas and then north to Lake Tahoe, circling back through Sacramento and back to Alameda.  On one trip, we started the climb to Mount Whitney but the car overheated and we turned back. These trips would take a total of nine or ten days. Along the way we would stop at various campgrounds. During the driving, though, I would often be stretched out in the back seat reading and dozing.

I’ve never felt any fear of flying, probably because as soon as the plane started to roll I would be asleep before it even took off. I’ve never been sea sick even when almost everyone else was. To me, the rocking of the ship was lulling, like being in a cradle, and I would just feel soothed and peaceful.

Maybe why I liked riding in all those vehicles so much was the comfort of being in a contained, and to my mind, totally safe place. And riding is not the same as doing the driving.

When I was just a kid, my uncles would sometimes let me hold the steering wheel when we were driving around on the farm roads. Actually learning to drive was something else: learning to coordinate your feet on the clutch, the brake, and the gas pedal, your hands on the steering wheel and the gear shift, making all those movements work to keep the car accelerating smoothly, maintaining a steady speed on the road, slowing down, stopping, starting again. Plus hand signals for turning left, turning right, coming to a stop. Not to forget backing up and parallel parking!  Remembering to keep your eyes on the road as well as constantly checking the rearview mirror. Good grief.

Besides all that, you had to be sure the tires were inflated properly, that the radiator had plenty of water, and the oil had to be changed regularly. You might even carry extra jugs of water to replenish the radiator in hot weather. You had to have a tool kit, including a tire pump, and be able to patch a tire in case of a blowout.

Maybe I’ll just take the bus!

Do you really remember it or was it a dream?

The summer I was ten and going into the fifth grade, my family moved from Wasco to Lamont, a distance of 40 or 50 miles. It meant entering a new school, making new friends, learning to fit into a whole new life. I had no problems adjusting. The new school was okay and the new friends became great friends. Still, I did miss seeing some of the friends from Wasco.

One afternoon, a couple of years later, my grandmother and I was just sitting around talking about things, and I mentioned that I would like to take the bus and go visit my friends in Wasco again, like I had done the previous summer. I thought about the trip, waiting on the main road for the Orange Belt bus, changing in Bakersfield to another local bus that would go from Bakersfield to Wasco. I remembered meeting my friends and having lunch at the little soda fountain diner, then catching an afternoon bus to go home to Lamont.

It was just a simple memory of a pleasant summer day visiting friends. Except it never happened. My grandmother listened to my recital of that trip and had me repeat the details of when and where and how it all happened. Then very gently and carefully she reminded me of the way the previous summer had really gone . . . what activities we did have, what trips we took as a family, work, church, movies, picnics. She told me that I had just dreamed that trip to Wasco, that it had not actually taken place.  But, I protested, I remembered it clearly.  Yes, she said, dreams can be that way, so real.

Now I sometimes wonder, when people, especially children, are questioned about events, do they really remember those events? Did those events really take place or is a dream now incorporated as a memory? Could even the repeated questioning itself create scenes that the mind accepts as memory? Can we always trust that what we “remember” is real?

Have you and a friend ever been talking about an event or a party or some other activity that you both enjoyed, and find that you have a totally different memory of the event? Did you like the way a party was organized, with a buffet dinner followed by mellow music and dancing, all taking place on the backyard patio?  Did your friend complain about dreary, cold food, insects, overloud music? Are you both right?

What about things that really did happen, but you have forgotten. Do you ever have a friend say, “remember when we  . . . “ and you don’t remember it at all? Do you vaguely remember some events but aren’t sure about the details?  I’ve had so many jobs I can’t remember them all. I’ve lived in so many places I sometimes can remember where I was living at any particular time.

Not to mention, getting up and going into the other room and immediately forgetting why you’re there! And who can remember where they put the car keys? If I set my purse down, I will probably walk away and leave it there . . . that’s why I love my unfashionable fanny pack!

Why do we write?

I was asked recently why I write. For me, writing is simply something that has to be done. Some people write because they have a driving passion, an inner compulsion, to tell their stories, to put words into beautiful poetry, or who write because they are paid millions of dollars for every book. I write for community newspapers and newsletters, and, in various moods, I even succumb to the urge to write a poem or two.

Writing is an art, but it is also craft, a craft that must be learned, honed, improved. I am one of the ancients who actually wrote, with pen and paper, letters to friends and family. As a child in World War II, I watched my aunt write long letters every day to my uncle who was away in the army in Europe.

In school we took geography books and encyclopedias and turned dry facts into stories of the culture and traditions of a country. In “Business English” classes we learned to write formal business letters, memos and legal reports.

Travel articles are written to make faraway places, tours and cruises, enticing to travelers. Personal profiles reveal the hidden sparks in a personality. Advertising blurbs must use just a few imaginative words to instantly capture the reader’s interest and stir desire. Each type of writing, memo, letter, document, or story, requires adherence to its own standards.

I do love how words work…how every type of combination brings its own result. Consider the alphabet. Think about how we use just twenty-six letters, choosing just the ones we want and turning them into unending combinations of words and sentences and stories. Take a word, change just one letter and it becomes different word altogether. Or put a word into a different context and it takes on a totally different meaning. “A bully” can mean a person who makes everyone’s life miserable, but “Bully for you” means “Hurray! Good for you!”  Take a story and change one “what if” and you may have a totally new outcome. Change a “will” or a “must” to a “shall” in a document and you have a different legal status.

Stories, fact or fiction, take us into worlds we would never see otherwise. Stories take us into the past or into the future, into other people’s lives. Reporters and journalists let us see what is actually happening. Historians show us what was happening a hundred or a thousand years ago. Romance writers let us experience love and loss without actually getting hurt.

Writing brings the world into view and into perspective, whether in reality or imagination. Sometimes an article in the newspaper will give us satisfaction in knowing what is going on…or it will leave us wanting to know more, which may be the best thing. Reading what others write is educational, inspirational, enthralling, and, at times, just plain fun.

Take those 26 letters and put them into words of your own, turn those words into your own stories. You might be amazed at the outcome.

Did you have pets when you were a kid?

 As I recall, when I was a kid my grandfather always had a couple of dogs but they were hunting dogs, not pets. They never came into the house. They were important to my grandfather and they were well fed and well cared for. The first dog I remember as being a pet was a German Shepard who decided he liked sleeping on my bed, probably because I was small and he could have plenty of room to stretch out. 

We always had house cats, though. They roamed at will but were always around at meal time. One of my aunts was afraid of cats. I knew this but, being a real brat, I pretended not to know and when she came to our house and sat on the couch I brought the cat the dumped it on her lap. Of course she screamed and jumped up and I was in trouble.

 Now we have a dog and a cat. The cat, Cora, came with the house. When we bought the house, we suggested that the cat might be happier staying instead of moving. The seller agreed and Cora stayed. She wasn’t too happy that we brought a dog with us and she rarely came into the house the first few months after we moved in, but when winter came Cora decided she liked being inside the warm house. 

Our dog, a Pomeranian named Ginger, is ten years old. She has a fenced backyard where she can explore and play but still loves to go on walks down the road, checking out all the smells along the way. Ginger and Cora have never become friends but have come to tolerate each other. At night Ginger sleeps on our bed at the corner near my feet. Sometimes Cora comes along and sleeps on the other corner. They seem to have reached a non-aggression pact when it comes to the bedroom. 

Cora has a cat door but she never uses it if she can get someone to let her in and out through the sliding glass door to the back deck. She’ll sit at the door for ages waiting for someone to notice her. 

There are several cats that come around to visit on a fairly regular basis. One of them, a big yellow cat, actually comes in through the cat door and helps herself to the cat food we leave out. She will eat and wander around the house, sometimes curl up on a chair for a nap.

I’ve never had a canary or parrot. I had an aquarium for a few years. It was pretty and pleasant to look at but required an awful lot of work and attention and I always felt sorry for confining the fish to such a small world. 

I’ve never had a pet rabbit or hamster. I caught a young jack rabbit once and thought it would make a nice pet but my grandmother explained that jack rabbits were wild and not domesticated so I had to let it go. Maybe that was a good life-lesson. Sometimes we just have to let things go.

What do you do with your time now?

 Isn’t it wonderful to be retired so you can choose what you want to do with your time and energy? I am very much involved in my local women’s club and we are working with the Friends of the Library to bring a branch library to our community. Right now we have a Bookmobile that comes twice a week, Tuesdays and Saturdays, for a few hours in the afternoon. Otherwise we need to drive into town . . . not that far, really, but we think there should be a library closer.

 Saturday we held a book/artist fair that we called “Authors and Artists Afternoon” with twenty-five local authors from around the county and eleven artists from the Valley Arts Group. A number of women donated baked goods for treats: cookies, muffins, cakes, cheese cake, fudge, and I don’t know what all. It was wonderful. We also had coffee, tea, soft drinks, and champagne! Admission was free and so were the treats. There was a small but steady trickle of people coming in to look, buy, or just see what was going on. This could turn into an annual event!

 Our Sudden Valley Women’s Club has regular monthly luncheons, sometimes with a speaker, sometimes with music. In June we do a motorcoach jaunt to a nearby attraction. This year we’re going to the brand new Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum, located in the Seattle Center; most of us will probably go to the Space Needle for lunch.  We have a regular November excursion to Nordstrom’s in the Alderwood Mall for the big sale and then lunch at P. F. Chang’s. We leave Bellingham at 8:30 in the morning and get back at 6:00. We play Bingo on the Bus both ways.

 In August, this year, we’re going to try something new. We’ll have an afternoon Musical Fair, with club members and friends singing, playing guitars or ukuleles, Tai Chi and Zumba demonstrations. Maybe a little line dancing. Tino’s Pizza & Pasta Restaurant will cater it with lots of delicious finger foods. Assuming the weather is good, which it should be in August, we will be outside at the community Adult Center.  We may have a few vendor tables. It’s still in the planning stages. Of course there will be raffles! We always have raffles. 

 Our September meeting is a “Welcome” meeting, as we kick-off the new season of activities. All the other clubs, such as the Arts Group, Golf, Garden Club, Bridge Club, Bible Club, Book Club, and Needlework, tell about their groups and invite new members. There’s hardly an activity you could name that doesn’t have a club here. Plus we have a recreation department with gyms, tennis courts, etc. Some of our meetings are held at Bob’s Burgers & Brew, some at Tino’s, and, for several years, we have been going to the Bellingham Golf & Country Club for our Christmas Party.  

Sudden Valley, in Bellingham, lies along the western shore of Lake Whatcom, with great stretches of woods and trails. Deer wander at will throughout the area.  It’s like summer camp every day. I like it.

I love my Kia Soul

People are so curious about the Kia Soul car. We had a Kia Optima for a few years but needed a new car.  We had seen the Soul on the road, and, yes, at a rest stop actually approached a Kia Soul driver, a total stranger, and asked how he liked the car!  So, after diligent shopping around we decided that the Soul was just the right car for us.

Since then, a year and a half later, I have probably been approached and questioned about the car by at least a dozen people, men and women, asking how I like the car. Someone always mentions the Hamster commercials.  One woman even said we were Soul Sisters! Now, I ask you, has any car ever had that kind of attention?

Well, maybe. Remember the 1949 Hudson Hornet? My aunt and uncle bought one and it was a beauty. So low slung it was call a step-down. It was so wide I could lie on the back seat and stretch out full length (of course, I was only 11). It was gray and shiny and beautiful.

Then there were the Chevys in the mid-1950s, some of which claim classic status today. The Jaguar, to many minds, set the standard for cars with class. Who could forget the tragic fate of the Edsel.

Then there was the Volkswagen Beetle and the Volkswagen Van, which offered so much economy and convenience and became icons of the age.

When the price of gas and miles per gallon were not important to car buyers, the Cadillacs and Buicks and Dodges were kings of the road . . . big and beautiful.

Do you remember when the gang would pool their pocket change, pull into the filling station, and buy a dollar’s worth? And that dollar got your oil and water checked, air in your tires, and all the windows washed! By an attendant in a white uniform!

What kind of car do you drive now?  Will you be looking for a new car in the near future?  What kind of car do you think you would like to have next?  What cars do you definitely not want?  Why?

We had a nice van for a few years and it was great . . . so big and roomy, perfect for hauling home those plants you bought at the nursery in the spring. But the price of gas did become a factor and we chose to go for more economy. The Kia Soul definitely fits the bill for us. It is small but roomy. It has a hatchback and the back seats are easy to fold down and put back up.

During World War II, everybody drove an old car because that’s all there was. Do you remember cranking the motor to get it started?  And the tires had inner tubes that had blowouts and had to be patched and the pumped with the tire pump which was always carried in the car trunk? Those were the days, my friend.

Remembering Easter Sundays

How many Easter Sundays can you look back on? How old are you?! If you are religious, do you still go to Sunrise Service? Did you get a new Easter Bonnet this year? Or at least a new spring outfit?  How about Easter Eggs? Of course you had Easter Egg hunts in grade school and maybe at home or at the neighborhood park. How old were you the first time? I was only three and couldn’t find one single hidden egg without help and I thought it a very strange game. Later, I always tried to be in on hiding the eggs instead of hunting them.

How many times have you watched the movie “Easter Parade” with Fred Astaire and Judy Garland?  How many movies about Easter can you name without going to Google?  The Robe, of course. What else? How many are always listed in the TV guide the week before? Did you watch any of them?

As you probably already know, my favorite books are mysteries, Agatha Christie, etc. Some of my favorite authors are Mary Higgins Clark, Carol Higgins Clark, Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark have written a number of mysteries with Christmas themes, but did you know there are Cozy-Mystery novels centered around just about all the holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, and yes, even Easter.

Speaking of Clarks, have you read Mary Jane Clark?  She has started a new series of Wedding Cake mysteries. The heroine, Piper Donovan is 27 and an aspiring actress. (Let me see, what was I doing at 27? Oh, yes, I was married and had three children, so I was a busy, busy mom. Oh, well.) If you haven’t read Mary Jane Clark’s KEY News series, you might want to get the whole lot at your favorite used book store (or the library) and read them all. Or maybe on your Nook or Kindle.

What are some of your favorite Easter Sunday memories. Yours would surely be different from mine, depending on how old you are, your family’s traditions, even what part of the country (or world) you live in. In colder areas, you would have had a lovely new spring coat. I saw those in movies and in the catalogs, but where I lived as a kid, near Bakersfield, California, the weather was always warm by Easter so I couldn’t imagine why anyone would have a spring coat. On the other hand, I always got a new winter coat for Christmas and could have used it at least a month earlier. Maybe winter coats should be Thanksgiving holiday gifts.

We do love gifts, don’t we, for whatever holiday. Of course Christmas is the ultimate gift-giving holiday. Mother’s Day gifts are very important. Valentine’s Day flowers and candy are for everyone, not just for lovers. What about Halloween? Birthday gifts are the best, though, because that day is all about you, just you and no one else! The birthday cake is for you . . . you share it, yes, but it is your birthday cake. Here’s to many more birthdays!