Category: To Occupy my Time

I have an Uncle Tom.  A Great-Great-Uncle, actually.  Well, he’s dead, but I did have one. And he had a chair.  This really great pink chair with excellent bones.  After Uncle Tom died, it sat in my grandparents’ basement, which, when they died, became my Aunt’s basement.  I can remember sitting in the chair reading and thinking, “someday, I’m going to have this chair in my house and I will sit and read in it.”  And indeed, all of that came to pass.

I liked how the chair fit my hips exactly, and I was charmed by the spring that had come loose, so the seat was a little askew.  Eventually, the cats took over the chair. Antares decided it was a great scratching post.  I held off getting a new chair, because I was afraid they would adopt the new chair as their scratching post, just as readily as they did this chair.  But I have acquired a new chair, so this chair will stand by the side of the road until it finds its new owner.

With tidying comes discarding and it is time for these favorites to go.

I got this skirt from my roommate in Somerville, who got it from her cousin Diana. I wore it a lot over the years and often received compliments.  Originally, the hem was very uneven, so much so that when I took it to the tailor to even out she had to get out the official hem marking device and mark her way around.  Its still a fun skirt for Contra Dancing, but it’s tighter in the waist than it used to be, so it’s time to find a new owner to love it.

Another stalwart from the Massachusetts days is this fabulous Deerstalker which I bought in a thrift shop in Somerville.  I could tie it quite tightly and keep my head warm for the cold walks I took every morning at 5:30am to get to work at Whole Foods.  I feel great affection for this hat, but have not worn it, even once since I moved to Portland.  There just isn’t a Deerstalker’s amount of cold in  my part of Oregon. 

I suspect I purchased this belt at Newberry Comics, a local chain I didn’t like because it tried too hard to be an Alt Record Store, when actually every location looked exactly the same.  I did love this belt though.  Who wouldn’t like to wear flames on their belt?

One birthday, maybe I was 25 or so, I took a hunk of my birthday money and bought many magazines, then stayed in bed reading them.  I also picked up two pocket dictionaries, because I am a bad speller and they were handy to have around.  One hung out on my desk and one I carried in my bag for quite some time.

Of course, now I can just look up anything on my phone.  But it’s fun to look at the pages, isn’t it?

I went to school at a small women’s college in the small town of Nevada (pronounced Nuh-VAY-duh) Missouri. Back in my day, when you went to college, you had to open a checking account in your college town because it was before debit cards and if you weren’t going to carry cash around all the time, a checking account was what you needed.  I put off going to open my account on the special day they had for college students, and then had to force myself to go on another day. It was my first checking account, and seemed like a very big step and I wasn’t quite ready to make that step.

There were (I think) four banks to choose from in Nevada, and I chose Citizens State Bank because they offered a free gift if you opened an account with them.  It was a crushing blow to realize I’d sold my choice for a pocket mirror. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this token. However, it was for years my eyebrow plucking mirror as I could prop it on the windowsill and use the natural light to find the stray hairs.

I’ve just realized that this was not the last Citizens I banked with.  There was one in Massachusetts, too.

Is Citizens still there?  Apparently, it changed even before I left in 1995.  It merged in 1994 with the Mercantile Bank of Western Missouri which merged in 1998 with the Mercantile Bank of St. Louis National Association which became in 1999 part of Firstar Bank of Missouri, which merged in 2000 with US Bank.  And that bank still exists.

Someday someone is going to write about the many bank mergers of the 90s.  They were super annoying and I’m guessing they didn’t help ME any.  In Boston I had to keep switching banks because I would find a nice small bank and it would be gobbled up by some conglomerate that wanted to charge me tons of fees because I didn’t have a combined balance of $5000.00.

Oh Delia*s.  How I enjoyed your catalouges when I was in my 20s.  This is my last item of clothing from that company remaining in my closet; the company has folded.  These shoes were always fun to wear because let me tell you, many men really enjoy big, stacked shoes like this.  “Those shoes are amazing!” many men (always men!) in my age demographic would say.  Perhaps they are not as aware of the fluctuation in fashion and the shoes make them think back to their college years, when all the hot girls wore big shoes like this.

The delia*s logo:

My first job out of college was for Motion Industries.  I was the receptionist, and the company I worked for had recently been acquired by MI.  Redundednt people were being let go, everyone in the company was older than forty, and there wasn’t  really anything much to do.  I was bored and depressed and it was the kind of company that only had two holidays per year and accrued any vacation time for a full year before awarding it. I lasted eight months before fleeing.  Best part? My boss Roberta Cronin.  “You are terribly overqualified for this job, but it’s yours if you want it,” she told me about a week into my temp gig.  We made it official and I learned–not for the last time–about  the danger of settling for whatever job comes my way.