Flashback Friday

Prompt #4: “Where is the most unusual place you’ve slept? Do you sprawl out or curl up when you sleep? Do you snore, talk in your sleep, or sleepwalk?”

How many odd ways have I slept?

Let me count the ways:

1. On the floor of the nursery, not long after falling off the changing table. I couldn’t be awakened. My mom was terrified. Nothing was wrong. I was just tired.
2. In the closet of my childhood bedroom, on top of a foot-thick pile of dirty laundry. I got tired of my sister tickling or kicking me out of our shared full bed–and moved into the closet.
3. On my mom’s swing out back, having fallen asleep with a book in late evening only to be locked out at night.
4. On a bench seat in my parent’s van after having been locked out at night.
5. Draped over the console in my car, taking a catnap halfway through my commute because I’m terrified of falling asleep while driving.
6. On an office floor after a long night of cleaning.
7. In my car with my seat stretched as far back as it would go and a blanket tucked closely around me so I wouldn’t freeze. This was out of desperation after I DID fall asleep while driving.

In normal life, I sleep in a bed, on my right side with my right arm tucked under my head, a thin pillow folded in half (to give it body) between arm and head. If it’s cold (and sometimes if it’s not), I’ll bring my left arm over in front of my face and under my pillow too. My knees are bent and I bring my left leg further over than my right, so that my spine is in a twist–sort of like that one spinal stretch where you’re on your back and your knees are on the side, except my shoulders are perpendicular to the bed, while my pelvis is almost parallel. Someday I’m going to destroy my back sleeping that way, but no matter how hard I try to break myself of the habit, it never lasts.

I’m not a consistent snorer, sleeptalker, or sleepwalker. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t done any of the above.

Apparently I spoke and walked in my sleep on my first trip to Mexico. I have no memory of the event–and my memory of what I was told I did and said is also vague. Sorry.

Less vague is the story of Rebekah the snorer.

Most of my family has nasal allergies of one sort or the other, and snore on one occasion or another. I am no exception. But I’ve never been told that I’m a consistent snorer.

My dad, on the other hand…

As the story goes, my sisters were enjoying a book on the lower level of our bunk-bed, I was sleeping peacefully in the upper level, and my dad was sawing logs in the room above.

I let out a single loud snore.

Dad startled, causing a sudden break in his snoring pattern. The girls heard his sleepy exclamation: “Huh? Wha? What’s that?”

Yep, that’s me. The snorer. Totally waking up the whole house.

Or something.

I’m not going to lie. I’ve had some strange sleeping arrangements this week–and my sleeping habits are all out of whack. Which makes it a perfect time to move from my childhood bedroom to sleep.

Tomorrow’s prompt:

“Where is the most unusual place you’ve slept? Do you sprawl out or curl up when you sleep? Do you snore, talk in your sleep, or sleepwalk?”

Prompt #3: “What was your bedroom like growing up? Did you share it with your siblings, or did you have it to yourself? Can you remember the carpeting, the wallpaper, the pictures that hung? What did you do to make it your own?”

My sister Anna had her own room for a blessed 14 months before I showed up, wrecking all of her plans of displaying play food on low shelves. With my advent, her small toys were banished to an upper shelf waiting for my nap-time.

Not that I remember that bedroom.

The first bedroom I really remember is the one where Anna and I spent much of our elementary years.

It was the largest bedroom in the house, maybe 12’x14′(?). This was the room where Anna and I fitfully shared the full-sized bed (fitfully due to Anna’s penchant for tickling and/or kicking me OUT of said bed.) This was the room where Anna and I much more peacefully shared the same crack of light from the hallway (so we could better read our novels after lights out.)

This was also the room where our doll changing table/crib (that Dad made for us) was set up and where the blue bookshelf (that Dad also made for us) held our favorite books.

This was the room that contained the closet that was perpetually overflowing with dirty clothes because we were less than diligent about doing our laundry. The doll changing table/crib was where we once found an apple core that was filled with maggots due to my disobedience to the rule about not eating anywhere but the dining room–and due to our rather lax room-cleaning habits.

This was the room that was almost perpetually a mess.

Every so often, our parents would get fed up with the mess and issue an ultimatum. Either we cleaned the room or Mom and Dad would come in with a broom and a trash bag and do it for us.

No way we’d let them throw away our treasures. We took to the room with a broom first, sweeping everything into the center and then dividing out the pile into a dozen littler piles, then finding homes for the items in each pile.

Finally, the pale hardwood floor would be fully visible.

Oh, that hardwood floor.

How we hated it.

How we wished we could have carpet like the rest of the house.

We begged and pleaded for carpet, but to little avail. How would we manage to clean carpet with the kind of messes we made? It would be a disaster.

Still, we petitioned our parents until they relented.

Conditionally.

We could have carpet if we could keep our room clean for a month.

And so we did.

Mom and Dad, with remarkable foresight, gave us not the wall-to-wall carpet we’d dreamed of, but a single large area rug for the center of the room.

While it wasn’t what we’d wanted, it turned out to be a wise move. Because within weeks (days?), the room was back to being a pit. “Do you think we live in a pigsty?” my parents would occasionally ask.

Maybe they didn’t, but we kinda did.

We knew it and were rather ashamed of it, but not enough to do something about it in the long term. We hadn’t the diligence to tidy it on a regular basis.

Instead, we spent our preteen years performing semi-regular all-night cleaning parties. We’d get out our brooms, sweep everything onto the carpet, and swear we wouldn’t go to sleep until we’d gotten it clean.

Six to eight hours later, we could roll up the carpet and sweep underneath it.

We couldn’t vacuum it, because by then it was six or so in the morning.

Instead, we went to bed exhausted, vacuumed (or beat) our carpet the next day, and unrolled it again across the floor.

A few years later, my Aunt Martha and my dad built a room for Anna and I in our previously unfinished basement. The teenaged and pre-teen kids (the first four of us) moved into the basement and Mom and Dad moved into the room that had previously been Anna’s and mine. Before they moved in, they carpeted the floor with dark green wall-to-wall carpeting.

As my sister and I neared the end of our teenage years, our family collectively realized that our allergies were being exacerbated by carpeting–and we pulled up all the carpet that had hardwood floors (or concrete) underneath. All except Mom and Dad’s room that is.

When Mom and Dad finally added on a few years back, they laid hardwood floors in the living room–leaving that one corner room as the only carpeted room in the house.

That’s the guest room now, and where Anna and I stay when we visit our parents in Lincoln.

Ironic, isn’t it?

Prompt #2: What was your first encounter with death? Was it a person or an animal? Did you have any rituals or otherwise “do” something with you grief? Or did you even understand what was going on?

My family didn’t keep pets so animal death didn’t really enter my equation–and my Grandpa Menter died before I can remember. So my first experience with death was when I was seven years old and my aunt delivered her daughter Melinda–stillborn.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table, crying and crying and crying. Of course, I’d never met Melinda, never had the opportunity to. But I grieved for her, for my aunt and uncle, for our family.

In my young grief, I’m not sure I was the best comforter, but I wrote my aunt a letter nonetheless. I wrote of my sorrow and grief-but I also told her I was praying that she would have another daughter, a daughter just like Melinda to fill the hole.

The funeral was just a blur for me. All I remember was being cold, standing outside in January.

My second really memorable experience of death came much later, when I was already in college and my Grandma Menter died.

She’d had Alzheimer’s for years and we’d had some forewarning of her decline as she moved from independent senior living to assisted living to an Alzheimer’s ward where she eventually went on hospice.

We’d visited her the weekend before, said what we knew would be our last goodbyes. She wasn’t eating or drinking at that point-she was clearly at the end.

The news came for sure on a Wednesday, over my lunch hour, right before my health aide class. I must have cried a little or something, because I ended up telling my instructors that she had died–and they encouraged me to go home. I pooh-poohed them, said nothing was to be gained by my going home. But I could only handle half of the class and ended up leaving before the three hours were up.

I’d expected to be ready, you see. I’d had plenty of time to settle into the idea that Grandma was dying. The Grandma I’d known as a child had left long ago, leaving a new Grandma more like a child than an elder.

But the preparations for the funeral brought me to the end of myself.

I couldn’t help. I couldn’t do anything. My parents and aunts and uncles were busily making arrangements and I could do nothing.

My siblings, all of whom had dealt with their grief long before Grandma died, went to a movie.

I felt helpless in my grief, guilty for not having done more when I could, angry that I couldn’t do anything now, even more angry that none of my siblings seemed to care.

I’d always been close to Grandma. I didn’t know it at the time, but Grandma attributed her decision to finally move to Lincoln (where her sons and their families were) to a conversation she’d had with the pre-teen me. Whatever I’d said had convinced her that yes, it was safest and best for her to be near us.

She’d started going blind before she moved, but we noticed the dementia progressing rapidly once she got to Lincoln. It got to the point we worried that she was eating properly. I went over to Grandma’s townhouse and cooked for her. She fell in the bathroom one day and I went over to help clean her up and make sure she was okay. While she was at the senior living townhouse, I was a caretaker and companion of sorts for her.

And then she went to assisted living. I didn’t visit her there, only saw her when we picked her up for church activities on Sundays and throughout the week. Anna and I picked her up for our home group, and laughed along with her while she shared her slightly rambling stories of childhood.

She wasn’t in assisted living long before she had to move further. We were blessed to have gotten a spot at a wonderful Alzheimer’s facility in town–wonderful for my Grandma and for the rest of the family, I know, but devastating for me in a way I didn’t realize until after she’d died.

You see, when Grandma went into the Alzheimer’s care facility, she ceased needing me, at least in my mind. I couldn’t do anything there for her. There were professionals there doing all the stuff I used to do–feeding her, helping her walk, pushing her wheelchair, helping her to the bathroom. I was helpless, so I withdrew.

I still saw her once a week when we picked her up for church and took her to dinner afterward, but our interaction was changed. She didn’t remember me by then, barely even remembered my dad. She knew he was important to her, but could only come up with “relative”, not “son”.

When she died and I could do nothing with the funeral, the weight of my helplessness in those last days fell upon me. I wept and wept and wept, blessed by the help of others, but feeling guilty at the same time.

I did nothing. I did nothing. I did nothing. My mind ran it over again and again. I left her before she died, left her in degrees. And now she was gone and I’d left her.

I still look back with sorrow on how I withdrew from Grandma once I could no longer help her. But I also see how God used my grief surrounding Grandma’s funeral to chip away at my self-reliance and make me realize my need for him and for the body of Christ.

In my grief over my helplessness and how I’d failed to do what I still could have done (be a companion), God reminded me of my utter helplessness in so many things. He reminded me of how I fall short of holiness. He reminded me that I need Him.

A dear friend of my late Grandma died this week.

Hazel was a faithful friend to my Grandma as my Grandma experienced the progression of Alzheimer’s.

Hazel was a wonderful woman, always full of joy and life, even in the midst of her own great pain.

And today Hazel walks on streets of gold, standing in the presence of the Almighty God. I’m rejoicing for her, set free from this body of sin and death–while all the while weeping for those of us left on earth, separated and still bound.

Tomorrow’s question:

What was your first encounter with death? Was it a person or an animal? Did you have any rituals or otherwise “do” something with you grief? Or did you even understand what was going on?

Prompt #1: What are your local newspapers? Has your name ever been mentioned in one? Has your picture ever appeared? How did you feel about that?

Growing up, our local newspaper was the “Lincoln Journal Star”, a liberal and not particularly newsy multicolor daily. We received it when I was really young, and I remember the paper guy always showed up during supper to collect his money. Our newspaper days were short-lived though, and I don’t remember getting the paper after I’d learned how to read.

In fact, I mostly remember the rather degrading nickname we had for the Journal Star (a bathroom fixture that roughly rhymes with “journal”?)

But that didn’t mean that I turned down the offer when a features writer from the Journal Star wanted to write an article about me.

I was one of two homeschooled National Merit Semifinalists in the area that year, and apparently that made me a good “local interest” story.

I agreed to an interview, scheduled a time. Somebody robbed a bank in Norfolk (pronounced “Nor-fork”) that day. Shots were fired and my feature writer went north to do public interest on some real news.

At the rescheduled interview, after brief introductions, JoAnne (the features writer) sat forward on my Mom’s slipcovered couch in our tiny living room. Somehow we’d managed to mostly ban the rest of the kids from the room, so it was just me and Mom and JoAnne. JoAnne took out her yellow legal pad and asked her first question: “Can you show me where you do school?”

Mom and I looked at each other and laughed. I didn’t have anywhere in particular that I “did” school. I did school at the kitchen table, on the living room floor, on my bed, at a table at Boston Market (where I worked part time), in the car, at church, you name it.

Her second question struck out as well: “What does a typical school day look like?” Uh, yeah. Typical school day. Do we have one of those?

We ended up talking about books mostly, about my passion for learning, for reading, for doing.

Since the photographer couldn’t take a picture of me “where I do school”, we opted for a photo of me lying on my mom’s porch swing with a copy of Pride and Prejudice on my chest.

When the article came out, I was appalled by the first line: “Rebekah Menter calls herself bookish, and it’s true–there’s not much the 17-year-old Merit Scholar semifinalist has done, or imagined doing, that she hasn’t studied and read about first.”

Of course, now the whole Lincoln Journal Star-reading population will think that I haven’t an original thought in my head, I fumed.

But the article was positive overall, and I wasn’t too disappointed by the results. I relished the cards that came in the mail carrying a clipped article and a handwritten note of congratulations. Most of those notes were from women who’d helped shape me into the young woman I was–my typing teacher from seventh grade, my Chemistry teacher from 10th and 11th grades, an older woman my Mom and I met with once a week in my early high school years to walk around the State capitol and pray.

It was a fun experience, I suppose, my fifteen minutes of fame–but I’ve since become much less extraordinary, and have settled for baring my soul online, in my own words (no “there’s not much she’s done, or imagined doing, that she hasn’t studied and read about first” here.)

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If you want to read the article, you’re welcome to do so by clicking the above picture. That’ll make a large photo of the whole article appear in a separate tab or window so you can read it. If not, feel free to ignore it :-)

Remember Linda’s Flashback Fridays? Man, did I love those things.

I understand why Linda stopped doing them-it’s a whole lot of work to host a weekly meme, and to come up with prompts on top of it? Wow.

But I miss taking intentional time to write down my memories while my memory is still (somewhat) fresh.

So I’ve made myself up some personal prompts (gleaned mostly from To our Children’s Children by Bob Greene) and intend to work my way through them in a spate of Fridays.

I’ll be choosing my prompts arbitrarily, sometimes based on what’s going on in my life (or in the news) at the time, other times just because.

This first prompt has been on my list of prompts for several months (since I made my list), but was chosen for this week because my picture was in an advertisement in our local newspaper this weekend. (Tagline: Why is it important to have a Registered in-house dietitian at your Skilled Nursing Center?)

Check it out if you’d like, on the upper right-hand corner of page 16.

Prompt #1: What are your local newspapers? Has your name ever been mentioned in one? Has your picture ever appeared? How did you feel about that?

Feel free to write your own memories in the comments or as a post of your own–I’d love to hear your memories (although you’re certainly not obligated to share.)

We were homeschooled, remember, and we were relatively active kids–but “PE” did not rank high on the list of educational priorities. In fact, there was really only one year that I remember us having a formal “P.E.” program.

Today Linda asks… Was physical fitness a focus in school when you were growing up? Did you have P.E. in elementary school or just recess? Was recess organized games or just free playtime?…

It was the year 1990.

Anna was six, a first grader.

I was five, a kindergartener.

Joshua was three, a preschooler.

Daniel was 18 months-ish, a toddler.

Mom was 8 months pregnant with John.

She taught us how to play hopscotch.

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Read other memories about P.E. at Mocha with Linda’s Flashback Friday Meme

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At Bible Study on Wednesday, we were asked to tell a funny story about ourselves. I couldn’t think of one, so I had everyone else go first. I still wasn’t any closer to coming up with a story when they got to me. Thankfully, my sister reminded me of the tooth story.

Which is what Linda’s asking us about today…

Linda asks… What are your dental memories of childhood? Who pulled your baby teeth and how was it done – with a tissue, string, or other method? Was it a traumatic experience or no big deal? Did you have to have any teeth pulled by the dentist? Did the tooth fairy visit your house? If so, how much did you get for each tooth and how long did that last? How old were you at your first dental visit? Did you go regularly? Did you have any/many cavities as a child? Was dental hygiene taught in school? Was flossing a big deal when you were growing up? …

I was eight and my brother Joshua was seven. We were climbing on our “eagle’s nest” (big wooden swingset/fort structure) out back when Joshua got upset with me for some reason.

I have no idea now what provoked him to action–but once provoked, he bit.

Problem was, I was climbing slightly above him, so the nearest available bit was my shorts clad bottom!

He took a big bite–and there went his tooth!

We called me “buns of steel” for years after that.

For myself, my best tooth-losing memory was the time I literally lost a tooth.

I was riding my bicycle around the neighborhood, eating an apple, trolling along nicely–and once I got home, I realized that my once loose tooth was gone.

Which wasn’t a problem, except that the tooth fairy couldn’t leave a quarter in a glass of water in lieu of a tooth that wasn’t there.

I had to find that tooth!

I went over the neighborhood with a fine-toothed (hah!) comb–but I never did find that missing tooth.

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Read more tooth stories at Mocha with Linda’s Flashback Friday Meme

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