Diane's Dress & A Meme

Time for an alluring view of me standing in front of the "tire flower bed", circa 1973. Can you see the flowers? They are probably petunias......Mom always planted those in the tire. Great shadowing on my face.......looks like I have a Hitler moustache.

Its especially heartwarming that my mom saw fit to include the tether ball pole in the photo. In truth, I couldn't wait to stop posing so I could run back there and throw the ball around the pole a few times. Mom probably had some difficulty aiming the Polaroid Land camera since she was simultaneously serving as a barricade against a herd of teenage boys who were crowding around, anxious to rush forward and ask the bespectacled bookworm for a date. Quite a glowing sight I was in that yellow dress, made possibly of dotted Swiss fabric, though I don't recall for sure. Yellow is simply wonderful on me......I wear it all the time......cough, cough. In truth, its a ghastly match for my complexion, and I avoid it, along with all pastels. Fortunately, this very fashionable 1970's dress did not belong to me. On an idiotic whim, my best friend and I had decided to wear the bridesmaids' dresses from her sister's wedding to church the morning this photo was taken. Thanks for the memory, Mom.

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Gramma Ann---of more than one great blog, Ann's Quotes & Things,

My Reading Corner, and others---tagged me recently for a fairly uncomplicated meme. The requirement is simply to list 6 facts about yourself. Here goes.....sorry I couldn't keep it simple:

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1. From my baby book (Yes, I have a fairly-well completed one thanks to the fact that I was a first child......thanks, Mom.): a. My first sentence was "See the birdie", spoken on June 25, 1959, when I was one year and 5 days old.......b. At 2 years of age, some of the books Mom would read to me were Farm ABC, Outside Cat, The Pie Wagon, and Pitidoe the Colormaker. Through online used book stores, I have acquired the latter two books. I look through them and try to assess my feelings.......some of the pictures do seem vaguely familiar.

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2. When I was 2 years old, a big dog knocked me down and bit me in the forehead. Thankfully, I have no memory of this event. Stitches were required and I think the poor dog ended up sacrificing his head for a rabies test. There is a scar high on my forehead, which is noticeable only in the event that my hair is worn severely pulled back, which never happens. When I was in the throes of a depressive delusional paranoia several years ago, I showed the scar to a nurse and told her that my parents had lied to me about the dog bite and actually the scar was from an incision made to insert a radio transmitter (I thought everyone could read my thoughts.......its a common delusion.......that other people can read your mind, and one which I've subsequently brought to life by becoming a blogger and spewing my mind to the world. A few other people truly are "reading my mind". I'm convinced that delusions do contain within them a tiny grain of some kind of truth.) I'm guessing this delusion might never have occurred had I actually retained a memory of the dog bite incident.

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3. When I was 4 years old, I was with my grandparents and a cousin and we were throwing bread crumbs to ducks swimming in a pond at a cemetery near Waterloo. Suddenly, it seemed I forgot to let go of a bread crumb and into the pond I plopped. I recall sinking in the filthy water and then my grandfather's strong arm reached in and pulled me out. Several years later my cousin confessed to me that he had pushed me.......which could be possible as the cousin was (and is) somewhat of a trouble-maker.

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4. One day in third grade, while sitting with two other girls in the school lunchroom waiting to be dismissed, I---for reasons unknown---picked up a stray pea from the table and absent-mindedly tossed it towards one of the upper-grade teachers, never thinking it would be felt through her heavy skirt and sweater. For pity's sake, it was one little, cooked pea. Well.....it hit her in the derriere and, by golly, it must have felt like a bullet to her, for she whirled right around and came stalking over to where we three girls were sitting. At first I was incredulous, and then terrified, for she was the most frightening teacher in the whole elementary school. All of us kids in the lower grades were scared to death of her. She barked out the question, asking who had thrown the pea. I don't really recall, but I must have admitted to being the pea-thrower. Plus, the girls on each side of me were probably staring wide-eyed in my direction. The offended teacher right away told my teacher and they must have called my mom, for when I got home that day Mom informed me that I would have to go and formally apologize to the peaed teacher. It seems an appointment was set up for me to do that a couple days later, during a recess. It went fine. I remember picking wildflowers from the ditch and putting them in a frozen orange juice concentrate can that I had covered in flowered contact paper.......to serve as a peace offering when I walked with great trepidition through the upper-grade hallway to the victim's classroom and apologized to her. To this day, my old friends will occasionally bring up the incident......"Hey, remember that time you chucked the pea at Mrs. M___?" I wish I could say that I WAS truly sorry for what I had done, but she was a really mean teacher and maybe in a way she deserved the peaing.

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5. Every year, our junior high held a spelling contest---bee, or whatever---it was a big deal, we sat up on the stage and spelled the words out loud in front of an audience. In my seventh-grade year, I won the trophy! I was ecstatic; spelling was my favorite subject because it was so darn easy. I never had to study, other than looking at a list of words once and that was enough. I attribute my spelling abilities to constant book-reading. The winning word was "acetylsalicylic".......not a word we had studied, so I had to wing it to win.

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6. My parents didn't wish to shell out money for a band instrument, but I did take piano lessons and could read music and thus was asked to join the percussion section of the school band, way back there behind the rows of woodwinds and brass horns. I played snare drum, bass drum, tenor drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, triangle, wood blocks, maracas, tympani......you name it. Percussion seemed to be where the troubled and the troublemakers ended up, though, of course, I didn't fit either category. Ahem. My favorite thing to do was pound out a song's beat on the bass drum. Maybe it gave me a feeling of being in charge, though in truth I was simply submitting to the timing as directed by the band conductor. A bass drummer, in a backgroundish way, controls the whole band by maintaining the correct rhythm. If the bass drum gets out of rhythm, the whole band follows suit. It was a pretty cool feeling......one that I miss from time to time, actually. Perhaps I possess a deeply-buried desire for power and authority. Beware.

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7. **EXTRA INFO**.......I've lived on a farm all my life. Not the same farm, but on a farm. The farm I live on now is about 6 miles from the farm I grew up on. I can read your mind......you're thinking "Wowser......whoop-de-doo......big deal."

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There, I've told you far more than you wanted to know about me. I would imagine this Six Things Meme has been around the blog block many times, but if you're a blogger and you've never done this particular meme, then consider yourself tagged.....YOU'RE IT! Get busy writing about yourself.

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