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So, Ruby’s Mom Had. No. Forearms.

Groovy-Cool Graph
“Where the Walls are Soft” as a Groovy-Cool Graph

January 15, 2008

How cool is that?! I think it’s the cat’s ass, myself.

Okay, onto the original subject, for which I have no pic, which is why I had to post the groovy-cool gizmo link… I’ve been harangued about this subject since I first brought it up, by all the Ruby fans (okay, mostly by Cardiogirl), and I can’t go another day with all the betch, betch, betching…

Ruby’s Mom was born with her arms drawn up so that her teeny-tiny little hands were pretty much touching her teeny-tiny little shoulders. It was all they (and by “they”, I must assume Ruby means her mom’s parents with the help of a midwife, considering her mom must have been born close to a hundred and twenty-five years ago, if not over…) could do to draw her little arms down into a normal-looking position, and it took days to a week to do it. She never was quite able to straighten her arms right out and lock her elbows, either.

Afterward, it became rather painfully apparent that this otherwise normal and most beautiful infant had been born… with….

No.

Forearms. (cred to Cardiogirl, who won’t type it any.

Other.

Way).

Yes, folks, the poor kid’s hands were growin’ out her elbows.

I know that sounds a little mean-spirited, but that’s how Ruby said it to me, so that’s how I’m saying it to you. From Ruby’s mouth to your ears (eyes, ahem…*).

ANYway….

Ruby’s Mom (whose name I never did remember to ask, but I’d only have to come up with a pseudonym anyway, so I will stick with “Ruby’s Mom”, I guess) never let the fact that she had.

No.

Forearms.

get in the way of anything. She grew up, went to school, taught school, got married, had eight kids (EIGHT!!!! KIDS!!!!), and ran her house like clockwork back in the days when most women had their share of overwhelming days.

She lived in the middle of the Northern Ontario “bush”, in a little, wee berg called “Northland”, where the only way in was by train. They eventually got a road built in; Ruby was old enough to remember it being built, but even then… Wow!

There was no electricity. No running water. And it’s not like Ruby’s Mom could run to the corner store to buy a loaf of bread, either. Nope. She made her own. Enough to feed EIGHT!!!! KIDS!!!!, remember?! Washed her family’s clothes by hand. Sewed most of them herself, too, with the exception of their “dress-up” clothes, the ones they wore to church, funerals, and dances. On top of all of this, she ran a small farm, growing vegetables, raising pigs and chickens, and chopping kindling… with.

No.

Forearms.

Ruby remembers that she never wore short sleeves, although she’d push her sleeves up past her elbows when she was working at home. If there was a knock on the door, though, first thing she’d do was yank her sleeves down over her wrists, so Ruby thinks that in some ways, it did bother her a little.

But, here’s the real kicker… it wasn’t until one of Ruby’s older sisters went to school for the first time and came home afterward crying, that Ruby even knew that her mother had.

No.

Forearms.

Seems that in the one-room school house that the kids all went to, that they liked to trade their lunches with each other (some things never change, huh?). It was during her first lunch hour at school, that Ruby’s older sister found out in that mean and nasty way that only kids have of treating each other, that she wasn’t able to join in on the lunch trade with the other girls.

Why? Well, that’s what Ruby’s sister wanted to know, wasn’t it? Well, it was because, they said, “Your mother works her bread with her elbows!” And they laughed until Ruby’s sister cried.

And then some.

When her sister came home with this story, Ruby was first puzzled. Then hurt. Then steaming mad. Ruby’s Mom, on the other hand, set about making a chocolate cake. In the middle of the week.

Un.

Heard.

Of.

And the next day, Ruby’s sister was most certainly the STAR player in the school house lunch circle, seeing as how she had a coveted piece of the Blue-Ribbon-Winning-Chocolate-Cake-of-Which-the-Recipe-was-
Never-Shared-and-Everybody-Else’s-Mother-was-Green-with-Envy-Over in her lunch pail.

Not bad for having

No.

Forearms.

Boo-Yah, Ruby’s Mom!

As a bit of a PS… watch this space tomorrow (or the next night, at the latest) for evidence of dead people. Damn, Suzi and her Dumb Dares.

Random Song for the Day: “Me and My Shadow” – Frank Sinatra & Sammy Davis Jr.

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Mish-Mash

Little Red Shoes
“Little Red Shoes”
Taken October 20, 2007 with Canon PowerShot A550

The Little Red Shoes sit in my mother’s Etagiere, if I spelled that correctly. Elle? Wanna let me know, Betch?! My mom calls it a “What-Not”. I think it’s because it’s to display all your knick-knacks and what-not in. Anyway, that’s where the Little Red Shoes are, when they’re not in the bathtub, with me and my camera. Bathtubs make great backgrounds for some pictures. Wet bathtubs are not necessarily good for cameras, but mine’s tough.

I love the Little Red Shoes, but I don’t have a story about them. I just couldn’t come up with a pic for this post.

I’m having trouble catching up with all the posts I have in draft. Hence the title – “Mish-Mash” is about what this one will be – just a couple of bits and pieces that I’d like to get out of my hard drive and onto the blog. This clip from today’s post by Cardiogirl reminded me of a bit about my mom when she was a kid, which, in turn, reminded me of one about Ruby’s mom…

clipped from www.cardiogirl.net

So essentially we have a socially-accepted version of a wealthy pretty woman (former Ford model who must have earned a lot of cash) whose hobby is traveling the globe and shopping. So she finds “amazing stuff” and brings it back to New York to re-sell it. Do I have that right? I thought so.

And these aren’t your mother’s baubles. A telephone table finished in frog skin. I’m understanding this, though I find it crazy, until I get to the shagreen part. What is shagreen? Is it like shazam?

  blog it

A million years ago, when my mom was a little girl of about 12, she and her sister were down at the nearby fishin’ hole with their cousin. My mom is the older of the three, but for some reason, it was Auntie and Cuz that did the ordering around of my mom. This was the story that made me realize that my mom was a little mouse when she was a kid. How she managed to grow up into a stern (SERIOUSLY stern) School Marm, I will never know. My mom was the teacher you didn’t want to get, because you couldn’t get away with any monkey business, and you might even (OMIGOD!) learn something!

At any rate (as Mom would say), they were down at the fishin’ hole, dib-dabbling around in the water, when the conversation turned to frog legs. As an appetizer. Because that was what the rich people ate. Probably every day, even. Imagine, they told each other, all the rich people in the big cities paying unbelievable amounts of money for a plate of frog legs, when there were hundreds of frog legs attached to hundreds of frogs right in front of them. For free.

And so Auntie and Cuz decided that they wanted frog legs for dinner. My mother didn’t think that was a very good idea. She thought it might be a little hard on the frogs. Auntie and Cuz didn’t give a damn about what the frogs thought of the idea, and they didn’t give much of a damn what my mom thought about it, either. They just sent my mom up to the house to get a knife. And my mom went. Slooooowly.

The whole walk up for a knife, she tried to think of a way to save those frogs. She couldn’t think of a thing. She considered just not going back to the fishin’ hole, but decided she might pay for that later, so instead, when she got to the kitchen she decided she would bring back a dull butter knife. She reasoned that it would hurt the frogs less than a sharp one would. At 12, my mom was all for “less hurt”, apparently.

As it turned out, a dull butter knife does NO hurt to a frog, because it wasn’t long before the other girls gave up trying to saw off frog’s legs and quit in disgust. They didn’t get their frog leg dinner that day, but there were probably a few pissed off frogs in the fishin’ hole before they gave up.

Years later, one of those girls ate frog’s legs in a restaurant – by accident. She saw someone else’s order of what she thought was chicken and just pointed to it, telling the server, “I’ll have that.” Served her right.

Ruby’s mom, now, would have got the legs off those frogs lickety-split. She was a woman who got things done (she also had no forearms – there’s a story for the blog, huh? Soon. Honest.).

Despite being a woman who “got things done”, Ruby’s mom had a heart of gold, and hated to see any animal suffer. She lived a hard, rough life on a farm, though, and there were times that some animals just had to be “taken care of”. Chickens had to be killed. Pigs had to be slaughtered. Sometimes, you had to shoot your dog. And there were always kittens that couldn’t be kept, and had to be “taken care of”.

Ruby’s mom hated that job, but it had to be done. She believed that the most humane way to “take care of” kittens was to drown them. Most people would shove the kittens in a burlap sack and tie it shut, and pitch the poor buggers in the nearest river. Not Ruby’s mom. That wasn’t humane enough for Ruby’s mom.

No, Ruby’s mom would pull on a pair of heavy gloves, fill a pail full of water and, one by one, she would hold each kitten (gently) under the surface until it was dead. Oh yeah, and she would make sure to fill the pail with warm water, so the little dears wouldn’t die shivering…

Random Song for the Day: “Alive” – Pearl Jam