Commonplace

Having just read Belle, Book, and Candle’s thoughtful writing on commonplace books, and a bit too busy right now to write a new post myself. I am reposting my own post on commonplace, which I wrote several years ago, in hopes that you will not only take the time to read Belle, but that you will consider keeping a commonplace book yourself – or tell us about the one you do have. Belle, Book, and Candle’s post can be found here. Thank you, Belle, for the inspiration I needed today.  Penny

Commonplace. The recording of words and ideas in a common place. It was started many hundreds of years ago and became known as commonplacein the 1600′s. It is used to this day by writers, poets, speechwriters and songwriters – even scrap bookers. I started thinking about the practice of gathering ideas in a commonplace book as I was reading a blog about books.

Do you have any idea how many blogs there are just about books? There are blogs about mysteries and children’s literature and authors. There are Pearl Buck and Jane Austen blogs. There are blogs about decorating with books and making books, and, of course, many authors these days have their own blogs.

They are all commonplace.

I have kept card files on books I’ve read since my first Kiddie Lit class. I no longer include such things as publisher and copyright date, but, I do write a brief synopsis of the book, what it was about, the month and year I read it and sometimes, when I’m really full of myself, I rate it. ★★★★★ Commonplace.

I also have kept a book with quotes. If I hear something notable or read something, I will write it down and cite the author. Sometimes, I will cut a quote out of a magazine or on a greeting card and paste it onto a page of my quote book.  Commonplace.

Emerson and Thoreau, Jefferson and Whitman, Hardy and Twain all kept such personal books. Many even learned the practice of commonplacing at Oxford or Harvard – or at their tutor’s direction.

My mother kept scrapbooks of pictures and memorabilia  that I enjoy today and my father kept succinct books that recorded good fishing spots and articles.

I first heard such a collection of phrases mentioned as a commonplace in “Tasha Tudor’s Heirloom Crafts”. Tudor was, among many things, a crafter of dolls. Her dolls lived in intricate, homemade doll houses, so famed that they were attracted to the folks at the Smithsonian and displayed there. Her dolls, clothed and appointed with furniture evoking the 1800′s, had their own commonplace book with tiny writing on the pages.

I love the idea of a commonplace book and was intrigued by the realization that I have kept such books not knowing their origins for much of my adult life. Quite exciting for something so common to me.

Do you practice commonplacing?

Do you keep a journal, special notebook, scrapbook, or log?

The image is from “Tasha Tudor’s Heirloom Crafts”. Photography by Richard W. Brown.

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Ms. Chiquita Banana

Mid-century. That’s what it is being called; that warp in time so many of us, now of a certain age, grew up in. It was as magical and idyllic as it was frightening and confusing and many of us, we baby boomers, had a playmate of sorts that we grew up with. The television. Big cabinets with little screens, three or four channels in shades of gray that went off the air at midnight, when the pictures would start to fill with snow and the national anthem would play, signing off for the night. When I was old enough to stay up that late, I always stood, in my pajamas, at sign off time.

We of the mid-century club watched Romper Room and Howdy Doody, Bonanza and Dr. Kildare, along with those commercials with jingles that still linger, like the one I started singing the other day as I cut up a banana for Kezzie.

I’m Chiquita Banana and I’m here to say

Put some rubber in your blubber

And you’ll bounce away!

 “Mom” cried Katy, “I always thought that was the song until friends said it wasn’t”.

Well, it really wasn’t the jingle, but, we all sang it that way and it became real to us. We would put our hands in the air or on our hips and belt it out like Carmen Miranda as we walked across the narrow bridge over the Eisenhower Expressway, giggling at the thought of all that blubber bouncing on the trucks speeding below us on the Ike.

When bananas, just being introduced into our midwestern stores, were in season, it was a rare treat to have one, carefully peeling so as not to bruise. That first bite, each time, so rare and delicious, was like visiting a foreign land . . . and then someone would start blubbering and we’d try not to bounce.

I don’t really remember if I saw this commercial on television or at the movie theater, where the jingle aired and whose purpose was to teach us all how to eat a banana. My sister and cousins would pile into Aunt Christina’s black and white Plymouth. The car always reminded me of saddle shoes. We would spend a hot summer day or Saturday afternoon watching double features at the Lido Theater.

As Kezzie ate her banana, Ezra cuddled in his mommy’s arms, and Yia Yia washed some berries. Suddenly, mid-century music escaped out of that little device we call a cell phone, which is not only a phone but a typewriter and a tape recorder and a camera and the repository of all YouTube has to offer. There was Ms. Chiquita Banana, teaching us how to eat a banana.

Do you remember this jingle? Are there others you remember from your childhood? Did you or your friends do your own interpretations of commercials?

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Croc-a-whiles

A lot happens in a day. In a week. In a life. We go from babyhood to childhood, teenagers to adulthood, and then we become, what?

A croc-a-while?

How does one become a croc-a-while?

With burp cloths and snuggle time,

Storybooks and nursery rhymes.

Bubble baths and dinnertime.

When we played and snuggled and did all the things we are supposed to do when we are about half past two years old, Mommy and Daddy explained that when Kezzie woke up in the morning, Yia Yia would be gone. On her way home to Papa. We kissed and rubbed noses and hugged, and then, like Tigger, Kezzie bounced off to bed as Yia Yia said “see you later, alligator”, a pause, followed by “after while” in a little girl voice,

 CROC-A-WHILE!

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Pin money

Pin money.

I have never heard a man use this term I have known for as long as I can remember. It has always been the women who have said it.

Women of my family, working around the kitchen table, kneading dough for kourambedes, brushing butter on paper-thin sheets of phyllo, working grape leaves around ground meat, casually mentioning that Patty was taking in laundry for some extra pin money.

Ma, slipping a few dollars to her friend Laura for coming over on her day off to give us a perm, saying it was pin money.

My Aunt Christina said it to me the first time I baby sat as I walked past her kitchen window with 50 cents held like Midas’ gold in the palm of my hand. “Now you have some pin money, Penny” as she smiled down at me.

“Penny, put this away for something special. It’s your pin money” said my Aunt Babe after my first week of stocking shelves for Burney Brothers Bakery at a grocery store in the City.

I mentioned it the other day as I thought out loud about ways to make some extra money and was asked what pin money was. Pin money, to me, has always meant small change or a few dollars, squirreled away here and there for something extra. At 50¢ an hour, it netted me the $3 I needed to buy a mohair sweater, spun in sunshine yellow, from the Ben Franklin Five and Dime when I was twelve years old. Quarters stashed away in a little tin can allowed me to purchase a leather-bound book held together by a strong, gold cord. “A Treasure Chest” is filled with wonderful quotes. It followed me to college and marriage and children and sits on a shelf. It was a book recommended to me my high school creative writing teacher. The chord remains taut. I still have a change purse where coins are tossed and eventually go toward something special; a book, a present, a new scarf.

Pin money, it seems, claims many origins, most of them about the purchase of pins. One source calls it “a small allowance to buy clothes”, another for  the purchase of pins, which were once an extravagant expense. Pins were, and still are, used for dressmaking, though they were paid for dearly in the past. Centuries ago, men would leave “pynne money” to wives or daughters in their wills. Nineteenth and twentieth century women were given an allowance, pin money, for expenses and, perhaps if one was frugal, a pair of silk stockings.

Pin money.

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Today’s strength

Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength – carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn’t empty tomorrow of its sorrows; it empties today of its strength.

 Corrie Ten Boom

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How now brown cow

 It was the root beer, on tap,  that had me as wide-eyed and eager as an eight year old girl at a backyard graduation party recently. With a grin on his face and a foamy cup in his hand,  my Tom endeared himself anew as he handed me the best fresh drawn root beer I’ve had in decades.

I closed my eyes, smelled the distinct essence of licorice, and slowly drank in my childhood.

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago mid-century, we didn’t have extra money for many vacations. Dinah Shore’s blowing of a kiss after singing “see the USA in your Chevrolet” was usually our only entrée to cross-country family adventures.

Our own backyard was our summertime retreat, especially on weekends when relatives and friends would come by for conversation and laughter, circling the driveway in dance as the record player sat in the open window of the kitchen, blaring the songs of the Old Country . . .

. . . and food. Always food. Pastries and cookies, coffeecakes and bowls laden with fruit of the season. Sometimes, there would be bricks of ice cream from Walgreens; squares of New York Cherry or Neapolitan, lined up like boats on a sea of plates, the spoons for oars.

The best treat of all would come home in gallon jugs from a screened in porch attached to a service garage on Maywood’s 5th Avenue. Strutzels root beer stand made the most heavenly root beer there ever was. My anticipation would begin when Ma pulled out the huge glass containers from under the kitchen sink. More often than not, we children would climb into our own Chevy, Penny and Dottie and Teddy and sometimes Louie, and ride along with Daddy to that orange screened in porch of root beer renown.

There was always a line at Strutzels; high school kids gathering on date night, a baseball team after the game, folks from the neighborhood. One could buy a glass of foamy root beer for five cents. There was also a schooner for just a bit more. A few tables were set up inside and out, but it was mostly lingering on the sidewalk along the street. Our jugs would be filled and I’d watch the foam rise to the top, licking my lips, wishing for hurry.

Off we would go, the glass jars with their handles safely positioned in PenDot’s interior; homeward bound as dusk thought of settling in.

Out came the ice cream scoop, the napkins, the spoons, the straws and the glasses. Slowly the scoop, dipped in water first, would carve out a mound of ice cream and be placed in a glass. Slowly the root beer would flow and then fizz and then foam as the ice cream floated about in the best volcanic eruption of summer. Layers of ice cream and foam and root beer. Layers of summertime all in a glass.

Brown cow, black cow, root beer float; whatever you call it, I call it heaven on a hot summer’s eve.

Image of Elsie, the Borden mascot, from texasarchive.org.

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Overcome

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.

                                                                           Beverley Nichols

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Shakespeare in Love

http://www.salon.com/Shakespeare in Love

“I know something of a woman in a man’s profession. Yes, by God, I do know about that.”

Queen Elizabeth I to Viola De Lesseps at the revelation that Viola, a woman, is acting on stage.

Do you have any favorite quotes or scenes from this movie?

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Busted!

I could not believe what I was hearing this morning. Matt Lauer used the word busted on the Today Show. I was making the bed, listening to the morning news at the top of the hour, most of the early features about BP and the oil spill in the Gulf and the word gushed out of his mouth.

Busted!

We have been hearing the word used more and more on local news. Our favorite news stations, both radio and television. I say  ”we” because Tom and I have commented on it, rather frequently, in fact. I am sure it has been slowly seeping into everyday language  and we hadn’t noticed it until now. You know, you hear something, are a little taken aback, go on, and it slowly becomes a word or a phrase that was once considered crude or slang or profane and suddenly, there it is, in your face, or even on your own lips, everywhere.

Down I came, muttering to myself, to Tom, to Maya  ”I don’t believe it. Matt Lauer said ‘busted’!”. “Really? When?” “Just now.”  The day, just heating up.

I looked up the word busted. First the internet, then I pulled out the several dictionaries I have and still use. I love dictionaries, especially old ones where you can find words like dither, but, that discussion is for another day. I looked up busted. Besides all the definitions referring to the bust, busted is listed as slang, a verb and oh, my, the many uses of it, some causing me to blush.

Growing up, it was considered slang and inappropriate to use the word, the term, the verb – busted. Busted meant you are goin’ to the slammer and you ain’t gettin’ out no time soon. I was not appropriate to use the word busted.

I was shocked. Really, I was. Matt Lauer, you are so busted!

Is there a word or phrase now commonly used that sets your teeth to grinding?

While you’re thinking about it, here’s a song we all know.

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Signage

Hum? Enjoy your visit along the river, or in the toilet?

Just goes to show that anything in life can be made to be more pleasant.

Just a few observances when wandering off the cutoff.

I wonder if I’ll see anything interesting as I wend my way back home today.

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