Mine kept hers in a couple of places as time went on, but they started out very neatly on index cards in a little box. Everyone had an index card, and everyone had the many, many years marked on the card on which she had shipped off a holiday card to them.
I decided to copy this tactic. It being 2021, I loaded my list of recipients into a Google Doc in Google Drive and decided to send cards in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and our perpetual quest to become a nation that lives up to the ideals in our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
It's been a long quest and it's not over yet.
Meanwhile, I keep my mother's box next to the Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, CA salt n' pepper shakers I recovered from my grandmother's stash when I was cleaning out my mother's house in 2014 (see previous post).
Actually, I'm not sure they're a pair. Not sure what the rabbit is doing there or where it came from. But I imagine it on its way through the hot desert (I mean, its ears are drooping) trying to find its way to Hollywood to get its paw prints in the famous sidewalk.
My mother's oldest brother, Richie, and his wife, Jody, never had kids. So they made a plan to take all four of us nieces and nephews on a roundtrip road trip to California when we turned 12. It was held out before us our entire lives, something to look forward to despite the fact that cars back then did not have air conditioning and by the time we would reach Needles, CA it would be 111 degrees in the shade.
They road tested the trip on my grandmother, Richie's mother, Mary, in the late 1950s/early 1960s. I wish any of them were alive now to talk about that trip. My grandmother was a big woman, six feet tall and over 200 pounds. What kind of car did they travel in? I know she -- a huge enthusiast for life with a loud voice and endless generosity and maybe a touch of manic-depression -- loved the trip and brought back boat loads of souvenirs -- pieces of the Painted Desert, cedar toothpick holders from Crater Lake, etc. in addition to the salt and pepper shakers -- so how did they fit all of this into the vehicle?! It had to be larger than the one in which we journeyed in 1973, a blue, four door Mercury Comet circa 1971.
The first of the kids to go was my cousin Walter in 1965. My cousin Cindy must have been on the trip in 1969. Looking back at the sometimes violent civic unrest of that era during the height of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, a time in which the nation sustained the political assassinations of four progressive leaders, I am wondering what both those trips were like. Did they follow the news? Did they circumvent certain cities?
Luckily my cousins are still well and with us, and I can find out. Luckily we've elected a new administration in Washington that is respectful of Dr. King's legacy, the Black Lives Matter movement, and our ongoing work for equity for all. Stay tuned.
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