Face-Off: Me vs. Andrew

Folks,

I've got another face-off for your consideration here. I recently visited with my nephew Andrew. You can learn more about him here.

Andrew likes to play by his own rules. And I like to try new things and exercise my rules-driven and overly rigid mind. So we did something different this time.


I called out the name of a person, and he made a face that best suited that person. I tried to match him. It's your duty to vote on who's cuter.

"Andrew... Show me Grandmamma Dill!"






"Andrew, show me your Mom!"







"Andrew, show me your Dad!"







"Andrew, show me Granddad Dill!"






...perfect.

Thanks,
DCD

The Smell of Nostalgia

I recently wrote about memory trickiness, exercises, and comic books. I told you about how I used specific memories of comic books to classify and 'age' other memories I had that were attached to those comics. Like that time in 1975 when we stopped at a hotel on one of our long distance trips and ended up getting to swim in the hotel pool at dusk.


My buddy Mario lists another memory technique that he swears by. Smell. It's not a new concept, I'm sure. But what may be new to you is the smell of comics. Smell has long been associated as the most powerful sense for eliciting particular memories.

But when Mario talks about the smell of a comic book, he's talking about the musty back-issue smell of slowly rotting paper. The memories and nostalgic feeling that he's invoking are of days spent pouring over back issues or re-reading his own mags.

The smell of comic doesn't particularly do anything for me. I'm familiar with it, and I think it's pleasant, but it doesn't necessarily invoke strong memories for me. I think it's because of the quantity of comic books that have marched through my life. The smell of comics doesn't hold any special attachment anymore. Not like certain glimpses and flashes that I have from particular comic books.






I think comics are unque in this era. The glimpse of a graphic that can bring forth a strong memory. Television and movies have this, but the static picture can sometimes be stronger held in the memory than the moving one. Or maybe it's just that we could spend more time staring at it.






But please don't get me wrong, I'm not immune to the smell-memory attachment by any means. There's one particular smell I encounter from time to time that suddenly sends me back to a very young age and a lonely hospital stay. Tonsils, maybe? I remember my mom coming to visit and bringing me a toy car. I remember being upset because I got a piece of sugar crisp cereal stuck in the back seat of the car and I didn't want my mom finding out.

I have strong smell-memories attached to the houses of both my grandmothers. I believe the smell is from certain cleaning fluids or laundry detergent. One is mixed with old paper, and is the smell of my grandmother Dill's basement entrance to her old house on Eagle Court in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

The other smell is some sort of bathroom cleaning fluid. And a particular memory comes flooding back of my standing at the bathroom sink at my Grandmother Lomax's house in North Carolina. I'm slowly filling the bathroom sink with water and my Mego bend-em Batman and Robin figures are in serious deadly danger.

Both of these are treasured memories. One is general feeling, the other is specific incident. They are strong.

My kids often visit their Grammy and Gramps Richards for a week over the summer. The kids get to trade off with who gets to go when. When they come back, their clothes always smell different. Having been through Grammy's washing machine during their stay. And I can't help but think that this is one of the smell's that will form strong nostalgic memories for them when they're my age.

Thanks,
DCD

The First Comic Book

Do you remember your first comic book? I do not. You think I would, with how important the medium has become to me. But no, I don’t know what it was.

Memory is a strange and tricky thing. I become more aware of this fact the older I get. I’ve even begun some memory exercises, forcing my brain to relive certain experiences from my past just so that the memories won’t fade completely. Unsurprisingly, I have a few documents and spreadsheets that help me in this pursuit. More of a ‘workbook’ phase to the memory exercise rather than a crutch.

No… when it comes to exercising my memory, I have two crutches. The first is that we moved so often when I was growing up. My father, the colonel to you, was an Air Force officer and we never stayed in the same place for very long. Until high school, the longest we ever spent anywhere was three years in New Hampshire. I was lucky to make it through six years of junior high/high school in the same house before the Air Force was to move all that around again. And even that is with one year of The Colonel stationed elsewhere and coming back every so often for extended weekends.

When you move around a lot growing up, you usually can start matching memories with the years in which they occur. For instance, we lived in Montgomery, Alabama for the 1981/1982 school year. Therefore I know I got my bike and a copy of Green Lantern #150 for Easter in 1982 because I remember the house we lived in for that Easter. Get it?


My other crutch is comic books. I remember many of the comics I had growing up. And I can pin some of these comics to certain experiences I had. Now these comic books sport cover dates, which are three months in the future from their shipping dates. So I know all these February comics I have were stuffed in my stocking by Santa Clause.


And I know that we moved from Texas to upstate New York in the summer of 1977 because of this:


(I have a story about this particular comic that I’ll share with you on a later post.)

My MOTHER would say the summer trek from one end of the country to the other was memorable because she was pregnant with my baby sister Robyn. However, that particular bit of sticky drama did not involve me. I was in the back seat. Content with this:


And at some point that summer, we went to Ocean City, NJ. My proof is this:


However, the earlier in my life that I try to illicit memories from, the trickier things seem to get. For instance, until recently I could have swarn that my first comic book was Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #214. And that my Dad gave me the comic when I had chicken pox in our house small first house in San Antonio, Texas.


However, if we check the spreadsheet of childhood comics, we find that this half-remembered fact cannot possibly be accurate:


So no, I can’t tell you what my first comic book was with any accuracy. Nor can the spreadsheet be trusted. As I compiled it, I realized the data was telling me my Mother bought a copy of Captain Marvel #27 in May of 1973 when I was three years old. No. That can’t be right. As I mulled this over, I was stormed with a long-forgotten memory of a older-kid-next-door in San Antonio who loved comics. Who loved Marvel comics, in particular. Loved them so much that he was prone to share them with me and even give me some, cultivating an early love of Jack Kirby. I’ll write more on THAT one later, when I can get through it without becoming emotional.

It’s illogical that my Mom would buy a comparatively obscure comic for her three year old son in 1973. It’s perfectly logical that an older kid would give the six year old next door a back issue from his collection in 1976.


In 1989, I was in college in West Chester, Pennsylvania and when not at class or at work, I was slowly rebuilding or building up my collection of comics. I was focusing on the Legion in particular. I picked up one issue, snapped open the tape on the bag and board, slipped the comic out, and flipped it open. This image hit me in the chest like a lightning bolt.


Images came flooding in. Grell. Measles. The seventies. San Antonio, Texas. And my father… having NO IDEA of the passion he had just ignited. A forgotten memory came storming back.

Thanks,
DCD

Hammacher Memorials

This is Hammacher Memorials. Recently destroyed.


Hammacher Memorials is a place in Martinsburg that sells headstones. They've been at their location on Route 45 for as long as I've lived here, which is fifteen years. I've never once been there, taken an interest in them, or even looked their way in a lingering fashion. They do not, to my knowledge, sell comics.

A couple of weeks ago the Martinsburg area was hit by a devastating storm. Our house was relatively untouched, with the amount of branches and pieces of siding brought down in the high winds totaling about two. So on the Saturday morning when this happened, I hoped into my routine as if nothing was wrong and got in the car to head to the gym.

Most of Martinsburg and the surrounding area was without power. The gym was closed. The older, residential neighborhoods were devastated with downed trees, power lines, and street lights. And it was just way too hot to be without air conditioning.

Lorie and I were okay, living in a neighborhood where the power lines are underground and the houses are relatively new. In comparison with the rest of Martinsburg, that is. Again another example of the ways in which we live affected by the decades.



I drove by Hammacher Memorials because I wanted to get some pictures of some interesting older houses that morning. When I saw the old tin roof peeled back and the crushed headstones out front, I slammed on the breaks and got out to take pictures. The surounding houses were fine, and no one seemed hurt.

Hammacher Memorials didn't even seem like it was that old of a building. But that roof...it's pretty much gone.

And... you can see... some history revealed! The "Hammacher Memorials" sign has fallen and underneath you can see...


...the building used to be a grocery store!

Which I thought was a cool find.

Because my brain works that way.

One of the things that gets me thinking this way is because we never lived in one area long enough for me to see the area change and grow. So this sort of 'revealed history' may be boring to life-long inhabitants to Martinsburg. But to me this reveals that this street had an entirely different feel to it at one point. People probably walked here for their groceries from the nearby little Martinsburg houses that dot the center of town. Houses that are now a little older and in disrepair. The idea that this lot, with barely any parking to it, used to be a grocery store is interesting because it opens a little bit of the historical character to this section of street. More and more I think Martinsburg is an interesting little town where you can get strong glimpses of the 1940's and 1950's if you look hard enough.












With the power out, little Madeleine Bline (Valentine Bline to some) had to seek out houses with electricity to beat the heat. We were one of the stops on her whirlwind Martinsburg tour. All was cool.


Maybe I should have done a face-off. But something tells me I would have lost.

Thanks,
DCD

Helter Skelter

When I was a senior in high school, I read the scariest book I have ever read. Helter Skelter. The true life story of the Manson Family murders. You can read more about it here.

The book is... to use the word 'insane' would be ridiculously redundant. The idea that this actually happened, that people performed these murders and believed that they were justified in doing so, or that they just didn't care, is downright scary.

I literally could not sleep with the lights out. I laid there in my bed in 1987, imagining there were murderous, unreasonable hippies hiding under my bed.

ANYWAY... it's today. Today is Helter Skelter. It happened in August 8th, 1969. Roughly one month before I was born. Sharon Tate, most publicized victim of the murders, was eight months pregnant.



I guess I feel intrigued by the macabre of the situation. It's why I like horror movies and I'm drawn to historical stories like Lizzie Borden and Elizabeth Bathory.

Lizzie Bordon is purely history, as her acts were from 1892. The Countess Bathory is even more removed, being from the 1600's. Manson and his craziness was over forty years ago. But this recent stuff? I prefer to read about these things like they're ancient acts of the past. I'm completely sick of getting iPhone AP News notifications that someone else has died.

So... it's Helter Skelter day everyone.

Thanks,
DCD

Triangulating the Super Friends

I learned about triangulation on September 10th, 1977, from the Super Friends. And I learned it incorrectly.

It was five days until my eighth birthday. My mother was VERY pregnant with what would turn out to be an attention getting red-haired baby sister. We had just moved from Texas to an Air Force base in upstate New York and were living in a cramped townhouse. My parents were fostering, socially. They ended up forging lifelong friendships with the other officers and families on base. Me? Not doing so well. Not a friend to speak of. But I did have one thing to look forward to… a brand new season Super Friends with all kinds of changes! The Wonder Twins! Guest stars galore in the form of other Justice League members! Actual villains! And an hour-long show in which to stretch some storytelling wings!




I barely slept the night before the first of these episodes was to air. I got up way too early and was downstairs first thing, refusing to budge from the TV set. I had negotiated show-picking rights with my sister in the usual two-fisted manner of justice, and everything was right.

The first episode had a segment titled “Invasion of the Earthors”, and that’s where I learned about triangulation. The Super Friends used it to find the secret base of the villains-of-the-week.

First, Superman finds an air vent and radios the location to Batman.









Then, Aquaman finds another air vent and radios the location to Batman.









"Using the time-tested method of triangulation, Batman draws the angle of the Earthor exhaust vent on the Batmobile computer map."




There were so many things wrong with this. And my little soon to be eight year old brain was listing them out like mad. Where were the angles? How did Batman know what angles to use for the lines? And doesn't the word 'triangulation' mean three? Where's the third element to make this work? And don't you need more accuracy than you can get while wearing gloves and using a pencil to hand-draw lines on the bat-computer screen while in a moving Batmobile with Robin narrating your every move in the background?




Conclusion? The Super Friends were infallible, awesome, God-like American myths. So therefore they must be right and my doubts were obviously a sign of weakness.

In the seventies, we kids were constantly learning things from cartoons. In fact, if it wasn’t showcased in an episode of Super Friends or Star Trek, I probably didn’t know about it. A good example of this is that I learned about triangulation when I was eight, but didn’t know what a sextant was until I was an adult working for the Coast Guard.

The 1973-1974 season of Super Friends downplayed conflict and violence and played up the more educational aspects of the show. As simplistic and childish as the first season was, it’s probably where I got the roots of my beliefs in racial tolerance and environmental preservation. Plus, it had that really cool episode where the Super Friends got shrunk down, trapped in jars, and had to be saved by a tiny Green Arrow. I cannot emphasize enough how cool that episode is. The turn away from super-heroes battling evil had a lot to do with some silly parents group that had targeted cartoons as a source of influence on children.

Poppycock. (<-- Yes, I know. I’m being hipster ironic.)

The 1977 re-emergence of the show attempted to blend action with this educational foundation. The Super Friends team members would show up between cartoons to teach kids about all manner of things, from swimming and bicycling safety, to first aid, to magic tricks and word play. I took notes and started a spreadsheet.




In fact, I learned so much from my entertainment as a kid that it makes me really wonder why I didn’t take to school all that much more. I seem to soak it in if I was hearing something from Aquaman or Captain Kirk or Steve Austin. Why couldn’t I focus better in school?




But more importantly, and I think about this a lot, what are kids learning today? Do the video games on Ashton’s iPad teach him about triangulation? There’s Dora the Explorer for younger kids, but what kinds of things are the older kids soaking in from Spongebob and iCarly?

Thanks,
DCD

Lizzie Borden Day

It’s Lizzie Borden Day. I’m normally very verbose and sharing about this particular note in American history. But today I have no idea what I’m going to say to you.

I’m hampered by what’s recently happened with the movie theater massacre on the opening of the latest Batman movie. But I’m not going to talk about that. Plenty of other, smarter people have that full-on covered. And every time I try to think about it, my brain shuts down and turns away.

But… today… it’s Lizzie Borden day.



On August 4th, 1892, Lizzie Borden’s family was found brutally murdered with an axe. Lizzie was arrested for the murders and tried. Nothing about the case made sense, but this was a certain point in American history and very very different from how things would have happened today.

If you’re interested in learning more, start here. In my opinion, it’s engrossing reading.

Lizzie’s story hits a couple of my pastimes; most obviously, horror and history. But there’s an element of unsolved – and will probably NEVER be solved – mystery to this case. And for me that’s the real intrigue. What really happened and why? Much has been written on the topic, debate rages, but the truth will probably never be known.


What IS know is that Lizzie was tried for the murder, acquitted on June 20th, 1893, and lived until 1927. Whether she was guilty or not, she spent the rest of her life in the shadow of suspicion and whispers. American jump-rope-skipping children gave us this classic to remember her by:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

I’m always yammering on about how our entertainment reflects our culture on through the ages. Well, this wasn’t entertainment in the strictest sense. But it is, in that it sold plenty of newspapers and books and got lots of attention. Much like the 24 hour newsfeed on the movie theater massacre is today.

As I said before, I’m not going to talk about that event, the news coverage, or the politics of it. That’s well covered by other people. Others are commenting on what the current day tragedy says about our culture, politics, and news habits.

But Lizzie’s story? What does she say about our culture and our history? Is it different? Can we possibly learn anything about ourselves by comparing the two?

Thanks,
DCD