Blue Tulip Glassware

Spring has sprung - I’ve put the green glass and red glass plates away. The Blue Tulip Depression Glass will be in the kitchen cabinets until the fall. As I make the change, I think about the old friends that collected it….and allowed me to buy all they had of my favorite pattern and color when they were downsizing. Those memories are good ones and extend back to the beginning of my memories. There are not very many items in my house that evoke that kind of history.

It also feels right to change things for the season inside the house just as so much is changing outside. The colors are lighter - the light is brighter - the days are longer. The Blue Tulip pattern matches the flowers that will be blooming soon and the color of the glass reminds me of summer skies.

Now that I have insulated drapes in my office and the Blue Tulip Glassware in the cabinet - the house is making the shift to spring and summer!

Life’s Decades - The Sixth 10 Years

Today I am focused on the sixth decade of life. For me - it was mostly in the 2000s and included the melded joys of career transitioning to post career and the growing independence of my daughter.

My sixth decade started with my daughter still in high school. The family enjoyed vacations - trying to see as many states as possible before she graduated. After she got her learner’s permit for driving, we made a big loop road trip from Maryland to Chicago. She handled a driving experience I had never encountered: a blown out tire on the freeway. I suppose a child learning to drive is a ‘white knuckle’ time for most parents. The only technology that might change the scenario in the future would be self-driving cars.

Visits to college campuses with my daughter were a vicarious treat. Being part of her decision making process helped my husband and I realize just how ready she was to be independent - not financially but in the way she took ownership for decisions about her future. She applied to 4 colleges and was accepted to all 4 - and went off to Cornell.

Some parents may suffer from ‘empty nest syndrome’ but I didn’t. I was still too busy with work and my daughter called us frequently enough (using time when she was walking some distance on campus) that we knew quite a few details about her college life. The advent of cell phones (and ‘plans’ that have unlimited minutes) have made a huge difference for families that want to communicate via telephone. Long distance used to be an expensive luxury. Now easy and inexpensive telephone calls are transitioning from a luxury (a ‘want’) to a need; it is coming close to being part of basic infrastructure in the developed world. They continued past her graduation from Cornell.

Pretty soon my daughter established a relationship with the young man she would marry before the end of my sixth decade. They were in the same dorm building and then apartment. When it came time for graduate school applications - they both applied to some of the same schools and decided to go to University of Arizona. As soon as they were financially independent (with graduate student funding), they got married. It seems that my daughter’s experience finding a life partner was very similar to my own; it happened early and marriage became the obvious choice very quickly.

Shortly after my daughter become financially independent it because obvious that I could retire and my husband phase down on his workload too. We both rekindled interests we’d left behind in our 20s: biology for me and astronomy for him. It took me a year to settle on some volunteer activities that were focused on areas I where I wanted to make a tangible difference in my community: Neighbor Ride to provide transportation to senior citizens and environmental education offered to students by the Howard Country Conservancy. I also realized just how much I enjoy being a student; the advent of Coursera was perfect for me.

Life’s Decades - The Fifth 10 Years

Today I am focused on the fifth decade of life. For me - it was mostly in the 1990s and included the melded joys of motherhood and career.

My career required long hours and some travel. Most of the time I could adjust the attention and time for the job to mesh with the needs of my family. There was always an underlying tension between the different aspects of my life but it didn’t seem to escalate to unhealthy levels of stress. I had decided to keep a journal when I first became pregnant in my fourth decade; the original motivation was to record what was happening to me…but a side benefit was that l inadvertently learned to ‘write it down, let stressful aspects go.’ In retrospect - journaling was a key part of my maintenance of well-bing in the most stressful time of my life: the fifth and sixth decades. I still do it (in my seventh decade now) but its primary importance is as a record of my life.

Do people always learn a lot from their children? I certainly did. When my daughter was in kindergarten and first grade, I realized that I was holding her to higher standard of learning than I was myself….and I made some changes. Being a linear thinker (inclination and education), I started using tools like mindmaps to change my pattern. I started reading a wider variety of books and taking notes. The growing content available through the Internet over the decade helped too. In the end, I don’t know that I ever did reach the delta that we expect of children as they learn to read, write and compute in their early school years. It is awesome how much they change in a few short years.

While every working mother probably experiences guilt from not being in the right place at the right time for some incident in her child’s life - the incidents where my daughter made her acceptance loud and clear stand out in my mind more. One such incident was when she was in first grade and there was a parent visit day in her classroom. I told her I was leaving work early to come home and change clothes to be dressed like the other moms rather than in my business suit by the time I arrived at her school (I was working for IBM and wearing a lot of dark blue suits/white shirts at the time). She told me to come in the suit! I did…and looked different than the other parents…but she was accepting (maybe even pleased) with the difference.

The decade seems like a blur of kite festivals, aquariums, museums, national parks, hikes, gardens, ice shows, and music lessons….there were times that we all decided a weekend at home was absolutely required. There were projects to. We finished our basement which was quite a learning experience for us all.

The activity level of my fifth decade was driven by having a child in my fourth decade. Women that have children earlier - or later - could have a different trajectory because of where they are in their career and their level of health. It surprises me to realize that I happened upon very good timing for me!

Life’s Decades - The Second 10 Years

Today I am focusing on the second decade of life. I think of it as the growing up decade. For me it spans the end of elementary school to the first years of college mostly in the 1960s; it also includes getting married near the end of the decade.

In the US the whole K-12 structure is still in place. The public schools I attended did not have air conditioning until my senior year. I assume that all schools in the hotter part of the country are air conditioned at this point. There are also more options in the classroom. The tools and resources available to teachers are dizzying to an outsider.

But even when I was in school there were experiments. I participated in an Up with People high school that traveled across the US during my junior year of high school. There were written evaluations rather than grades…and a musical show to perform several times a week. It was my first time away from home and probably the most perspective broadening year of life.

My senior year I was back home and in another experimental school - this time a public high school that was just opening that offered clusters of focused instruction. I spent three hours focused on biology and three hours learning to program (Fortran and Cobol) in the afternoon. I took an English course in-between the two.

There was also some self-paced learning although it was mostly in reading/comprehension and all paper based. Now computers make it easier to provide enriched and self-paced lessons on a wide variety of topics.

Is there a shifting of emphasis that has occurred over the years? The technology may push students toward faster pacing and shorter duration tasks. But maybe that is what is needed for their future work environments. I hope critical thinking is still underlying the other content.

I don’t remember a lot of teen age angst.

Part of it was my mother going back to college when I was in my teens and sharing her experiences with the family. That sharing resonated with me. It became a natural introduction to college life years before I went myself. A similar thing happened with my own daughter and myself when she was in her teens but focused on women in technical fields (like I was).

Being away from home during my junior year was another factor. Whatever chafing might have developed during that year had I been at home, didn’t have a chance. By the time I came back, I was mature enough to get along with both my parents.

But then came an unexpected pivot point. As soon as I started thinking about college in my middle teens I assumed I would wait to get married until after I finished. But I met the right person for me about mid-way through my senior year and we married a year later.

I used my computer skills to start a career to support us. He worked one semester and then became a full time student. I worked full time and went to school part time…but that story is better told in the next installment about the third decade.

Life’s Decades - The First 10 Years

Now that my life has spanned more than 6 decades - I’m thinking more about my own history (what was typical…what wasn’t) and how growing up has changes over the years. Today I am focused on the first decade of life which, for me, was mostly in the 1950s.

My earliest memory is of a shadow made by a Venetian blind on the wall of my bedroom. I don’t remember being frightened (although I’ve read that something frightening is usual for a first memory)…only the image. My mother thinks it was the first night in a new house when I was about 2 although she didn’t realize I was frightened. With the advent of baby monitors - do parents detect the frightening first memories of their children more often?

We did not have air conditioning at home until I was 4 or 5…and the schools were not air conditioned at all. It was very hot during the Texas summers! Strangely enough - I don’t remember melted crayons. When my daughter was growing up we had a couple of instances of melted crayons. Is air conditioning so pervasive that the crayons have a lower melting point now than they did 50 years ago?

There were lots of children in the neighborhood before I started school. There were swing sets and shady porches…popsicle trucks on hot afternoons (although Mom had made our own in the freezer most of the time) ....getting wet with sprinklers or in small pools. In the neighborhood where I live now, the density of children has always been less during the 20 years I’ve lived here and many are in day care during the day before they start school.

Kindergarten was in a local church basement - across from the public elementary school. Both were within walking distance. Dresses were the mainstay of my school wardrobe. I had enough clothes to last between laundry days…not extra. Jeans were not the norm although I don’t know whether it was a rule or just tradition. I don’t think I had a pair of jeans at all during my first decade. Now the clothes for elementary school children usually includes jeans…and lots of other fashions that was ‘too causal’ for school in the 1960s!

Probably everyone remembers some trauma they remember vividly from their first decade even though it might not have been all that import to their parents. For me it was falling down on the boundary between vinyl flooring and carpeting when I was in 1st or 2nd grade. The carpet nails did a multi-streaked scrape across my shin. It was not deep or gaping. It did not get infected. But - I picked off the scabs several times and still have the scars.

In fact - maybe a lot of ‘scars’ we carry along with us for the rest of our lives have an origin in the first decade of life. I must have been frightened by a dog very early - I don’t remember it - but I do remember having to learn to remain calm around them and I still don’t want a dog as a pet.