The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

10 Random things I found while digging though an “Ivory’s GoodStuff” box which has been ducttaped closed since before the move, two Novembers ago:

1. One eared sock monkey. My Great Grandma was a doll and toy maker, and all the kids in the family got a sock monkey when they were little. Except me. I can’t complain, since I did get a lot of other toys from her, but I was somehow overlooked when it came to my very own sock monkey. After my Great Grandma died, my mom gave me her sock monkey, and I love that it only had one ear. Ella and Alice both got sock monkey’s from their Aunt Jena this Christmas, so we have a little sock monkey family now.

2. The very first embroidery I ever ‘finished’. The back is here. I was probably 6 or 7 when I started it, and I remember it taking forever. Patience was not my strong suit as a kid, but I wanted to be able to dig around in my mom’s sewing box, so I had to sit down and be still for a few minutes a day. My mom kept it, and I found it in her ‘office’ after she died.

3. Yarn dog from Bea, my 80 year old best friend when I was 5. It turns out that the things I worry about with my daughter really just stem from my fear that she will be like me, and I want it to be easier for her. I want her to be comfortable with her peers, because I never was as a kid. Bea lived in an RV on the same beach we lived on when my dad was working on HWY 101 in North Cali, and when I wasn’t with her or Benji (the disabled vet who lived across the way) or Barbra (the woman who ran the community store) I was hiding under the trailer, playing with slugs and talking to squirrels. Rinse and repeat for 20 years.

4. Speaking of middle aged people who were kind to a kid who had no friends: A bear, a knicknack, and a book from Mrs. Harrison, my speech therapist when I was in k-2nd grade. You wouldn’t know it today by how I can blather on, but when I was young I had major speech issues, and almost no one outside my family could understand me. Enter Mrs. Harrison, who was beyond kind to me. I was so inspired by her, that years later I studied speech pathology for three years of college before realizing that it wasn’t what I wanted and switching to English. I wrote her years ago, thanking her and including a playbill from a play I was in at the time, and she wrote back (and as I keep digging, I’ll probably find the letter).

5. 8 jewelry boxes of random, cheap jewelry, none of which I can bear to throw out (I stopped taking pictures after a while…)

6. A package of moon flower seeds from a plant in my mom’s yard.

7. This tiny boat, from “Undersea World” which is the toy of my earliest memories.

8. A replica of one of my pageant dresses for my ‘ cabbage patch’ doll, Maggie Mae. My mom made my dress, the little dress, and Maggie. She also took me to an estate sell on the way home from losing “Little Miss Oklahoma” and bought me an enormous green bridesmaid’s hat.

9. The postcard that informed me that I had been selected to receive the scholarship that ended up paying for my degree. Until I got this slip of paper, I was planning to stay in the small town I had graduated in, working as a waitress and taking care of my brother. Instead, I came to college, got a degree in something that doesn’t pay but that I love, and met Tom in a Lit. class.

10. An autograph book (like yearbook autographs, not lifestyles of the rich and famous autographs) of my mom’s, which I will probably do a whole other post about, because so many of the pages made me laugh.