Heartbeat of a city.

Heartbeat of a city: New York, New York: photos show Times Square and Central Park: classic American wonders

Deviating from my ongoing retelling of childhood memories, I'd like to insert a miscellaneous entry here: "heartbeat of a city."

A special Native American person in my life spoke to me often about "the heartbeat of the earth." He saw the vibrancy in, say, a leaf dancing on a twig when there was no wind. He and I witnessed that phenomenon quite a few times! I haven't stopped to notice whether this happens when he is not with me. One lone little leaf will just start dancing back and forth . . no others near it doing the same thing . . . and we cannot detect any breeze at all. As the Psalmist said, "The trees of the field will clap their hands" in praise of the living God.

As someone who was born in, and grew up in, a city, I also detect a "heartbeat of a city" sometimes. It can be hard to put my finger on just what that is and where it comes from. After all, isn't a city just a random collection of individuals who happened to go there or be born there? Maybe. Maybe not.

I recently spent a week in New York City and very definitely experienced its heartbeat, at least a little bit. It seems to me to be a city of lovers. Dreamers. Dancers. Fortune chasers. Humble hearts and proud ones.

All the tall buildings around lend an air of "looking upward" to the whole place that is different than what happens when one just looks up at clouds. I guess each building and area of the city contains the cumulative effects of many dreamers and fortune chasers of eras gone by . . . and their legacy worms its way into people's way of thinking and being.

More on this topic later. I've just scratched the surface of what I'm trying to say.

(Please note: The photos used for this blog entry were taken by a friend of a friend on Facebook. She graciously agreed to let me use them, with no name attribution necessary. Thank you, if you ever see this!)

I was a cat person from the moments I laid eyes on one.

I wrote in my previous blog that I became excited the first time I saw a cat. I badly wanted to pet it, and did so. It was a stray around our 15th Street neighborhood in Oklahoma City. Not long afterward, both I and our neighbors across the street were infected with ringworm from that cat. I don't remember that very well, except for crying and hearing the neighbor kids cry.

My mother wasn't really fond of cats but she came to understand over the next few years how much I longed for one. So I received a yellow tabby kitten for my 6th birthday. I named her "Pussy" because of a children's nursery rhyme that had a cat with that name. My mother gently guided me to change the name to "Kitty." It was many, many years later before I understood why.

Anyway, Kitty was my constant companion throughout my growing up years. The most exciting thing for me was when she had kittens. Once a year when she went into heat, my mother would allow me to let her outside to seek a mate. Then, by magic, about two months later, she would have kittens!

All in all, she had four or five litters. The vet gave her a shot in between times that kept her from going into heat for a whole year. I think it must have been something like Depo Prevera that is used as birth control for women. Later, the cat version was made unavailable for some legal reasons. I thought, and still think, that was a shame. It worked really well.

I'll write more about "cats and me" in another blog. This is a basic introduction. I'll try to explain to myself and anyone who reads this what the attraction is in my case, and also explore the history of interaction between cats and humans.

Lesson learned about posting blog entries.

I just wrote a long blog entry about iris (the flowers) and as I was trying to "publish" it, got an error message . . . and it's all gone now. That's a lesson. Next time, I'll highlight and "copy" a blog before posting it so that if this happens, I'll be able to just "paste" the copy in and try again.

Flowers and my early childhood.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, my father's gardening activites are a large component of my earliest memories.

We had a large back yard with extra land available right outside the fence. He grew some vegetables, though I don't know what kind, but most of all, iris. He had a hobby of experimenting with cross-breeding of different colors of iris. He showed me at a young age how to do that with pollen from one flower introduced into a powdery place in another flower.

Sometimes he took me to iris "shows," where we saw other people's examples of their best blossoms. He must have taken his own to show sometimes. I remember that some people were trying hard to make a black iris . . . but so far, they were just dark purple. I have no memory of the other people at the flower shows . . .probably a bunch of "old people."

Recently, I got curious and looked up this information about the iris society: http://www.okiris.org/. Apparently, those iris shows that we went to may have been at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds, which were not far from our house.

I've owned a home since 1996, and always thought I should have iris. I finally planted some bulbs in 2005. They have grown green leaves since the spring of 2006, but never bloomed until last year in the spring and summer of 2007. Lots of lucsious light purple blooms. See the photo above.

I think it's time in my life to get serious about iris. This coming fall (2009), I think I'll buy and plant LOTS of iris bulbs and see what I can get out of them. It takes a long time to get good results.

Earliest memories.

I've always been fascinated by attempts to figure out when one's earliest memories are.

I suspect that we all remember the sensation of our warm residence inside our mothers, and the early days of seeing daylight for the first time, and much more, but for some reason, have suppressed those memories, just as we lose sight of our dreams within moments after waking up from them.

Similarly, my mother claims that a new mother forgets the agony of labor and childbirth as soon as she holds her baby -- suppression of memories of pain as an adult due to the magic of the great excitement of welcoming a new baby.

Anyway, I'd like to start blogging about some early memories, significant or not, sentimental or analytical. Along the way, I will probably get distracted and ramble on about related topics that come to mind as a result.

Among my very first conscious memories are the following (I think I must have been younger than 2 when all of these occurred):

+holding onto my father's legs as if they were tree trunks that would provide safety and stability

+sitting in a chair (captain's chair type, probably with a pillow for a cusion) in a corner of my grandmother's kitchen in Irving, which I perceived as huge. I remember her as a beautiful goddess-like lady dancing around an island of sorts in the middle of the kitchen, making rolls or cookies or something . . . .and some of my young cousins, older than myself, running around laughing.

Since I was born in summer, and this is a very early memory, I have to wonder if this may have been perhaps the second Christmas of my life? Lots of baking was going on. Mostly I perceived my grandmother's bright and energetic spirit.

+seeing a cat for the first time --I know I was less than one year old when this happened -- and badly wanting to have it. I believe it was a stray in our yard that I petted. There are, in fact, family movies of me doing that, somewhere. I remember lots of crying later, as some of us got ringworm from that cat. I remember the kids across the street crying about that.

+being "teased" by my brothers quite a bit, especially my #2 brother. They liked to trick me and see me be confounded and cry as a result.

I'm very ashamed to confess that as a result of how MUCH such teasing went on, I believed it was a normal part of being an older sibling, and years later when my sister was born, I engaged in several phases of deliberate teasing of her with the same goal that my brothers had when they teased me. My teasing of her left her with some bitter memories though I meant it in fun.

Anyway, I, too, felt beseiged by teasing at a young age, by my brothers.

Of course, we also had a lot of fun times in each other's company! Such as when my #2 brother and I jumped for a very long time on trampolines set up in a retail store's parking lot in Canada, where we spent the summers of 1961 and 1965.

He and I actually had quite a lot of fun and funny times during those summers. Our usual friends from back home were gone, so we were forced to be each other's companions. I don't remember as much any interactions with my #1 brother on those trips . . . . perhaps because he had to leave early for Boy Scout camps and such.

+lots of flower garden scenes with my father and my maternal grandmother, both of whom did quite a bit of gardening. In my memories, I would be playing nearby while they did their gardening in their respective yards.

She grew lots of roses and peonies. He grew lots of iris, and once I got old enough, he helped me plant my own pansy garden each year while we still lived on 15th Street in Oklahoma City.

Since I left that home at age 7, that makes me think that the pansy gardening probably took place between about age 3 and 6.

+seeing dust float in sunbeams in the dining room in the house on 15th Street while my mother ironed and watched soap operas. I was truly fascinated by that floating dust and would try to catch the dust particles in my hands. I couldn't figure out why, after apparently grabbing some, I didn't see any dust on my hands.

That's enough early memories for the first blog entry beyond my list of proposed random topics.