"When Mr. Peter Knoppert began to make a hobby of snail-watching, he had no idea that his handful of specimens would become hundreds in no time. ... 'I never cared for nature before in my life,' Mr. Knoppert often remarked - he was a partner in a brokerage firm, a man who had devoted all his life to the science of finance - 'but snails have opened my eyes to the beauty of the animal world.'" That's from the beginning of one of Patricia Highsmith's short stories about humans and snails, this one being "The Snail-Watcher", the other one "The Quest for Blank Claveringi" (both of which you can find here (although there are two versions for "The Quest")).
Highsmith
loved snails and kept hundreds of them as pets. She took them along to
parties sitting on lettuce in her handbag and she smuggled them into
France in her bra because she didn't want to leave them behind in England. I read both of her snail stories at a young age in an
anthology, but "The Snail-Watcher" impressed me more, and the image my mind formed of the ending has its own
little room in my head jumping out every time I see a snail. If you know the stories, you can imagine why. Have I mentioned it being a horror anthology?
There are other snails in my childhood memories, like the freshwater snails in the ponds of the park near my home.
We
used to walk around on the walls and look for snails (we always left them there in case you wonder). From what I
remember, my guess is that they were great ramshorn and great pond
snails. There were fewer of the ramshorns, and I was convinced that this made them the Queens of the Snails, so it was very exciting to see one
of them.
Of course, we were also fascinated by land snails (not slugs, they creeped me out, especially after a big rain when the path up to the woods was covered with them, it looked like an invasion). The most common one you see here is the garden banded snail, but it was special to find escargots (which we call "Weinbergschnecken", literally "vineyard snails"). My friend and I once found two of them in the street and decided to put them in a safe spot in a garden, but the garden owner was outside and told us not to dare, so we left them on a wall (although they and other kinds of snails are no pests!). Afterwards, I worried a lot about their fate for quite some time, thinking we should have found a really safe spot. Sorry, little snails! I would also like to apologize for being one of those annoying kids who sometimes poked your eyes to see you pull them in and for picking you up by your shell, we didn't know that it can hurt you. Actually, I haven't seen any escargots in the wild in years, but snails kept inspiring me in my creative journey, in wire wrapping, needle felting, and bead embroidery.
And then there is Nelly of course. Nelly came in two colors, blue and brown with spots, and a size of 10 cm. In the 60s, Steiff had a few designs that were only produced for a short time - 1961 to 1963 for Nelly - and were quite unusual for cuddle buddies.
Beside
Nelly, there were for example bats and colorful spiders (and I could
still cry over the story the lady from the toy store told us about not
being able to sell them and throw them out instead of candy during the
town's carnival parade, argh!). When the ex and I got our first Steiff price
guide, we immediately knew we wanted to have all of them, not for their
rarity, but because we thought they were really cute (I still think that).
Nelly is made from cotton velvet with faux leather underneath and has a painted rubber shell and rubber tentacles/feelers whose ends were prone to break off as you can see on one of them. Isn't this little pair adorable?
Did you notice something about them, though? With those shells they are no land snails and I never thought about that until today. I wonder why Steiff made that choice.
There you have it, my snail memories. I spared you one when I inadvertently ste.... nah, let's forget about that.
The
story goes that I was five years old when I watched my first complete
movie. My mother told the story, and you know how it is, my mind started
building an actual scene around it. I can see myself sitting on the
floor before the TV set in our wall unit, in my typical position, knees
in front, feet at my sides - I was lot more flexible then - simply
because that's how I used to do it later. Anyhow, as a kid I loved to hear my mother tell me the story of my first "real" film and how I was glued to the screen. The film was "Lilies of the Field" from 1963 which after watching it at least dozens of times is still one of my favorites.
Of course I chose a picture from "Lilies of the Field" to make a beaded portrait of Sidney Poitier for my fan wall.
Let's start with the movie (there will be spoilers for both the movie and the book it's based on).
Homer Smith stops at a small rundown farm because he needs water for his car. There are five women there, and when one of them, who introduces herself as Mother Maria, sees Homer she thanks God for sending her a strong man. Homer, however, doesn't intend to stay. As there's not much in his wallet right now, he agrees to repair the roof - one man for hire for one day. At the end of the day he hands Mother Maria the bill and she just takes it and says she'll let him know about dinner. Homer is surprised to see that the women are in fact nuns. They come from Germany, Austria, and Hungary and try to learn English, so he gives them a lesson after the very meager meal.
The next morning Homer is ready to move on, but instead Mother Maria takes him to a construction site where she wants him to build a chapel. Once again ignores the bill. After cleaning up the site, Homer tries again in the evening, this time by quoting from the Bible, but the Mother quotes from the Sermon on the Mount - hence the title of the film - and informs him that he will drive them to Mass the next day. Being a Baptist himself, Homer doesn't attend Mass. He goes to a diner for breakfast where Juan, the owner, tells him about the nuns coming from an East German order which inherited the farm and that they escaped over the Berlin Wall.
My favorite scene - Homer orders "a real breakfast" after having to endure the "Catholic" meals. His passion about wheatcakes with maple syrup, coffee, and fresh orange juice makes me hungry every time I watch it.
Despite
himself, Homer gets drawn in more and more. When he decides to leave
for good, the Mother has him take her and one of the sisters to town to
ask Mr. Ashton, the owner of a construction company, for donations. They
tell him that Homer is their contractor, and not wanting to give Ashton the satisfaction of confirming his doubts, Homer says that he is indeed. He starts working on the chapel, but also for Ashton two days a week and uses the money to buy groceries for the nuns. Mother Maria has no luck getting more money and bricks, though, and one evening emotions rise so high that Homer leaves.
He does come back eventually, though, even if a little the worse for wear. That impresses the people in the Hispanic community so much that they finally decide to help, both with supplies and their labor. At first, Homer refuses to let them help and admits to the nuns that he always wanted to build something by himself, but then he realizes how much it means that everyone wants to help with this special project as he tells Mr. Ashton who donates bricks after all.
When the chapel is finished, Homer signs his work. He knows that it's time for him to leave now although Mother Maria already has new plans for a school and more.
No matter how often I watch the movie, I wonder every time why the h is lowercase.
On the evening before the dedication of the chapel, Homer and the nuns sing together once more. Then he gets up, still singing, packs his things and drives off into the night.
Now what could it have been about the movie that attracted a five year old so much that it became one of her all time favorites? I never tried to dissect my feelings before, I just know the film makes me feel good.
One point is easy to find - I love "Amen", the Baptist spiritual Homer is singing with the nuns, and I'm afraid I might have turned it into a bit of an earworm at home back then, just the "Amen" part of course. I still sing along today. Actually, I like the whole score.
Poitier didn't sing himself, by the way. "Amen" was written and sung by Jester Hairston (if you would like to know more about him, check the sources).
But obviously I was drawn to Poitier himself and the humor he's bringing to the film. I adore his smile and laugh and I love that the humor is warm and gentle, especially in the scenes with him and strict Mother Maria. The role was offered to Harry Belafonte first, but Belafonte thought it was demeaning and missed the social justice topic and Homer was too plain a character, so he turned it down. He even discussed that with Poitier who defended his reasons for not doing so. Indeed the movie doesn't dwell much on racism except the one time Ashton calls Homer "boy" to which Homer reacts by calling him "boy" back. Instead it shows how people from different circles - the black handyman, European nuns, a Hispanic community, an Irish priest, and even a white businessman - can work together to accomplish something no one thought possible, despite the differences in race, wealth, and faith. Although the spark for the plot was Mother Maria's unbroken faith in God, to me this was never a religious film (once I was old enough to think about it) although I'm aware others might not see it like that. For me, it's about community, communication, cooperation, understanding, and tenacity. Have I used the word gentle yet (I know I did)?
Sidney Poitier won an Academy Award for Best Actor (the first African-American to win that one), a Golden Globe, and the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival and was nominated for other awards as well. Lilia Skala as Mother Maria Marthe was nominated for several awards as Best Supporting Actress. Not that I cared much about that as a five year old (as if I even knew! 😉)
It wasn't easy for Ralph Nelson to get financial backing for the movie. It was even suggested to add a love interest, a nun who hadn't taken her vows yet. Another studio wanted Steve McQueen as Homer. Ralph Nelson finally found a studio who offered a budget of $250,000 but demanded a collateral. Nelson offered his own home. At the time, Poitier had already been a respected actor and earned about twice that budget per film. Poitier accepted a deal of $50,000 and ten percent of the gross earnings. And as the budget was so low, he actually had to do the heavy work in the movie himself. Both of them really believed in this movie which only took 14 days to shoot, by the way. Well, and it did become a success making $2.5 million in the first six months.
Now to the book.
My German copy.
William
Barrett was a writer of novels three of which got adapted into movies
including "The Lilies of the Field". He was Catholic and also wrote
essays, reviews, and biographies, one of them about Pope Paul VI.
The
story of the nuns is actually based on the true story of the Abbey of
St. Walburga in Colorado. In 1935, three sisters were sent from the Bavarian motherhouse Abtei St. Walburg to Colorado where they bought land cheaply from monks who said it was "un-farmable". Originally, it was meant to be one potential place of refuge from the Nazi regime if needed, but eventually the farm turned into a priory taking in novices and then became an abbey. The book of course changed the time to that of the Cold War and the nuns fled East Germany as mentioned above. It also explains a bit more about Homer. He's 24 (that's younger than Poitier was when he made the movie), he "lives his life one day at a time, there is laughter in him". He has a bit of money after leaving the Army and wants to go see the West (while the film is set in Arizona). And he cherishes his freedom, being able to go where he wants when he wants, only working if he needs to. "A man was free when he could say 'yes' or say 'no'." And still he feels he can't just say no to Mother Maria Marthe.
There are also some small differences which aren't really important, though. The priest isn't Irish but Hispanic, and he doesn't have to hold the service from the back of a car, there is a little church. There's no Mr. Ashton, he's called Livingston in the book. The book also explains what Homer does when he leaves for the first time. He gets himself a job with a wrecking company in the big city, but although his days with the nuns feels like a dream, he thinks of them when they tear down a row of houses. He goes through the salvage thinking that the nuns need a bath tub. So he buys one and takes it back as a present. In the movie he just returns with a black eye, but the book doesn't say anything about him getting into trouble nor what made him come back.
The biggest difference, however, is the ending. Homer drives into the night alright, but the book doesn't end here. A legend is evolving around Homer and his chapel. Tourists start visiting. Thanks to contributions, the nuns can build a school and take in boys from broken families to help them make their way in life. And in the chapel there's a painting of Saint Benedict the Moor by Sister Albertine which looks like Homer. To be honest, I'm glad the movie left that part out.
Now excuse me, I think I'm going to watch the movie one more time.
I have talked about the city library of my childhood, the one that had been into turned into an apartment building when the library moved to the "Adelberger Kornhaus" in 1981. To be fair, the old building had been an apartment building before housing a library, first the American library after the Second World War which was then merged with the city's own library. I'm sure the librarians appreciated the comfort of the new building (well, actually old as the Kornhaus is one of the few still existing medieval buildings in town which was restored for the library).
I know I would as a librarian, but of course I haven't forgotten the library I grew up with and was the foundation for my reading habit, you could say (as was my family). The feeling of going in there and not only looking for new books, but also returning over and over again to the comfort reads of my childhood, drawn to certain shelves like a magnet still lingers in my memory. Which brings us to the book I picked from my cabinet today - "Die Lockett-Kinder" by M. E. Atkinson (only the German translations say "Mary E.") which was first published in 1954 and whose original title is "August Adventure", published in 1936. It's the first one of a fourteen book series about the three Lockett children and their friends. I think my library had all six that I know were translated into German. They are collectibles now, so I'm glad I already own five of them and also a few English ones! Instead of getting the last German one, though, I ordered the five books I'm still missing in English which only cost me about twice as much as the one book.
The Lockett children are Oliver (12), Jane (13), and Bill (10). Their parents live in India. Jane lives with an aunt and uncle while her brothers are in a boarding school and only come home in the holidays. Luckily, there are several aunts who take turns in taking the three during the holidays.
In this book, however, all of the aunts go travelling at the same time, so they are invited for the summer holidays by their Aunt Lavinia whom they don't even know yet. She's a painter and a free spirit who sometimes just takes off in her brightly painted horse wagon roaming the lands.
When the children get to her house, though, Lavinia isn't there. Instead they find a strange man who tells them Lavinia has taken a trip and won't be back home soon. A tag left on the table mentions a town. We all know what the children have to do now, right? Of course they have to take the horse wagon and get to that town. They do send Lavinia a telegram hoping it will get forwarded to the current address which they don't have and which the guy at the post office won't give them, but they can't wait around at the house with a strange man in it who tells them - not very convincingly - that he has rented that house for those ten days or so.
To make matters slightly more difficult - really better, though, how they find out soon - there's a girl standing at the door saying that she was sent to stay with Lavinia because her grandmother is sick and that her five year old brother Robin will join them as well. Luckily, Anna is experienced with horses and knows how to deal with Pegasus and Robin is much more mature than the Locketts have anticipated. On they go and the adventure can begin, and an adventure it truly is. They literally go through fire and water, save a dog, spend a night in a haunted house, play cricket, some of their money gets stolen, and much more. More importantly, they make new friends and some enemies as well, but of course we get a happy ending.
Ah, those times when children could still travel hundreds of miles by themselves! Granted,
one village butcher questions this to be a good idea, but after leaving
that village they get around hearing more unsolicited opinions by
grown-ups - honestly, how dare they? - by putting Anna's long braids up
to make her look older as she's the tallest of them. Amazing how easy it is to deceive adults, especially if you take into account that Anna is actually a
few months younger than Jane.
I loved the books so much and I so envied these kids being allowed to live the life of the free
when I really knew I would have missed my bed very much on the first night. That's the nice thing about books, you can pretend and dream. Maybe I was also jealous that they were so practical and skilled. They cooked, they knew how to send a telegram and drive a horse wagon, and they never seemed to be very afraid ... a little, but not enough to keep them from going and always finding a way to deal with the circumstances. I would probably have had a hard time making it to the next village.
By the way, if you have read my post about Enid Blyton and domestication, foreignization, and continuation books last year, you may wonder about the German translations. Obviously, I can't compare directly as I only have the books either in German or in English, but from what I've read my guess is nothing much has been changed except for translating "Manor" in a house's name to the German "Herrenhaus". Also there are footnotes, one explaining English boarding schools, the others, quite lengthy, explaining cricket. It would have been easy to change the German text, turning cricket into another sport, for example. That suggests foreignization rather than domestication.
It's really a pity that there are almost no illustrations. The English originals were beautifully illustrated by Harold Jones. The
cover of the German book is not a Jones illustration, but I can't tell
you who did it because they didn't get any credit in the book. There you can only find a map showing the Locketts' trip. The original
was also by Jones, but this one isn't. You can tell it's inspired by the
original, but it isn't as elegant, and again there's no name. I found a copy of the book listed in an online store for old books with the names Mary E. Atkinson and Susanne Ehmcke. Ehmcke was a German children's book author and illustrator, but that listing is the only one where I found the name in connection with "August Adventure" at all, so I have my doubts if it was really her.
When I think of the old library today, like when I pass the building, the first image coming to mind is always me heading to the A shelf and looking for the Locketts and often getting disappointed. The books were popular at that time and often checked out, well, and then I guess they were culled eventually when interest waned or the books were too damaged.
I'm looking forward to the ones that are heading my way to complete my little collection. Don't say goodbye to the Locketts just yet, they have a good chance of returning to this blog (especially with my favorite book!).
Further reading (including pictures of Harold Jones's illustrations):
"Le Petit Nicolas", "Der kleine Nick", "Little Nicholas" ... I don't know how popular he is where you are, but he sure was here in Germany when I was a kid and still is with a lot of people, not few of them people who grew up with him like I did.
Nicolas started out as a comic strip, but he really got popular when he turned up in a short story written by René Goscinny (whose "Asterix" texts were the first Latin class for countless children) and illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé (also known for his covers for "The New Yorker") and published in 1959 in the Sunday magazine of the "Sud Ouest" newspaper. Thanks to the sudden popularity, the comics were published in "Sud Ouest" and later also in "Pilote" until 1965.
The
first book wasn't successful until Goscinny and Sempé were invited to a
literature program on TV after which they followed up with four more books between 1960 and 1965. Today "Le Petit Nicolas" is a French classic and not just in France. The
world of Nicolas is not the world today. It wasn't even the world of
the time when the books were written. There is no politics, there is no war,
there are no big problems. There is Nicolas and his little world, his
parents, his friends, school, and he's telling us about it from his
point of view and in the way a child often tells a story, naïve, straightforward, in run-on sentences that sometimes seem a bit breathless (I don't know about the French original, but the German translation warns children not to use the style in school because it doesn't make teachers happy 😉 but I'm afraid this is sometimes the style you see on my blog, now you know why).
In
German, he uses the words "prima" or "klasse" a lot which is "chouette"
in French and "great" in English, but "prima" for example is not a word
I think young people use much anymore and was very much slang of the
time. Funny about that is how quickly something can change from "prima"
to something that makes him cry and go back to "prima" if it is resolved. His
train of thoughts can go from a broken store window to the nice store
owner and how his mother shops there and buys jam for example,
strawberry is best because it doesn't have stones and is "prima". That
could be me, to be honest. Nicolas and his friends live very much in the moment (except when they plan to run away, see down below).
Both
Goscinny and Sempé didn't have easy and happy childhoods, for different
reasons, and they created Nicolas's childhood like one they couldn't
have. That doesn't mean there's no conflict at all. Nicolas and his
friends get into fights a lot and the grownups argue quite a bit as
well, within the family or with the neighbors, but as Sempé put it, it
was a dream childhood of his - scuffles that didn't hurt and arguments
that didn't end in separation.
Anyway, Nicolas's world is mostly that
of boys. There are girls, but rarely, and Nicolas is not quite sure
about most of them at first, but one story in particular shows that girls are not even always that different which makes him change his mind.
Also, there are of course no modern inventions and toys. There are no computers, no smartphones, but a lot of wild imagination.
Is it merely a nostalgic joy then to read these books, for grownups who idealize and miss their own childhood? No. There is more to these books ... there are the parents, the teachers, the neighbors, the camp supervisors, the shop owners, etc. These
are the parts that might be enjoyed a lot more by grownups than
children because it shows the natural anarchy of children which can
drive grownups to despair - the photographer who tries in vain to get
the class under control, so he can take a good picture, the camp
supervisor who is ready to chuck it in after just one day, the parents
who get woken up several times in the early morning because Nicolas got a new
watch and is ready to use it for good (making sure his father isn't late
for work), the sales clerk in a shop full of fragile items that gets
run over by the boys because they want to buy a gift for their teacher. Of course, the humor is in the exaggeration here, but we may still recognize
or remember one or the other incident that could have inspired a
similar story.
One of my favorites is the soccer game that starts
with the boys playing, but then the fathers "support" them until they
have taken over completely and don't even notice that their sons have
already taken off to one of the friends' house to watch television there
(which not all of them had at the time).
What's timeless about
these stories is the friendship and the love. No matter how often one of
the boys is threatening to run away because something doesn't go their
way and not come home again before they have a lot of money, a car, and a
plane, in the end they couldn't be happier about being back at home and get a nice dessert. Dessert is mentioned a lot.
Idealized?
Sure. Funny? Definitely. An escape? Yes. But don't we all need a little
escape every, now and then to be able to make it through reality? A
snicker, a laugh, a bit of relief?
P.S. In 2004, by the way,
Goscinny's daughter Anne found unpublished Nicolas stories in the attic
which even Sempé hadn't been aware of. Her father had died quite young
in 1977, but Sempé was still there and he made drawings for them. In Germany, the translator of
the original books, went to work again although he was already over 80. I
know not everyone is happy with his translations, but my school French
is not good enough anymore to pass a judgment on that myself. Possibly
people don't like the domestication (see more on that topic in my post here),
in this case by replacing the French names of people and towns with
German ones. I think that was a good call here because the original
names were a bit unusual even for France. Except for the very first one, the
English translation also replaced the names, by the way.
My
personal copies of the books are extra special to me because they have a
story of their own, but I'm going to tell you about that in another
post.
Some
years ago when I still did the "Finds of the week" posts, I had some
called "I'm a collector" in which I shared vintage items.Over
time my collections have mostly stopped growing due to different
reasons, but they are still there and still loved. I also have vintage
items, some inherited, some gifts, some from fleamarkets, some more
interesting than others.So I thought it could be fun to share some of them every, now and then and tell their story.
The other day a friend shared on Facebook that PEZ had been invented as an alternative to smoking. By now you may have noticed that I can't resist a new good trivia story, so of course I had to check that right away. It's true.
Did Ponder think the PEZ lady pointed at the ceiling?
PEZ takes me back to my childhood - once again, sorry, but that's why this is a nostalgia and no random Saturday post - to the "Totoladen" (we just called it "Toto" for short), to be precise. I grew up in a residential area that nevertheless had (almost) everything you needed. Two pubs, a grocery store, a small café, a bakery, two butchers, a shoemaker, two different banks, a small shop where you could get office supplies, a post office, a pharmacy, a dry cleaner, two auto supply shops (they belonged together and also had other stuff like decorative tape), a playground, and the "Totoladen", named that way because not only did they sell unpacked candy, "miracle bags" (surprise bags with chewing gum and little figures inside), newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, and office supplies, they were also a lottery agency (TOTO is a soccer lottery). Outside they had a gum ball and a PEZ vending machine on the wall. I loved vending machines or gum ball machines which had a mix of chewing gum (which I never liked) and little toys and it was probably a good thing I didn't have much money available. It was a tough choice, though, between getting something from the PEZ machine or try out for the miniature lighters and cheap rings in the gum ball machine.
Anyhow, PEZ. The name PEZ is an abbreviation of the German word for peppermint - "PfeffErminZ" - because it is an Austrian brand. Eduard Haas III invented the peppermint drop as a healthy alternative to smoking. Originally the drops were round, but quickly changed to the compressed brick shape. They were available in little tins, but Haas wanted to cater to the elegant society and therefore looked for an equally elegant way of dispensing the drops. So engineer Oskar Uxa invented the first PEZ dispenser which resembled a slim golden lighter, then colorful "regulars" followed. From 1955, the first special shapes arrived - such a space guns - and the first dispensers got their heads. You can look up all the designs by year in the PEZ dispenser archive.
In the late 50s, Haas came up with the idea of the PEZ Ladiesas a marketing strategy, young ladies dressed in PEZ uniforms with a pillbox hat who drove around in PEZ-branded trucks and handed out free samples. Graphic artist Gerhard Brause designed the advertising figure based on the style of US pin-ups and dressed in a bellhop inspired costume, to be used on signs, vending machines, posters, etc. such as the following replica items.
According to the PEZ site, there were 36,000 vending machines in circulation through Germany and Austria from the 50s to the 80s - one of them in our neighborhood. Now I have a confession to make. I never was a big friend of PEZ, there was candy I liked a lot better, but I was a huge fan of the vending machines or vintage vending machines in general. So I may only have three dispensers two of which were a buy in an American thrift shop (one of which has disappeared, you can guess whom I'm blaming, he's small and fuzzy), the other one was a gift, but I also have - this worn little beauty, with a more modern PEZ lady, probably from the 70s or 80s.
There had to be made changes to the machines when prices were increased and you had to put in three instead of two coins because the chute where the coins were collected had to be bigger. As you can see the "2x10pf" (pf for "pfennig") was scratched out and a new slot with "3x10 PF" imprinted on it attached.
Not all machines had the same candy available. For example, you can see in the picture above five kinds, the "orange" and "citron" (why not the German word "Zitrone"?), the "peppermint", the chewing gum, the dextrose (which "creates power"), and the Tomby "cream caramels". I have seen the same vending machine with five kinds, but if you look at the actual selection of mine, you see you can choose the double pack "orange/citron", the dextrose, a double pack chewing gum/spearmint gum, and the Tomby. No peppermint. It makes the machine look asymmetrical, too. I wonder how that was decided. Or did it have to do with the bigger chute?
PEZ vending machines disappeared when the Euro was introduced. This one was still out in the wild until at least 1991. I know that because "Jürgen" and "Siggi" from the little town of Beselich decided to mark the date of, well, whatever - is Siggi a girl and they didn't find a tree to carve their names into or was it just a spontaneous idea - almost exactly 34 years ago!
This is not something I usually do because I'm just not very good at it, but when I read that Marsha from Marsha in the Middle chose the topic "Special Summer Memories" for "10 on the 10th", I figured I would be able to do a bit of nostalgia.
Sooo, let's try this. There won't be any particular order, I'll just put the memories down as they come to mind.
1. The first one coming to mind is the birthday of my best friend when we were kids. Our birthdays are about a week apart, mine end of June, hers beginning of July. She used to have around ten or so kids at her birthday parties and one of our favorite games was "vampire" which was basically a variation of hide and seek, but the "victims" were put into time out for a certain period of time in a small storage room on the first floor. That wasn't as bad as it may sound because they had a little basket on a string which they let down through the window to have it filled with cherries from the garden by those who hadn't been caught yet (they were so good!). We were very proud of that game idea ;-)
2. This one also has to do with birthdays and fruit - my birthday and strawberries. When I was a kid, there were a few times (probably not as many as I seem to remember because that's how those things go) when my grandfather would go buy strawberries with me and my grandmother made a strawberry pie with them for my birthday. This year a family member brought me some strawberry pie for my birthday and the memory popped up once again.
3. While we are at birthday memories, here's another one. I have been a fan of Jane Goodall ever since I got one of her books as a gift when I was about 12. She's absolutely amazing and of course her portrait is on my fan wall. Some years ago, there was an evening with her in Munich which is about 125 miles from here. A friend, knowing how much I admire her, but also that it would have been hard for me to organize this by myself, turned up with tickets and an overnight room reservation. It was truly an experience to remember, hearing Jane Goodall talk, then spending the rest of the evening in the small self-service bar at the hotel talking to some other guests and driving home the next day not via "Autobahn", but through little towns and villages, stopping here and there like at a field full of poppies.
4. There's nothing like a sponteanous field trip, don't you think? There is one I remember especially well. A friend called me very early in the morning asking if I wanted to come on a quick trip to the source of the small river Lauter to hang our feet into the water. It was a very hot August that year, the night had been very humid, and the idea sounded great. The Lauter source is a small spring surrounded by nature. You walk there from the church, through the woods, birds singing. There are only a few houses and a historical inn and except for a couple taking a quick peek, we were all alone, talking, laughing, enjoying the water. Then all hell broke loose, just rain luckily, no thunderstorm. We are both no runners, but it really didn't make a difference because we were soaked through to the skin within seconds, anyway. We laughed all the way back to the car (and luckily my friend had extra tees in the car which was better than nothing).
5. This memory is as stereotypical as it can be. When I was 13, I was invited to stay with an aunt (actually she was probably more some kind of distant cousin) for a few weeks during summer vacation. As luck would have it, a cousin of mine (we had the same great-grandparents on one side) lived in the same little town. He was my age and so were his friends. My aunt said I could use her old bike, and from then on, we were out there all day and came home in the evening very hungry and full of stories what we had done. As the only girl I even got an honorary nickname and for a while we even sent one another letters after the vacations were over. Had we been looking for a body instead of mushrooms, it would very much have been "Stand By Me".
No pictures exist of our adventures, so my needle felt/embroidery mushroom will have to do.
6. My last trip in 2011 was to Cambridge in the UK. I loved it. I loved the town, the museums, the atmosphere, I didn't even mind the other tourists. The weather was a perfect mix of sun and rain. In the afternoon we just sat in the lounge for a while and had a cup of tea while reading. The special memory has to do with breakfast, though. We tourists love our breakfast and this one had so many choices, we could have eaten all day. What was the biggest fun about it, however, was that they didn't have an ordinary toaster back then, but what I called - for lack of a better word - a "toaster tunnel". You put your toast on the conveyor belt which ran it through the tunnel, and at the end - voilà, nice browned toast. I was actually amazed how well it worked and could have just made toast all day. I know, I'm such a child. The hotel got a complete makeover in 2018, though, so that huge breakfast room has changed a lot, it seems, and the toast tunnel is gone :-( Now I wish I had taken a picture of it.
7. Although I'm not a summer person, I have to admit that sitting outside somewhere quiet in a warm summer night can be wonderful. Being next to a body of water is not the worst thing if it's hot. For me, that was the only reason to join the ex and family members for night fishing although I am a vegetarian and don't fish (not that chances of catching fish were very high where we went, anyway). A comfy chair, a cooler bag full of goodies, and a book for the evening when there was still light - and once it got dark, just listening to the rustling in the bushes and trees behind us (joking that it was bears when it was probably hedgehogs and other small animals), the waves in front of us and the muffled curses of the men when there was another missed bite, and relaxing until it was time to get ourselves home again.
Sorry, we never took pictures, so you have to make do with one of my handmade fishes ;-)
8. July 27, 2018 was the day of the longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century, and a lot of people were really excited to see that one, including my friend and I. We
drove around for a while to look for a good spot and finally ended up
on the "Aasrücken" (literally "carrion back", I have no idea why the
vantage point near our local mountain, the Hohenstaufen, has that name)
in a farmer's almost harvested field (he was still working on it at the
far end) with hundreds of other people. Some had huge telescopes and
loads of photo equipment, others set up rich picknicks for the whole
family. Although it got rather cool eventually, my friend and I were
among the last few who sat it out until the very end and didn't regret
it. It was rather magical. Again, no pictures, but here's a time lapse video (not from our area, though).
9. Fleamarkets are not restricted to summer, I know, but this memory is about a very special June fleamarket. One reason it was special was that my American friend was there for a visit. We had met her via Steiff and no matter which country, a fleamarket had always been a favorite activity of us. This particular one was a city fleamarket that only took place once a year and it spread out all over city center. We usually did one round and then sat down somewhere for a drink and some food, then did another round. I was always slow at fleamarkets and usually relied on the "hunting master" to find the good stuff, but this time it was my friend who called me to tell me she had found a Barbie case with contents and she thought it was old. One glance at the case and the two dolls in wedding outfits and I asked for the price without even knowing what else was in it. The price was so incredible that I almost fell over. All I could say "Sold, just let me get to the bank." as I had very little money on me. I was very glad the bank was nearby and the lady put the case under the table because others had shown visible interest when I had looked at it. Only when we took our usual break, I allowed myself to take a closer look. While I had been looking through children's books, my friend had found a real little treasure for me. I still feel as excited now when I look at those finds in my collection, for example this sweet pink and black outfit called "Atelierfest".
10.
This
isn't really just one special memory, but more of a mix of all the
summers my best friend and I hung out in the woods and had "adventures" - I
think making them up ourselves doesn't take away from us having a lot of
fun being out there with the bikes, picking wild flowers, pretending to
be in a jungle, solving cases or re-enacting our favorite books. I'm not saying these were better times in general, but we had some great times which I'm looking back on fondly.
If
you really made it down to here, all I can say is thank you and you
definitely deserve to get yourself a stiff drink and/or some chocolate now ;-) My summer memories may not have been what you expected, but I sure had fun remembering all of them. Happy Summer everyone!
Some years ago when I still did the "Finds of the week" posts, I had some called "I'm a collector" in which I shared vintage items. Over time my collections have mostly stopped growing due to different reasons, but they are still there and still loved. I also have vintage items, some inherited, some gifts, some from fleamarkets, some more interesting than others.So I thought it could be fun to share some of them every, now and then and tell their story.
Today's post is a huge flashback to my childhood. Family gatherings for birthdays or confirmations, coffee and heavy buttercream cakes, and tableware from the 60s. Always having been drawn to sets in different colors, I loved those ceramic dishes. Of course back then I didn't think to ask why my parents chose different colors instead of getting just one, now I wish I would have.
The model is called "Arabella", the decor "Boston". According to the Bonnefanten, an art museum in Maastricht, the model was produced from 1960 to 1966, Antoine Corstjens being the creator of the decor and Otmar Lochschmidt of the model. We had the coffee sets, stackable cups, saucers, and small plates, and there were two of each rich color - red, brown, green, yellow, and blue. One sister and I thought we only had the dark blue, but not the light blue, but my other sister says we had both, and thinking about it again, I have to agree. Over the years, pieces broke, and eventually the ones left became a memory in the cupboard as mugs got popular instead of small coffee cups. I have always loved the yellow and got a complete set. It still makes me smile looking at it. I love the stripes in the glaze and the yellow looks so happy and fresh.
This is the mark on the cup - the sphinx surrounded by the words "Royal Sphinx Maastricht" and a crown, with "Made in Holland" at the bottom. The cursive writing underneath the sphinx says "P. Regout" which stands for Petrus Regout, the founder of the manufacture.
I tend to obsess when researching for my nostalgia posts (which is probably the reason there are not more yet), and I ended up on Instagram, in Dutch online shops, museums, collector sites. It would have been easier if I had been able to read everything without using DeepL to help me translate.
Imagine my (unwarranted) surprise when I found that there are other items in this particular decor, soup bowls, egg cups, flower pots, sugar bowls, coffee pots (no idea if we had a coffee pot although it would have made sense), even with the colors reversed, and I really liked the milk cups at the Bonnefanten Museum (which unfortunately are not on the site anymore)! I may already have ordered a soup bowl and a flower pot and inquired about an egg cup ... so if anyone stumbles upon a milk cup, let me know, it doesn't even have to be yellow ;-)
Update: Here are the soup bowl with saucer and the little flower pot now, unfortunately my inquiry about the egg cup has been ignored.
A minute ago, however, I ordered a sugar bowl and milkpot. Update: They are here, these ones are light blue.
Next goal - milk cup and egg cup :-)
For now all I would need is a buttercream cake which I haven't had in decades, I think!
