January Lately

In support of Netflix despite its blunder-filled ventures of 2011, I have continued my DVD subscription.  (The streaming option is not available in Korea.)  In four days this last week I watched three disks—my current Netflix allotment.  Two disks featured a four-part series titled In Search of Shakespeare that kept me quite enthralled, and several hypotheses developed from this group’s research particularly resonated with me:  The “fair youth” addressed by Shakespeare in a series of his sonnets is his son Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven, and those sonnets express both Shakespeare’s love and sorrow for a son whose life he mostly missed.  And, the “second-best bed” Shakespeare left to his wife in his will could well have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance. 

 

After depositing those two disks into a UPS box on post, two nights later I giggled and sniffled my way through The Belle of Amherst. 

My living in Korea greatly inhibits Netflix’s efforts to provide quick turn-around service; it often requires at least ten days from the time I put a disk into the mail until I receive the next one from my Neflix queue.  So, with my entire Netflix allotment roving the obfuscated channels of the US Postal system, I returned to my book in progress—Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid—and finished it.  In this book Bill Bryson, who was born in 1951, recounts his childhood in Iowa in the 1950s.  Although he is several years older than I am, many of his memories of childhood awakened some of my own.  Like penny candy!  Oh, what a kid could buy back in the day with even a nickel or dime, a time when a quarter heralded a seriously sweet, if at times also weird, haul.  Here is how Bill Bryson remembers the riches on offer for mere pennies:

Perhaps nothing says more about the modest range of pleasures of the age than that the most popular candies of my childhood were made of wax. You could choose among wax teeth, wax pop bottles, wax barrels, and wax skulls, each filled with a small amount of colored liquid that tasted very like a small dose of cough syrup.  You swallowed this with interest if not exactly gratification, then chewed the wax for the next ten or eleven hours.  Now you might think there is something wrong with your concept of pleasure when you find yourself paying real money to chew colorless wax, and you would be right of course.  But we did it and enjoyed it because we knew no better.  And there was, it must be said, something good, something healthily restrained about eating a product that had neither flavor nor nutritive value.

You could also get small artificial ice-cream cones made of some crumbly chalklike material, straws containing a gritty sugar so ferociously sour that your whole face would actually be sucked into your mouth like sand collapsing into a hole, root-beer barrels, red-hot cinnamon balls, licorice wheels and whips, greasy candy worms, rubbery dense gelatinlike candies that tasted of unfamiliar (and indeed unlikable) fruits but were a good value as it took more than three hours to eat each one (and three hours more to pick the gluey remnants out of your molars, sometimes with fillings attached), and jawbreakers the size and density of billiard balls, which were the best value of all as they would last for up to three months and had multiple strata that turned your tongue interesting new shades as you doggedly dissolved away one squamous layer after another. (pp. 95, 96)*

                I do remember that a lot of what Bryson describes was available for purchase during my childhood, but I—quite finicky of palate where candy was concerned—could rarely be convinced to spend my precious pennies on such fare.  I preferred Necco Wafers, Smarties, lemon drops, licorice (only black), bubble gum, or else a Sugar Daddy.  I never was a candy bar kind of girl either.  When my siblings and I would accompany my mom grocery shopping, sometimes she offered to buy us a candy bar, and I usually chose Life Savers instead.  As a teenager I finally learned the pleasures of a Snickers or a Mounds, occasionally a Three Musketeers, but I failed to ever acquire a taste for Butter Fingers and Babe Ruths.  Of course, in this current era of my life, I would much rather spend up my calories on dark chocolate—70-80% cacao, preferably—than any aforementioned candy bars.  Godiva dark chocolate truffles, too, rank as worthy calorie expenditures!

                Here is another Bryson memory of a 1950s childhood that reminded me of some of my own ponderings regarding the disappearance of certain undergarments so prevalent in my girlhood:

Among the many thousands of things moms never quite understand—the manliness implicit in grass stains, the satisfaction of a really good burp or other gaseous eructation, the need from time to time to blow into straws as well as suck out of them—winter dressing has always been perhaps the most tragically conspicuous.  All moms in the fifties lived in dread of cold fronts slipping in from Canada, and therefore insisted that their children wear enormous quantities of insulating clothes for at least seven months of the year.  This came mostly in the form of underwear—cotton underwear, flannel underwear, long underwear, thermal underwear, quilted underwear, ribbed underwear, underwear with padded shoulders, and possibly more; there was a lot of underwear in America in the 1950s—so that you couldn’t possibly perish during any of the ten minutes you spent outdoors each day.

                What they failed to take into account was that you were so mummified by extra clothing that you had no limb flexion whatever, and if you fell over you would never get up again unless someone helped you, which was not a thing you could count on.  Layered underwear also made going to the bathroom an unnerving challenge. . . .

                Mothers also failed to realize that certain clothes at certain periods of your life would get you beaten up.  If, for instance you wore snow pants beyond the age of six, you got beaten up for it.  If you wore a hat with earflaps or, worse, a chin strap, it was a certain beating, or at the very least a couple of scoops of snow down your back.  The wimpiest, most foolish thing of all was to wear galoshes.  Galoshes were unstylish and ineffective and even the name just sounded stupid and inescapably humiliating.  If your mom made you wear galoshes at any point in the year, it was a death sentence.  I knew kids who couldn’t get prom dates in high school because every girl they asked remembered that they had worn galoshes in third grade.  (pp. 140, 141)*

                And my question is, what ever happened to the concept that undershirts accompanied panties as required undergarments for little girls, at least through the chillier months of the year?!  That day in late spring when my mom finally allowed her daughters to dress for the day sans undershirt always ushered in a certain jubilation . . . quite possibly because it also signaled the imminent arrival of summer.  I wore an undershirt for at least seven or eight months of every year of my life until I got my first bra!  When I first began changing clothes for gym at school, I worried about that undershirt directing unwanted attention my way; I was not on the forefront of blossoming womanhood in my age group.  How grateful I was to observe a handful of other girls still appareled in undershirts, too!  Ironically, when I finally achieved bra-worthy status in my mother’s mind and became the owner of several of said undergarments, I found the bras itchy and for a while returned to wearing an undershirt beneath the bra!  In fact, it was my mom who presented me with the ultimatum:  bra or undershirt?  Yes, I chose the bra.

*Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Broadway Books, NY, 2006