Tag: memory

[Note: I edited the last post to fix the incorrect letter. Oops!]

This was the inside of my step-dad’s woodworking shop in Metamora, taken in 1979. The shop was in the back of the old livery stable.

We lived in the house on the left. My room was upstairs, the two windows on the left.

The woodshop was in the back of the grey building next door. I worked in the front shop, from 4th grade until we moved away in 9th grade. It sold granny craft supplies and, weirdly, cabinet doors. The woman who ran it would make dried flower arrangements and attach them to the doors. Tourists ate that shit up like candy. I remember her telling me that crafting was cheaper than therapy, and I guess it was for her.

We didn’t have a shop in the house, and there was nothing on the porch to make it look like a shop, but tourists would walk in the front door all the time. It was a strange place to grow up. But on the weekends and in the winter, we had the whole town to ourselves. We were basically feral.

The Google street view image is from 2013. I expect it’s changed even more since then. I sometimes think I should go visit. I don’t live far from there. But I’m sure it would be depressing.

What the house and shop building looked like in 1979. That’s trumpet vine covering the corner of the house and the front of the shop.

My step-dad from the door of the woodshop, 1979. Basically, it was hippie hell.

Me in 1979. I’m pretty sure that’s a Hardy Boys book I’m reading. My mom’s purse on the coffee table was made by inmates at the Indiana State Prison. My step dad had worked there, teaching automechanics.

Reading List (pdf)

A million years ago, when I was a junior in high school, I took a humanities class. The school I went to was a lab school attached to a state university, so part of the deal was that the students were basically guinea-pig-slash-gold-fish hybrids. We were studied and experimented on. One of those experiments was this humanities class. It was team taught by one English teacher and one History teacher. We also periodically had observers from the education department at the university, sitting in the back of the room, watching us stuff our heads with information and try to synthesize it all.

I was 16 years old. That class broke my brain. Nothing I took in college came close to comparing, in mental difficulty or in the sheer mountains of work required. I’ve tried to explain the experience to others, but the response is usually, “Yeah, I had a hard class, too.” I’m not sure the experience was as universal as one might assume.

Last weekend I sorted through a bunch of old papers and binders, weeding out things I no longer want to hold onto. My humanities binders were in the pile. I flipped through them, and I thought it might be entertaining to put together a bibliography of the readings from the class. Four pages later, I’m starting to see why that class was such a monster. That’s a lot of material to ask a kid to ingest! I don’t know how we did it then. I know I couldn’t do it now, even if I treated it like a full-time job.

I’ve been cheating a bit at this years NaNoWriMo. I’m doing the writing, but it’s not a novel. I’m writing a personal history (sounds slightly less ridiculous than “memoir”). A friend posted on Facebook that it was the anniversary of the Jonestown massacre, and that reminded me that it was also the anniversary of my family moving from northern Indiana to the tiny not-even-a-town Metamora, in southern Indiana.

We moved on November 18, and on the 19th, I crushed my hand in the rusty gears of an antique cotton gin. It was sitting on the porch of the house we’d rented, and the big kids were trying to loosen the gears. Don’t ask me why. I guess it seemed like a good idea? I put my hand on the gear, intending to help, at the exact moment the gears finally loosened and moved. My hand was was crushed, and I ended up getting a bunch of stitches. The ring finger was the worst, but the most visible scars are on mah fightin’ finger.

It’s throwback Thursday, right? So. When I was in high school, I chopped off all my hair but left a long side tail. Which I braided. And at the end, I used a plastic child’s barrette to fasten it. I had a whole collection of them, but Commie Kitty was the best.

A family friend visited us multiple times over the course of several years and took tons of photos and slides. At some point, he gave them to my mom, and she asked me to scan the slides for her, since I have a slide scanner. This is just a few of the more general photos. These were taken between 1979 and 1980, in Metamora, Indiana.

Below the aqueduct

Foggy canal

Candle Shop (?) and Post Office

Train

Canal and Water Wheel

Canal Days crowds

Canal Days vendors

Canal Days vendors near the mill park

Gristmill interior

Inside our woodworking shop

Me reading

Canal Boat Horses, circa 1980

When we lived in Metamora, the canal boat horse holding area was near our house. They were draft crosses, so not as huge as they could have been, but still big compared to the little toy horse I was used to riding.