Lunch Break

I was feeling a little down today, for no good reason I might add. I pondered how to present my latest wrinkle, but I couldn't find the creative energy to compile a cohesive piece. Feeling scattered I wondered if it mattered. So I gobbled down my turkey chili and logged onto Blogger.

I went straight to Wendy's' Among Mad People and read the header "Monday List Love and holy crap someone gave me an award!" I cheered! I do that for Wendy because she is a wonderful writer that I love to turn to for some quality entertainment. She sure beats watching the markets crash and the politicians berate each other. When I tune into Wendy I feel good about the precious time I invested. The return is always profitable.

So I read on and was surprised to find that Wendy had tagged me with the Kreativ Blogger Award. Who'd a thunk it? Lunch never being long enough I headed back to my desk feeling a little better 'cause maybe it did matter...just a little :)

*Here are the award rules:
List 7 things that you love and then pass the award on to 7 bloggers you love!
Be sure to tag them and let them know they have won!
You can copy the picture of the award and put it on your sideboard
letting the whole world know.....
you are KREATIV!

Seven Things I Love

(It was hard to pick just 7!)

1) Coffee by the fire with Wil

2) Stories about the good old days preferably from the oldest person I can befriend

3) Cocktails at sunset on the bow of the boat

4) Watching and feeling the little peanut move inside my daughters' pregnant belly

5) Photography 24/7/365

6) Campfires and the friends that gather around them

7) Meals because the best conversations are when people are full and happy

Passing it on to Seven fabulous bloggers

(If you have already been tagged, too bad. I want people to know how wonderful you are anyway!)

1) Invest some time with Wendy at Among Mad People http://www.wendy93639.com/

You won't be sorry.

2) Invest some money in Robin Collins at Sneaking Out at Midnight http://fourcrows.wordpress.com/

Her art is beautiful and needs many homes.

3) Estizer Smith at http://estizer50.wordpress.com/

She is a good friend who is tracing her history back to 'Bloody Lowndes' County Alabama. She is currently showing her latest photo exhibit at the Banana Factory in Bethlehem, PA. She has also authored a book titled Welcome Home. Her photos and words will move you.

4) Roxi at Roxi's 365 http://roxis365.blogspot.com/ for her stick-to-it-ness. A photo a day for 1 year.

5) Sandy at Family Recipes http://familyrecipecollection.blogspot.com/ for her tempting recipes.

6) Katie at http://kkhoffmanillustration.blogspot.com/ for her beautiful illustrations.

So, I stop at 6. You should know that I don't always follow the rules. Although this entry also seems a bit off course for the quest, it's not. It is about women supporting women. We rule wrinkles and all!

Meet Roxi

She took time out of her busy schedule, and she came to my door holding a bag of homemade cookies and chocolate. YUM! The shoot was off to a great start. I had met Roxi in a photo journal class. I gathered bits of her daily life through the photos she shared during the course. She provides Communion to shut ins, holds Apple Dumpling fundraisers, host Community Dinners, knocks out walls and runs marathons. She is a strong woman who knows her path. She was patient with me as I manipulated her and the lighting to get the most wrinkled look possible. Then she left me with a warm hug and I knew that she had gone out of her way to do this for me expecting nothing in return. Funny after she left and I processed my photos, I kept coming back to this one. Not the most dramatic of the shoot, but the one in which I saw the little girl and the gentle spirit that builds into a strong woman. Here is her story....






I've never been a girly girl. I had dolls, but without sisters they were not played with as often as I played with my brothers and their cars and trucks in the sand pile by the shed. I was a tomboy and I knew it. Growing up on a dairy farm 10 miles from town in northwestern Wisconsin I didn't have girlfriends close by, so my brothers and I rode bikes on the farm, played softball and football in the yard, and did our chores.


Most often chores were divided along traditional gender roles. After supper my brothers went to the barn with my father and grandfather to milk the cows while I stayed in the house with my mother to wash dishes. I learned how to cook, how to sew, how to clean, how to manage a household. I also learned you do what needs to be done even when they crossed traditional gender lines.


I learned to fold fitted sheets from my grandfather. My mother regularly mowed the lawn. My father taught me to throw a football. When I was five my father set me on the flat roof of a steel shed; my job was holding nuts while he tightened the bolts. At 16 Dad built a small addition to the house and I was given the task of gofer; go for tools, go for this, go for lemonade.


It was the 70's and the Woman's Movement challenged traditional gender roles. I was already living it, and so were most of the women I knew. It was not a conscience decision on their part. It was simply doing what needed to be done. For me that meant working my way through college, then went on to seminary. I became a pastor, then wife and stepmother. Along the way I accumulated degrees. Now I am wrinkled, and if genetics has a say, these wrinkles are just the beginning to a face furrowed with wrinkles.


I think I should name them. One is called Hazel, my most wrinkled grandmother, whose first born died after being hit by a car when he was 4. One is called Ruth, who delighted in children. One is called Esther, an aunt of gentle spirit. Another is called Gertrude, who homesteaded 169 acres. My wrinkles are named Jane and Cori and Cari and Barbo and Freelove and Susan and Anna and Elizabeth and Caroline and Sarah. My wrinkles are named for women who sailed from England and Ireland and Norway and Germany, women who traveled west from New England to Pennsylvania to Wisconsin. My wrinkles are named for the women whose own wrinkles I see on my face.....wrinkles that declare perseverance, determination and resilience.

How To Disarm A Woman

This one is dedicated to all the men who think they know the answer to "Honey, do I look fat in these jeans?" and all the women who suffered through their replies.

Happy New Year! May your 2009 be full of happiness and joy :)



It was one of those swinging hormone days. I could see the fear in his eyes. He was close to the line of fire. He knew before I did, there was no right thing he could say. Resigned to his fate my husband looked at me pleadingly with that deer in the headlights glaze as I fired.............." I look old and fat. Don't I?"

Quickly I glanced at myself in the mirror and then returned my full attention to my opponent. I stared him down and waited for him to strike or run!

Suddenly to my surprise the look of fear dissipated. It was replaced with a twinkle in his eyes. His face lit. His lips curled. He grinned and replied, "You are beautiful, and I don't deserve you."

What could I say? I was instantly disarmed. Surrender was imminent. There was nothing left to do. Graciously I replied, "You are crazy, and that's why I love you."

Although the battle was lost, I couldn't help chuckling to myself as I walked away satisfied that I had won the war. Truth be told the battle of the bulge and wrinkles will inevitably be lost, but love conquers all.

You see, my wise husband understood that the underlying question I was really asking was "Do you and will you continue to love me despite the wrapper?" What a guy!

Birthday Cake

Today I'm 53!................ Happy Birthday to ME :)

Food for Thought

Flattery

When I was seventeen I was shopping with my young nephew in the nearby mall. The manager of the sporting goods store struck up a conversation with us which resulted in a job offer for me as a cashier. I was flattered. I gave notice at the expressway rest stop where I was currently cashiering and where, by the way, a fellow employee had just grabbed my derriere. I was moving up. I would receive a higher wage, be closer to home and work in a safer environment. Unfortunately a couple of weeks later as part of my training, I was chased around the back room while proof reading the Sunday sales flier by the same married middle aged manager that had hired me. Luckily I was able to stave him off with a sharp awl, a few harsh words and a very loud "I QUIT".

At age twenty I was married. My husband and I had opened a service station. Always enjoying art and being on a strict budget, I painted all of the signs for the business. I was particularly proud of a large billboard boasting the state inspection seal. An established businessman in the community also admired the sign. He asked if he could hire me to paint signs for his miniature golf farm. I was flattered, and I said that I would be happy to take the job. In less than an hour, hurling an armful of signs, I was running from his barn.

In my forties I was running my own corporate food service. One particularly powerful executive said that I really did a great job. He was impressed. I was flattered when he stopped by my office with a gift of candy he had bought on a recent trip abroad and quite surprised at how quickly this man I identified as fatherly could turn predator.

At each of these times I was angered at being treated in this manner. I dismissed those involved as dirty old men and moved on with life.

In reflection, I see how women can confuse the measure of their worth with the measure of their beauty because at those moments what I was really made to feel was worthless.

Meet Paula

Long before my project began, I can remember Paula exclaiming, "I think wrinkles are great!" I giggled at her spunky outspoken wit. Little did I know that I would have the opportunity to test her resolve by examining her through my lens. I had hoped to get an image of her snarling at aging, but I only found a sense of peace. I saw no fear, no apprehension, no self consciousness. She is truly one with her wrinkles.

In talking to Eleanor before, during and after this shot, I remembered a pivotal wrinklequest moment. At the time I was a 20-something Masters student at the University of Texas, El Paso writing a thesis on women's liberation documentary films, full of vim and vigor and a little political movement energy. Our Bodies Ourselves had just come out and I was engaged with the notion that growing older was mostly about becoming wiser. The secretary in the Journalism Department, Jean, had the most exquisitely lined face I had ever seen, and was stunningly beautiful. Though I don't have a photo of Jean, her face is indelibly etched on my memory. I thought, when I am older "I want to look like her!" This image has replayed itself again and again as I have gotten older. Maybe it's similar to how young girls look at models in Vogue as their ideal body image model.

Wrinkles don't scare me. I see them as earned markers of maturation. Though I don't want to judge others, the concept of having this face un-wrinkled seems such a waste. I do notice the necks of women who have had the tucks, and the age is still evident there. For me it's the more the merrier. In my early 40's when traveling in the Southwest through Navajo and Hopi lands I ran across a lithograph (artist unknown) of an ancient shamanic woman
wrapped in an Indian blanket, wearing a beautiful clay pot on her head
with canyon lands in the background. This has been on my wall/office since then. She is magnificent.

Recently, when I was visiting family in Hawaii, I showed them this picture of Eleanor's of my wrinkly face. I was laughing about it and looking at the contours of the wrinkles as an almost geographical landscape. They weren't laughing and said, " I wouldn't want that done to me." But I am delighted to be a subject of Eleanor's.

And the shoot was such fun! There she is lying on her back, balancing one lamp between her legs, and another behind her, me hanging off an exercise bench "trying" to wrinkle my face. Ironically, my face is pretty much a rubber-face. I make faces and am totally unaware of what face I just made. Eleanor kept trying to capture a "face" she had seen before. I could not do it, much to her chagrin. I would make an awful photographer's model because I can't at-will recreate a "look". Clearly the mind/brain doesn't remember how it created the face. I hope that Eleanor's blog will help us all to feel the inner giggle in the process, that we can all let go of any expectations we might have had about "getting on" in years. There is no rule that says that wearing your battle scars cannot be a really fun and funny ride. I agreed to do this in my own personal pact to take myself LESS seriously. Cheers to the wrinkle brigade!

Paula Michal-Johnson Ph.D.
Moving Body Mind Spirit
Fountain Hill, PA

Meet My Mother

I've always known that my Mother regretted not going to high school. After all, she loved school. She is smart. So smart that despite the twenty eight moves her family made, she was able to test out of sixth grade and skip to seventh. A story that she is proud of and has told me many times. She also told me that she never went to high school because she stayed at home to help my Grandmother.



My Mother was born to dire times, The Great Depression. A time of no frills, no indoor plumbing, oil lamps, sparse heat, hungry bellies, hand me downs and few jobs. Families had to be resourceful and work together to make ends meet. It didn't seem unusual that her place as the oldest was to help take care of her siblings, that she picked tomatoes to earn money to contribute to the house funds, and that she learned to make her own clothing from feed bags. These hardships were generic to the era, or so I thought until recently.



A few months before my Mothers' 88th birthday and out of the blue she shared her truth with me. You see my Mother and a neighbor girl did set out for high school in the fall of 1935. They boarded the train to Haddonfield, a well to do neighborhood where the high school resided. They arrived at the school to find a parade of well dressed students of less modest means. Sadly my Mother and her friend looked upon their own dresses made of feed bags and hand me down shoes with shame and couldn't bring themselves to enter the building where they would surely face the scorn of the other students. To avoid being discovered they cowered in the school yard all day and anxiously waited for the afternoon train home where they regretfully remained.



After hearing my Mothers' truth, I could finally understand why she hated my beloved, worn, artfully patched and embroidered jeans of the seventies, and why it was so important for her to study and pass the GED when she was in her early fifties. I am proud of my Mother, her life and her accomplishments. I just wish she had told me this story in the seventies instead of throwing out those jeans!