I should have known while still in my mother’s womb that I was not destined for greatness.  Emerging, misshapen feet first, all knobby-kneed, with cowlicks that would have done Alfalfa justice, and a nose too big for the face it sat upon–I was less than ordinary.  If I am to blame anyone for what were to be my eventual shortcomings, it should be Shirley Temple.  What you say?  The adorable curly-headed tot, and the idol of all parents back in the 1930’s and 40’s?

        My parents ignored the obvious however, and after watching every Shirley Temple movie thrust upon an innocent American public, they enrolled me in tap, acrobatics, ballet and adagio.  Weekly lessons were consummated with an intimate, every Friday night recital in our home, where my adoring mother and father would invite all the friends and relatives they could muster, ply them with cheap booze, then plant them on our worn-out couch with its concave cushions clutching them captive, to watch this six year old dance and prance across the living room floor.  Shirley Temple, I was not.

        When the roster of unwary acquaintances was fairly exhausted, I was promoted to piano lessons.  The seven foot behemoth of a teacher arrived, shuffling in old felt slippers and dressed in a long, flowing skirt with a tattered black sweater, from which emanated the fragrances of body odor and Lucky Strikes.  She glowered with a withering look so evil, I knew immediately I was doomed for disaster.  Positioned, back straight at our old spinet, she proceeded to drill scales into me.  My knuckles were rapped repeatedly if not held in an upright position–all ten digits meant to stand at full dress attention.

        Her name escapes me, and I’m sure there is a subsconscious reason why, but I do remember my first and only recital.  It was a simple piece titled “March of the Wee Folk”.  I fretted for weeks.  When the evening arrived, not only my parents and my scowling older brother who hated me under normal circumstances, but the few stalwart friends still hoodwinked by my parents were perched reluctantly in the front row.  I walked to the stage, all pink, frilly and Mary Jane’d, adjusted the piano bench and proceeded to play.

        And play, and play.  I COULD NOT REMEMBER THE ENDING!  The same chords were struck again and again.  After many agonizing moments, and a final ‘pling’, I slunk from the stage with the Wee Folk never destined to march across the finish line.  Shirley would have remembered the entire piece, ended it with a resounding crescendo, and then for good measure, perform the song and dance routine of  “The Good Ship Lollipop”, whilst skipping across the top of the piano.  Thus ended my musical career.

        Summers were spent at Girl Scout and YWCA camps where I was skill-less to grasp the simplicity of braiding a lanyard, kindling a fire from twigs, or assembling the perfect s’more.  I do recall a grand case of poison ivy, a painful bee sting, and a savage bite from a frightened little mole which required a series of weekly tetanus shots.

        Then came my early teens.  perhaps I might become an Olympic champion of sorts, my parents reasoned.  I was enrolled in horseback riding (never could mount the horse by myself,) archery, with weeks of missing not only the target, but the bale of straw upon which it was tacked; and ice skating, only to discover than my ankles could barely support penny loafers, let alone skates.  Gratefully, those same two people who had conceived me, birthed me, nurtured me, threw in the towel.  Well, not quite–almost…

        For Miss Dimples had now become the darling of teenage flics.

        The Olympics became emblazoned in the minds of all true Americans, and my dad, never one to admit failure, took me to Harry Minto, who had coached the Army Olympic Swim Team.  He now headed the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company swim team, and I competed with them for four years.  When it came time for the 1948 Olympic tryouts in Detroit, I was there!  Many others on my team were there also–they as participants; I, a lonely spectator, whose sole purpose was to spur my compatriots onward and upward!

        College arrived and I became a bridge player and chess player–forget about classes.  Barely making a two-point my first semester, I could be found ‘bridging’ and ‘chessing’ on a daily basis until one of the professors check-mated me in five moves, which resulted in a photo and a fairly unflattering by-line in the local newspaper.

        Miss Temple had now married a wealthy, successful California business man, and her wedding made national headlines.  I married my jobless, broke college sweetheart, and we honeymooned in a seedy Cleveland motel for three days.

        After marriage, I thought perhaps there might be an artistic bent.  I enrolled in art classes, but within a few weeks, it was suggest that my stick figures didn’t measure up to the rest of the class, who by then were painting fairly credible copies of the Great Masters.  It mattered not.  Like Don Quixote, I was quest-driven!

        I pressed on relentlessly  to needlepoint, cross-stitch, Tole painting, decoupage, quilting and Eggery.  Gorged boxes of only partially completed needlepoint, enough embroidery floss to span the globe, mounds of cut-out bunny rabbits waiting for their innards to be stitched and stuffed, jars and tubes of paint, brushes by the score, and an entire storage bin of quail eggs, chicken eggs, double-yolk goose eggs, ostrich and emu eggs; not to mention jewels, glues, hinges, music boxes, and an expensive Dremel Drill.

        When my daughter was born, I was inspired to build a doll house befitting a princess.  An unfinished three-story doll house was ordered, with siding, roof and stairs to be built and stained, bags of unassembled furniture, wallpaper not yet pasted, and electric wiring to be installed.  Alas, it sits in an obscure recess of my basement–still in its virgin state.  It’s been that way for forty-eight years.  My princess is now a grandmother.

        In my forties, I took a course in Glass Blowing at Akron University with the hope that there might be a small smattering of untapped fluid long lain dormant in my dehydrated creative juices.  By the fourth week, others in the class were blowing objects so awesome a master glass blower would recognize their worth.  I, on the other hand, (and this might have been the nadir of my ambitions,) had reduced my skills to blowing safe, insignificant generic fish; for who among us knows just what lies beneath the sea?  I could fashion them with ten gills, three tails, no scales, or hands and legs for that matter.  I still have one lonely fish ensconced in a California type-case to remind me of one jaunty evening at a country club:

        In a gathering of swanky clubbers who were bragging of their varied accomplishments, I boldly cleared my throat and heralded:  “I’ve been taking Glass Blowing at Akron U.”  One inebriated gentleman wrapped his arm around me, and with a lascivious grin breathed into my ear, “How do you do?  My name is Mr. Glass.”

        Mrs. Temple Black was now an important stateswoman, working for The United Nations, had become  Ambassador to Ghana and more recently, Czechoslovakia.

        I signed up for a class in stained glass cutting.  It took months–and again a costly amount, but I did manage to create a rather impressive window with three candles of assorted sizes in a myriad of colors, and underneath, painstakingly crafted, the words ‘Joyeux Noel’.  Proudly carrying it home, I opened the door with one hand, as the heavy window slipped from my other hand.  There, covering the garage floor were hundreds of shards of colored glass.  The Noel was not so joyous, and I never returned to class.

        The mid-years came.  It crossed my mind that perchance there still might be an untapped muscle or two.  I took up tennis, bowling, and golf–just so-so, and skiing.  Skiing–ah, yes.  This would be my niche.  I could feel it.  All the accoutrements were purchased: the latest in ski wear, the clearest of goggles, the warmest of gloves, and the costliest of skis.  The thought of lounging around an immense stone fireplace in some exotic location, apres ski, chatting up expats and quaffing grog, smacked of derring-do!

        Unfortunately, I forgot how essential it is to check one’s bindings.  On the first run of the first day of a seven-day ski trip, shushing down the mountain at daybreak, (and breakneck speed,) the tip of my right ski caught the snow, the binding never released, and my leg did a one-eighty around my boot.  I was flown back to Ohio, and after a five-hour operation, four eight-inch scars, three casts, two months in bed, six months on crutches, and a year in physical therapy, I packed away the gear and one last dream of glory.

        So there you have it.  I tell you this, for thanks to Miss Temple, my life has been a graveyard of mediocrity.  Even now she has bested me once again, for at age eighty-four, she is raking in big bucks from her collection of Technicolor enhanced, digitally upgraded, beautifully packaged, and commercially hawked boxed sets of her films to seduce yet another generation of unsuspecting parents;  while here I am–two hip replacements and a bum knee.  Shirley is penning the second volume of her autobiography.

        These five pages pretty much sum up mine.

        I turn eighty in July.  On Friday the Thirteenth.

        Figures!

                                                                           Jan Chapman

                                                                           December, 2011

          Do you remember the first time you viewed the crevices on the moon’s surface thru a telescope?   Or the presentation when served a decadent souffle with it’s concave indentation right smack in the middle–the one in which the waiter pours the sweet cream?  Or the time you blew a perfect gum-bubble, and it imploded within itself?  Those best describe her dimples. Eye-catching, mind boggling, forever memorable—

          They were on her chubby knees.

*     *     *

          The houselights softened in the Palace theater.  The tape-recorded music of Chopin began and then, as the anxious crowd silenced itself, the brocade curtains parted, and twenty-four identically dressed little tots pranced onto the stage.  Blue gauzy tutus, pink ballet slippers, tiaras with their fake jewels twinkling as luminous as the Milky Way. Forty-eight mascaraed eyes looked like frightened little fawns staring into the headlights of oncoming cars. Forty-eight tiny feet occasionally tripped over themselves with their plie’s and jete’s.

          I’m fairly certain there were twenty-four dancers; however I only had eyes for the one who hadn’t shed her baby fat as yet. The one with the dimpled knees.

          She had a quiet cheering section of six: Her proud papa, her harried mama, the tolerant older sister who had been through this before, the fidgety younger brother, her grandfather and I.  I say ‘harried’, for her working mother stopped at the florist on her lunch hour, selected a bouquet to present to the wee one; hurried back to work, and at the end of the day, driving through heavy traffic, she arrived out of breath with the all important flowers, just as the houselights dimmed.

          At the conclusion of the less than noteworthy, but highly amusing, evening’s entertainment, twenty-four eager mothers pushed their way down the aisles to the footlights to present their solitary prima ballerina with her bouquet. My daughter was no exception, and having been through this before, she knew the strategy.  Bolting out of her seat as the four and five year olds were still taking their rehearsed bows, she was the first to present her cellophaned mixture of roses, daisies and baby’s breath to the future Maria Tallchief.

*     *     *

          Making our way out of the theater on that sultry July evening, we paraded down the street two by two to the parking lot. The star of the night’s performance proffered her flowers to her mother and said, “Here, these are for you.”

          “Oh, no, sweetheart—they’re for you.”

          Looking up to her father, she asked, “Daddy, wouldn’t you like the flowers?”

          “No kiddo, that bouquet is because you did such an outstanding job this evening.  It’s your reward.”

          Ignoring her brother and sister, she lingered a bit, and as her grandfather and I were bringing up the rear, she fell in step with the two of us. Again, she extended the mix of posies to her grandfather and pleaded, “Please,Grandpa Tom, I want you to have these.”

          “No, honey, I wouln’t dream of it.  Your mother picked these out especially.  Just for you.”  My husband winked at me, and our hearts overflowed with joy for this young child, who even at her tender age was filled with such an abundance of generosity.

         She paused mid-step, turned to me, and clutched my sleeve.  Letting out an exasperated sigh, she thrust the bouquet into my arms and in a low and plaintive voice whispered:

          “They’re dead, you know!”

　                                                            Jan Chapman

                                                                 March, 2012