Maternal Legacies

[rolanni]

I have a few things from my mother:  A bad temper; a sarcastic sense of humor; an erratic cycle of dark sight and brilliance -- those are the big things.  She taught me how to read -- that was huge -- and she taught me that nothing that I did would ever be good enough to redeem me in her eyes -- that was huge, too.

In terms of things...I have more things from my grandmother than my mother -- a platinum lattice-work ring set with three mine-cut diamonds.  A couple of shot glasses.  Pie Pans.  A Book League of America edition of Jane Eyre bound in blue cloth, the gilt letters and furbelows that had adorned the spine flaked away long ago.  A porcelain Chinese boy and girl; a figurine of a dog cast in lead; a pineapple-shaped lamp finial; another dog -- maybe a Jack Russel Terrier -- porcelain, his spots fading.  A skeleton key.

The thing I have from my mother, though -- the single physical thing object. . .is a brass ring.

It looks like this.

Family legend has it that this ring had come off the carousel at Gwynn Oak Park (if you ever go to Washington, DC, and visit the carousel on the Mall -- that's the carousel that used to be at Gwynn Oak Park.  A Herschell menagerie, built in 1947.). 

Typically, brass rings were traded back into the carousel operator for a free ride.  Some people, of course, kept them as souvenirs.  It seems odd to me that, even as a little kid, my mother would have held onto something as frivolous as a brass ring.  Maybe there wasn't time for an extra ride that day, and she forgot to take it back the next time the family rode the streetcar out to the park for a picnic.

However that may have been, the use to which the ring had been put by the time it came to my attention was entirely in keeping with what I know of my mom.

She used it to keep the wire of her portable electric mixer coiled tidily.  It served that purpose for years, and then one day -- I don't know.  The mixer broke?  We could finally afford a big mixer?  Whatever it was, the brass ring was no longer needed to fulfill its long-time duty.

So my mother was going to throw it away.

"Can I have it?" I asked.

"What do you want it for?"

"I just do.  It's pretty."

There was a long pause before she threw it to me.

"If you leave it laying around, it's gone, hear me?"

"Yes, ma'am."

So, anyhow, I still have it.  Usually, it lives in a drawer in my office.  Occasionally, I see it, when I'm looking for something else, and I'll smile at it, because it's not pretty.  Because it is entirely and only what it appears to be.  I think that's it.

I saw it again today, when I got into the drawer to look for something else, and it made my smile, like it always does.

Comments

memories of carousels

[ednaemode.livejournal.com]

Hi Sharon,

While I do not have a brass ring, I am lucky enough to have memories of catching several as a young child. The carousel of my memories is the one at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Rhode Island where my father came from.
If you ever get a chance, it is a wonderful place.

beth symonds

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The math on that carousel doesn't work out. Gwynn Oak opened as an amusement park in the late 1890s, and there was a carousel on the grounds then. I'm wondering if the Herschell, which is tracked in the National Carousel Census, was a replacement machine...

Something to research in my spare time (cue laugh track). FWIW, by the time I started going to Gwynn Oak, the Herschell carousel had been in play for a decade.

odd little objects

[barbinbandon.livejournal.com]

I love those odd little things that make one smile.

So, you've already got the brass ring. :)

Holy crap, Lee

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to know your mom was like mine. And sad for you.

Mom's way of doing it was taking every achievement and going, "Well, you did X, that was great, but you're Y and that is a total failure. You lose." or something to that effect.

I've had a couple rounds of self-talk with myself over this recently, what with depression over not being able to get my prosthetic as quickly as I wanted to because of a small, non-healing wound.

I can't say I'm glad to have a fellow sufferer from our mom's baggage, but I understand wholly. My mom is still with us (lives around the corner from my sister in Lawrence, KS) and we have a detente. she knows what NOT to say and we try to be kind to one another. but I don't let her get too close ever. It make me feel sad sometimes, but it is safer emotionally.

[the wol (from livejournal.com)]

My mom, who was a self-made girly-girl, wanted a girly-girl for a daughter, but didn't get one. I was accused of walking like I was stepping over rows, was told repeatedly I talked too loudly, was not allowed to pick out my own clothes, was not allowed to have my hair long, and grew up feeling inexplicably uncooth and like a fish out of water. I suppose it is some consolation that the years (entirely too many!) have worn away what is not important. My mom and I were never close, but are closer now than we have ever been.

Off topic, is "Daav" pronounced with an "ah" or an "ay" and are the "A's" pronounced seperately? Also, does the apostrophe contribute anything to the pronunciation of words like "melan'ti" -- it's use suggests that it breaks up what would otherwise be "clusters" into distinctly separate syllables -- or is it just a place holder like "don't." -- My apologies if you have already addressed this issue elsewhere, but I'm a newbie to the wonderful world of things Liaden.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I really hate trying to do this in writing, because not only am I not a linguistics scholar, regional accents play hell with phonetics. For instance, I once had a stenography teacher spend an entire half lesson on the pitfalls of sound-alike words, choosing as her illustration "penny" and "pinny" -- which to my ear -- and the ears to Every! Single! Baltimorean Ear in that classroom -- were two perfectly distinct sounds: peh-NEE and PIN-ee.

So...soft A for Daav -- DAHv.

For the apostrophes in words like melant'i...it's as you'd treat "don't". The name prefixes -- yos'Phelium, for instance -- warrant no more than a half-stop.

[the wol (from livejournal.com)]

Thanks! -- I was reading the apostrophe as a cue to pronunciation -- and that it was "me-lan-ti" -- three distinct syllables rather than "me-lanty" (to rhyme with "shanty") -- I've been googling for recorded interviews where you (plural) talk about the Liaden universe to get correct pronunciations. One does want to pronounce things correctly. BTW, I take it there is a naming convention that assigns males a two "word" name, like Val Con and Er Thom, but "Daav" seems to be exceptional in that respect as well. He and Val Con are my neck and neck favorites, although Jela runs a close second. (him and that potted tree!) Miri Robertson is my hands down favorite female character.

[mardott.livejournal.com]

Ditto with my mother. Perhaps she saw too much of herself in me, and wanted to make sure I understood at a young age, that my dreams could never come true.

That's the kindest spin I can put on it.

But Sharon, that brass ring - is so many kinds of awesome. I can just imagine your smile when you see it.

I would want to touch it once in a while. To feel the dreams again...

[eoma-p.livejournal.com]

I had no idea where the expression grab the brass ring came from before this. There's even a Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_ring

Thank you for sharing this story.

[trolleypup.livejournal.com]

I've always been tempted to obtain a handful of brass rings the same size as the iron rings at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and add them to the mix...then wait and see what happens...

Brass Ring

[catherine ives (from livejournal.com)]

Ob viously the brass ring is a lucky ring. I'd keep it.