Snotty

Remember when you were in grade school and someone got called snotty, and it had nothing to do with a runny nose?

"Margot is being snotty!" exclaimed Karen Hildebrand because she thought that Margot Stone was putty on airs. 

"Don't be snotty!" accused Rachel Rubenstein when Gretta Landau didn't want Rachel to play four-square on the playground. 

Calling someone "snotty" always seemed to me to be something very childish.  Pissy, if you will.

Maybe, because, I never heard anyone use it after fifth grade.

After fifth grade, "Stuck Up" took root.

"Billy Winslow is being so Stuck Up because his family spends their summers at his grandmother place on Cape Cod," Sally Sebreen opined in seventh grade.

"Well, wouldn't you?  They have a compound with three houses," Karen Richards pointed out.  "Like the Kennedy's do."

In high school, stuck up stayed around, but that was because moved to Marion, Ohio, and things were always a bit slow to roll into that town's stream of teen consciousness. By that point, "What a bitch," and "asshole" took over.

Now, Cookie's 40th class reunion is coming up, and over the over other put-downs came and went.   And in the gay community, they are sets of put-downs.  Snotty, isn't one of them unless you are sick with a head cold.   "My head is so snotty, and I have copious amounts of lung butter when I cough."  Ew!

In fact, aside for children, I seldom even come across "Snotty" anymore.

Which surprised me last week when Snotty shoved its way into the conversation, twice.

The first one was in an online genealogy forum when some woman hated the Ancestry.com "rainbow" logo.  So. Much. Hate. and So Much Drama!

"Cancel my account!"  "I will never again use your site!"  "Take it down or Ancestry will be rooo-in'd!"

My ass.

But someone replied to something I wrote essentially telling one of the bible belt drama queens to take a deep breath and refrain from jumping out of her basement window to end it all.  "Build a bridge Ethel; it's not about you anyway."

The response came from a woman named Carol who wrote: "There's no need to be snotty."  Really?  Really Carol?  Are you ten?

Then the other night, in a phone call with a family member, and she accused another family member of being "snotty".

To me, after the age of ten, when you call someone snotty, it really is a snotty thing to do. Like pointing a finger and having three fingers pointing back at you.

Even the husband later said "Where did that come from?"  Honestly? Years and years of pushing things down.  Deep, deep, down.

Now, stuck up, that I get.  Putting on airs. Sure.  But Snotty?  What's next, Nanny Nanny Bo-Bo?

But snotty is so childish.  It's so second grade.

I called our friend Bruce who works in Pop Culture Language at a major university, and I asked him: "Is snotty making a come back with adults?"

And I was surprised to learn that it is "rising", with tween girls.

"I blame it on Arrianna Grande.  But I blame a lot of things on that bitch.  Like donut licking.  Who does that?  It'll go away quickly, too.  It's so pissy sounding.  And kids don't hang onto childish sayings these days.  But if it gets picked up by someone like Cardi B, watch out."

English is so rich.  If you want to knock someone down, go to hauty.  Go to conceited.  Go to self-important. Go to opinionated.  You can even go to "Now, is that really the nicest thought you can have?"  Better yet, don't respond.

But leave snotty to the kids and the tweens.  Or not.  Just remember, if you use it with me, my response is going to be a raised eyebrow and a "Really?"

Really. 

And the last one falls

So a bit of news from the Ohios is that the last of the "First Time Home Buyers Club" for 1993 has listed his house for sale and plans to move into a downsized condo.

Back in 1993, Cookie decided to buy a house.  I had never owned a house, but I worked for a company that trained mortgage lenders.  I had sat through so many seminars I was qualified to become a broker myself.

If I planned it right and bought in the right area, I could have walked into a nice house for a $2,000 down.  Back then, Mortgage lenders had something we called "Red Line Money".  These were programs, set aside to help mortgage companies and banks get loans to houses in neighborhoods where they didn't have many loans.  The idea was, that they would do just about anything to get first-time buyers to buy a house in a neighborhood where they were short mortgages.

So I found a ramshackle place near Ohio State, in a neighborhood that could have tipped the wrong way.  It had 1,200 square feet, one bath and it was only 60K.  So I jumped.  My mortgage PITI was $500 a month, even.   Of course, it needed a ton of work, but we got it there when we sold it 19 years later, and it was lovely.

But then my friend Marty wanted a house.  She was an attorney, so why shouldn't she get in on the action.  And she did.  Same program, different neighborhood.

Then George got in on it.  "If Cookie can do this, why can't I?"  And he did.

Finally, Mikey got in on it.  He bought a real monster in an "Up and Coming" neighborhood. Mikey hit the jackpot.  That neighborhood skyrockets in value.  And the former drug den became a very nice place.

We sold, to move to "Charm City" (A terribly disappointing name for a place that offers no charm, no charm at all.) in 2012.

Marty lost her mind, lost her job, and lost me as a friend in 1999. "NO!" she ordered me at the last.  "You can't choose your husband over me!"  Wrong.  But she hung onto his place until 2017 when she stepped up to "new" place in German Village.

George died - cancer - and his sister sold that house in 2018.

Now Mikey has announced that he has sold his pile to a couple hipsters who paid $800,000 on a house he picked up for $98,000.  Of course, the hipsters won't have to shovel out piles of hypodermic needles like we did when he got overwhelmed with it all.   But then again, Mikey is seldom home, never cooks at home, spends his weekends away at his "summer house" (read that as "camper" in a "park") and he doesn't need a 4,000 pile to take care of.

So the last one of the group falls.

And word also came today that yet another friend has listed his place for something smaller, now that he's divorced from that witch he married ten years ago.  (If you are reading this Helen, I never liked you.)

So, the "Old Order Passeth."  It makes you kind of sad, and it's another reminder that you can't go home, or to your old friend's houses, again.

Home...

...is the place where, when you have to go there, they must take you in.  ~ Robert Frost

Cookie has just completed the first of TWO visits to the Ohios* this summer.   This was a one Ohio trip.  In the coming weeks is a more complex, multi-Ohio journey.

Will tell you more once I have reacclimated myself to Baltimore.


*Note a typo.  Ohio is not a single state, but a confederacy of city-states, each with its own political identity.

Cousin Martha: "You know how it goes"

People have asked Cookie why I love genealogy.

The answer is simple.  You meet people that you know and you dig up people you wish you could know.

Take Cousin Martha.  Actually, fourth cousin Martha, twice removed.

Now you are asking what does "fourth cousin, twice removed" mean?

Let me try and explain this without you going all glassy-eyed.  When we determine relationships, we look at two people and the closest equal relationship that they have. With children, its parents. With grandchildren, its grandparents. With great-grandchildren, they share the same great-grandparents, who are their parent's grandparents.

When it comes to determining cousins, we define a basic cousin as two people who have different parents but share a common set of ancestors.  You and your first cousins SHARE the same set of grandparents.  You and your second cousins mean that you share the same great grand-grandparents. Etc, and so on.

So a full cousin, be it a cousin, or a second cousin or a set of third cousins, and you can go back and equal number of generations and find a set shared common ancestors. 

"Times Removed" means that there is an unequal number of generations between the common ancestors between you and the cousin.  So what we do is first find the two people who have an equal number of generations - that gives us the cousin degree, then we count the additional generations on one side as "removed" from one and other.  Removed means a different number of generations on one side.

So my fourth cousin, twice removed is someone with whom I share a common ancestor, plus two generations on one side of the equation.  Martha's fourth cousin was my grandfather, my parent and me being the two generations different from Martha.

Now someone will say that "Well you really aren't related..."

Au contraire mon frere!

If we really weren't cousins, there would be no common ancestors.  But there are, so we are, so there.  Now it has nothing to do with shared common experiences.  I have first cousins that I barely know.  I do have third cousins that I am very close to.  I have two cousins that I am related on through both their grandfather and grandmother, through three different lines without any intermarriage until my grandparents.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Anyhow, Martha and I were related, but separated by space and time, and we share the same Revolutionary War-era couple as common relatives.  All of our families knew the same people, but the families, themselves were like planets, everyone in their own orbit, crossing paths, never colliding, never really understanding how it worked, but passing closely one to another.  You know how that goes.

So back to Martha.

Many years ago, in the early 1980s, I was on the hunt for a copy of the expansive family genealogy - a book my mother called the "Kennel Papers" or what I have grown to refer to as "the moldy tome".  There weren't many published, and if our branch of the family had one, my grandfather more than likely threw it out and/or burned it when he cleaned out his aunt's home in the 1940s.

A local librarian had told me that I might want to go knock on the door of an overgrown house on the main street that had a rusting Mercury in the drive.   The house belonged to someone with my mother's family name, and we passed it frequently.  But it was someone my mother denied knowing.  "Maybe I met her once, but don't pester her.  She doesn't like people."

The librarian, however, was certain that the woman in the house might be open to parting with the book. "Martha probably has one and she most likely would sell it."

So, I went to the big ramshackle white house, with the weeds and poison ivy in the front yard and knocked on the door. And there was the black Mercury, rusty but operational.  The smell of cigarettes was terrific, and I have always hated cigarettes and the smell and the dirt.  But it was odd because I was on a stoop, not on an enclosed porch or such - and the smell as if someone had been smoking beside me.

I waited and was about to knock again when the door opened and through the screen door appeared a woman with a face like the Mighty Favog, but topped a mop of chopped hair like Roseanne Roseannadanna, grey tinged with yellow from cigarette smoke.

I introduced myself, explained my quest and she said "Susan called and said you would be by," and opened the door.

The day outside was bright and hot, and the house was warm and dark.  The air was thick with Pall Mall smoke and as my eyes adjusted there was clutter here and there, but not to the extent that she was a hoarder.  She motioned me to the left and opened up a pair of French doors. "I don't often have company."

The room was dark, the air was thick and the barkcloth drapes drawn against any sunlight, but slices of light cut through the dim light to show the film of decades of smoke and dust whirling about.  It wasn't until I was seated that I really could see around the room, and it was pure "Chinatown".  If Hollywood was going to set a scene of California in the thirties and forties, this was it.

Bentwood furniture, barkcloth upholstery, wicker lamps, art deco cigarette boxes, bakelite pulls and rattan chairs and painted plaster lamps with fringed shades so old the silk was disintegrating.  Pulled back against the walls was older furniture, more in line with the 1900s.  A large tall case clock stood in the corner, its pendulum still.

We chatted, figured out how we were related.

"I may have met your mother in 1935 - when I came back from California for the reunion.  Is she in that picture?"  She pointed to a long boy picture of about two hundred people that I had never seen. "We used to be a bigger family, but we all have scattered to the winds," she said.  I would have needed Windex and a roll of paper towels to wipe away the soot and smoke to see the details.

I complimented her on the furniture.  It was the 80's, this stuff was worth a small fortune.

"I left for California in '23.  On a vacation to the Coronado.  After two weeks beyond my return, my mother called to see when I was coming home.  I told her I was home.  I adored the California lifestyle.  So when I moved back in '65 to take care of her, I bought my things.  I thought I would move back, but you know how it goes sometimes."

Yes, she had a book.  And yes, she would sell it for a $100, firm.  "But I would have to look," and that she planned to get the house in order in the coming month.

"Would you like 'a hot Sanka' and a cookie?  I hate to have a coffee alone."

I followed through the dining room, the butler's pantry into the kitchen where a table and chairs sat in the middle of the room.

"I don't cook much."

For as dark and cluttered as the living rooms of the house were, the kitchen was clean.  The range was from the forties and the refrigerator was like the one at my grandparent's house, a one door GE.  "It's easy to keep a room that you don't use clean if you don't clutter it up."

She sat down a cup with hot water, the jar of Sanka and some archway cookies that were hard as rocks.  And prattled on, in between drags on the cigarette, after cigarette.

"When I decided to stay I went to Los Angeles and visited cousin Walter.  He gave me a job in his bank.  I didn't like working in a bank.  But Walter had made the arrangements and I didn't want to disappoint him. I made enough to buy a house in Hanock Park, and I rented rooms to the star-struck and people who worked in the very early talkies.  You never rent to a silent sta hoping to get a break.  It never works out.  When Walter died, I was a branch manager.  The War started, but there was no way to move home, so I stayed with the bank. You know how these things work out."

She took a break to smoke a Pall Mall and then continued on.

"By the early sixties the bank had been sold and sold, and I ended up at the Broadway in the accounting department.  It was tres chic."

Then the topic shifted so fast my neck hurt.

"Mother cooked.  I don't.  She's been gone since 1969.  So I keep the kitchen clean, because I may need to cook one day."  I think her entire diet was "hot Sanka", stale cookies and Pall Malls.

I left, she promised to look, and a couple months later she invited me back, and we talked but I mostly listened.

"I wasn't interested in men when I was young.  I was having too much fun.  And when I was older, men weren't interested in me," she said.  "Do you play rummy?"

We met twice more before she said "I have exhausted hiding places where the book would be.  So I called (her sister) Millie, and Millie has it in Chicago.  You know how these things work out."  That was fine, I had enjoyed spending time with her.  She did have all the gossip.

We talked about her side of the family: "Now Corliss married Fred Weaver.  They bought a farm by McCutchenville...Emery died from an accident - a thresher ripped his arm off and he bled to death in the field...Movie stars are alright, but they have a right to go to the grocery without people bothering them...Now movie actors are great fun.  No ego.  They just want to work....I never cared for modern art - I have a hard time with the battle between what I see and what the artist meant to communicate...Chester Rowe was a nice man, crushed to death by a tractor wheel in the field...Dorothy? She lost her finger in the cream seperator...did you know about cousin Leon Wiglesworth?  He was going to make it big in film, but he spent too much time with Billy Haines and cheap brown booze...Do you cook? What do you like to cook?" 

You know how that goes.

She did bring forth her grandmother's "Misery Books".

Evidently, her grandmother loved to clip out news stories of misery, bad luck, and tragedy.  The books were made from published text books that she glued the newspaper stories onto the pages.  The newsprint was brown with age and the horse glue had hardened.  But there it was "Mrs. Dorothy Williams Loses Finger, New Cream Separation Machine Blamed: WARNS OTHERS  OF POTENTIAL DANGER OF ELECTRIC MACHINES" and "CHET SMITH CRUSHED BY TRACTOR WHEEL, Wife knew something wrong when seeing buzzards aloft."  She gave me one book, and I still have it but mostly afraid to open it after 35 years.

We met once more. "Can you bring over a jar of Sanka with you?"

When I arrived the house was exactly as it always was, and my hopes of ever getting the book were dashed.  I wrote to Millie and she said she would ship it back.  Maybe in the fall.

The cards came out, rummy was played and gossip was imparted between hands and smoking breaks.  "Did you know the Kennedy's? Such a tragedy about Mary Joan and Jean.  I would like to visit Jean, but she's in a home down by your people. I don't think I could make the drive in my car...Vesta Glidden was a church-going Methodist until she met the married Baptist preacher...And I told her "oh what a tangled web we sleep with a married man and then we conceive...So that's where that diamond was...

Not long after that last visit, I moved out of the area.

Martha died in 1986, and Millie - like my grandfather - cleaned out the house by throwing everything away, even the stuff that had any value.  By the time I made it back, the house was gone.

My mother said that they had to tear the house down because the Firestone bought the property and needed the parking the lot would yield.  More like they tore the house down because it was old and unkempt and beyond a quick coat of paint.  I would see the Mercury around town on my visits.

So, what did I get from meeting Martha and talking about family, California in the 20s and 30s and beyond?  Well, I still hate Sanka, hot or otherwise, I still hate cigarette smoke.

But on the plus side, I got to meet her, appreciate her love of "the California Lifestyle" and now I know everything about cousin Leon Wiglesworth who acted under the name David Worth.  And I know not to become distracted and to be careful when and if I ever use a cream separator.

But its the experience of meeting people and hearing them and asking them questions that makes it worthwhile.

You know that goes, right?

Write your own description

"Two days after they messed up her order at Panera, perimenopausal, chain-smoking Karen was still upset that they forgot to add extra feta to her salad so she’s thinking about going back to speak with the manager." ~~~ Faith S. on Facebook

Cookie loves bad art.  In fact, I have several pieces hanging in my house because it brings me great joy. 

So when Cookie found this picture in a thrift store group and that description - and I couldn't write it any better than Faith, I had to share. 

But she looked more like a Judith to me.

Anyway, I invite you to write your own cutline about this painting and post it in the comments.section. 

Goodies!

Trust me, lady; he will be disappointed when he gets his hands on the truth.

Yesterday I wrote about cleaning out my papers and files from my previous career. 

And what did the postman deliver to me today?

Goodies for my current career!

I can't say what the goodies are, but let's say that one blows the locks off one of the most told foundational stories in American business in the 20th Century.  Obliterates it.  YAY!!!!

So I am currently in talks with a major archive, a major university depository, a major library's manuscript division, and a national museum to see who wants this, and who gets it.  More importantly, who will take it and give access to researchers who will want to look at it. 

Very excited and a little annoyed that I can't play with the stuff until I get the clean out completed. 

Yeah, I don't think I can do that

Cookie is in the middle of a massive home office reorganization project that is meant to get rid of twenty years worth of detritus accumulated in my former career now that I have retired from writing local and regional histories for a major publisher.

Frankly, it's not my job to be the archivists for these communities. So all these copies of pictures that we made while we were writing these books are getting shipped off to the towns around the Midwest where I worked and wrote.

I was reminded today of the types of locals who just don't get it.  I mean they don't get what a local and regional history book is. 

An elderly man back in Ohio died.  He was really old when he died.  Really, really old.  Like in the running for world oldest person old.  He was old when I started this venture. 

The way the books would work is I would get hired, I would go in, get what I could at local historical societies, scanning and writing "cutlines" - telling the story of what was going on in the image in 120-140 words, max.  After that, we would invite locals in to bring their pictures in for scanning and story swapping.

Well, this one day, with about ten people waiting, in comes this elderly man with his three daughters - and they were old, too.  I think he was about 90, and the "fillies" as daddy called them were in their 70s. 

Instead of taking a seat, and filling out the form and meeting with the local interns I used for "intake", one daughter barged her way up and lied to the others saying she had an appointment.  She did not - if she had an appointment, I would have written it down.

"I'm sorry but my father (insert the guy's name) is here and he can't wait to be interviewed for his chapter."

Huh?

"Surely you have heard about my father.  He's the oldest man in this county."

Now, the historical society for the said town had a man on it who was 101 and he was still driving.  That's something you remember.  If for no other reason to stay off the roads.   So I asked how old he was and the daughter said 90 something.

How interesting. 

"And I know that these people won't mind letting my father move to the top of the line."

The faces of the people who had been pushed aside certainly looked as if they minded.  Of course, they did.  They had played by the rules until the fillies stampeded the event.

So I asked her to wait, finished with the person who I was working with - a dear woman who timidly came in and "Oh, these pictures won't be of any interest."  That was an understatement!  She had pure gold - one of the images ended being the cover shot.

So I went over and the old man says "My 'fillies' tell me that you are going to write a chapter on me."  I introduced myself, shook his hand and smiled.   I asked what kind of images they brought and the daughters looked perplexed.  Pictures?  "No, we just brought daddy."

OK, then, perhaps we should schedule a time when I can come and visit and we can look at some pictures and do an interview.

The oldest filly - who was one hoof to the glue factory - said that "Daddy's life is more interesting than any picture from the past."  Sensing disaster, I suggested then, that an in residence appointment would be best.  "You see, today was for scanning pictures and these people who signed in before you brought their images, and we have the equipment for that purpose..."

The oldest filly, Mrs. Ed, said: "Aren't you interested in even talking to daddy?"

Just as I started to say what I had kindly just said, again, a local historian named Corlis came in and thankfully inserted herself into the middle. 

"Margaret, I told you it isn't that kind of book...This is a book that will have more photographs than body text...Well yes, and I am sure he has many wonderful stories to tell...The society might want to write a book based on his stories...I will call you Howard and set something up...Good seeing you, b-bye...So who is next in line?"

Later Corlis said while we were packing up "I told them, and I told them again, and they just don't hear a word anybody says."  Verily, Corlis was over the fillies.  "Their father is a really nice man, but he's dull as a dangerous knife and whenever anyone has a project they foist him on us.  When we built the new library, they wanted his name on the plaque inside the door because he was the first child to get a library card when they opened the old building when it was new.  That's a nice piece of trivia, but it isn't plaque-worthy."

Looking through my box of notes I found a card from Corlis - who died about five years ago - so says Legacy the death notice people - telling me that she met with the fillies and daddy but there "wasn't really enough for a paragraph, let alone a book.  I told them to write the stories down, as he tells them, and I will do something with them."

The other thing I was reminded of was when we did a signing and some woman came in and said "My friend said that there would be a chapter on their father.  I don't see it. Now this book is a present for their father so inscribe it with "'I am sorry that I didn't write a chapter about you for the book.'"

I literally wished I had a spray bottle of water so I could have sprayed in her face and said "NO!"

Instead, I smiled and said "I am not writing that. But I will write War?"

Deep down, I think the fillies did their father a disservice, time and again.  Great love can make you do things like that.  But that love is usually blind to carnage it creates with empty promises and misunderstandings.