Be it Ever So Humble and Odd

One day, when my gal-pal, Lyle and I were still raising babies and up to our ears in diapers and baby food, she said to me, "Sometimes I wonder how many weird things there are about my house that other people notice and I don't."

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

After she said that, I wondered too, especially since we were at my house when she said it. I still wonder years later, just in a different house. I no longer have raising babies as an excuse, but still, life gets hectic, my kids couldn't care less if our house looks like we just hosted a frat party, and I'm not very handy. You get the drift.

As I write this, there is a cobweb growing ever bigger on the front porch, as if our house were practicing for Halloween. There is duct tape wrapped around the kitchen faucet, and the kitchen waste basket is in the pantry, one step down from the rest of the kitchen and out of reach of everyone but giraffes and orangutans, because when we put it anywhere else, the dog gets into it and trots the contents all over the house.

The paint is peeling off several of our interior doors, but only at about six inches up the outside edges because that is where the cats squeeze their paws in to open doors that aren't quite latched. If we were to shut the doors more tightly when we want privacy, the paint would be peeling off the outside of the doors in whichever bottom corner the door knob is on because that is where the cats "knock." Since they tend to "knock" with their claws, we can tell which of us is most popular with them by comparing the number of scratch marks. 

There are two large pieces of plywood lying in my driveway, placed there by the restoration company before they deposited a garbage dumpster over them last winter; that was because the basement had flooded. I keep meaning to call the company to have the plywood removed but I'm too busy knocking down the cobwebs and wrapping duct tape around the faucets. Household maintenance can be demanding.

Our car has idiosyncrasies too. There is a towel covering the front passenger seat because during a girls' weekend last spring, I forgot one of the weekend's many candy bars in there and it melted. Then there was a period of several weeks where the trunk wouldn't latch because I had broken it trying to attach a bungee cord, and since it didn't fly up and nothing was getting wet in there when it rained, I let it go until the car was smashed up (not my fault) and it had to be in the shop anyway. The only thing that got tiresome about not having the trunk latch were all the people pointing it out to me that my trunk wasn't latched. Sounding appreciative when you're actually annoyed is annoying in its own right. I wanted to say, "Oh, thank you, but it's fine. It's been like that ever since I stuffed my ex-husband's body in there last fall."

Anyway, I suppose life is like that for everyone to some extent. It's easy to get used to little oddities until we're barely aware of them. 

I hardly noticed that body in the trunk until I bought a bookcase at Ikea.

Stand Still, Bright Eyes

The docent met my daughter, my friend, and me at the back door where a sign instructed visitors to ring the bell. She showed us through the old home and told us of the family who had lived there when it was new. 

A Victorian couple pose on either side of
their deceased daughter. Notice the 
parents' images are slightly blurred.This 
happened due to long exposure times 
required by cameras of that era and was 
caused when a subject moved even slightly. 
Notice also that the image of the deceased 
is much clearer. Boo.

Now the house, a beautiful orange brick Victorian, serves as a museum and wedding venue. It was decorated for Halloween with orange lights winding up the banister in the main hall and mannequins clad in vintage-style masks and gauzy or satin-y period costumes.

The docent pointed out a photograph of what we took to be two parents and their daughter (see photo at right). The daughter, seated between her parents, appeared to be in her early twenties, and her posture and facial expression struck me as a little apathetic. Then the docent explained. The girl was dead, sitting up, eyes wide open.

There were similar photos planted around the room, and I failed to grasp why photographing dead family members like this made sense, which, it turns out, it does. 

So the first thing out of my mouth was, "Why would people do this?"

Shockingly, it was my daughter who piped up:

"It's called Victorian era postmortem photography," she explained. "Back then, photography was new, and people couldn't always afford to have pictures taken unless there was a good reason. And because the exposure time needed to take a photograph was so long, people looked blurry if someone tried to take their picture goofing around in the yard or something. Even if they moved just a little, they'd look blurry. That's why so many of the photos from that time period were portraits. And if someone died, a postmortem photo might be a family's only picture of them."

I stared at her. She's 19 for Heaven's sake. "How do you know all that?" 

She shrugged. "I read."  

I knew that deceased family members are often photographed. We have such photos in my own family. But what I didn't understand was why Victorians propped them up with their eyes open. Then again, as Syd explained, Victorians held a unique position in time, when photography was there, but not really there. If they wanted a photo of their dead loved one in something resembling a living state, this was often the only way to go. 

Later, I did some Googling and found more photos, purportedly of dead Victoreans, and these upset me for days because these subjects were standing with the aid of a special device, the base of which was visible near their feet. Then I did some more research and learned that it's unlikely these subjects were dead. According to Wikipedia, thank God,  ". . . it is untrue that metal stands and other devices were used to pose the dead as though they were living. The use by photographers of a stand or arm rest (sometimes referred to as a Brady stand) which aided living persons to remain still long enough for the camera's lengthy exposure time, has given rise to this myth. While 19th-century people may have wished their loved ones to look their best in a memorial photograph, evidence of a metal stand should be understood as proof that the subject was a living person."

All of the photos below were said to be postmortem photos. That's why I was so glad I'd read that Wikipedia entry when I found this: 

and this,

and especially this:

It's likely that the only grief associated with this photo was that the parents had to pay for it.

If you happen to do your own research on Victorian era postmortem photography, be warned, it can be unsettling, and to this day I get cheery little teasers from Instagram saying they've found more postmortem photography I might like. And there's a lot of hoo-hah out there about living people being corpses and a lot of photos of perfectly healthy kids that someone will try to convince you are tragically dead. 


Even this photo (immediate right) which an eagle-eyed reader pointed out is not of the Victorian era (noting the woman's dress and visible knee), I'll leave here to prove some points. First, as with the claim that Victorians sometimes had their dead photographed "standing," you can't believe everything you read on the Internet - like me falling for someone's claim that this photo was of Victorians.

Second, whoever posted the photo wrote that the baby was dead and his eyes had been painted onto the photograph. Let's say the photo was Victorian, doesn't it make more sense that the baby is alive but with no clue what that contraption is that some stranger is pointing at him? And if you'd never seen a camera flash before, wouldn't your face look like that too? And in those days, as with the photo above of the girl with the closed eyes and lolling head, sometimes people had to settle for less than the ideal photo. 

So anyway, the next time you find yourself on a paintball field, cursing that paintball that really, really stung, be grateful that some Victorian photographer wasn't aiming at you. 

Comedians Aren't Funny When You're Pregnant

Sometimes even professional comedians aren't all that funny - like when you're living with one, or married to one, or find yourself impregnated by one. No, not funny at all.

My ex-husband, Michael at a run 

to end breast cancer - finally 

doing something helpful for women.

Photo courtesy of Michael Aronin. 

For instance, most husbands of women turning forty and overdue with their first child, know enough to keep their mouths shut - about pretty much everything. But when the husband is a stand-up comedian, he doesn't know enough to do this and says things men planning to live long enough to see their babies would never say.

Picture this: I'm standing there, so pregnant my nose has gained weight. The baby is inside me, hanging window treatments, rearranging the furniture, and ordering from Wayfair, showing no signs of coming out. My then-husband, Michael looks at me suspiciously and asks, "How do I know you're the real mother?"

Then imagine this: I'm somewhere into my 104th week of pregnancy. I have given up shaving my legs. Our shower stall is tiny and when I bend over and lather my legs, the soap immediately washes off and I'm cutting myself. Even if I shut the water off first, bending over to shave is miserable.

And forget shaving in the tub; just sitting down in the tub is like centering a house onto one square of a sidewalk. 

So I give up shaving for a while.

After a few weeks, as I roll into bed, Michael reaches over, pats my leg and mutters, "Dad?"

Anyway, I blubber and sulk my way through my fortieth birthday and two weeks later the baby is still a no-show. By the time I am finishing the nursery, I am enormous, and if I am sitting on the floor painting a baseboard and need a rag from the other side of the room, I roll there to fetch it.

One night, I am putting up a wallpaper boarder at chair rail height. When it starts peeling off faster than I can slap it back up, I scream for Michael to help. He does his best, but we end up watching helplessly as all my hard work comes crashing down like a home improvement project in a Laurel and Hardy short. 

I throw myself on the floor in a hormone-enhanced tantrum and begin to bawl. At first Michael takes the sympathetic approach and tries unsuccessfully to comfort me. Then he decides I will settle down if he leaves me alone for a few minutes. My hysterics, however, continue.

After a full thirty minutes of this, Michael grabs the bull by the horns and, using the same judgment he too often employs, takes the tough love route.

"Teece!" he bellows from the bottom of the stairs. "Pull yourself together and get down here - NOW!"

I yell back what he can do with his order.

And his stand-up buddies weren't all that different. When one of them got in trouble with his pregnant wife, he solemnly absorbed her words, looked at her with mopey eyes and a divorceably straight face, and said, "That's okay, honey; it's just the baby talking."

As another of them was coaching his wife through labor, the baby's head emerged, but his wife was exhausted and stopped pushing. The doctor told him to say something motivating, so he told his wife, "Sweetie, if you don't keep pushing, you're gonna have a helluva time buying pants."

Yes, comedians are a very glib bunch - which is just one of the reasons so many are divorced.