More or less

Retirement has caused a seismic shift in amounts of things in my life. I have many fewer pairs of shoes and pounds less of clothing. Last year, I gave away a great deal of my business attire to Dress for Success and to my niece (mother of grandniece, whose birth made me a great-aunt, see last LiamLicks) I held on to some for the second winter of retirement, thinking I might wear some; no, I did not, so I gave up the rest to a number of charitable organizations. I must have been prescient in saving all, of my many cardigans. How did I know Michelle O would make them acceptable for dress wear? Now I need to shop in my closet for bottoms (meaning skirts , pants.)

The shoes and boots I had accumulated and wore to work no longer have a place in my retirement life, so they all went last week, leaving spaces in my shoe compartments. I am so popular with Charities that they compete for my business. How do I know? They give me two -three bags for packing while my neighbors get one. They send e-mails. They text. They call. Dress for Success invited me to speak at their annual dinner. I declined, but did want to spy on the recipients of all my clothes when they donned them for their first day on the job. Imagine folks working in my clothes. All my suits had a story of what I had done and achieved while in them and now they were out in the world at new jobs adopted by new workers. Thrilling for a Leo personality!

Less - jewelry- no more frequenting vendor sales in the lobby at work- jewelry tree has spaces.

More-the recycles amounts are huge I now discard all recycles at home- soup cans, Starbucks plastic, ice tea bottles, weight watcher dinner trays, water bottles, wine bottles ( they would always have been from home) I also read several newspapers a day So these add to the paper goods to be discarded.

Less-fewer books from Barnes and Noble.

More-borrowed books from the Hillside Library.

Less-My dry cleaning is non-existent. I had not been to Chen brothers for a year when I went last week to repair a dress Liam had ripped with a joyful greeting During my working years I had a friendly relationship with the Chen family, When I retired they even said that they would miss my clothes as I had good taste and my suits were so perfect (thanks J. Crew). I feared Mr. Chen would not even remember me. A year had passed. He did remember. When I picked up my repaired dress, I brought him a gown to clean. I want to keep the relationship going. Two submissions per year should grow his business substantially.

More -laundry, I have added pounds of clothes to be washed. I wash, Paul folds. Everything is folded while Paul watches sports and placed in piles in the living room to be carried upstairs. Mostly all I now wear is washable, no more dry cleaning. Liam is always in the midst of all folded clothes

Less-My eyebrows are smaller and lighter. They had been getting that way for a while. See progression from growing
1952

1968 (Susan Boyle-like)
2005
Eyebrows are back-eyebrow pencil-see 2008

Less- undergarments- Liam has found and accessed the drawer full of intimate apparel.

More Uggs they have replaced all other shoes and boots for winter.

More Liam. the little pup has grown to maturity, about 15-18 pounds at adoption Now a full grown lad of 32.4, but not tall still gets mistaken for a puppy at 15 inches high.

More friends


Is all this the concept of yin yang ?
yin and yang- complimentary opposites within a greater whole seemingly disjunct or opposing forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, giving rise to the other in turn (from wikipedia.) Everything has both yin and yang aspects, which constantly interact, never existing in absolute stasis.

or is it simply about change, looking at life in different ways,
from different perspectives
and different positions exploring

more or less.

Woof, woof

Great or Grand or Grande

I have had many great-aunts in my life. I have known some and only heard about some. My grandmother (mother's mother) had many sisters and some brothers (most seem to have been missing). My father's mother had a sister also. I do not remember all the names but some were Maggie, Kitty, Celie, Agnes (2- one on each side), Anna, Maize. My mother's mother was Rose.
One great-aunt actually did a fifties version of day care-I stayed with her while my mother worked. Her name was Anna Montgomery. As a toddler, I was not able to say her full name. I am told I called her Nanny Gummy. Makes sense-Anna Montgomery= Nanny Gummy. So there was a great-aunt babysitting me full time.
Now I am a great-aunt because my niece, Liz, had a baby girl in April, Kiera Grace. I have my first grandniece
A question has occurred to me. Why am I great and why is she is grand? Why are we not consistent in our titles? Either both great or both grand. If my sister is her grandmother, why am I not her grandaunt?
I checked the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary for the definitions of great-aunt and grandaunt. It seems I am either great or grand. They are synonyms for each other.

Great-aunt, noun, dates from 1637, synonym -grandaunt
Grandaunt, noun, dates from 1826, synonym -great-aunt

The definitions of great and grand, apart from the relationship definition, are quite nice.
The Irish love to say "tis grand" and how many times a day do we say "great."

Merriam Webster Online has some meanings for each word-

Grand- Anglo-French -dates to 1548
Magnificent, imposing, majestic, lofty, sublime, stately, chief

Great- Middle English -dates to before 12th century
Huge, numerous, eminent, noble, main, aristocratic. distinguished

My relationship to Kiera allows me to be either Great or Grand, not both. I would like to be Great and Grand. We Leos believe we are. Ruth gets to be both as she is Kiera's Great Grandmother.
Great-Aunt Carol and Great Grandmother Ruth before they had titles
and Liam, Ruth's grand-dogger beneath famous water color, "Embrace" of Mother and Child (could be someone's grandniece)

I have decided to be not to be addressed as a great-aunt. Grandaunt is looking better.
I like more of the synonyms for grand than I do for great. In addition, there is no hyphen in grandaunt, smoother, more pleasing visually.

And there is another reason. I had some boring mind-numbing jobs as a teenager. There were times when I wanted to take a day off but knew that a young healthy girl calling in sick was not believable. I had to make someone else sick. So I started using my great-aunts as excuses. I would say "My great-aunt is very ill." It always worked. They were relatives, respected and distinguished, but not close enough to cause guilt in using them for playing hooky. I reached my nadir of excuses when I actually lied about the death of one. She was already deceased, so I rationalized it was okay. I would not mess with a "live" relative. When the manager came to see me to express his condolences on my return to work, I was mortified. I couldn't even remember which one I had summoned from the grave for my excuse! I realized how terrible killing off these great ladies was; even worse than enduring the temp summer jobs.
I never used my great-aunts again as excuses for staying home from work.

I so seldom used sick leave at my career Social Security job that I ended up with almost a year added to my pension, as credit for unused sick leave. I can thank all my great-aunts for that lesson.

Therefore, I think being called a great-aunt would tempt fate "sort of what goes around, comes around." I sure don't want to be used as an excuse to cut work or school by a young relative. I will be a grandaunt. I will spare Kiera the "great-aunt excuse" temptation.

Maybe even a Grandeaunt-my favorite Starbucks size drink being grande, mid-size between tall and venti. Liam licks a grande non-fat latte

Liam has been listening.

Liam wonders why there is a Great Dane, but not a Great Mutt, like him The great Dane is considered a giant among dogs. The synonym of great as huge would fit here. Liam is a small dog often mistaken for a mini lab (no such animal). So not great in size. Nevertheless, great in personality.

Liam the Great
Liam the Grand
Liam the Grande

woof, woof,
sleep well

Housing Projects House Future Famous Children

My mother might not like this LiamLicks. Why? She does not admit to anyone that we lived in a NYC Housing Project. She believes that all the widows in the senior residence where she lives are rich with inherited money, grew up in mansions and think of projects as drug infested, dirty, urban horrors.
I found this out one night at dinner with her Tampa friends: I mentioned that I grew up in a city housing project. I thought this to be so exotic and so different from their backgrounds that they would view me with awe. How Leo of me! I was kicked so hard under the table that my wine spurted out of its glass. I do not know which made me sadder, being kicked by my mother, or losing my Shiraz. My mother admonished me later that "it was not good for folks to know of her background, because they looked down on middle class widows." I tried to compromise by offering in the future to say that only I grew up in public housing, and that she just lived there. A slight bit of blarney. She was fully grown when we moved to Pomonok in 1952. She just resided there for 22 years, did not grow up there, she was already formed.
However, now maybe she will change her mind about this blight on her life. Seems folks are rushing to admit that they grew up in "the projects" and others who have been outed as childhood residents of public housing projects are not racing to file a lawsuit.
And why I am thinking of this now?
We have Supreme Court Judge Nominee, Sonia Sotomayor from the Bronxdale houses on Bruckner Blvd in the Bronx, one of New York City's many housing projects.

The esteemed NY Times carried an article in its Sunday edition about famous children of the projects who have made it in the world in different ways. See "Up and Out of New York's Projects" NY Times 005/31/09 edition and "The Projects Were a Launching Pad for Many Successful New Yorkers" NY Times.com.

I grew up in Pomonok Houses in Flushing, Queens, NY. The NY Times article displays a picture of Congressman Gary Ackerman as a child growing up in Pomonok Houses Today at 66, Mr. Ackerman is easily identified by wearing a white carnation boutonniere on his jacket Very classy-all male Pomonok residents must have been required to wear them. I must have missed that.

There were rules to living in the Pomonok houses; there were several thousand residents, some sort of order had to be established.

One rule: we were not permitted to play or walk on the grass. I might have been there as early as the summer of 1952, (it opened in June 1952) since one photo shows me walking and pushing a carriage and there is no grass yet

Some information about Pomonok Houses-
Pomonok is a large New York City Housing Authority Project in south Flushing in the NYC borough of Queens. The construction of Pomonok began in 1949 and was finished in June 1952.
The name Pomonok comes from a Native American word for eastern Long Island and either means "land of tribute" or "land where there is travelling by water."
Pomonok was built on a golf course; its boundaries are 65th and 71st Avenue and Parsons and Kissena Boulevards. There are 35 buildings; 3, 7, 8 stories high, on 51.98 acres with 2071 apartments and about 4ooo plus people.
we lived on 71st here on 71st is 4 year old Carol and Grandpa Mickey Coughlin, circa 1954)

More rules from my childhood in Pomonok: No dogs, no cats; only small birds, fish and turtles. Liam would not have been allowed

Pomonok and those projects like Judge Sonia Sotomayor's were not the housing projects that evoke fear today. "In the 1940's, 50's and 60's when most of the city's public housing was built, a sense of pride and community permeated well-kept corridors, apartments and grounds. Far from dangerous, the projects were viewed as nurturing." (from NY Times) Lois and Carol McNiff circa 1955 in Pomonok ( on the grass, breaking the rules)

More rules: only certain color paints were permitted for the walls of the apartments. The sanctioned colors were grey or white. This changed years later. You could use other colors if you paid a penalty when moving out.

No air conditioning.

No screens to keep out bugs.

The Times article lists many people who were launched successfully from NYC Housing projects. I have added a few more notable people whose names I have bolded.

Pomonok Houses, Queens
Gary Ackerman U.S. Congressman
Carol McNiff writer, LiamLicks blog
Joan Leichter-Dominick, known for moving into Carol's 1st apartment
Lynne Nardoza Geiman, survived a childhood of living beneath the giant Pomonok water tank
Lana Kahn, daughter of renowned Pomonok grievance counselor, Ida Zuckerman.

Elliott-Chelsea Houses, Manhattan
Caryn Johnson AKA Whoopie Goldberg
Lynne Nardoza Geiman's grandparents

Marlboro Houses, Brooklyn
John Franco, baseball player
Lana Kahn's first residence, before she went west to Pomonok.

and hundreds more.

I always dreamed of having a dog. I have Liam now I waited a long time. I did not move into a house until I was 39. At times I still miss apartment living I liked being stacked on top of others and sandwiched among four families on a floor. However, we could not have dogs. So what about this pic of the little boy Gary Ackerman with a dog? Guess that was a borrowed or visiting dog.

When I talk to my mother this week, I will ask if she has revised her thinking on NYCH projects now that a woman from the projects has been nominated for the Supreme Court.
I will also ask what year we moved to Pomonok.

And the question most bothering me after viewing Congressman Ackerman and his dog
"Was there really a rule of "no dogs?" Maybe some were hiding

On second thought (or third) -the dog thing doesn't really matter-Liam was worth the wait-maybe the answer is not worth knowing now.
My parents both worked and my sister and I were in school all day.
Who would have cared for a McNiff dog during the day? A 1950's Liam would have been lonely
not like the 2009 much cared for Liam

Woof, woof

Puppy Picking on Pepper

Liam has a favorite toy, Mr. Pepper. He has an inner squeaker and because of this, falls into the toy category frowned upon by animal trainers. The fear is that the pet will eventually break through the outside casing, seize the squeaker, chew, swallow and choke on it. The squeaker is usually a tube sealed inside the toy. It makes noises appropriate for its species. If the toy is a duck, it will quack, a goose will honk, a bird will chirp, a cat meow, and so on. What noise would one expect a toy pepper to make? I guess noises evocative of real peppers: when chopped, a crunch, when fried, a sizzle, when inhaled by a novice eater, a howl. Liam's Mr. Pepper had a deep, almost chuckling sound when rolling down the stairs. Liam's Mr. Pepper made loud grunts when tossed in the air. No sizzles, no crunches, no howls. We all loved to hear him talk. He was the toy of choice when Liam went to day care or on vacation.. Mr. Pepper journeyed through every room, he was a traveling toy Most often escorted against his will by Liam. We thought of his noises as not emanating from his voice box but more from his heart. What intrigued Liam most, resulting in hours of intense play,was his desire to win Mr. Pepper's heart. Liam has thrown, poked, prodded, chewed licked (of course) his beloved toy. Mr. Pepper has responded with loud grunts and incredible durability. Mr. Pepper, earned the title of Mr. because he arrived from an elite East Side Manhattan pet shop, not just any chain pet store (not that there is anything wrong with them). All other toys are called "duck," "kitty""goose" etc., but Pepper is always Mr. Pepper, not Pep, Peppy or Pepper.

Early this week Liam seemed to focus on his pet with an intensity and concentration that has been reserved for peanut butter and lime tortilla chips. He went after Mr. Pepper. The following pictorial illustrates the scenes as they unfolded. I had the crisis of conscience that all photojournalists have. Do I become involved by stopping the story as it unfolds; do I drop my camera and intervene? Or do I allow this event to go forward? I choose to record it and observe. I think Bloggers are in a different group-our standards not yet defined.

Liam looking for Mr. Pepper Liam thinking: aah, here is Mr. Pepper, he is hiding behind the love seat

I'll get him out and we'll play got him, now for some fun let's make Mr. Pepper talk, shake him up

ooh, what is that? cotton balls? I think I found a way to his heart; is that his heart to the right?



oh no! It is over, those are not cotton balls, those are his stuffing's-aroooooooooooo :(



What have I done?

silence

Liam's hiding spot after or during mischief-behind the couch-has a piece of Mr. Pepper's heart

Take another piece of my heart now, baby
Break another little bit of my heart now, darling,
Hey! Have another little piece of my heart, now, baby, yeah
You know you got it if it makes you feel good.
Janis J-a long time ago

woof, woof