Weirdly wonderful

Well Love from Leila has tagged me in something called a Meme. My instructions are to write seven weird facts about my life and then tag seven other friends. I am going to request that my readers volunteer to be tagged and send me a link to their answers in a comment.

1. My mother was perhaps the most wonderfully weird person that I have ever met. She used to swim in holes cut in the ice during the Finnish winters and then when she moved to Africa she would often say that she had never felt as cold in Finland in the winter as she did in Africa in the winter as the winters were too mild in Zimbabwe for people to have heating in their homes or to wear heavy coats. My mother was intrigued by all things alternative--she was interested in UFOs and the Urantia book and most especially in alternative health remedies. Garlic was her cure all and was administered to me at the first sign of a cold. (I still use garlic as my main defense against the first signs of illness). She loved her Tianjin Keep Fit tea, Rooibos tea and her Acutouch equipment from Korea. She set up a little "clinic" in her home joining forces with a traditional African herbalist to treat any adventurous clients. She took in a man who had been one of my father's fieldworkers who knocked at her door dying from AIDS. None of his family members would have anything to do with him. She cooked for him and served him her special "healing" meals in her kitchen when others would not even dare to shake hands with him and arranged for him to go around talking to students in schools around the country doing AIDS awarness work. He lived for two years with her until he died.




2. My mother's eccentricities such as her opinions on health and UFOs, were difficult for my father to tolerate and yet he was equally eccentric in his own right. He dressed quite flamboyantly in his later years. An outfit you might frequently find him in would be a plaid shirt, rainbow colored suspenders and his prized Navajo turquoise bolo tie fastened around his neck.

[This is not a picture of my father but it is apicture of rainbow suspenders]

He was always sure to draw on what little money he had left in his US bank account to subscribe to a variety of reading materials including Popular Science, Science News, National Geographic, Mad Magazine and the National Enquirer! (just now that I think about it, he might have subscribed to this latter for my mother. She certainly enjoyed reading all the unlikely stories contained therein). He also subscribed to World magazine for me when I was a child and Seventeen as I grew close to that age.

He spent as much time out in the bush doing his work as a geologist as he could. He used to say that he could feel his blood pressure rising as soon as he started drawing close to the city. His time in the bush is how he came to have so many African friends who all called him Uncle John.


3. When I was a child, my parents would take me into the villages every now and then when they were out visiting Baha'i communities, going out to teach people about the Baha'i Faith or assisting in the establishment of Local Spiritual Assemblies. Sometimes I would play dodgeball with the other village children using balls they had made out of plastic bags bound up tightly together. Sometimes little girls would play with my long blonde hair braiding it tightly into many tiny braids. Once I stayed in the car on my own to read a book while I waited for my parents to finish their visit and within minutes I had a whole crowd of children pressed against the windows looking in on me like an exotic animal in a museum exhibit. They were shouting things at me through the glass like "Are you a boy or a girl?" and "How old are you?" and "What is your name?" I remember being frightened by the sheer number of the faces peering in on all sides of the car all shouting questions simultaneously.


4. Even though I grew up in the city it seems to me I was surrounded by wildlife. Large wall spiders with flat bodies scurrying along the walls two to three inches in diameter. Geckos and lizards. I had a door to the outside from my bedroom and there was a little shrew that would crawl under the door into my room at night in the winter. There were large rats in the attic that would run above my head at night making a such a noise and I would be afraid that they would drop through the ceiling onto my face. If you walked outside in the garden at night you could hear the squeaking of the fruit bats in the enormous avocado tree in our front yard. They would nibble at the large avocados until they knocked them off the branches and the avocados would come crashing down through the foilage with a heavy thud as they reached the earth below. I have yet to find avocados as large, delicious and creamy as the avocados that grew on the splendid tree in our front yard.
There were all manner of glorious birds in our garden as well like hoopoes and go away birds.


5. When I lived in China there was only hot water at specific scheduled times and even then it was not very hot and sometimes there was no water at all. I got tired of trying to schedule my baths around the irregular availability of water so I finally broke down and started going to the public bath house just outside the university where the water was always plentiful and came down copiously at a gloriously high temperature. There was a 2 yuan entrance fee. It took much courage because I was already tired of being stared at as a foreigner whereever I went and that was WITH my clothes on. I was expecting it to be insupportable to go to a public bathhouse where everyone stands under showers in the same big room together and to have people staring at me WITHOUT any clothes on. It was no problem though. All the ladies were engaged politely in civil disattention involved in their own washing. The women in Shanxi seemed to be able to wash themselves for two hours scrubbing and scraping at the coal dust in their pores. I could never stay for more than 30 minutes hard as I tried and when I would come out the lady in charge would invariably ask me "Are you finished already?" I felt myself quite the unclean foreigner.


6. My dear Chinese husband is wonderfully weird in so many ways that I won't outline here. He sometimes likes to heat his orange juice in the microwave so that it is lukewarm.

7. My parents in law who live with us here in CT are also wonderfully wierd in so many ways. When they went back to China for a couple of months over the summer my father in law put his large collection of goldfish into the bathtub to that it would be easier for us to change the water while they were away! So I would go up to their apartment every day to feed the goldfish and let half of the water out and pour in the buckets of water I had prepared ahead of time.

They continue to discover the most amazing discarded treasures when they go out to throw out the trash. Their most recent gift to me is a brand new toaster with Mickey Mouse on the side that sings when the toast pops up. I love it. Might not sound like your cup of tea but I happen to love it.