My Mom, Jean Ruddell

My Mom is Jean Ruddell, that's her "nom de plume" of the moment. To me she's just Mom. Well, she happens to be one of the most interesting and adventurous people I know. I'm sure I got being a Dreamer from her. She's a story teller from way back. Where other kids were read Faerie Tales at bed time, my brother, JR, and I listened to colorful tales told by Mom, tales of when she was a child, or tales of colorful ancestors, because we have a lot of those.

Me as a 2 wk old preemie & Mom at 21

Anyway, after years and years of trying to get Mom to write down those stories so they can be passed down to the grandkids and great-grandkids, she's finally doing just that. The stories are every bit as wonderful as I remember them as a child. And the crazy thing is, those stories are true. It was like having Robert Louis Stevenson or O. Henry as my Mom, because her stories are every bit as good. So be sure to check out her blog "Journeys of a Lifetime" at jeanruddell.blogspot.com.

Now on to the adventurous part. My Mom lived all over the place, in the Philippines; Point Barrow, Alaska;, France; and Kuwait. At the age of 60, following the end of the first Gulf War, Mom moved to Kuwait for ten years and was a journalist for the Kuwait Arab Times. Talk about adventures! Not only did she live in cool, interesting places, she traveled so such locales as Japan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Turkey, I could go on and on. Though she moved back to the states nine years ago, when she retired at the age of 70, her stories are told as if they happened yesterday. I'll let Mom tell her own stories. So please be sure to visit her blog.

More Memories



My parents' wedding

 After looking at all those old photos in my cedar chest, I just had to scan some of them for safekeeping. Actually, I put my husband to work doing the scanning while I kept sorting through all those old memorabilia.

I love that group photo from my parent's wedding, Mom looking so terribly young, Pop (my maternal grandfather) standing next to her, then Dad looking much too young to get married, then Grandma (his mother) standing next to him. Grandpa Will (his father) had passed away a few years before. That's my Nana (my maternal grandma) in the wheelchair. She was paralyzed at 16 from polio, so I only knew her as "my Nana in a wheelchair." I thought she was cool. I could sit on her lap and she could wheel me all over the place. She even let me play in her wheelchair when she was taking a nap.

I look a lot like my Nana and my Auntie B. I got my strawberry blond hair from them and from my Dad. My blue-green eyes I got from my Dad. Oh yeah, I guess I got my temper from my Dad too. Anyway, so many memories, all packed up in that cedar chest just waiting for me to take them back out again.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Grandma & Grandpa Will's Wedding

I spent all day going through my old cedar chest, looking at photos, old letters, an assortment of keepsakes. I made one pile of "Why did I keep that?" - ancient newspaper articles that mean nothing to me now, photos of people or places I don't even remember, some photos so discolored and faded they're not worth keeping. I found two tickets for a free dinner at Circus Circus Casino in Reno, only the tickets are 28 years old. That goes back to the few months that I lived in Reno and worked at Circus Circus. I even found my name badge and my Employee Manual (not much more than a pamphlet).

So some of those things went from the "Why did I keep that?" pile to the "I guess I'd better keep this a little longer" pile. That included handmade and store-bought birthday and Mother's Day cards from my daughter, birthday and Christmas cards from my Mom, postcards received from far-off places, and even some postcards that I sent to family members many many years ago.

 In the end, I only threw away a few odds and ends. Mostly I just organized things and put them back in the cedar chest. The chest itself is over a hundred years old, one of the few things I received years ago from my paternal grandmother. In the chest I found her wedding picture to Grandpa Will, who was many years older than my grandmother. They had three sons, of which my father was the youngest. I even found a photo of my Dad when he was just a little tyke with his two older brothers, his dad and his uncle. They were all eating watermelon.  I realized those "ears that stick out" were passed on down to my grandson. So now I can tell him where he got his ears (actually, the ears came from both of my grandfathers).

My Dad (the little guy) with his Brothers, Uncle & Father

I found my old baby album with a picture of me at 2 weeks old with my Mom. I was a skinny little preemie born a month early. Another photo of me at 3 months old shows I quickly started gaining that baby chubbiness. I found some black and white photos of my parent's wedding. They were so cute and so young, only 18. My head is spinning with all those old stories and old memories. Some things brought tears to my eyes, others made me smile. I don't know if it was good or not to take this trip down memory lane.

Black Cats & Friday the 13th

Chester

Friday the 13th and visits from our neighborhood black cats. We have two of them. One is bigger with a leonine walk, cocky and acts like he owns the world. The other is smaller, takes her daily strolls, looking in all our front windows and examining all the flowers in my flower pots. I assume that one is a female, only because she's inquisitive, like I am, and we share a love of flowers. My husband is not a cat person, so we don't have any of our own, but I love cats of all shapes and sizes.

My Mom and Brother have three cats. "Chester," the newest addition, is a two year old pure Maine Coon, 20+ lbs. in size and has the loudest purr I've ever heard. He likes to put his cheek up next to mine and "sing" to me. It's definitely a love song. "Larry" is a Seal-Point mix, a contented fat cat who only "talks" to my Brother. "Sabrina" is a senior lady, a tortoiseshell who becomes a contortionist when she's getting petted. She has a deep mellow purr that won't quit. Well, as for my neighborhood Black Cats, I've never heard a sound from the bigger (male?) one. The smaller one will wind around your legs and say demurely, "Mew, mew."

As far as this Friday the 13th goes, it started out cloudy, gloomy and humid. Now this afternoon we have bright cerulean-blue skies, still humid, but with a light ocean breeze. Before I end today's blog, I want to mention that I was delighted this morning to find that the Slideshow feature, that I installed yesterday and wasn't working then, is working fine today. So in explanation of the current slideshow photos, these were taken in '65 to '67 in southern California where I was born and raised, before I moved to Florida. Some were taken at Catalina Island and one even shows the Casino at Avalon Harbor on Catalina. That's a place that will always hold special memories in my heart. Two of the photos show me at 15 learning to tandem surf at Doheny Beach, in So-Cal. The one shows me at 14 in Huntington Beach with my very first boyfriend, who moved away to northern California not long after the photo was taken. We wrote letters back and forth for a while and then that was pretty much the end of it. But that's another story, not a Friday the 13th story.

One of the photos is of my old dog, "Mr. Binks." Now "Binky," as he was commonly known, was a connoisseur of beaches. He preferred the ones with rocks he could climb on, like the photo of him at Laguna Beach. But he also loved the beaches on Catalina Island because he could swim in the crystal-blue waters and watch the bright orange Garibaldis and gray-and-white Sheepshead swim underneath him. I'm sure "Binky" would have been a scuba diver if he could have figured out how to wear the gear. However, he was rather fond of colorful bandannas and sunglasses. He was also partial to seafood, particularly lobster, and once ate two whole lobsters, shells, antennas and all, when our cat "D.C." knocked them off the counter onto the kitchen floor so "Binky" could help himself to the feast. "D.C." on the other hand was more into fresh fish and once ate a hole in the side of a marlin that my Dad caught and brought home.

My Dad had a sports fishing boat so I grew up eating seafood: swordfish steaks, yellowtail tuna, calico bass, lobster tails, fried abalone. In fact, I ate seafood so often that I was prone to groan, "Not again!" Ah, but now I'm older and wiser and would love to have some of that great seafood every now and then, particularly the lobster and abalone. Well, this lets you know a little more about me, that I was a California "beach girl" who later moved to Florida and am still a "beach girl."