Archive for month: February, 2021
© Catherine Haslag
What the Wind Told
Cover of What the Wind Told by Betty Boegehold.
One of my favorite books of all time came into my life on a Halloween night. A neighbor lady worked at Scholastics and gave out candy and books to trick-or-treaters. I was the last kid to come to her house one year so I was the lucky recipient of half a crystal punch bowl of candy and a stack of books. A jackpot of massive proportions to someone who could still count their age and not use all their fingers to do so. One of the books in my acquisition was titled What the Wind Told.
The story of the Old Woman’s Window.
Published in 1974 and written by Betty Boegehold, this book tells the story of Tossy, a little girl who is homesick and bored out of her mind. She eventually asks the Wind to tell her stories about the windows across the way to help her pass the time. The Wind tells Tossy stories of a woman whose kitchen floor turns into a pond during the day, a family of plants who keep their children on the window sill, and a dog who sits typing names for things all day long.
The story of the Old Dog’s Window.
What the Wind Told opened my child-mind to the idea that each window contains a story. I wanted to learn those stories. To this day, I enjoy touring other’s homes and looking at their houses as I walk down the street. Each window tells a story about the people who live there. The widower who hasn’t changed anything in the living room since his wife died. The family of 6 who lives in a 2-bedroom house. Bunk beds stacked in one bedroom with sheets in the windows for curtains. The retired neighbor who loves to sit on his 3-season porch and wave at passers-by. The immigrant family who purchased their first home and is chasing their American Dream.
Drool and Gool hiding in the middle of their apartment, terrified.
More than 30 years later this book still inspires my imagination. A home a few doors down from where I live has captivated me for years. It reminds me of the Scary window described by the Wind. The windows are dark and the curtains are always drawn. I never see anyone come and go from the house. There is no car in the driveway or garage. There are never any tire tracks in the snow come winter and the sidewalk is never shoveled. Sometimes I see a cat in the window, staring back in boredom. There are decorations by the door and someone does live there, but there is no evidence of this other than the bored window cat and dumpster and recycling found weekly at the curb. Every time I walk by this house, I imagine that Drool and Gool are hunkered down in a pile of furniture in the living room, hoping no one calls or knocks.
Unfortunately, What the Wind Told is out of print and copies of it are very expensive. I am so thankful for the neighbor who gave me this book when I was a child. It sparked my imagination and taught me that windows are glimpses into others’ lives. The stories our windows tell about us are beautiful and incomplete. A glance at the private lives contained in our homes and hearts.
PLEASE NOTE: All photos used in this blog were taken from my copy of What the Wind Told and are not my personal work or of my creative labor. They were used in this blog to help communicate the essence of the book and provide an illustration of the stories the author was telling.
A VERY SPECIAL THANK YOU to Alvina Jaegers for the Halloween candy and books. Your house was my favorite to visit on Halloween night.
© Catherine HaslagMemorex
When I was 12, I was given a boom box for Christmas. I had always loved music and this was a tool to access the musical world. The boombox had an AM/FM radio, cassette tape deck, and a CD player component on it. My favorite feature of this gift was the ability to record songs from the radio onto a blank cassette tape. At that time, the only way to listen to music on demand was to own a recording of it on cassette or CD. The cheapest, but by far not the easiest, way to possess a recording of your favorite song was to record it off the radio. I had many mixtapes of my favorite songs for my efforts.
One of the blank cassette tapes I used to collect my favorite songs from the radio.
The quest to capture my favorite music from the radio took time and planning. I ALWAYS had a blank tape cued up in my cassette deck when I listened to the radio so I was prepared to press record when the latest Counting Crows or Bush song came on. I might spend weeks trying to get a song. Sometimes I couldn’t get to the record button fast enough to catch the start of the music. Other times I turned on my boom box only to find that a song I had been trying to record for weeks was in progress and I was just moments too late to capture it. I hunted for songs like a lepidopterist chases butterflies. DJs would sometimes talk through the intro or end of a song, so many of my radio recordings have the sound of DJ sprinkled in. I think DJs did this just to torture those of us trying to record from the radio.
When a cassette was full, I would listen to the songs over and over. I could rewind, pause, stop, and start at any point in the music I wanted. It was an amazing feeling to have built my own mixtape of sounds I loved. It was equally incredible that those cassettes survived the constant use of a teenage girl.
Now, we have almost any song we desire at our fingertips in an instant. When I was a teenager, I listened to the radio for hours a day. Now, I rarely listen to the radio. Spotify, Amazon, and my collection of MP3 music files are my go-to when I need to hear a beat. My boom box no longer has a blank cassette ready to record. Mixtapes have been replaced by playlists.
I still vividly remember most of the songs I captured from the radio on my mixtapes. I have created a 90’s Mix Tape Spotify Playlist so that I can reminisce about those times whenever I want.
When you listen to it, I hope you also hear a teenage girl lunge across her bedroom to hit record.
© Catherine HaslagWhat I Didn’t Know
May 25, 2020
I didn’t watch the full video. 8 minutes and 46 seconds. I saw parts of it, but not the whole tape. I can’t watch the video of George Floyd dying, of anyone dying.
I had the privilege of sitting with my feelings on this for a while. To learn more. To take it all in. I began reading. Looking. Researching for anything I could find.
I found a mountain of information. Podcasts. Books. Videos. Theses. Documentaries. Journal articles. Newspaper pieces. Magazine reports. Websites. There was no end to the documentation. What I could read, view, and listen to. New information to learn, to shatter my old misunderstanding, and develop a new, more accurate picture.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the deluge of resources I found, but I was. It was eye-opening. Once I started looking, learned so much about US history. More than in any class I took. Our history spells out the impact of racism and how far its tentacles stretched. Education, healthcare, housing, travel, restaurants, the GI Bill, voting rights, religion, policing, marriage, redistricting. There isn’t an area of life that isn’t affected by systemic racism. Every person in the United States has either benefited from or been disadvantaged by this disease.
There are many perspectives to history. The white perspective is the primary one told in this country because white is the dominant race, the dominant caste. There is a vast amount of US history that isn’t taught because it doesn’t paint white people in a positive light. This creates an incomplete and unfair narrative of our country, its history, and its people.
Redlining. Gerrymandering. Jim Crow. Segregation. Racial profiling. Stop and frisk. Voter ID. Poll taxes. Travel bans. Internment camps. Reservations. The war on drugs. All forms of racism make it harder for people of color to live their American dream. All efforts to keep the privilege in the hands of white people. White privilege. White power. White supremacy.
Equal rights have not been established. All lives don’t matter until all lives are treated like they matter. Black and brown lives don’t matter in the United States. Four hundred years of history demonstrates this. The evidence is there for anyone to see if one is open to seeing it.
I believe that the United States of America is a great country. I believe in the quest to form a more perfect union…more perfect union for ALL those who call the United States home. I also know that quest is a messy one. We are not a country of saints. Far, far from it. To paint this country as such is a lie and dooms us to repeat our sins of the past.
If you are open to learning about how systemic racism permeates our society, I encourage you to access the Google Docs link below. It is a file that contains the list of resources I found in my research on systemic racism. As I continue collecting resources, I will continue to update this document.
#SystemicRacism Resources Google Docs Link
These resources tell another side of US history, it’s not a pretty one but it’s true. My hope is that the research I have done will help open more eyes to the reality of our nation and those who are mistreated in it because of the color of their skin. My dream is that as we know the fuller story of US history we will break the ongoing cycle of systemic racism.
© Catherine Haslag