Dear Manfredis

Terry and I just wanted to let you know what a wonderful and magical time we had with all of you Saturday night. I had heard about each of you for so many years that it just seems impossible that we could not have met before now. I felt comfortable and "at home" in the midst of you and I appreciate so much that you accepted me into your family. It was gratifying to finally meet the faces and personalities that go with the entertaining stories Terry has told me over the years.

Terry is amazed by the way that no matter how much time has passed, the family picks up where it left off and it seems as if no time has passed at all. The time with family is precious time and he hopes that we are all able to be together more often from now on. He has no words to describe the oneness he feels surrounded by each and every one of you. "It is as if each of us is a thread in the tapestry that illustrates the story of our lives. The Manfredi family is like a song, made up of different words and different verses. I love my family dearly."

I couldn't agree more.

Brenda and Terry

Special Announcement

I have some very special news. My blog entry "Mad Hatter" has been read by Sage Tyrtle on her podcast "Quirky Nomads." She has a special segment called "Click: images that capture the imagination" and she used my short essay for her May 19 podcast. If you click on this link, you can download it in mp3 format. It's the "Vancouver Island" podcast and is relatively short so your download time won't be too terribly long. Your computer should play it in iTunes or on your Windows Media Player. It's worth a listen. Sage did a beautiful job with the production of it. Let me know if you get to hear it. I am very proud of it.

If I Had a Hammer...

In 1990, Terry was in Berlin with 1964 when they were still "as the Beatles" rather than "the Tribute" of today. It was when the Berlin wall was being taken down. President Reagan had proclaimed "Mr. Gorbachev, take down that wall." In the meantime, it was Terry and a 12-year-old girl at the site with a hammer and chisel helping to hammer out large pieces of the wall. Neither Reagan or Gorbachev were present at the site.



I think anyone who advocates war should have their body over there dodging bullets and anyone who is for peace should be helping to tear down the wall.--Terence S. Manfredi.

If I had a song...

Fun with the Internet

At MyHeritage.com, you can use "facial recognition software" to compare a personal photo to a database of celebrity pictures. Seconds later, the site serves up a list of celebrities you resemble most.

So I uploaded this picture of myself:



And guess what? I had a 74% match with Marcia Cross, the anal retentive, Martha Stewart-type from "Desperate Housewives."



Isn't she lovely? I also had a 68% match with Gary Sinise.



"Lieutenant Dan! You got legs!"



This picture of Terry yielded the following results:



A 60% match with Pierce Brosnan! Yowza!



Also a 60% match with Alfred Hitchcock? What? He looks as much like Alfred Hitchcock as he does Pierce Brosnan? Of course. We all know how much those two celebrities look alike. In fact, I think they were separated at birth.

Go check it out and if you dare upload a photo of yourself, be sure and let me know who you most resemble.

The Last of the Wedding Photos

Here we see Marla in the bride's room just before the wedding modeling the garter I knit for her. She seemed to really be pleased with it.



This is Marla with her best friend, Beryl, posing for the photographer. There aren't any pictures of me because I, as usual, was behind the camera. The photographer took some so I may allow those to be seen by my constant readers depending on how good/bad/goofy I look.



I'm not really sure what this is all about but, generally speaking, you don't want to be on the receiving end of that particular Marla Expression.



The bridesmaid's dresses that we wore were halter tops so I had to wear my industrial strength bosom corral which allowed for a little space in the cleavage. Just enough space, mind you, to stash my Canon Powershot Elph digital camera. My plans were to whip it out during the ceremony and take photographs from a vantage point that no one else would have. Marla threatened my immediate future if I were to do such a thing. (See expression above.) Plus, my vantage point turned out not to be what I had expected. So here are Marla and Joel, apres nuptials, looking duly impressed with one another.







Here are Joel's parents, beaming proudly.



With Rob, Pastor of Ceremonies.





To honor the memory of DeAnna Joyce Miller, mother of the bride.



Centerpieces.



Cutting the cake.

And that's all I got. Oh, except for some fried pickles I took a picture of later at dinner at Mimi's Cafe with Beryl. I'll spare you that.

Marla and Joel are back from their lovely honeymoon in Montana where they took some 20+ rolls of film, saw a moose, a coyote and a deer with fawn. They're mostly settled into Joel's apartment and are both back at work.

And they lived happily ever after.

A Bit About Crochet

Disclaimer: I know I've got more wedding pictures to post but this is what has been on my mind today so I'm going to blog about it. There will be more wedding pictures soon. I promise.

I taught myself to knit from an instructional booklet that I got at Walmart shortly after 9/11, following a trend I didn't even know about until a couple of years later. I had always wanted to learn to knit but at that time in my life, everyone I knew who did yarn work, crocheted. So I determined to teach myself. It worked out OK. Except that for a about a year I made my purl stitches backward. Oh well. (Thanks, Katy!)


Granny Brenda crocheting with the dreaded Red Heart yarn and wearing my granny square hat, crocheted by Grandma Bare.

My mother taught me to crochet when I was very young. I don't remember exactly how young but it was probably around the age of 6 - maybe even younger. I made a lot of chain stitch necklaces and bracelets and crocheted small blankets for my dolls. That was about all I knew how to do. As an adult, I remembered the granny square bonnet that my Grandma had crocheted for me in the '70s - I actually wore it and looked like a granny myself when I was in the second and third grade. She also crocheted matching capes for Marla and me, which we also wore but only to church on Sundays. I can remember many a Sunday in the pew while Howard Winters railed on and I, bored to distraction, carefully began braiding together the fringe all around my crocheted cape. I'm not sure what happened to either hat or cape but I still do have a granny square afghan that Grandma crocheted for me.


A family portrait with me wearing my crocheted cape with the braided fringe.

I also still have a small green crocheted worm that serves as bookmark that Grandma made for me by request, also when I was probably in the second or third grade. Crochet was big that year, I guess.


The bookworm that Grandma crocheted for me at my request. I think one of my classmates had one. It is so old it has self-felted.

Grandma Bare, being creative, carefully embroidered a face on my little green worm.

A Christmas doily Grandma crocheted for me while I was living in Akron. I have never had the heart to remove the name tag with my name in Grandma's handwriting on it. I don't remember the exact year that Grandma made the doily but I'm sure she was in her nineties by then.

The main reason I wanted to learn to knit was because all the crochet patterns I had ever seen were granny squares made from icky, acrylic Red Heart yarn or doilies made from thread that was impossibly small. Intriguing, yes, but just how many crocheted doilies can a single, twenty-something use? The knitting patterns were what I was interested in. You could make sweaters and scarves and hats and mittens and socks and blankets out of exquisitely soft yarn, in beautiful colors and actually wear the items without looking dorky. So I began to knit.

Not long after I first cast on, my mother, who did not learn to knit because she was left-handed (I'm left-handed, too) casually remarked to me that Grandma Bare had also knit. "No, she didn't," I said, remembering the granny square hat. "Yes, she did," Momma said. "Who do you think made those pink slippers?"

"They're knitted?" I exclaimed, having thought for all my life that they were crocheted. I dug them out of my treasures box and, sure enough, tiny baby slippers in pink cotton yarn, hand-knit by my Grandma. My heart sunk. I never knew she knit and now she was gone. I could never share that with her. I could never ask her why she gave up knitting for granny squares, Red Heart yarn and impossibly tiny thread. Momma was gone not long after and I was never able to teach her to knit, now knowing that left-handed people can knit just as easily as right-handed people. When Marla came home for the memorial service, I gave her Momma's big bag of yarn, including an unfinished shell stitch afghan that Momma had been working on.


Pink baby slippers knit for me by Grandma.

Marla crochets. I could no longer remember how to chain stitch but Marla was crocheting baby gifts for friends at church that were beautiful and not made out of eye-popping acrylic yarn. Marla knits, too, but she knits about as much as I crochet which interprets: as little as I can get away with. I asked Marla once why she wanted to crochet instead of knit and she said because crochet was easier and faster.

So, I have continued to knit and it has been nearly five years. Hard to believe as I still feel like a beginning knitter, even though I have more than 50 projects completed. Through the years, I have crocheted, sewed, quilted, cross-stitched, rubber stamped, scrapbooked, beaded and dabbled in nearly every craft that was popular. It seems only natural that I would return to yarn.

The trouble is, crochet is no longer granny squares and doilies. Crochet now looks like this. (I recently convinced Marla to crochet Titania's Capelet for me in black.) And this. I've been thinking I need to brush up on my rusty crochet skills. If only to make Maiden's Glory, a crocheted flower and leaf headdress.

Would I ever wear it? Maybe I would put it on my head and dance barefoot in the light of the full moon while strains of Loreena McKennit play through my iPod (where the arcane meets nouveaux). Maybe I would wear it to climb the hill behind my house and sit on the crest and celebrate a spring sunrise. Perhaps I will put it on and dance around the living room with the dogs romping at my feet and the cats diving for cover. Would I ever wear it? Did I wear the plastic rose vine and put doily cones on my ears at Marla's Bachelorette/Ya-Ya/Hen party? I wore the granny square hat, didn't I?



I'm still waiting to hear from most of you about your favorite summer infatuation song. I've got three so far. (Don't make me put you on the spot, *****.)

The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God

I was remiss in my role as a photo-journalist blogger in that I didn't get a picture of Marla after she had blow-dried her hair but before she started working on it. To be honest, all I could do was stand and stare. I've known Marla all my life and she's always had lots of hair and she usually wears it long - sometimes curly, sometimes straight. But I haven't seen her in a long time and I guess everything really is bigger in Texas. Her hair was huge. It's fairly long and the curl adds so much ... uh ... body to it that it resembled - well, I'm sitting here in front of the computer trying to think of something it resembled but I can't. Imagine hair that is longer than shoulder-length. Then, imagine that hair standing at about a 78 degree angle from your head. Picture below that more hair and more hair and more hair. Imagine hair that, with it's own gravity could consume and hide a hairbrush, a kitten, three skeins of yarn and a package of Raman noodles either before or after cooking. Please, Marla, don't be offended by this description because it is wonderful, beautiful hair that many people would give an extraneous child to possess. It's just that it's so much more hair than I've ever seen on anyone's head in my entire life. I asked the hairdresser if she had any other clients with as much hair as Marla and she, strangely enough, said, "Yes. Lots of them, in fact." As I said, everything's bigger in Texas.

I Googled "big hair" and had to scroll through five pages of results before I found something that came close to looking like Marla's hair, pre-styling. This picture is as close as I could find. Please note the arrows because you would need to picture this space also filled with hair.

Let me reiterate that I'm not making fun of Marla's hair. I'm just expressing my unbridled incredulity that someone who is three years older since I saw her last could have so much more hair. I have always had thick, coarse, hair and found myself envious at the abundance of hair possessed by my sister. Certainly no one else in our family has hair like hers. It took her an hour and a half of wielding her flat iron to get it to cooperate. In fact, halfway through, she had to take a break and rest because her arms got tired from holding them up so long. Let me state that this was all because she dried it with a blow-dryer. If she lets her hair air dry, it turns into long, thick, spiral ringlets that many people envy and pay exorbitant amounts of money to recreate in a salon to no avail.

At the wedding site in the bride's room, Melissa arrived with hairspray and a brand-new curling iron and got to work on Marla's hair.

It took Melissa another hour and a half, right up to wedding time, to add all these curls. It looked beautiful. The final picture is a rear view of Marla's dress with all the buttons down her back. She covered them all, just like Momma did on her wedding dress when she got married. Marla commented that she didn't have a brother-in-law to help her like Momma did, though, looking pointedly at me, forgetting that she is the one who moved to Texas and Terry is the one who moved to our hometown, and, furthermore, would have been a crack hand at covering buttons, I'm sure.

***

I am curious to know how many of my readers had a hard time viewing the video I posted yesterday. I got a couple of positive comments about it but was worried that many would not be able to watch it. If most of you could, I was thinking of posting a video about once a week. If too many could not see it, then I may scrap the idea.

Also, I'm trying to come up with some new playlists for my iPod and I am soliciting your help. I'm going to post a theme and then I would like for you to respond with a song that fits the theme. Either post it in the comments or email me directly and I will collect all the submissions and publish a playlist. The first theme is "Summer Infatuation." Think back to that first blush of summer love and the song you associated with the summer. I'll start you off: More Than Words by Extreme, Summer 1991, the summer I was infatuated with "long-hair dudes": Brandon at Macado's, Nuno Bettencourt from Extreme, Matthew and Gunnar Nelson and, of course, Terry Manfredi.

Dedicated to Pam

Here is a music video featuring Moonfredi on guitar and vocals and back-up vocals by Karma. "Them Dog Kickers." Be warned: this video has sound.

Wedding Rehearsal

Thursday afternoon was a long drive to Mineral Wells, Texas. Marla's best friend Beryl drove her Xterra crammed full of the overnight bags, garment bags, accessories, reception paraphernalia and my big honkin' knitting bag. Besides, Beryl, Marla and myself, there was also Marla's friend Terry Jasper. We stopped at the mall to pick up Joel's ring (!) and then drove to Mineral Wells where we checked into a hotel near the gardens where the wedding was to take place. After hurriedly changing clothes, we went to the gardens for the wedding rehearsal. It is, apparently, bad luck for the bride to participate in rehearsal so Terry Jaspar stood in Marla's place.



Marla and Joel walking to the wedding site.



Joel's parents arrive.



Terry Jaspur stands in for Marla next to Joel.





Marla and Joel at the rehearsal dinner.



This is Rodney and Karen Bailey. Rodney was Joel's best man and Karen was the wedding coordinator.





Tomorrow: Pre-Wedding Ablutions