The corners of my mind

While I consider this blog as much a diary as a public forum. That being said, I still tend to skip over some of the hardest realities of my universe. I posted recently about our grand trip to Minnesota, including our 'Minnesota Bound' get together. The invitation for this gathering was posted up on the Facebook events section about three weeks ahead of time. One of the people accepting our invitation was my best friend from high school, Margaret. (I wrote a long post years ago about how Thomas was going to be named Margaret if he were a girl)

Through the years, we lost touch. 😥 This photo was taken in my high school bedroom when I came home from college for the summer. I don't have a photo of us together. Sighhhh...

Then, Facebook happened. Yay! I can read about the lives of so many friends from back in the day. Facebook has its problems, but that connection is invaluable. 

Heartbreakingly, in the time between her responding 'yes' to our Minnesota Bound' event and the actual event, Margaret passed away. Margaret "Cheech" K. Weisbrod. Margaret had been living with Lupus for the majority of her adult life. I am so sad for her and her brothers and other loved ones. I am also heartbroken that the opportunity to see one another again was lost.  

My memories flow out freely. 

I never called her Cheech, not ever. She was always, always Margaret to me. 

Margaret taught me to eat mushroom pizza on Fridays during lent. As a Catholic, I had spent the majority of those Fridays eating tuna casserole. 😑 We shared long road trips on the team bus for basketball! During which the conversation was definitely R or so rated. Ahhhh...high school. I spent many a night sleeping over at her house and her at mine. There were also those warm summer days swimming at Manke's Resort across the water from where they lived on Spec Lake. Because they were neighbors of the resort, she got in free, thus so did I when I was with her.

We would always go to Princeton for movie nights. Mainly horror! Driving home late at night alone was terrifying! I saw Halloween for the first time in that theater with Margaret. It was the most horrifying movie of my life forever! 👿I have told my children many times about Margaret screaming "GET. OUT. Of the water!!!" at a different movie during a  particularly gruesome scene. I wish I could remember what movie that was so I could watch it again.

 We stopped at her family bakery...the Weisbrod Bakery for snacks when we were out and about.

The last time I 'talked' to Margaret on Facebook, she wished me a happy birthday. Not odd for Facebook, except I don't have my birthday listed on there. 40+ years and she still remembered my birthday.

We shared the last moments of our childhoods together. My heart hurts.

Back in 2019, just moments before the Covid pandemic roared to life, my high school boyfriend Brian died.  Brian James McClellan. Though he passed away just days after Halloween, I am still in shock. Again, we had not spoken in years, but the memories are still vibrant in my mind. His birthday was Christmas Eve. We spent New Year's Eve together at our cabin up on Snaptail Lake. Winter in Minnesota!!! He also spent time with me up at the Osakis house before it was sold.

He lived in the same house as my best friend since kindergarten, Also my college roommate, Lori. She moved into our neighborhood when we in the second grade. He took me to my very first rock concert, the Doobie Brothers. https://www.last.fm/music/The+Doobie+Brothers We went to Star Wars together down at Northtown Mall at a time when A movies did not show in Cambridge, Minnesota. For instance, I went to the local theater with my friends and saw the Ma and Pa Kettle movies in the mid-70s.

The typical he's a senior, I'm a sophomore relationship, we had a summer of marching band trips before he left our high school. This included a swimming party over in Wisconsin at band director, Richard Hardy's lake cabin. During my junior year, he helped me build a cardboard box train for my high school child development class. Five child size boxes all hand painted in delightful playfulness. He asked me to marry him that night. At the time, I said I was too young to answer that question.

Somewhere in a storage box, I still have an electronic counter he made for me in his basement workshop. I would watch the tiny red digital numbers counting up in my dark room at night.

So much time spent together during the twilight of my childhood. 💔

When you add in that Molly, the sister I shared a room with, a childhood with, a lifelong bond with, has been gone these past twenty-six years, the three people who shared the vast majority of my young, almost adult life with me are now gone. These memories I have are now mine alone. 

Written by me in 1996.

My heart aches for those sweet, innocent moments of life.

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8mm memories

Snaptail Lake, MN (early 70s) 13 minutes

This past spring, we used our tax return to purchase an 8mm to digital converter to make the stack of old films sitting in my closet for years could be viewable once again. We purchased the Wolverine MovieMaker Pro from Amazon. It took several calls to the company to figure out why we could not get the recorder working...AT ALL. But, after the initial frustrations, we were able to transfer all of the films I have in less than a week. We still have a few flickering flops, that will need to be redone, but we have viewable family memories for the first time in decades. Yay!

There were incredibly large amounts of hunting footage on the film reels. Not surprising considering the many vivid memories I have of carcasses hanging in the rafters of our garage every autumn. What was missing, sadly, was the plastic 5 quart bucket of 8mm films we watched many Christmases, Thanksgivings and many other gatherings. The majority of the footage of my own childhood were not in my collection. 😥

I do, however, have the film of my parent's wedding back in 1948. Many reels of the older siblings. And by many, there were only a dozen reels to begin with in the box. When finished, I ended up with 61 clips. Some are a few minutes long. The longest reel held about 14 minutes of footage. Some just a few seconds. I had begun to cut to the clips into smaller pieces. Then, my daughter ended up in the hospital two months early, delivering our newest granddaughter. Born at four pounds, she spent a few weeks in the NICU. 

  

Eight months later, she is a healthy, always smiling little girl. The early delivery distracted me from editing most of the 8mm digital files. A very happy distraction.💟 It has become another 'someday' project. At least, I have the files and can view them whenever I want. 

Green Lake family reunion (1962?) just under 5 minutes

This final video I will post is from my parents wedding, filmed 74 years ago.

Greg and Shirlee wedding then 4th of July (1948) 3 minutes

The recorder/converter was more than I would have liked to spend. Looking at the prices today, it has decreased in price, naturally. After years and years of planning to send the films off to be converted, the memories are indeed priceless! I definitely do not regret finally leaping in and creating these new OLD memories for my family to share. 

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