Some Perspective

I wanted to post a picture or two with this post - but forgot to take my camera to school - so this photo from my junior high "A9 Pin Day" will have to do!! (We had junior high for 7th, 8th and 9th grades. And we had separate grades for the semesters - the first part of a year was the A part and the second was the B part. And they started students in kindergarten every semester and graduated you from high school every semester. So I started school in February and graduated 12 years later in January. And started Seminary in A8 and finished in B12 so my last semester of high school I didn't go to Seminary. LA Unified ended the practice back when Leslie and Donna were going to high school. But I met a woman from Chicago who had gone to school with a similar system there.)

But I digress - I often do!

When I was a teen going to Seminary - back before the Flood - there were two girls in my class named Margaret and Linda. And they had more clothes than anyone I knew! They came to school every day for weeks on end and never repeated what they wore.

I should note that in the late 50's and early '60's, fashion was full skirts with "stiff slips" underneath that we starched so the skirts would be very bouffant. And I think the one girl made lots of her skirts - they weren't all that difficult to make, but that didn't help me have more of them. I don't think I could even go a week without repeating some part of my outfit.

And so I always thought that it would be the height of coolness, sophistication and luxury to be able to go a period of time and not repeat what you wore. Eliza and I discussed this once when she was working at the Church Office Building. She said someone pointed out to her once that "You haven't repeated your clothes for a month now." (Eliza said she was pretty sure she'd repeated things; she'd just used different combinations.)

But let me get to my point - because there is a point to this. I decided about 3 weeks ago to see if I could wear something different every day for one month. Because I have "favorites" - I'm sure I usually wear 20% of my clothes 80% of the time - I wrote down what I wore each day.

It's a good thing I did, because I couldn't remember after a couple of days what I'd worn 3 days before!

And I found myself wearing stuff I hadn't worn in a long time - and hoping that my experiment would soon end so I could wear my jean skirt, my khaki pants and my black trousers again!

Now let me introduce what might seem to be a non-sequitur - and I am the queen of non- sequiturs remember - but I had Henriette L. come and speak to my high Language Arts class. We are reading The Diary of Anne Frank and studying the Holocaust.

She, as you may remember from a blog post Dad wrote a year ago, survived as a Jew in Belgium during the war. Her aunt and uncle raised her and her sister after their parents disappeared while working for the underground. Her aunt was married to a non-Jewish Pole and was able to register as a non-Jew. Henriette and her sister were small enough that they were not required to wear the yellow star, so no one particularly remembered them as Jewish. She also changed her name from Hannah to Henriette to appear more Flemish. After the war, she didn't change it back.

She had my kids enthralled as she told stories of the deprivation and fear she remembered, and also the stories she has collected from her family. Her aunt and uncle hid a Jewish family for 3 years in their apartment in Belgium - the police only came one time and the man, woman and child hid in the wall!

For two years, Henriette and her sister were in a Catholic convent for safe keeping. A woman her aunt was going to hide decided to leave the apartment - against Aunt Stella's wishes - and was caught. Aunt Stella was afraid the woman might "talk" so that was when she sent Henriette and her sister to the convent for 2 years.

The sisters in the convent did their best to care for the children in the town, all the children!

Last year she went to Belgium again and recorded stories. She also had pictures to show my students - there is something beautiful and haunting about old photographs! She had two uncles who were rabbis and she had pictures of them and wedding pictures of her parents and photos of their town and their apartment and the members of the Church in Liege, Belgium where they went to church after they were converted - which was before the war. They weren't able to go all that often, but they maintained their faith.

But back to clothes and the sisters from the convent. One Christmas they got new shoes for all the children in the town who needed them. The trouble was, the pair Henriette got were boys shoes and she didn't want to wear them. In fact, she refused to go to school in them. But her aunt made her go - and when she got to school, Henriette discovered that all the other girls had boys shoes too!

Henriette said, "That's a story about false pride." And I thought, "How silly to spend time writing down what I'm wearing and wondering if people will notice that I wear something different everyday for a month." I thought, "How silly to give that much time and thought to clothing!"

So I think I will wear my black trousers tomorrow!