#SoCS, Engraved

I am finally going to be one of the first to get my #SoCS post out there this week.

A few weeks ago, I could not think of something to write – not one thing, with that week’s prompt not inspiring enough ideas for me.

Then, last week, the prompt gave me too many possible choices and I chose to do none of them.

Well, with this week’s prompt I am back and ready to share a little stream of consciousness with you.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS SATURDAY

***

On my sixteenth birthday, my oma gave me a big bar of my favourite chocolate and something in a little triangular box.

“This belonged to my parents,” she told me, as I lifted the lid, revealing an old ring inside.

She always wore them, several rings on her fingers.

“This one,” she informed me, as I touched the band on her finger, “Opa bought for me. I give you this one when I die,” she would say to me, as matter-of-factly as she often could be, but I chose not to think of a time when my beloved Czech grandmother may not be there, rings and all.

I kept the little triangular box with me, not letting it out of it’s home like I did with my other rings.

I often wonder about where my ring has been, what life it lived, long before I took possession of it.

I would sometimes think it is a part of my life, but really I am, for a little while, a part of its’.

I don’t know much about my great-grandparents. I don’t know where the ring has been or what it may have seen during it’s early years.

How had it survived – traveled all those years and miles, from Europe to Canada and from them, to their daughter, to me?

I can not read the engraving on the ring, but I believe (if memory serves me) it is dated 1919 and will soon be 100 years old.

I haven’t been able to wear it often, as it was a little bit too big for my small fingers. I still don’t like to wear it, for fear that it could slip off and be lost forever to me.

I have lost precious things and precious people in my life, never got a chance to meet my great-grandparents, but I won’t lose this symbol of their love.

Okay, so although I do not know their story like I wish I did, I like to imagine things about them and their love for one another.

I keep the ring, securely in its box, hidden under my underwear in a drawer, away from the inquisitive hands of my nephew. He likes to play in my room, looking at my jewelry, specifically putting my many rings on his fingers. This one ring he can not, he must not find, as he is too young now, not able to understand the history and the memory wrapped up in that little ring.

“Tweasure,” my nephew cries, whenever he spots anything even resembling a treasure box. He thinks my mom has one at her place, but in it, to his disappointment, he finds only boring slips of paper and other things.

He has found an old tin chest I have to remember my oma by.

He likes to open it up, like a “door,” he says.

I always remember that same chest sitting on my oma’s dresser, in what once was the bedroom my dad’s two older brothers shared, where I slept any night I stayed with her.

It had a metal rose with a magnet on the bottom stuck on the lid and was often locked with a tiny lock. I was dying of curiosity, but the only treasure inside it was a bunch of pennies and other coins. It was still my favourite thing in that entire room.

Treasures are relative things, subjective to each and every one of us.

I will treasure the ring I received on turning sixteen and I will hold onto the memories and the history before my time, if those who are gone I can no longer have with me.

Those people and their stories and lives will, forever, be engraved on my heart.

1919-2019 – Time will go on, but nothing will ever change that.

***

Linda speaks of treasures here:

http://lindaghill.com/2015/07/10/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-1115/

Every day is to be treasured, I say, as I plan my next post:

https://summat2thinkon.wordpress.com/ten-things-of-thankful/

Thanks to Stream of Consciousness Saturday and Ten Things of Thankful, I love weekends again.

SoCS: Let Them Eat Cake

***

The initial idea would have been to write about world peace. Honestly, who doesn’t want that?

If I could say anything really stirring on that goal I would have said it a long time ago, not waiting for a blogging prompt to say my piece.

Then there’s my love of cake. I love a big, delicious piece of cake, but then something else popped into my mind.

In fact, it’s always in there somewhere, so it just pushed a lot of other stuff in there out of the way and made itself at home, front and center.

When I was in the eighth grade I started writing a diary. Well truthfully, I called it a log, not wanting to call it a diary because I felt the word was becoming a cliche of sorts for young girls.

I wanted somewhere to write down my thoughts, somewhere with a name as different as I felt.

Silly of me. It was a diary.

🙂

From there, the idea sprung up in my mind, that I would write my autobiography.

What did a fourteen-year-old have to put into an autobiography anyway?

Well, I had just been through a year or more of illness, medications, missed school, and surgeries. I wanted to call it The Year and a Half From Hell.

This was back in 1998 and just barely was I using a computer at all.

I started writing it and I did this in braille, using the old, heavy-duty Perkins Brailler.

I soon had pages and pages of braille, a towering pile of pages filled with row after row of raised dots, telling my story, but only I could read it, with maybe the exception of my brother or maybe my mother.

Then, just as suddenly as the idea came to me, it faded. I ran out of steam, but the dream never left my mind entirely.

I didn’t know where to go from there.

Now that I have this blog, I wonder if my long harboured dream of writing, what I now call my memoir, if that is less necessary.

I now have a place where I can write, in a broken up manner, when I feel inspired.

The problem is that I didn’t know how to downsize something so integral to my life, into a book.

I didn’t know what to say and what to leave out.

Also, I have decided to scrap Year and a Half From Hell, in favour of a title that takes me back to that cliche question.

Piece of Cake:
It’s a phrase meaning a task that’s thought to be simple or easy to accomplish. No problem at all.

Of course that year I spent in hospital and attached to dialysis machines was anything but simple or easy, but I would have no idea as that fourteen-year-old girl, just how much harder the following years would be after the idea for a memoir first occurred to me.

I think it sums up the sort of sense of humour I possess. I am not overly funny in any real ha ha sense of the word.

🙂

I am more dry, ironic, witty sense of humour girl.

Both titles felt authentic to me, even if one is a highly repeated, widely overused cliche from way back.

I like it and, besides, it makes me think of that sweet sweet piece of cake I so often deny myself.

I would have used it as reward for all that hell I’d been through, and have done at times, but all in moderation.

Besides, those two things don’t go together for someone who was put on steroid medication from age twelve onward.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, I am just as sweet as any cake.

🙂

Plus, I don’t like pie, so Easy As Pie was never a possible title for any autobiography or memoir of mine.

***

That was my offering for this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday:

http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/17/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-1815/

I was sorry to hear that this weekly blogging prompt almost came to a halt, so soon after I came across it.

Would have been a real shame, but I would have understood if the blogger herself, in charge of SoCS, if she needed the break.

Thanks for keeping it going. It has come to mean something to my blogging schedule and to myself.

I may even take a stab at the Wednesday prompt next.

Note:
If you read the title of this post and expected me to write about Marie-Antoinette, sorry to disappoint. Perhaps I will work it into a future post on this subject, but for now…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

As for that pesky world peace question, I’m open to a discussion, if anybody has any ideas or suggestions.