My Second Meme

Thanks to Drew for the tag.

Here are the rules: Drew poses a question to me, and I answer it. Then I pose my own question and tag others; then they ask their own question and tag others, and so on... just like a seventies shampoo commercial!

Drew's question to me is “If you could go back in time and relive any moment in your life exactly as it originally happened, what would you choose to experience again? (Note: You cannot alter the out come; you'd just relive the experience).”

Okay, I thought and thought, and had a lot of trouble coming up with something that I wouldn't want to fiddle with and change a little, either the circumstances or my reaction to the circumstances...so I finally settled on this:

When I was sixteen, my great Uncle B____ passed on. He was the brother of my grandmother, Mrs. W____ (the one with the castle down the street - see below). An interesting character, he; never married, but was "engaged" to the same woman for over sixty years. His fiancée was the youngest child of the richest family in town, and years later found out that the woman she believed to be her mother was actually her grandmother - her real mother was her "sister", Princess. And yes, Princess was REALLY her name.

But I digress.

Uncle B___ lived on a farm, though WHAT exactly he farmed I never knew. He occasionally had sheep in his barn, though they weren't his as I recall. There was corn, I suppose, possibly other grain crops, but when I was growing up we were never there long enough for me to properly explore the fields - not like the heady days of Mother Rubble's youth, when all the cousins in the family would gather and spend the entire summer there.

The farmhouse was where Uncle B___, Mrs. W____, and all their siblings had been born and raised. The farm sat a little ways out of town, along a creek where Mother Rubble used to fish - though by my day, the creek was obscured by a highway and an abandoned Drive In.

The house was a standard late-19th Century design, with a ground-floor living area and a large, usable attic space. In my youth, when we would visit the farm, visitors entered through the back door, which led to the kitchen. Adjoining the kitchen was the indoor bathroom (a later addition, naturally) and the "dining" room, which was piled high with papers and magazines and was where Uncle B___ slept. And until the day he died, those were the only three rooms of the house I had ever seen.

After his death, the contents of the house were to be sold at auction, so Mother Rubble and Big Ray and I went up one Saturday to clear out anything of value that the family might want to keep. While Big Ray and Mother Rubble were busy collecting little treasures like paper bags full of money that were hidden in the dining room, I had a chance to explore the parts of the house that I had never seen.

The upstairs room, once the children's sleeping quarters, had only an old rusty bed frame and a closet full of family photographs - the old-timety photographs where no one ever smiled, and had vacant, expressionless yet luminescent eyes, like Melissa Sue Anderson on Little House on the Prairie. Of particular interest was a photograph of Aunt O___, grandmother's oldest sister, who died of scarlet fever at age sixteen. In contrast to the other photos, hers depicted a bright, lively girl with thick ringlets of blond hair falling about her shoulders, as delicate as a china doll. I imagined that, had she lived, she would have become an international beauty and sailed back and forth to Europe with her financier husband.

The true treasure, though, was the front parlor. Its existence was completely unknown to me (remember, I had only ever entered from the back door - the front porch was overgrown with weeds, so I had never even crept up and looked into the front windows). The parlor probably hadn't seen a human being since about 1940, and looked as if it hadn't been altered for about thirty years before that. There were a few pictures on the walls, which were covered with a patterned Victorian-era wallpaper. There was a high-backed, red-upholstered settee of some sort, with low, round-topped table. Also an upright piano, with stacks and stacks of sheet music, primarily early 20th-Century popular songs. And a bookcase - the bookcase!

I pause here to inform the reader that I am obsessed with historic ephemera - obsessed - which is to be borne in mind as you read on.

I suppose it would be really swell to, say, be in such a situation and stumble upon a first edition Tom Sawyer, or Of Human Bondage, or something, but I infinitely preferred what I DID find - a collection of MacGuffey Readers, Farmer's Almanacs from the late 1800's, and lots and lots of popular fiction of the turn of the century, tales of hardscrabble orphan boys traveling the world on steamer ships, and rose-cheeked maidens suffering some sort of cruel existence until the day when they can be married to their true love.

And then, the find of all finds, the very mention of which made Mother Rubble drop something breakable, make an inhuman sound, and rush into the parlor; behind the other books, obviously quite intentionally placed there so as to be concealed, was a huge, illustrated, wood-bound German Bible, the Bible of Wilhelm Forster (1749o-1815), an ancestor who was the first Lutheran missionary in the Ohio Territory. The Bible had been a point of some contention in the family for years and years - everyone wanting it, no one knowing who had it - and the person that DID have disavowing any knowledge of its whereabouts.

So that's it, that's what I would re-live, my day of uncovering hidden rooms, family secrets and commonplace reading material of a bygone era.

Now for my question, which is multi-part: You wake up tomorrow morning, and can have TWO super-powers of your choice. 1) What would they be; 2) How would you use them, and; 3) why would you use them that way?

I'm tagging LSBB, Doc Johnston, Li'l Erika, and Niece Ratched.