Objects: Part Two

I got this idea from Icklewriter who has to put together 10 objects to take with her {on a course }that represent her as she sees herself. The first part of my list is two entries back.

                   5. When I get up in the morning after I have brushed my teeth, showered and weighed myself, there is one other thing I always do. I darken my eyebrows. I have dark hair and eyelashes, but my eyebrows have always been a light brown, and now, if course, my eyebrows have silver in them like my hair. This looks pretty good in the hair and less than good in the eyebrows. So, object #5 is an almost empty tube of dark brown mascara which is applied very lightly to each eyebrow and is perhaps the only item of makeup I apply every morning.

                     6. My mother was a practicing Irish Roman Catholic which meant that in order to marry my mother, my father  had to promise that any children of the marriage would be brought up in the Catholic religion. This he did  even though I can never remember him coming to church or talking about religion with us. However, I do have a prayer book, a Roman Catholic missal, which has my name written in his handwriting. This missal will be object #6. It represents a link to my father, a man who contributed a lot more than just genes to the person I am today.

                    7. When my father died, the little money he had went to my sister {who was still completing her nursing training,}and I got his books. Among these was  a collection of the poems and stories of Rudyard Kipling, a writer {along with D.H.Lawrence}whom he admired a lot. Every Christmas, no matter what else he got for me, my father always bought me a gift certificate, a book token from our local big-chain book store, and every year I spent a couple of weeks before Christmas deciding what I would buy with this gift and a couple of weeks after the holiday enjoying more browsing and the pleasure of actually acquiring a book. So, my father’s copy of Kim by Rudyard Kipling passed on to me at my father’s death represents another important part of who I am and and is also a memory of the man who encouraged me to be the reader I have been all my life.

More later…