The Very Best Kind of Feedback

May 2, 2013

I’m not sure about this title.  Every kind of feedback about my writing (unless it’s just plain mean-spirited) is the very best kind.  But yesterday’s response to last week’s column in the Observer was so totally unexpected and so right-on-the money, that I was about bowled over!

I had stopped by my friend Kay Buesing’s house to drop off a book.  She was expecting me and, there on her kitchen table, was the newspaper folded back to the editorial page.  “Even in our not-so-gigantic gene pool…” was the headline of my Elementary my dear column for May.

“I left that out to remind me to tell you…” began Kay. “…I’ve started a project I should have done long ago.” And she began to tell me about the box of photographs her grandmother had left to her.  “I was the oldest and so I got to go to visit her all by myself, without my siblings.  And I was her favorite,” she laughed.  “She left everything to me.”

Kay told me about playing “behind the dining room table” where she and they could talk as her grandmother worked in the kitchen.  I shared a similar memory… of being able to stand upright under the dining room table and having that delicious feeling that I was invisible.  Two old octogenarians sharing childhood memories.

Buttons! Buttons! Buttons!

We also talked about our grandmother’s button boxes.  I told her that I used to take mine into the classroom and we would have a lesson on sorting and preferences and diversity. Put a pile of old buttons in the middle of a group of four six-seven- and eight-year-olds and the discoveries are unending.  Kay told me about the “story buttons” in her grandmother’s collection.  “There’s one about Rumpelstiltskin,” she said.  I’d never heard of story buttons and we agreed that we need to have a Button Box Date to compare and reminisce.  Soon.

But it was the box of photos that Kay wanted to tell me about.  “Your article prompted me to get them out and start putting the names I remember on the backs.  My girls are coming for Mother’s Day and I think they can help with some of them.  My grandmother had labeled some.  But, sadly, there are those that we probably won’t be able to identify.”  She went on to say that she never would have gotten at it had it not been for what she felt was the “inspiration” of my words.  Yay!  I’m so glad.

One Response to “The Very Best Kind of Feedback”

  1. Lovely to see your blog on the FB newsfeed again. Haven’t seen it for weeks. This blog was particularly nostalgic. I remember pouring out buttons from my mom’s button box when I was a child. I thought the box contained magic. She always seemed to find a matching button to replace one that went missing. And how beautiful they seemed to be when see as an aggragate, like jewels. Thanks for the memor, Sydney.

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