Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Omigosh! I look like a MacBain!

The MacBean Clan Plaid
 
Don't get me wrong. I'm inordinately proud of my Scottish heritage and my membership in Clan MacBean. My house is dotted with Scottish items--a rug in the clan plaid, two hangings featuring the clan crest, a picture of Gillys MacBean who was a hero/martyr at the Battle of Culloden in the 18th century. But my aunts and grandmother had a definite MacBain look, and while I loved them dearly, they were not particularly attractive women--their faces long, with bags under the eyes. An air of sadness or resignation hung over them and showed on their faces. They'd had hard lives--my grandmother gave birth to five children, saw four survive to adulthood; an Anglican minister's wife, she moved her family from one parsonage to another every two years and probably they were as poor as church mice. I have few memories of one aunt, but warm and wonderful ones of the other two--one was crippled in her twenties by rheumatoid arthritis and lived a pain-filled life, a spinster until probably her sixties when she married the widower next door who helped her turn faucets and jar lids that her disfigured hands couldn't handle. I spent more time with the third aunt--I called her Ha, though I don't know why. Ha took a cynical attitude from her difficult childhood but she married a sophisticated fun-loving man, enjoyed life, and one summer when I stayed with her for two weeks, treated me more as a friend than a child.
That MacBain look worked well on my dad--a man of great moral certainty, a leader with great self confidence, strong liberal leanings, and an inbred sense of right and wrong. Even the jowls looked okay on him. But I didn't want the MacBain look and yet I find it on my face more often as I age.
This all came up today because I was trying to take a picture of Jacob and his anteater project with my new iPhone 5s that I don't really understand. He took it from me and took about twelve videos of himself, which I managed to erase. But the phone was stuck on that mode where it tried to take a picture of me, rather than what I was looking at. If the phone is just below your face, it's not an attractive look.
Jacob and I practically fought over the phone, with him assuring me he knew how to fix it--he didn't. I finally wrested it from him, switched its focus, and got a good picture of him with his project. It really is impressive, depicting the habitats of anteaters--forests, swamps, and grasslands.
Hard to settle down to homework after all the hilarity with the camera. No, I'm now showing those pictures.

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