Gentle Humor

Suzanne Olsen's Humor Blog - I don't offend some of the people most of the time

My Daughter’s Home!

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On May 16, 2021

In Home Life, Kids

My daughter is home for a visit so I am posting a blog from a while ago, called “Suzanne’s Law.” I want to spend every minute I can with her, her boyfriend, and Juniper their dog!

Do you remember Murphy’s Law? It went something like, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. I have invented my own law, called Suzanne’s Law. This is a law of the universe that says, anytime you want someone to do something, they will either: not do it, do it but not do it well, or do it but not when you want them to.

This law is proved by my daughter on a regular basis. Here’s an example. I asked her for weeks to get the oil changed in her car. When she finally did, she brought the receipt in the house to show me all the add-on things they talked her into adding on. After I looked it over and heard her explanations (this was her very first oil change), I said, “Put that oil receipt in you glove box to show you’ve been maintaining the car.”

“I will mom.”

“Today?”

“Yes, I just don’t want to walk out there right now.”

If you apply Suzanne’s Law, you know that the oil receipt is still lying in the bonus room floor days later, and will continue to stay there unless ants carry it off or I plant myself in the middle of the room with my hands on my hips, tapping my toe, and watch her pick it up and take it out to her car, at which time she’ll come back into the house scowling and go straight to her room, slamming the bedroom door to let me know how unreasonable I’m being.

My dog has Suzanne’s Law down to a science. If she does something really cute, like cock her head to one side and look up with the whites of her little black eyes showing, and it’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your life so you want to share it with someone, it’s guaranteed that she’ll cease doing it the second the other person looks at her, no matter how fast they turn their head.

Another version of this same thing is when she sits or rolls over on demand all day long, but if someone says, “Does your dog do tricks?” and you say, “Yes, watch this,” and then say, “Roll over,” she will just look at your like she’s deaf and not even acknowledge that you are speaking to her. If you say it again and again, she waits patiently, looking at you and maybe cocking her head as if to say, “What up?”

Now that I’ve discovered this new law, which is akin to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in its scope and application, I see it happening all the time. We had a leak in our roof and the roofing contractor was supposed to call this morning by 7:30 to say when he was coming. I called him at 8:00. He said he was coming at 9:30. I called him at 9:45. He got there eventually, but not when he was supposed to – again proving Suzanne’s Law.

Curiously, now that I’ve coined this law, I feel more forgiving toward my daughter. She’s only following a pre-ordained, scientific model of teenage behavior patterns that are consistent with 99.9% of the teenage population.

I feel so much better. I’m going to get a lot of use out of that law until she goes to college. Feel free to use it as well. It may save you from pulling all your hair out.

Happy Mother’s Day

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On May 9, 2021

In Holidays, Home Life, Humor

I was lucky to have a mother blessed with a hearty laugh and an easy sense of humor. From her I learned how to find humor even when there ought not to be any.

Momma wasn’t usually the one who created humor. She wasn’t known for telling jokes or making witty comments, but she could conjure up humor in just about anything. When something amused her, she laughed with her whole being. It rose up from her heart and came out deep and strong. None of that high-pitched, trilling, sissy kind of laughter – it was robust. Not loud or annoying but genuine and infectious. When you were with her, even if you personally couldn’t see what was so funny, you laughed anyway because you didn’t have a choice. Her laughter kept going and when you joined in it took everything out of you until your hand when to your chest and you said, “Stop, just stop, I’m exhausted.” Then you collapsed into a chair and laughed some more.

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Learning to Pray

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On May 2, 2021

In inspiration, Religion

Like a lot of people, I’ve been praying all my life, especially when times are really rough – “Oh Lord, please don’t let that policeman notice that I was speeding,” prayers, and “Lord let me get through this railroad crossing before the arms come down so I won’t be late AGAIN.”

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Playing the “Age Card”

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On April 25, 2021

In Humor, Work

As I have said in the past, I’m an old woman. I don’t see myself as old because I can hike further and kayak longer than some people decades younger than me, but on the way to doing a volunteer project involving manual labor yesterday, I’m ashamed to admit I was considering playing the Age Card. Especially if they wanted me to paint.

We were supposed to meet at 8 am at the home of a financially challenged, disabled person to paint her home’s exterior, clean up her yard, build a porch, clear a tree that had fallen on her house, repair a rusty sliding door and garage door, etc. I was okay with all of that except the painting. I hate painting. When I arrived at the home, the first thing the volunteer coordinator said, “Great, another painter! I’ll show you where the brushes are and get you started.”

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Interior Desperation

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On April 18, 2021

In Home Life

             For years I’ve wanted color and pizzazz in my home, but my husband didn’t want to paint until the kids were grown. Finally, when my oldest got his learner’s permit, my husband consented to paint. Halleluia!

            But what color? For help, I called my cousin, Nancy Adair, in Memphis. She’s an interior decorator whose work I’ve always admired. I asked her if she’d come to Portland and help me choose colors and accessories. 

            “Sure, Cuz,” she said. She arrived six weeks later, and after exchanging some memories and laughs, we started right to work. She faced the dining room wall of our great room, which I considered my decorating masterpiece, and said, “Let’s start here. You need a large canvas instead of those little pictures, and something tall on the china cabinet because the ceiling is so high.”

             My husband agreed. “I never liked the look of that wall.” I was speechless, and a little hurt. Nancy’s gaze turned toward the seating area of the great room. “I like the pictures behind the sofa, but you need a higher sofa, a red sofa, and an end table and lamp instead of that floor lamp.”

            My heart was broken. The dining room was my favorite spot in the entire house. And sure, the sofa was faded and too low, but I’d sat there reading Berenstain Bears stories to my children, illuminated by my trusty floor lamp.

            That night I barely slept, worrying that Nancy would change all the things I loved.

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Food Is the Boss of Me

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On April 11, 2021

In Exercise, Food, Health, Vacations

I think about food all the time. Here’s an example. The anniversary of my marriage to my wonderful and ornery husband was a couple of weekends ago. To celebrate we went to the beach – not to sit with our toes in the sand or stroll hand in hand listening to the ocean waves. No, my husband wanted to go away from the beach and drive two hours on twisty, gravel, muddy logging roads so we could hike two miles to see waterfalls and wildlife and such. 

And see them we did. But the whole time, all I could think about was lunch. We left our motel around 8 in the morning, drove forever then started our hike. By 10:30 I was checking my watch – an hour and a half until I could eat. An hour later I checked my watch again. 10:48. What??? This went on at regular intervals, until around 11:30, when I started checking every couple minutes. Then I said, “I’m going to have lunch.”

“Must be 12 o’clock,” my husband said.

It was. I fight eating until the noon hour, and then until dinnertime because I want to eat all day long. Someone I worked with once told me they put out a cigarette on their break and immediately craved the next one, miserable because they’d have to wait until the next break to have it. That’s the way I am with food. Even when I proclaim, in misery, “I’m stuffed,” I still want a little something sweet; a little something salty. I’ve been told by lots of people that I eat more than anyone they’ve ever known.

I have to do three things to stay within the normal range of my body mass index (BMI). (1) I only eat at mealtimes – three times a day, and (2) I only eat healthy food (there are occasional exceptions to these two – I am human, after all). (3) is the one I don’t ever break: I never buy the next size up. Otherwise, with my appetite, I would always be the star of “The Biggest Loser.”

At straight-up noon I unzipped my fanny pack and ate my pumpkin seeds (for protein), a bunch of carrots (for Vitamin A), a lot of celery (for some crunch and filler), and two small mandarin oranges (for dessert). It was a lot of food, but all of it served my body’s needs for nutrition. I figure my mouth is like a car’s gas tank. I want to put the stuff in there that will my body run well. Good food is good fuel. I want my belly’s gas tank to give me a body that can get out of a chair without struggling.

Because of my three eating rules, I can eat like a horse and still wear the size 8-10 I’ve been wearing for decades. When I get above my ideal weight (always at Christmas because of sweets and party foods), my jeans get tight and uncomfortable (no stretchy pants for me – I need good old-fashioned Levis that let me know I’m not eating healthy). After those extra pounds slowly (way too slowly) melt off, I’ll be able to eat a few more fun things every now and then, like chips – man oh man I do love salt and vinegar potato chips. I hardly ever buy them, otherwise they’d be scarfed on the drive home from the grocery store.

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Happy Easter, Everyone!

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On April 4, 2021

In Holidays, Religion

It’s Easter Sunday. For those of you who only know Easter as a day for bunnies and chocolate, I’ll try to explain origin of Easter. 

It started with the Jews. They were all the time sacrificing bulls and lambs to God in order to atone for their sins. It sounds barbaric, but there’s some logic to it. If you’ve done something wrong, like stole your neighbor’s plow, you ought to be held accountable. You know good and well you shouldn’t have taken his plow. When you feel guilty enough, or you get caught, you’d take a lamb to the High Priest to be sacrificed – the lamb died for your sins. It was a high price to pay back then, so it served as a deterrent for stealing as well as a way to relieve your guilt.

Unless you’re a psychopath, most humans will eventually feel guilt for hurting another person – maybe not until they’re on their deathbed, but sooner or later they’ll say, “I regret that I…” or “I wish I hadn’t…” If a person is forced to publically admit their crime and give up a lamb for what they’d done, they wouldn’t have to carry all that guilt on their shoulders for years. It’s genius, really. Instant justice so people could get on with their lives. Maybe they’d stop being jerks too.

Which brings me to Easter. The Jews, around 2,000 years ago, had gone through a lot of rulers who set bad examples, and they’d done a LOT of misbehaving. They worshipped other gods, sinister gods that wanted them to have sex with temple prostitutes or sacrifice their own children. I’m not saying all Jews went astray because there were always good people in the Bible and some (called prophets) tried to tell others how wrong these things were. Unfortunately, they usually got killed.

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Tumbleweeds

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On March 21, 2021

In Gifts, Home Life

My brother just called – he’s on his way to Texas and saw a tumbleweed blowing across the road. “It reminded me of that tumbleweed I sent you when I was a Coke spy. Remember it?”

Of course I remembered it. I had just flunked out of college after two years of courting Jack Daniels rather than going to class. To pay my half of the rent I worked as a waitress – a little smug because who needed college anyway since I made more in tips than a lot of college graduates earn. I was living the life, having a lot of fun, but sometimes nagged by that vague sense of despair from not having any direction in life.

This is what a tumbleweed looks like.

Then a box arrived – a big box, from my brother. He’d gotten a job with the Coca-Cola company in Atlanta as part of an elite team of high-achieving college graduates hired to enforce trademark rules in restaurants across the country. The company gave these college VIP’s a new car, good salary, an expense account, and lots of other perks and sent them out to American cities large and small. Their job? Go into eating establishments and say, “Can I have a burger and fries and a Coca-Cola?” When the waitress brought their beverage, they sneaked a sample of it with a syringe, labeled it and later typed up a report, such as, “I ordered a burger and fries and a Coca-Cola from a slim 5’4” waitress with blond hair in a beehive hairdo wearing a name tag that said, ‘Mabel.’ She brought a beverage to me at 12:42 pm” and so on, describing the interaction, restaurant, and all other facts about the encounter. The Coke spy labeled the beverage and mailed it to Atlanta, where it was analyzed. If the waitress served a Pepsi or RC or some other brand, Atlanta sent them a letter saying they could not substitute cola beverages. They had to say, “We don’t have Coca-Cola, is Pepsi okay?” Later, another Coke spy would return to the same place, and eventually, if the restaurant didn’t comply, they’d get sued and my brother flew to Atlanta to testify. The company was trying to keep people from using the word “Coke” as a generic word for cola. In other words, they wanted “Coke” to be a Coke, not a Pepsi, not a Shasta. I think it’s called trademark infringement.

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Covid, Disasters, and Friends

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On February 21, 2021

In Friends, inspiration, Relationships

All hell broke loose in Oregon last weekend. We had snow, freezing rain, ice, power outages, and the worst – no TV! You don’t realize how truly alone you are until you’ve lost the internet and TV. My husband’s mom came to our house for two days because her power was out, and while she was here our power went out. We were forced to play Scrabble by candlelight to entertain ourselves, and then she beat me. “The game was rigged!” I whined.

Then we heard that in Texas hell actually did freeze over, bursting people’s water pipes and causing power outages and water shortages. The news was full of tragic stories about couples with four kids having no power or water in a freezing house. Many of them left their homes to stay with relatives or friends. In times of trouble, strangers step up, but it’s easier to call your mom or son or a friend to help. 

Some of us don’t have nearby relatives, and some don’t have friends. It’s hard to make connections when you’re busy all the time, or prefer your own company so you don’t have to share the remote control. It also takes courage to have friends, because there’s always the risk of rejection. They might not invite you to a party, or they choose someone else to go with them to the beach. If you’re busy all the time when they call, they eventually quit calling. Plus you have to be nice to them. That sounds flippant, but really, you can’t insult your friends or do mean things to them because they’ll put up with it for a while but eventually they’ll find a new friend. 

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Don’t Answer It!

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On February 14, 2021

In Friends, Holidays, Home Life

When my daughter comes home from college and the land line rings, I yell, “DON”T ANSWER IT!” She always wants to – she thinks it might be her grandmother or somebody. It’s not.

Reminds me of growing up, when we always answered the phone. That was a long time ago, before cell phones and answering machines, in the days when the phone rang and you could count on it being a relative or friend or someone you did business with. During my teenage years back in the days of the dinosaurs, I was either on the phone talking to friends for hours, or I wasn’t in the house.

My dad worked out of town and was only home on intermittent weekends. He was one of those guys who took the newspaper with him into the bathroom when nature called. He’d be in there reading the sports page when the phone rang. Back then, though, there weren’t lying, cheating jerks who wanted to fleece us over the telephone. So when the phone rang, we answered it. Also, because there weren’t answering machines, the phone just kept ringing. Teenage girls figured you were in the bathroom popping zits or something and they’d just let it ring until you got done and answered. Or, if they were lucky, your cute brother would pick up the phone and you could talk to him until he realized it wasn’t one of the girls in his class but some dumb kid.  

After a few thousand rings my dad would throw the newspaper down, pull up his pants, clutching them at the waist because he had to return to the bathroom and finish up, and stomp to the phone. He thought that if the phone was ringing all that time, it must be an emergency. He growled, “HELLO!” Either the friend thought to herself, “Oh crap,” and hung up on him, or she said in a mouse’s voice, “Is Suzy there?” He yelled, “NO!” and slammed the phone down.

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Superstitions and Ornery Boys on the Ski Slopes

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On February 7, 2021

In Exercise, Sports

My superstitious traditions didn’t protect me when I went skiing with my brother last week. I know, I know, superstitions are ridiculous. I’ve stepped on a lot of cracks and never broke my mother’s back. But still…

On Thursday my brother and I headed to the mountain. I like skiing with him because he’s as bad a skier as I am. On the hour and a half ride to get to Timberline, there are two things we always do because, I don’t know about him but for me, I think if I don’t do them something unfortunate might happen on the slopes.

If you’ve never skied, let me assure you, it’s dangerous. You’re going way too fast on snow and ice with your feet strapped to two boards that could turn on you at any minute. One board could go into a track left by a previous skier and follow that line, or you can “catch an edge,” while the other board keeps going straight. You’ve probably seen it happen in cartoons. Usually you can force the wayward ski to behave, but if it won’t, you fall. Which can hurt, but mostly it’s just a LOT of work. Picture a walrus in the Arctic trying to get up on an ice floe, grunting and swaying and bellowing. That’s like one of us struggling back up from a fall, covered in snow like a powdered donut – well, not really, because a walrus is more graceful. Also you can get hit by a beginning snowboarder who’s going too fast and hasn’t learned how to stop yet except to ram into you and flatten you like a steamroller.

That’s the reason traditions/superstitions come into play. We want all the help we can get. The first thing we do, on the way up to the mountain just past the town of Sandy, is salute a metal sculpture. My son started that one when he was just a toddler. On a road trip going toward Mt. Hood he spotted a metal sculpture of a skeleton riding a Harley in someone’s side yard. He shouted, “Skelekos Rider!” because that’s the best he could do at such a tender age. So every time we go on Hwy. 26 and we pass that sculpture, we raise one fist in the air like the man on the Harley and say, “Skelekos Rider!”

This sculpture of a skeleton riding a Harley with his hand raise up is cool in itself, but I liked the old car and tow truck in the background, too. Not to mention the "Harley" sign.
This sculpture of a skeleton riding a Harley with his hand raised up is cool in itself, but when we pulled over to snap this picture, I liked the old car and tow truck in the background, too. Not to mention the “Harley” sign.

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Wrestling with a Vitamin Jar

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On January 31, 2021

In Health

I got a new jar of multi-vitamins and began the task of opening it this morning. I finally got through obstacle Number 1 – removing the clear plastic wrapper that is molded around the lid and most of the jar. I put my best magnifying glasses on, grabbed a pointy steak knife and, delicately as a surgeon, nosed it at the edge of the plastic repeatedly until I got the tip under it, enough to lift a little edge that I could tear away with my teeth. 

After I wrestled off all that plastic, I pressed down on the child-proof cap with all my might and opened the jar. I found obstacle Number 2 inside. The round white inner seal – held in place with industrial glue so strong you could chain it to a pickup truck, gun the engine and no matter how many horsepower or Hemi’s under the hood, it won’t pull the inner seal off.

Typical vitamin jar inner seal - nearly impossible to remove

The manufacturers like to trick you into believing the seal will come off, so they put a itsy bitsy little tab on the edge of the seal, or, as in this case, they have kindly glued a thin clear strip of plastic that sticks up like a shark’s fin for you to grab onto. I always get suckered into trying. “Maybe this time,” I say to myself with faith and hope, “maybe this time I can tug the inner seal off with my bare hands and brute strength.” Getting a grip on the thin plastic fin is not possible with human fingers – it’s barely enough to pinch. Gripping takes more finger real estate, almost all the way to the first knuckle. The jar designers know this, so they make the fin almost – but not quite – tall enough.

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Things Are Looking Up

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On January 24, 2021

In Home Life, Pets

My two deer came back this morning. What with the neighbor yelling at them and a strange man sneaking climbing into people’s hot tubs in the area, I was afraid they’d never be back.

The woods above our back yard are thick with rhododendron, fallen limbs, underbrush, debris, ivy, and holly. Years ago I blazed a trail through the mess so the kids could play up there. Soon deer and coyote started using the trail to get to the park. It’s a woodland circus if you happen to look out the window at the right time.  

My husband piles leaves in a bare spot up there – the woods slope up just beyond the grassy area – and that’s where we see most of the wildlife passing through. A couple of months ago two deer started hanging out in that bare area. They stand there, scratching their fleas with their teeth or skinny hind legs and intertwining their necks to scratch each other’s fleas.  

Deer in the backyard scratching an itch with it's teeth.
Deer in the backyard, one scratching an itch with it’s teeth, the other chewing its cud.

Just before Christmas they showed up four days in a row. On the fifth day my daughter arrived home from college. “Oh boy,” I said, excited. “You’ll get to see the two deer!” But of course we looked all day but no deer showed up. “Just wait, they’ll be here tomorrow. I’m telling you, they were up there for three hours the other day napping in the leaves.”

On my daughter’s 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th days the deer didn’t come. The morning of her 8th day, she packed up and drove away. I always get teary-eyed when she leaves, so I started putzing around the house, keeping busy to stave off the sadness. Barely 30 minutes later (I checked my phone) the two deer strolled into the clearing. I laughed, delighted to see them and amazed at their impeccable timing. I sent my daughter a text with a picture of them. “Of course,” she replied back. “They came to keep you company after I left.”

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Regrets – not today

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On January 17, 2021

In Exercise, Fears, Holidays, inspiration

You might be saying to yourself, “I wish I’d learned how to play the piano as a kid – I’ve always wanted to play – but it’s too late, I’m old and it’s foolish to start now with these arthritic fingers and the joints all knobby and covered in warts.” Or you’re saying, “I’ve never exercised in my life and now I’ve got pain in my knees and heart troubles and my doctor says I ought to exercise – it would make my life so much better – but I’d look like an idiot walking around the block all by myself and Harold won’t go with me, he never goes anywhere except to the Mr. Suds Bar and Grill for a few cold ones, the lazy bum.”

Or maybe, when you finally go for that walk, it feels great, and the birds chirp and squirrels frolic and the sky is blue and the grass is green and you get angry with yourself, and the whole world at large, and Harold in particular, because you didn’t do it sooner. “Why didn’t I do this years ago, before I got so stoved up I can’t even hoist myself out of my recliner and have to scooch up to the end of the chair and rest there for a minute and then start rocking back and forth until I get enough momentum, and then I lean way forward and put both hands down and push with all my might and if I don’t get it all perfectly in sync so that I’m propelled straight up onto my feet, if I wobble even a little and fall back into the recliner, I’ll wet myself because I really, really, really need to go. Why didn’t I start exercising sooner? Why?”

I’ll tell you why. You weren’t ready. You were a mess, and maybe you didn’t even know it. A lot of us do (or don’t do) things because we have some dumb fear that keeps us in the same wacko patterns that have made us afraid we’d be less happy if we did things different, even when common sense and our gut feelings tell us we need to change.

I’m in that pattern right now with eating. I’m a healthy eater – plant-based, lots of fruits and vegetables – a pillar of respectability when it comes to diet EXCEPT at Christmas time, when all the homemade goodies get exchanged. People feel compelled to open a can of sweetened condensed milk and mix chocolate chips in there and heat it up and cool it down and call it fudge and put it in a pretty tin decked out with Santas and holly and give it to me in December, often with a side of butter cookies in the shape of Christmas trees with green sprinkles. Who can resist? Not me. I gain 10 pounds from sugar every holiday season. Then the whole months of January, February and March (and sometimes April and May) are spent chastising myself for doing it because (every dieter knows this formula):

1 pound gained in 24 hours of binging = + or – 3 pounds lost in one month of strenuous dieting

Usually it takes longer, because once the sweets addiction takes hold, you spend at least the first half of January eating every piece of concentrated sugar you can find, even down to those round disks of white hard candy with red streaks radiating out of the middle that taste like peppermint – I think they’re called Starlight mints. They always have them in at restaurant cash registers where the management is cheap and happy not to have to  keep re-filling the bowl because no one eats them. Sometimes my husband grabs a couple and hands me one and, so as not to hurt his feelings, I put it in a coat pocket and it stays there all summer and the next winter I put my hand in the pocket and the candy has drawn in a little moisture from the humidity and gotten itself gummed up and turned pink all over and leached out of the wrapper and stuck to the inside of the pocket and I tug it out with my fingers that get all sticky and there’s nowhere to wash them off. You know the ones I’m talking about. In January, when I’ve gone through all the existing sweets and exercised enough willpower not to buy anymore, I’ll resort to eating one of those things because there’s always at least one somewhere in the house. Then, like a drunk in a mud puddle in the rain in a movie who’s reached rock bottom, I know I have to stop. No more sweets. No more McDonald’s fries between meals. No more eating chocolate chips right out of the bag just before bedtime so I can’t go to sleep because of the caffeine buzz. I’ve hit bottom, and I’m overcome with regret.

But consider this. Whenever you come to the point that you want to change for the better, whether you’re 18 or 89 – that’s the best time to do it. Before that, you weren’t ready. You weren’t even capable of doing it. It was not possible. You were too scared, too tired, too busy, too lonely, too afraid. And now you’re not.

 Maybe you realize you can’t blame Harold anymore, the no-account bum. You don’t need him to help make you better – you only need you. Right now.

I’ve taken up a couple of hobbies, and that voice in my head is telling me I’m stupid because I didn’t do them when I was younger – when my body and mind were nimble. “You’re an idiot, you know that, don’t you? You should have done this instead of having your girlfriends come over and calling up boys and saying, ‘Who do you like,’ for hours and hours when you could have been using that time learning to play the banjo.”

For some reason, right at this point in my life, I’ve gotten brave enough to do a couple of things I’ve always wanted to do, and I’ve resolved to do them with the zeal of youth, and appreciate my progress, no matter how slow. Even once around the block – that little accomplishment – is better than sitting and feeling the life flow out of me like a receding tide.

Up now, UP! Let’s rise up and do something extraordinary – you and me. Let’s stretch our bodies and minds and be the best we can be today. Let’s take piano lessons, learn to sing or dance, take an online class to become a rocket scientist.

And if Harold, the no-good bum, or the voice in our head makes fun of us, let’s not listen. Just for today.

. 

Happiness and Losing Stuff

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On January 10, 2021

In Home Life, Humor, inspiration

I was going to copy a letter from Pope Francis, such a smart guy, to give us hope fin all the turmoil, but I can’t find it – along with my keys and cell phone. At church our priest read the letter for his sermon and I thought, “This will be my blog this week – rather than giving a mild chuckle to the millions and millions of people who read this blog faithfully (or maybe that’s just one person – Pearl), I’ll give them Pope Francis’s take on happiness, and how we can have it even with the Capitol being stormed and all the other sad news we have.”

Doggone it. I can’t find it. Let me see if I can remember what he said. 

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Believing

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On January 3, 2021

In Fears, inspiration

Don’t panic – this isn’t about religion, although that’s when I had the revelation. I read a chapter in the Bible every day, and some of it, especially in Genesis, sounds a lot like a Marvel comic plot line – somebody makes a man out of dirt and takes one of his ribs and makes a woman, then she does something bad and so does he so they are cast out, and one of their sons is jealous and kills his brother. Later a man makes a giant ark and puts two of every living thing on it and floats in pouring rain for 40 days while the world is destroyed by a flood. If you’ve ever been on a Royal Caribbean cruise you can see how two of everything would fit. Still, some things are hard to imagine, even when you really want to believe. That’s when I had my revelation – about believing, and life.

To believe you have to have faith – against all odds and maybe even all logic. That’s true about religion, but it’s also true in life. If you want to be successful at anything – a career, a sport, learning to play piano – you have to believe you can do it. Others may believe in your and encourage you, but if you don’t have faith in yourself, you won’t succeed. You’ll give up.

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New Year’s Resolution

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On December 27, 2020

In Holidays, Home Life, inspiration

We’re all doing the best we can. That’s what I started telling myself over the Christmas holidays.

People catch up with each other this time of year. When they start talking about their problems, I say (or think), “Why don’t you just…?” Then I insert my unsolicited advice. They react with something like, “Well, I can’t do that because…” so, ever helpful, I offer another bit of advice – I’m an endless fountain of solutions.

In a Zoom room full of people I can solve all their problems in a matter of seconds. I think to myself, “He looks like Jabba the Hut, he needs to go on a diet.” “If only she’d pay attention to that child it would stop screaming in the background.” Boom – world’s problems solved.  

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Memorable Decorations

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On December 20, 2020

In Holidays, Relationships

Christmas Angels my children made years ago out of paper plates

These two angels that my kids made at an Advent Fair are part of the Christmas decorations I put out every year. My daughter’s has a sweet face – smiling and happy. My son’s is a tough guy – his scowling expression says, “You want a piece of me?”

Those pictures in magazines that show holiday homes with color schemes – turquoise birds on white trees with silver ornaments all matchy-matchy – that’s not happening in my house. Nothing coordinates. Just about everything has broken parts glued back on. I keep them for the same reason I’ve kept my kids’ angels all these years – they have a memory that makes me smile.

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Presents

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On December 13, 2020

In Gifts, Holidays, Home Life

Around mid-December, when I was eleven or twelve years old, my brother who was fourteen or fifteen, skulked into our house, hunched over a wrapped present tucked under his arm, looking from side to side like a cartoon thief. He went straight to the Christmas tree, got on his knees and slid the present all the way to the back of the tree so it would be completely hidden. When he stood back up, he had a scared look on his face. “Don’t tell anybody,” he whispered. “This is from (he said her name). I don’t want dad and momma to find out about it.”

I knew who he was talking about – the girl lived a few blocks away – part of a trashy family. We knew they were trashy because Momma used this descriptive title for anyone who didn’t take care of their house, or it had unsightly trash out front. Garbage, or cars up on blocks – that was obvious, but it could be peeling paint, rotting porch steps, or a yard full of straggly weeds. This girl’s family was well-known for several of these aberrations. It was nothing personal against the girl, but the lifestyle of the family cursed her all the same.

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Focus

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On December 6, 2020

In Holidays

There’s nothing like the holiday season to highlight my extreme and utter lack of focus. Ho Ho Ho!

Just this morning I went to the laundry room to get a clean cloth to wipe down a jar of my homemade Shea butter cream so I could put a label on it for a Christmas present. When I got to the laundry room I saw ten napkins that had hung overnight to dry and folded them. I went to the kitchen to make my morning tea and saw a scouter ant – that’s one of the ants the colony sends out to search for a microscopic drop of semi-sugary substance anywhere in your house so he can bring 9,000 of his friends to the feast.  

I got a ladder from the garage/bonus room because when I blew on the ant he started heading toward the ceiling. Back in the kitchen I cleared off two shelves in the panty where I saw the ant and wiped them down with vinegar water. I thought, “You forgot to wipe that jar and get that label on it.” I climbed up the ladder and followed the ant back to his entry hole above the cabinet. I feel sorry for ants and don’t kill them, just follow them home and caulk up their entry. 

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Christmas Frenzy

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On November 29, 2020

In Holidays, Home Life

The Christmas frenzy came early this year. Long before Black Friday my email overflowed with people wanting me to spend money at their stores. Even my dentist is begging me to get something – anything – done to my teeth in time for the holidays. Tis the season!

I responded to Land’s End’s frantic 55% Off and Free Shipping! emails by ordering a bunch of stuff I don’t need, since I have nowhere to go. No holiday parties, no nights at the theater, no restaurants with old friends I haven’t seen since March. But just in case, I ordered a red sweater – they were practically giving it away. Also some cotton zip-up sweatshirt things to stay warm while I clean closets. I’ll wrap these items and give them to myself for Christmas. That way I’ll at least get a few presents I won’t have to return.

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Thankful

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On November 22, 2020

In Gadgets, Holidays, inspiration

One of the things I’m most thankful for in this world is my electric teapot. Sorry if you were expecting me to say my family, my health, food on the table. Those are the big things, and I’m exceedingly grateful for all of them. But sometimes it’s the little things that have the most impact. Like when a child hands you a bouquet of scraggly wildflowers to show they love you – isn’t that more wonderful than a huge box of long-stem roses? Sure, the child is just trying to bribe you, but still, you see my point.

When my mother-in-law gave me the electric teapot for Christmas a couple of years ago, I rolled my eyes. Another gadget. She’s the queen of gadgets. If it’s been on TV, or a friend has told her about it, she’ll buy one for herself and one each for her daughter and daughters-in-law. At my house a few of these get used, some collect dust, others find themselves snuggled in with clothes and old toys headed for Goodwill. I pictured this gadget in that last group.

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Talents and Fears

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On November 15, 2020

In Fears, inspiration, Writing

We humans are a stew of talents, motivations, and fears. In the right proportions, our stew can end up being a huge success that feeds many others, or it can be something a dog wouldn’t touch. 

Take, for example, the metaphor I just tried to make. Shakespeare’s pen would have made it a culinary masterpiece. My keyboard has produced a bowl of gruel.

Here’s a mo’ better metaphor. A guy had three servants. He gave the first five talents, the second two talents, and the third, one talent. This metaphor is a tad confusing because a talent is an ancient measure for a weight in gold – approximately one gazillion micrograms to the third power or something like that.

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Election 2020

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On November 8, 2020

In Exercise, Fat, Fears, Food, Humor, News, Politics

Election 2020 has put an extra five pounds on me. On Tuesday, as I watched the returns coming in, my appetite for salty, crunchy foods hit new highs. We made tacos for dinner, and I ate extra beans and onions and chips and cheese and guacamole, and vigorously shook out way too many drops of Tabasco sauce on everything. I was wound up.  

Record-breaking quantities of food passed through my mouth at dinnertime. With every new red or blue state on the map, I headed for the kitchen. I devoured 80 percent of the crunchy food group before moving on to chocolate. 

It was fear eating. Like when I’m at the cinema watching a scary movie in wide-eyed horror, barely breathing, putting fistful after fistful of faux-butter popcorn in my mouth with one hand, clutching the armrest with the other, not even aware I’m eating until my greasy fingers scratch the bottom of the bucket.

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Halloween 2020

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On November 1, 2020

In Holidays, Home Life, Kids, Relationships

We don’t get many trick or treaters on our street. Parents drive their kids to clustered neighborhoods of decorated houses where all the lights are on so they get maximum loads of candy with minimum time and effort, like I did with my kids. On our street the houses are darker than a bat in a cave. They are obviously not in the free-candy business on October 31st. Except us. One of us is usually home, or at least we leave a full candy bowl on the porch.

stacked pumpkins with big spider on top

A few days before Halloween I put a few decorations around the house, a witch sitting on a pumpkin with a plug-in little Christmas light in it, an round, orange wicker basket full of dried mini-corn cobs – those kinds of things. For the window by the front door I have six carved pumpkins stacked on each other – about 2 feet high – that my mother-in-law gave me years ago. They sit on the shelf looking out the window. This year I balanced a giant spider on the top pumpkin’s head to look creepy.

My daughter's ghost - round eyes and smile

I also hang ghosties outside. My kids made a dozen or so of them years ago out of baseball-shaped Styrofoam covered with white cheesecloth and a pipe-cleaner that we twisted under the ball to look like ghosts. By fanning out the “arms” of the pipe cleaner under the fabric, they become fuller and look more lifelike. Each one is about 8 to 12 inches long. My daughter drew happy faces on hers – my son’s look grumpy.

My son's ghost - has a frown and some stitches

For the final decoration I carve a pumpkin – three triangles (two for the eyes, one for the nose) and a jagged mouth. This year I found a pumpkin at the last minute. He was the right size but had a big gash. I got him for a discount – $1.67 – and figured I’d just carve the good side. But when I started carving, the gash was so mushy I cut it out and gutted him from that direction, rather than the top. A semi-rotten pumpkin is the way to go. The whole thing turned out to be soft and pithy. It was very easy to carve. Plus, it’s extra creepy-looking with the whole back of his head gone, and you can see through it so it gave off more light. I put it on top of my car facing the street, and could also see the whole pumpkin’s face (from the inside) while looking out the kitchen window. 

You can see the car outline in his right eye because he has no back on his head.

Since we were home because of Covid, we decided to watch “The Shining” as our Halloween entertainment. Neither of us had ever seen it. Boy, that Jack Nicholson can sure look spooky when he moves his eyes sideways, especially with the eery music that sometimes sounds like my heart pounding (or maybe it was). We’d pause the movie so one of us could grab a Milky Way while the other got a little bag of peanut M&M’s that had either 4 or, if I was lucky, 5 pieces in there. Hardly worth the effort to tear open the package.

I got worried around 8pm – not because Jack was hacking through the locked bathroom door with an axe, his lunatic – no possessed – eyes wild. I worried that Covid would keep my one family of trick or treaters from showing up. I’d gone to the kitchen for more food (candy) when I heard the doorbell. By then my nerves were as tight as new banjo strings, and I was afraid that, instead of a sweet family, there’d be an axe-wielding maniac with crazy Jack Nicholson eyes.

Giggles from outside gave me the courage to open the door. “Trick or Treat!” they called. “So glad you came! Tell me what you are.

The boy, who’s maybe middle-school age, had on a black outfit and carried a black bow with arrows on his back. “I’m the Black Bowman,” he said.

“Haven’t heard of him.”

“It’s a name I made up.”

The girl, who’s close to high school, was also in black with a wad of aluminum foil on her right hand. “Are you familiar with Marvel characters?” she said.

“Yes.” I know about 479 Marvel characters and have seen about that many Marvel movies. Tuesdays used to be $5 movie nights (before Covid) and my friends and I saw a lot of Marvel movies.

“I’m Bucky Barnes.”

“I don’t know Bucky Barnes.”

“He’s a fried of Captain America.”

“Oh, okay, cool,” I said. “I know him.” I turned to the adult behind her. “And you are?”

“I’m a hobbit.”

“That’s what you were last year.”

“Yes, you’re right, I was.”

“Good to get your money’s worth out of these costumes. What about you?” I said to the woman beside him, but can’t remember what she said – I think it was a half costume, like when you dress normal and wear a witch’s hat. “How about you?” I said to the woman behind her – making Halloween small talk, I guess. As a kid, I used to hate it when people delayed me with a lot of questions – I wanted to get to the next house for more candy, but figured this was their last stop.

“I’m just me,” she said. “No costume.”

“It’s hard to tell if someone is wearing a costume when we all have masks on,” I laughed. They chuckled at my sparkling humor. “I’m just really glad you came. You made my night.”

“We love coming here,” the girl said. “We love all the ghosts. We call you the ‘Ghost Lady.’

“The Ghost Lady,” I said. “Hmmm, I like it. I have a Halloween nickname.”

“I love your stacked pumpkins,” the boy said.

I held out the bowl of candy. The kids grabbed handfuls. “Take more,” I said. “Anything you don’t take I’ll eat.” I stretched my arm toward the adults. “Here, you guys, take some. Take it all.” Each of them grabbed a small fistful. I offered it to the kids again. They took most, but not all, of the candy. “Trust me, you’ll want a few pieces tomorrow,” the man said. Of course he was right.

They left, and it occurred to me that, in all the chaos of life, we’ve had this five-minute encounter that I look forward to every year. I know where there live (not on our street), but I don’t know anything else about them. They always come later, probably after they’ve hit the good, candy-rich neighborhoods. We’ve never exchanged names. Every year I’ve had taken my kids out, and in later years walked with my friend and her youngest daughter, or occasionally we’ve gone to a party, but I always try to be home by 8 in case my one family comes. I leave the candy bowl out in case they get here before we do.

When they left I came back inside beaming, an active participant in the Halloween tradition that I have loved ever since I can remember. “Well, they came,” my husband said. “Yeah, they came,” I said. I cozied up under my throw, pressed the “Play” button and saw Shelley Duvall slice Jack Nicholson’s hand when he reached through the hole he’d hacked in the bathroom door to get to the doorknob. The blood. The fear. The horror. Didn’t bother me a bit. I was floating like a, well, like a ghost. The Happy Ghost Lady. That’s me.

Vacation

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On October 18, 2020

In Vacations


I’m on vacation. These are some excerpts from emails I’m sending to friends about the trip.

Already, a few minutes after we left at 7:30 am, we got in an argument. About politics. By the time we got to the Gorge, however, we’d forgotten about it – literally, the plus side of being old. The low fog made the Gorge look mystical, prehistoric – a setting for a Swamp Creature movie – I could picture the Loche Ness monster rising out of the deep. 

We pulled over at almost every historical marker on the way to Lewiston Idaho, including this one of the Valley of the Jolly Ho Ho Ho Green Giant in Dayton, WA. If you zoom in you can see the giant is also up on the side of the hill, too.

Jolly Green Giant stature, Dayton, Washington

A couple miles out of Dayton is a historical sight where Lewis and Clark camped on the Touchet River .-  the lifelike structures depict the horses, 30+ men in the Discovery Party, and three dogs – the artist wasn’t sure how many dogs there were, but when they left camp they only had one, they ate the others. Dog gone them!

Lewis and Clark camp near Dayton, Washington

One of the roadside kiosks told of the Nez Perce Indian’s skill at breeding horses – they used natural selection to develop the American Appaloosa horse, probably originally called the Palouse horse after the Palouse River. I like those Nez Perce. Chief Joseph was the one who said, “I will fight no more forever.” 

On I-90 in Montana we pulled into a rest area for another potty break. I opened the back of the Tahoe to get a snack – road trips (like everything else) make me hungry. We drove up the ramp and I heard this noise that sounded exactly like a cooler sliding out the back of an SUV, followed by another cooler and a suitcase. “The back’s open,” I screeched. Sure enough, in the rear-view mirror, two coolers, a suitcase, and odds and ends were scattered on the ramp like a tornado had dropped them there. Scott always closes the back hatch but – ooops – not this time. Cars drove around the debris, their occupants shook their heads at us. Dumb Oregonians. We backed up and gathered everything – it was good for a laugh. 

Scattered luggage on freeway ramp

Then I looked for a place to hike on the Map of my iPhone – never tried that before. The map took us down a dirt road that dead-ended on some rancher’s property. It was a little creepy out in the middle of nowhere. Barking dogs lunged out from all directions, viscous and snapping. The rancher appeared and said there wasn’t a hiking trail there, but directed us to Ringing Rocks. We drove 5 miles up a rutted, pot-holed, narrow dirt road (thank goodness for 4-wheel drive) to the parking area, then hiked the rest of the way. They have hammers hanging there to beat on the rocks – I think the rocks have iron in them because they’re red, and some sounded just like a blacksmith beating on a horseshoe. I made a one-minute video of Scott so you can hear them – see below.

https://youtu.be/9GMwV5mdqNg.

We hiked around up there a little – lots of cool boulders (see the last picture) and saw elk and deer scat (turds) – so exciting – but no actual animals. 

Got to Bozeman late. They’re predicting snow tomorrow, high of 41. Glad I packed all those sweaters!

Driving in the snow out of Bozeman, Montana

Talk about cold! We headed out of Bozeman at 8am with those little ice crystals falling out of the sky, and by the time we got up to Bozeman Pass it was 28 degrees and a blizzard. I white-knuckled it while Scott tried to keep up with some maniac Washington driver whose license plate said PNW BOY (Pacific NW I guess). We stalked him for several miles going way too fast especially for the conditions – we were going about 65 – Montana’s speed limit on the freeway is 80, but nobody goes that slow. Even in the snow they don’t slow down much. I started listening to a book on tape to distract me from worrying about shimmying off the road and going over a cliff. Then a lunatic in a semi-truck pulled up beside us and splashed a fire hose blast of slush on the windshield – it rocked the car. I liked to died. Scott squirted water on the windshield to get the slush off, which immediately froze – he couldn’t see a thing. Luckily there was an exit ramp rich there. When we stopped at the bottom of that ramp was the first time I breathed all morning. Once we took the exit for Cody it was a little better. Not much else happened today except that we went through Belfry, Montana and turned down a side street that led to their school. The town is Belfry, and the school’s marquis read, “Home of the bats.” Seriously. I took a picture – there’s a big  bat over the sign and bats on either side of the entry door.

"Home of the Bats" school in Belfry, WA

Driving out we saw a flock of wild turkeys passing through someone’s front yard. This was the excitement of the day. We checked into our room in Cody, then walked along the Shoshone River for about 2 1/2 miles – snow blowing on us, colder than a well-digger’s ass in the Klondike. I went to St. Anthony’s Catholic Church at 5. The priest had a sense of humor. He said, “It takes a village to raise children, and a vineyard to home school them.” Amen to that! It is 25 degrees outside. We about froze during the five minute drive back from dinner.  Debating tromping down the hall in my bathing suit to do a few laps. Nah. I’m hittin’ the hay and snuggling under every blanket I can find.

Cory

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On October 11, 2020

In Friends, Humor, People

On Thursday I had lunch with Cory, a 43-year-old Black man I visit as part of a volunteer thing through an organization that builds community with low-income people. I enjoy our visits because he makes me laugh. We meet on the phone now, because of Covid, but every so often I go downtown and take him lunch in the park. This is the first time we’ve gone to a restaurant.

We met at Chipotle. As we waited our turn, I explained that he’d go down the line and tell them what he wanted. While I paid, I asked for some hot sauce – mild for me and regular Tabasco for him. Cory’s told me many times, “I like a lot of hot sauce on my food.” The server handed us two little clear plastic cups filled with about an eighth of an inch of sauce. Poor Cory, what he calls “hot sauce” apparently isn’t Tabasco.

Even though it was chilly, we sat outside. He took a bite of his steak bowl and said, “This is good.” He told me about his pending lawsuit against the guy who ran into him and broke his femur. “The lawyer said the son-bitch’s insurance will pay for me to have a maid if I want one.”

“You only have a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture except a bed,” I said. “Why do you need a maid?”

“Hell, if the son-bitch’s payin’ for it, damn right I’m havin’ a maid. A mother-f-ing butler too. I needs me a butler.”

He took a couple more bites, then remembered the little cup of hot sauce and picked it up, still talking. I watched him pour the whole thing on his food. When I shake Tabasco from the bottle, I count the drops – about 7 is my limit – each drop carefully spread out so I have the flavor without getting excessive heat in one bite. Cory poured that whole little cup on his bowl, and even thumped the cup with his finger to get the last few drops. I figured there were about 250 drops coating his food.

I stopped eating and watched him take a bite. He put the fork into his mouth, pulled it out, did a little shake of his head and said, “Man, that’s some hot sauce.” I started laughing. Anybody who’s ever used Tabasco knows that feeling, the heat, the burning that won’t stop, and he had just dumped enough on his food to belch fire.

 “I thought you liked hot sauce.”  

“I do, I do.” He paused as if trying to convince himself. “I do.” He looked at the bowl like it was a rattlesnake or something worse, but I could tell he wanted another bite because he had his fork raised, ready for action. Finally he got up his nerve. He aimed the fork, then slowly, cautiously, put the bite in his mouth and deposited the food. He looked straight ahead, his eyes bugged out. “That’s some hot sauce,” he said. He shook his head a little and let out a “Shwooo,” sound. He grabbed his water glass and took a sip. “Wooo,” he said.

I started laughing and couldn’t stop. Not only was it funny the way he said it, but I understood the dilemma he was in – between a culinary rock and a hard place. He wanted to eat, but he was scared to because his mouth was on fire. He also probably didn’t want to seem like a wimp. He’s six feet tall, meaty, with a bushy grey beard and shaved-bald head. A sweet guy in a hardened shell. The times we’ve eaten together in the park, he’ll only eat a couple of bites then say, “I’m going to take the rest home. I wanna put some hot sauce on it.” He had an image to uphold.

So I just watched. He looked at the bowl as if it was now the enemy. He stirred it. Stared at it. Stirred it again. Pushed the food from one side to the other. Then he took another bite. As he pulled the empty fork away he paused midair. “That’s some hot sauce,” he said, and shook his head. I laughed again, actually I guess I hadn’t quit laughing from his previous bite. 

He put the fork down and picked the empty sauce cup up and looked at it, like it had betrayed him. He put it down and said, “I called Merry Maid and told them I wanted a maid. I can’t just get somebody off the street. They might rob me. You can’t trust people. Not around here. They said they’d call my lawyer and get it all set up.” 

I continued to eat and just let him talk. A couple of times he looked down at his food, like he was getting up his nerve. Finally he loaded the fork half-full and hesitated a split second before putting the bite in his mouth. He chewed a couple of times, shook his head and said, “That’s some hot sauce.” I started laughing again.

I was enjoying this lunch. A lot. It was cold sitting out there under the October overcast sky with wind trying to steal our napkins, and I ate quickly so I could be done and climb back into my warm car, plus all the laughing was wearing me out. I often tell Cory how funny he is, though I’m not sure if he means to be. It’s a combination of all the cussing plus the way he tells the stories. His eyes twinkle and he grins when he sees me laughing, so I know he does some of it on purpose, but not this time. He picked up the aluminum to-go lid and molded it over his bowl and put it in the bag.

“Too hot for you?” I ask.

“No girl, you know I can’t eat much at one time. I’m gonna take this home and munch on it later.”

“Yeah, right,” I said to myself. He asked me to drop him off at his dentist’s office a few blocks away. He made fun of the way I drive, and I thanked him for all the laughs. On the way home, every time I hear him in my mind saying, “That’s some hot sauce,” I start laughing, and it’s a hearty, deep, lasting laugh.

They say it’s better to give than to receive. For the small price of a Chipotle lunch, I enjoyed a lot of entertainment. I also got a blessing that filled my heart, and my soul. Thank you, Cory!

Dreams

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On October 4, 2020

In Home Life, Humor, inspiration

What do you want to be when you grow up? We ask children this a lot. One time my daughter answered someone with about twelve things, all in a row. “I want to be an artist, a teacher, a doctor, (eight more that I can’t remember but I think astronaut might have been in there) and a waitress.” Lofty goals for a five year old!

I used to reply with only one response: a singer. I loved to sing, but I also had the ability to make up songs on the fly because of all the practice I got with my older brother. We were very competitive, and when he wasn’t beating me in foot races, high-jumping, basketball shots, ping pong, or, as big brothers often do, just plain beating me, we’d have rhyming contests. They went like this:

Me: You’re fat.

Him: You’re a rat.

Me: At least I’m not a splat.

Him: Well you’re a brat.

Me: I can’t agree with that.

Him: You’re as ornery as shit under a couch from a cat.

Me: You stink like liquid toe jam in a vat.

Him: Not bad – I’d call that tit for tat.

As you can see, we didn’t make Shakespeare jealous. The object of the contest was to not be the one who couldn’t come up with a sensible rhyme (not just jibberish) right away. If you paused too long to think of something, you lost that round. This could start at any time – walking to Dairy Queen, sledding in winter, riding bikes. With all that practice, I gained the ability to knock out songs that were, admittedly, awful. But they rhymed. I’d sing them to a slow, syrupy melody to give me time to compose them while I sang – picture a soulful love song sung by Barbara Streisand or Adele. They went something like this:

My dog has fleas,

He’s weak in the knees,

So I feed him peas,

Because he loves…….me.

My dog is kind

He’s here all the time,

Licking his behind,

But I don’t mind

Because he loves……me

My friend Carole and I used to get in verbal skirmishes a lot, probably from being together all day long in the summer heat. Most were those “are too!” “am not!” fights like: “You’re cheating.” “Am not!” “Are too!”  “Am not!!!!” 

With Carole, it escalated to one of us getting so mad we’d shove the other one. We were about eight years old, bored, in the hot, muggy, Tennessee haze, plus both our birthdays were in December, on either side of Christmas, so people were always giving us just one “combined birthday and Christmas present,” which caused a smoldering current of aggravation to pulse through our veins year round, and is probably what made us so cranky.

We were like a pressure cooker about to blow, and one of us took off running, knowing the other was about to strike. We both had long, skinny legs and she was exactly as fast at running as I was. We’d chase each other all through my backyard, and finally the person in front would falter – out of breath, legs tired – and the one chasing would catch up and swat her in the middle of the back, then pivot 180 degrees and start running. It was a little like two-person tag, except on the anger chart we had reached 11 on a scale of 1 to 10, so instead of tagging, we’d swat. Seriously, we chased each other like this until we were exhausted, red-faced, sweaty, and laughing.

One time my brother came out with two pairs of boxing gloves and said, “All this running around is stupid. Put these gloves on and just duke it out.” We tried but it wasn’t the same just standing there looking at each other, she in her long brown braids and me in my sun-streaked pigtails. After all, she was one of my best friends! I don’t think either of us even threw a punch.

In peaceful times we’d have singing contests. She sat on the grass and I stood up in front of her and sang as I made up a song – a really excellent one like the one above. Then she’d stand up when it was her turn and fumble around. “No, you have to make it rhyme. A song has to rhyme.” “Does not!” “Does too!” “Does not!!!!” She’d start chasing me and I knew if I ran out in the open area of the backyard, I might step in a gopher hole or trip on a croquet wicket or get clothes-lined by the cIothesline, and she’d catch up and deliver a soft whack between my shoulder blades, so I kept circling the two trees in the middle of the yard that had a thick bed of iris’s between them. Round and round we went until I got dizzy and darted into the open area, slowed down from exhaustion, and got swatted.

I never performed my little concerts for anyone but Carole, and she told me I was too good at singing and it wasn’t any fun. She probably meant rhyming, not vocal ability, but I took it as a huge compliment and pictured myself as a star.

Now I’m old (Am too!), and that dream has been in the fog of my memory all my life. In case you haven’t noticed, I not a star yet, haven’t ever tried to be one (what a yellow-bellied coward I am, plus I’ve rarely had any encouragement from any sane person that I should pursue singing, or even do it in public), and rarely ever sing around others except in the pews at church or when a group is bellowing happy birthday.

My dream has been with me all these years, and even though I’m old, I’m still working at it. If you pass my house early on summer mornings, when the windows are open, you’ll hear me practicing, “Corina Corina,” or “At Last,” or “Speeding Cars,” or even “Like a Rolling Stone,” although Dylan stuck a lot of words in there and it’s hard to remember them all.

Everyone has dreams. Kids don’t have the monopoly on them.

What do you want to be when you grow up? It’s not too late, you know.

Is not.

Is not!!!!

Gifts

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On September 27, 2020

In Gifts, Home Life, Miracles, Religion

Gifts is misleading – a gift is something someone gives you, not because you deserve it (although I do, especially on my birthday because I, like many children born in December, got short-changed back in the day and would only get one box with the feeble, “Here’s your birthday and Christmas present,” mantra that, to a child, did nothing but break my heart. I didn’t know the pecuniary value of the gift, all I knew was that there was only one box to open, and that box didn’t even have balloons and streamers on it, but reeked of Santa’s and pine trees and red and green do-dads, so where’s the birthday present? – the cheapskates), but because of the person’s generosity.

This previous run-on sentence is an homage to William Faulkner, whose book, The Reivers, I’m reading now. I read it in one of my literature classes decades ago but probably only skimmed it enough to write a satisfactory analysis. Woo-wee, Faulkner is hard to follow. He writes like someone rambling along, one thought jumping in on another, going back and forth in time the way we say, “No, wait, that happened first, not after, he got out of the car. Now I remember. He was driving along and then that’s when he said…”

That’s how my brain works, a song drifts in and I sing a couple of lines in my head and then a thought bursts in (kind of like my husband does, banging open the bathroom door when I’m relaxing in the tub, just for a laugh), “Oh shoot, I forgot to put those green beans in the refrigerator. Crap! I’ll have to go back. They’ll go bad. They’re in vinegar, won’t they be okay? I don’t want to turn around. You’re an idiot. You’re almost to the mall. Just do your exchanges real quick and go back. I hate this. I wanted to go to Fred Meyers. I wonder if it would hurt to leave them another hour? With all that vinegar? They’ll be fine.” And then I sing out loud, really belt out the last stanza of the soulful song “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, putting all my heart into it. “Oh shoot. You just missed your turn. What an idiot.”

The book is delightful, but I don’t know if modern readers could get past the couple of chapters to get hooked, even if they knew it won the Pulitzer Prize and got made into a movie starring Steve McQueen.

The gifts I’m talking about are the ones I get from God. Some people would call them miracles, but I know miracles. These are on a much smaller scale – like stocking stuffers or party favors, but no less appreciated.

The gifts I get most often have to do with me running late for everything. I can’t leave the house at the scheduled minute and hour because I think I have time to put the water glass in the dishwasher, and hang up the dish towel, put the magazine on the pile around the corner. I’ve got time – I know, to the nanosecond, how long it takes me to get somewhere – IF I don’t get stopped by too many red lights. When I make it through a few in a row I smile and say to myself, “It’s a gift.”

I get premonitions – not like someone who sees the future, but I get a feeling that I should do something. Like pick up around the house when I’m not expecting someone to come over. The place is usually technically clean, but I leave things lying around, drawers open, coats hung on the backs of chairs, an open umbrella drying in the great room, dirty clothes in the basket in the middle of the floor headed for the laundry room or folded on their way back to the bedroom, pine needles and leaves on the carpet, cups and plates in the kitchen, recipe book, colander, measuring spoons, pepper grinder and fresh dilly green beans in jars that should have been put in the refrigerator. Saturdays I do toilets, vacuum, sweep, dust. The place is nice for the weekend. Weekdays it’s a hoarders paradise.

Sometimes I take a notion to pick up around the house even when I’m not expecting anyone, who knows why, I just do it. And then there’s a knock at the door and it’s someone like my mother-in-law. “Come in, so glad you dropped by.” As I lead them into the tidy kitchen, “can I get you a cup of tea?” I smile and think, “It’s a gift.”

I’ll make plans to do something when I’m too busy or it’s not my favorite activity, and then it gets cancelled. “It’s fine,” I say, “it gives me a chance to get this mess picked up. You should see my house.” I hang up, smile, and think, “Another gift.”

No, it’s not coincidence, because these aren’t things I’m praying for, they’re little surprises that come from subconscious hope. I don’t want to pester God with trivial things like red lights (although I do sometimes when I’m desperate). I know where my gifts come from, and I know who to thank.

Even picking up that dog-eared, water-stained, frayed, crackling paperback from Survey of American Literature 403 was a gift. Thanks Mr. Faulkner, for giving me some smiles and forcing my brain to focus pretty darned hard to figure out what the heck you’re talking about. You really did understand the human heart. Maybe someday I will too. “It’s a gift.”

And yes, I’m smiling.

Quotes I’ll remember

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On September 20, 2020

In Friends, Humor

It’s funny what sticks with you – the famous quotes of days gone by. When I first came to Oregon my brother took me to a Portland Beavers baseball game. They were a minor league team, part of the Pacific Coast League. We’re sitting in the bleachers at Multnomah Stadium, eating hot dogs and popcorn, watching the game, when a big man with a bushy black beard stood up behind us and bellowed, as loud as he could, “Nobody…..Licks….Our….Beavers!”

For a few moments the earth stood still. The wind ceased to blow, there was no crack of the baseball bat, no “batter, batter, batter” chatter on the field, no crunch of the wad of popcorn I’d just put in my mouth. Silence. Shock. Did he really yell that? Did he know what he was saying? Did he understand the double meaning?

Then the earth started rotating again. Laughter rolled over the crowd like ocean waves. We elbowed each other, “Did you hear that?” “Did he really say?” All through the game we could hear chortles of laughter from pockets of spectators. Here. Over there. Through the remaining 4 or 5 innings. Spontaneous laughter. It’s something I’ll never forget – a quote I’ve shared with just about everyone I know.

I’ll always remember the time my friend Clark and I picked up our friend Mary one Friday night in 11th grade. Pretty soon we found out that she was drunk. “Pull over,” she said, “quick.” We did, and Clark and I hoisted her out of the back seat and stood on either side of her, supporting her as she threw up. Her shoe came off and got filled with barf. Clark and I kept going, “B-lah, b-lah,” about to throw up ourselves. “What the heck have you been drinking?” I asked as we returned her to the car and tucked her into the back seat. She looked at me with big round innocent eyes and slurred, “I only had a little bit of Daddy’s cough medicine.” Yeah right. Turns out she’d gotten in a fight with her parents and snuck into her dad’s liquor cabinet to drown her sorrows. Every time I drink too much I say, “I only had a little cough medicine.” People don’t believe me either. 

Another quote I remember came from a boyfriend I had when I was 19. We’d  encountered some spooky characters in the remote hills of Virginia (think of the movie Deliverance). A few of them had some teeth, but nobody had a full set. We were able to talk our way out of trouble, but it was scary and I was relieved when we got back safely to the car. I said, “Hey Steve, what would you have done if they’d had designs on me way out here in the middle of nowhere?” He laughed and said, “I would have told them, ‘Have fun with her boys, I did.’” It took me a lot of laughing before I could start pretending to be mad at him.

He had a friend named Adrienne who was quite smart. One day Adrienne said, “Can I porif some of those potato chips?” “Can you what?” I said. “Porif,” he said. “It’s short for porifera, which is a sponge.” It became the verb that replaced the words borrow, bum, hit up, purloin, mooch, glom, and sponge. We never used those words again when the group was together. It was always, “Quit trying to porif my candy. Get your own.”

Growing up, there was a guy in our neighborhood named David Roach, a tall, skinny kid with a quick sense of humor who hung out with a bunch of us on my street – he lived a few blocks away but in those days all of us were free-range kids and would walk to wherever there was a softball game or four-square in the street or croquet or ping pong in somebody’s backyard. I was probably in 6thgrade. He was a couple of years older. One summer day a bunch of us we were standing around in the street, riding bikes, trying to decide what to do next. Someone saw a dog walking toward us and said, “Here comes a shit-eating dog.” David got a scared look on his face and took off running. We laughed and laughed, repeating, “Hey David, look out, here comes a…” To this day I can’t remember names or dates or what I went in the bedroom to get, but I will always remember David Roach running away from that shit-eating dog.

My friend Clark, whose first name is Pryor, named after his dad as many of us were in the South – first name for a family member but everybody called us by our middle name – Clark got a nickname somehow, I don’t know who gave it to him or why, but whenever my cellphone buzzes and I see it’s him on the caller ID, I answer like this: “Pryor T Coon Type Dog Liar Makes His Rules Up As He Goes Along.” To me, that’s his name. That’s what we called him when we were kids. In the middle of a conversation, when I want to make a point for emphasis, I don’t say the whole name, I just say, “Now look, Pryor T, you need to take better care of yourself.” I haven’t called him Clark in decades.

On a serious note, the world has lost a wonderful human being with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We’ve respected her strength and her bravery as she stood up for America’s constitution, equal rights and justice for all people. I wanted to close with one of her memorable quotes. There are many wise and profound ones, such as: Every now and then it helps to be a little deaf….That advice has stood me in good stead. Not simply in dealing with my marriage, but in dealing with my colleagues.”

The one I think that fits best here, however, is the one she said after someone mentioned that she’d dozed off during the State of the Union address: “I wasn’t 100 percent sober.” This is the one I’ll remember, and surely use, even after dementia has warped and gnawed my brain until it resembles porifera. In the nursing home I will shout out, “Nobody licks our Beavers!” followed by, “I wasn’t 100 percent sober.” 

Thanks for everything, dear Notorious R.G.B. May you rest peacefully with the other angels.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg dozing during the State of the Union

Wardrobe mishaps

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On September 13, 2020

In Fashion, Friends

We’ve all had wardrobe malfunctions. A couple of days ago I was visiting my 90+ year old friend when her daughter walked in the room, saw I had on one of my house dresses, and said, “Are you wearing underwear today?”

“Some,” I said.

I’d told them that during the summer I wear cotton dresses around the house to keep cool and comfortable. To enhance the experience, I sometimes go without one or both of the typical undergarments worn by women. I don’t usually wear the dresses in public, but will fetch the mail, do yard work, or visit female friends, so I like my house dresses to be all cotton, have pockets (for my cell phone), and either have a busy design, thick fabric (like denim), or chest pockets because I don’t want my neighbors to see that I’m not wearing one (or both) pieces of underwear.

“On Tuesday, that really hot, windy day,” I said, “I wore one of my dresses over to my garden to water and was praying that the wind didn’t whip up the skirt. It would have given people nightmares. You can’t un-see something like that.”

My friend’s daughter, who’s my age, leaned against the kitchen counter and said, “Did I ever tell you about my first date with my husband?  I had on one of those dresses with the stretchy stitching on the top.” 

“Strapless?” I asked, picturing the dress.

“Yes, strapless.”

(This type of dress probably has a name but I’m too lazy to look it up. Oh, all right, hold on a second. I’ll be right back..Okay, Google calls them a tube top stretchy dress. Back to the story.)

“I had this dress on, with tall high heels. I was gorgeous. We were going out for a fancy dinner at that restaurant up on the hill in Sellwood – it looked like a castle.”

“Was it in Sellwood or Milwaukie?” I said.

“Yeah, could have been Milwaukie – near Sellwood.”

“I remember that place, I don’t think it’s there anymore.”

“I don’t know. Anyway, the maitre d’ seated me, but off-center for the view. I just wanted to scoot over a little, so I raised up in my chair. The hem of the dress got caught in the heel of those high heel shoes.” She paused for a beat, so we could picture it.

“When I raised up to scoot over, the dress stayed put. It came down and both my boobs popped out the top.”

“Were you wearing a bra?”

“Of course not.”

We all laughed. “No wonder your husband fell in love with you,” I said.

It reminded me of swimming at a motel pool with about eight or ten friends the summer before 9thgrade. I think one of the boys knew the owner and that’s why we got to swim  there. Typical of those motel parking lot pools, it had a shallow side and a deep end with a small diving board. For some reason it also had a foot wide ledge to stand on at the deep end, maybe so little kids could go down there and still hang onto the side and stand up. 

We were playing tag. My best friend, Christine, was it. All us boys and girls were focused on her to see who she’d come after next. She’d chased us for a while, swimming underwater, sneaky, trying to tap somebody’s leg. I think she was probably ready for a rest. She sprang up from the deep end, pushing off from the bottom fast so her long red hair back would be back off her face when she surfaced. She swam to the ledge, stood up and faced us. The water, as she’d swooshed through it, had pulled down one side of her bikini top. Her left boob, big for her age – big for any age – hung completely out.

As soon as we saw it, after a couple seconds of shock, all us girls shouted at once: “Duck down! Your swimsuit! Go under! Get down!” We didn’t want to say whatever word we were using at the time – I think the word boob came later – maybe we were using breast then, but we didn’t want to say it out loud. Up until then we’d only swam with our girlfriends. We’d just started hanging out with these boys, probably because one of us discovered they had access to the pool. Those were prudish times.

Christine thought we were hollering because she was it. She thought we were taunting her. She didn’t realize we were hysteric. She just stood there – that boob big and white, framed with swimsuit lines and her tan, freckled skin. The more we shouted the longer she stood there like some half-naked Grecian statue with a puzzled, cranky look on her face – an eternity in the lives of fourteen-year-old girls.

The boys, of course, never said a word.

Finally the closest girl swam to her and pushed her under. “You’re it!” Christine said she sprang back up. There was that boob again. Law have mercy! The girl pointed, Christine looked down, threw her arms over her chest and ducked under water. She stayed down there until her breath ran out,  embarrassed to death. The incident earned her the nickname, “Lefty” with the boys. By the end of summer we’d abandoned them and gone back to the public pool, they got so annoying. 

Ahh, well, there’s nothing like wardrobe mishaps to get your mind off of everyday worries. Today in Portland the fires are raging 30 miles away in the national forests south of Estacada. The air is smoky thick, the sky yellow-grey. I can barely see the fuzzy outlines of houses across the street. Even though our windows and doors have been closed for three days, the smoke smell has seeped in. The air quality at 8:00 this morning is the highest it’s been – 516 – Hazardous. It’s listed as Beyond Index on the Air Now website, which only goes up to 400. www.airnow.gov

Portland Oregon Air Index - Sept. 13, 2020 - Hazardous

Remembering Christine and picturing that stretchy tube top dress have brought me a chuckle this morning – a good thing in worrisome times.

The search for the perfect bra

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On September 6, 2020

In Fashion, Humor, Shopping

How come I can go into a department store where there are more than a million bras and not one of them fits me?

My apologies to the men reading this, I know you don’t like us to talk about women’s underwear. Maybe just compare it to something that has to fit a particular part of a man and, like a bra, also has a cup. Maybe it’s hard for you to find the right size. Male athletes, especially baseball players, are constantly fiddling with it – seriously, they are spitting and nudging their crotches the whole game. Perhaps some of you even wear bro-bras. I remember a Seinfeld episode about that – a bra for the well-endowed man. Kramer and Mr. Costanza were trying to get rich with their Manssiere.

Kramer with the Manssiere

Back to women and this huge stumbling block to our happiness. All we want is a good, everyday bra that cradles the girls in comfort while preventing jiggles, sags, headlights, and squashouts – that flab that squashes out on our backs from under the bra lines. It’s as unsightly as panty lines.

You men say, “Just go braless.” You’d love that look on the young ones, no doubt, but gravity tugs at us older women. There’s a greeting card with an old man at a bus stop who says to an old woman, “Show me your tits,” and she pulls up the bottom of her dress. You wouldn’t be so excited to see us braless.

No, we need bust trusses, especially the well-endowed, full-figured ladies of a certain age. That’s not me, by the way. My problem is not finding anything small enough. Even the teenage bras don’t fit. I just received two of them from Kohl’s online delivery. The cup size was okay, but I’m too big around. It’s like trying to fix a monster truck flat using a bicycle tire. The bras felt like straight jackets, only not as comfortable.

My friend got a new sports bra and we played golf a couple of weeks ago. Every time she swung the club the bra rode up under her armpits. After each of her 80+ swings she had to grab hold of the bottom and tug that bra with all her might to get it back in position. She was chapped from all the friction.

I bought a workout bra one time. Just getting it on was the workout – I didn’t even need to go to the gym. I had to wiggle into it over my head. It was like a thick rubber band with only so much give – once it reached the limit of its stretch that was it. I had to pull down an inch on the left and then an inch on the right until it was in place. It made me look like a penny from one of those penny squishing machines – the ones you put a dollar in so you can get a three-inch long skinny penny that says “Seaside” on it. Flat as a board is too flattering for what that bra did to me.

Another frustration to add to our woes – when a company stops making the style of bra we’ve been wearing for years, which the company always does, it’s like losing a close friend. Most older women, especially the married ones, don’t go in for all those new fancy girly bras taking up space in the store. We buy ones that work and only replace them when the straps start falling down. Once that strap elastic gives out, the bra is worthless. If you see women constantly pulling up their straps, it’s because their bra has been discontinued and they’re still hanging on to it in denial.

My mother in law is 87. She can’t get her bra anymore. She tracked down the manufacturer and talked to several levels of higher ups before they convinced her that her bra is no more. She told us this sad news with trembling lips and a tear in her eye. Deb, her daughter and Laura, her friend, and I sat at the dining room table and comforted her, then started sketching out ideas to keep her straps up in such a way that still allowed her to get into the bra. After several hours we had a diagram and a pattern. I sewed a prototype, attached it to the bra, and it worked! She’ll have another few weeks with the bra until the hooks wear out. Then they’ll be fresh tears.

They’ve also discontinued my bra – the Maidenform T-shirt bra with a racerback so the straps wouldn’t show in my sleeveless golf shirts. They’ve replaced the whole back with lace. What the? I don’t want lace. It’s flimsy and scratchy. Nope. No lace on my back. Plus golf shirts are thin – I don’t want that lace pattern showing through. Why, oh why did you do it, Maidenform? Why?

Those two teenage bras are going back to Kohls, and I will begin the search again. Someone told me that Soma bras are good, so maybe I’ll try those. They’re spendy for me but after all the time and money I’ve racked up going through thousands of bras at hundreds of stores, I’m to the point that I’d pay anything to have a nice comfy home for the girls. Bless their hearts. They deserve it.

What’s happening in Portland?

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On August 30, 2020

In Politics

I get this question a lot from my friends and family back in Tennessee. They want to know why people are rioting in Portland. Who’s stirring up all the trouble?

Here’s what I tell them. We’ve got four groups on our streets here. The first group wants to change the world for the better – they’re the people who leave their comfy, air-conditioned homes in the summer heat and walk the streets to support Black Lives Matter. They hope that demonstrating will alert police to the reality that we don’t want them killing unarmed black people. It’s a pretty good reason to hold demonstrations.

The second group wants to use the cover of the demonstrators to vandalize and loot. They are opportunists, criminals, thugs – the cockroaches of society. They’re thrilled that people are demonstrating because they lay low until the focus is on other groups, then break a store window and steal what they can. They destroy property so they can profit. Black lives don’t matter to them. They need to be sent to jail, the sooner the better. Almost as bad are the vandals and scum who spray paint our buildings and everything else with their stupid giant letters. It’s ugly. Just stop it. Put them in jail, too, after the judge makes them remove their awful graffiti. 

The third and fourth groups are vigilantes here to fight each other. One is the white-supremacists, the Skinheads and Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer and other modern-day fascists. They want every race except whites to be somewhere else, preferably dead. Let me refresh your memory about fascists. They were in charge in Germany during the 1930’s and 40’s. They called themselves Nazis, and Hitler was their leader. He started World War II. In the meantime, the Nazis practiced their white supremacy by killing six million Jews in Germany’s concentration camps, not to mention anyone they deemed inferior, such as handicapped people.

Today’s white-supremacist, fascist, hate groups in America call themselves Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer and other names, because the word Nazi has such inconvenient connotations. I call them Profa – short for Pro-fascists – they are the opposite of Anti-fascists, or Antifa. 

Antifa is the fourth group here in Portland. They oppose white-supremacist, fascist groups, for, what I think, are obvious reasons. (See paragraph above about Hitler, Nazis, murdering innocents, and World War II). 

The question is, why are these two groups, Profa and Antifa, in Portland? Pro-fascist groups are okay with the police shooting someone as long as the victim is not white. They certainly aren’t here to support Black Lives Matter. Antifa is here to stand up to the white supremacists. Antifa is like the kid in school who gets between the bullies (white supremacists) and the kids being bullied (everyone who isn’t white). So Pro-fascists and Anti-fascists clash. Violence ensues. Opportunists break into stores and steal. Demonstrators keep marching.

I’ve heard people say, “Antifa is a terrorist group. They’re bussing in people and paying them to riot.” This makes no sense to me. Antifa, remember, are anti-fascists, the far left – they’re on the side of Black Lives Matter. They are against police brutality. The only people they’re fighting are the white supremacist fascist groups. 

What makes more sense is that someone is bussing in the pro-fascist groups, the far right. But who would want pro-fascist groups in Portland? Hmmm, the Proud Boys and all the rest of the pro-fascists have Trump’s name plastered all over their banners while they parade through Portland. Maybe that’s why Trump keeps calling the anti-fascists, Antifa, a terrorist group, but sympathizes with the white supremacist pro-fascist groups. 

If I were a president whose ratings are down, I’d spend some of my millions or ask my rich friends to rent a few busses so the Proud Boys, Skinheads, Patriot Prayer and other fascists can come to Portland where they make Black Lives Matter demonstrators angry. Anti-fa comes to stand up to Pro-fa. Fights break out. People get hurt. It’s cheap advertising. It’s almost the only thing they talked about at the Republican National Convention – IF YOU DON’T RE-ELECT TRUMP THE WHOLE COUNTRY WILL BE LIKE PORTLAND. What name is on the banners of the fascist, white supremacist, hate groups as they parade in Portland? It’s not Biden. 

If a person wanted to stay in power, wouldn’t it be in his best interest to stir up trouble, to manufacture fear, to pit people against each other? And then spend day and night Tweeting that the whole country will be like Portland if he’s not re-elected? 

But wait. Isn’t he the one in office right now? And isn’t the country already like this? Right now? Could it be his “divide and conquer” strategy? Divide us to the point that we’re so angry we can’t even talk to our own family members or our best friends from high school without getting into a shouting match. We may have disliked other presidents, had political debates, agreed to disagree, but we can’t even talk now. He has definitely divided us. 

But will he conquer? Not if we vote. Actually vote. Not just not vote. Many people didn’t vote in 2016 because they thought Trump was a joke, but they couldn’t support a Democrat, or a woman with a trumped up email scandal. Hilary won the popular vote, but Trump ended up in the White House. Please don’t let it happen this time. I know he’ll whine and cry and say it was rigged and we’ll have to endure his pouting, vengeful tweets about how he’s a genius and everyone else is a loser and blame it on fake news and on and on and on, but who knows what will happen to Democracy, to America, if he gets another four years? If you don’t vote for whatever reason, or vote by writing in the name of someone who can’t possibly win, Lord help us. 

What’s happening in Portland? Who’s stirring up trouble?

Do you really even need to ask?

Random silliness and a prayer

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On August 23, 2020

In Golf, Humor, Religion

Before the pandemic, a group of us stayed for lunch and canasta after we played golfed on Wednesdays. A couple of years ago, when I took over sending the emails out to see who would be playing, I tried to entice everyone to come with a little gentle humor. I started with just a poem: Roses are red, Violets are blue, Cards won’t be much fun, Without you. 

Because of my cleverness and poetic genius, we got a decent turnout (canasta is more fun with a larger group), which emboldened me to do more. I started searching the internet for jokes relating to various holidays. Did you know there are several reasons to celebrate every single day of the year? For instance, today, August 23, is National Cuban Sandwich Day, National Cheap Flight Day, and National Sponge Cake Day. There’d be four or five National Days to celebrate, so I’d pick one, then search online for jokes. For instance, here are some jokes for National Sponge Cake Day:

I once knew an arrogant sponge cake. It was very self absorbed.

To make a Real sponge cake…borrow all the ingredients. (Get it. A play on words – you sponge off your neighbors. P.S. You know a joke stinks when you have to elbow your audience and say, “Get it?”)

Here’s a groaner: What did the sponge cake say to the sink? Water you doing? 

Sometimes I just sent random jokes – like I’m going to do for you right now. Hope these give you a nice Sunday chuckle:

A lot of people cry when they cut an onion. I don’t know why they get so emotionally attached. 

What do you call bears with no ears?  B’s

What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?  I don’t know, and I don’t care.

What did one DNA strand say to the other?  Do I look fat in these genes?

A police recruit was asked during the exam, “What would you do if you had to arrest your own mother?” He said, “Call for backup.”

What did the grape say when he was pinched? Nothing, but he gave a little wine.

What do you call a karate move done by a pig?  A pork chop.

Two years ago I asked the girl of my dreams out on a date, and today I asked her to marry me. She said no on both occasions.

What do you call a boomerang that won’t come back?  A stick.

Why did Adele cross the road?  To sing, “Hello from the other side!”

Why can’t you trust an atom?  Because they make up everything.

They just opened a new restaurant called Karma. There’s no menu, they just give you what you deserve.

If you have 13 apples in one hand and 10 oranges in the other, what do you have?   Big hands.

What did the man say when he walked into a bar?  Ouch!

It’s me again. Some of you are probably saying “Ouch” because of these jokes.

One other thing I want to add. I went to online Mass today and our priest asked us to write a couple of sentences about what Jesus means to us. He’s a nice guy, even though he gives us homework each week. Something like, think about ways to help someone else, that kind of thing. He’s never told us to write anything, so I will do that now. What does Jesus mean to me? He’s my friend. Jesus is the one I thank when big and little things go well (like getting across the railroad tracks on my way to golf just before the bar goes down behind me). Thank you, Jesus. I would have missed my Tee-time. He’s also the one I talk to when I’ve hit a rough patch – when things aren’t going well and pile on. Oh, Lord, why does everything bad have to happen at one time? Please help me be strong. To me, Jesus is my best friend. He listens, and he loves me no matter how many stupid things I do, which is a lot. All the time.

Ahh. Homework’s done. Now my prayer for you is that you stay well and happy and that you get a nice belly laugh at least once today. Amen.

Someday….but not today

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On August 16, 2020

In Fears, Home Life, Humor

As I get older and my body sounds like Rice Krispies – snap, crackle, and pop, I worry that I won’t be able to see, hear, smell, and taste, much less ski, golf, hike, etc. It’s scary. So when those thoughts cross my mind, I beat them back by saying, “Someday I won’t be able to (insert ability I fear I’ll lose, like hit a golf ball without tipping over), but not today.”

We all get old, it just happens to some of us sooner or later. Wrinkles, lumps, bumps, chins that hang like a Shar Pei, brain that refuses to remember names, dates, how to get home from the grocery store.

After I’ve been sitting for a while and stand up, I can’t take a step right away because of aching knees that won’t go. It’s like when you drive a stick shift and you don’t put the clutch in all the way so the gears grind and growl. I’m pressing on the gas pedal but nothing’s moving. Someday my creaky knees will buckle like the scarecrow’s on The Wizard of Oz, but not today.

I’m afraid of losing my hearing. It’s getting harder to understand people, especially in a crowd. I have to fake hearing and hope I catch enough of the conversation to be able to say “uh-huh” when I’m supposed to, like an attentive listener. Sometimes people just look at me and I realize they’ve asked a question. Oh crap. “Hmmm I don’t know” I say, my standard response. “You don’t know if you have a dog?” That I hear.

When someone sticks their iPhone in my face to show me a picture of their giant zucchini, it takes me a while to focus. Tonight my mother-in-law showed me a black and white photo of my husband’s dad as an infant. I looked at the picture and saw a two-headed baby. “Is this a two-headed baby?” I handed the picture to my husband. “It’s a dog,” he said, handing it back. He can’t see either. I grabbed my reading glasses and looked at the picture. “All I see is a two-headed baby.” I will have to find my magnifying glass to tell what it is. Some day I won’t be able to make out anything in a photo, it will all be a blur, but not today.

One of the things I dread losing is my sense of smell. Right now I can smell a rose from ten paces and the stogey smoke on my husband when he comes in from outside. I can predict the weather, “smells like snow,” even before it falls. I told my kids I’d know if they’d been drinking or smoking pot when they were in high school so they’d better not do it, and they believed me. I think it kept them from being too wild, or maybe it made them better sneaks – who knows what they got away with right under my nose. Someday I won’t be able to smell pine trees on a warm summer day, the fresh air after a rain, or marijuana smoke wafting out of a car full of teenagers, but not today.

Come to think of it, losing these abilities may be God’s way of helping us to accept getting old. If I don’t put my reading glasses on, I can’t see all my wrinkles in the mirror, my arms don’t have divots, my knees don’t sag like an elephant’s skin.

And old people smells – yikes! They let gas slip and don’t know it (and don’t hear it either). Old folks homes and hospitals have a particular odor, kind of like Pine Sol, and that’s where us old people will end up most likely. Maybe not being able to hear will be okay, too. The nightly news is just history repeating its bad habits. The scandals. The wars. Same as back in the day.

But I’m not there yet. Someday I will be really old and things won’t function like they should, and I’ll forget how I used to stand up straight and tall and will start saying no to hikes and golf, preferring my soft sofa with a remote control in my hand, watching the clock to remember to take my next pill, going to bed before sunset. But not today. Thank goodness, not today.

Second best of the worst

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On August 9, 2020

In Golf, Humor

I play a game, a hateful and cruel game that treats me like a friend and then dumps me into a bottomless pit to scratch and claw my way out for what seems like an eternity.  

Why do they say we “play” golf? It’s not fun. It’s hard. A person can play golf for years and not get much better. Improvement comes only with a lot of practice – going to the driving range and hitting over and over trying to figure out not only how to make the ball go straight, which it never wants to do, but also go the correct distance. The ball will just about always refuse to do one or the other. Oh, it may get the distance right, but if it does, it won’t go straight.

Say you’re hitting the first ball on any of the 18 fairways in a golf course, and you want the ball to go 150 yards. It will go 150 yards, but it will go to the left or right, not straight. Just about every golf ball I’ve ever played behaves like this. I’ll end up in someone else’s fairway. I have to go into their territory where they’re hitting their balls at 10,000 miles per hour straight at me. When they see me, all four of them stand there, arms crossed, toes tapping, waiting for me to get out of their way. I’m embarrassed and  “off my game,” and the ball decides to indulge in some shenanigans. I have to hit between two gnarly oak trees to get back to my fairway, an easy shot, I can do it with my eyes closed. This ball, however, loves smacking into trees so it richochets off one and line-drives the squatty player with a stogie hanging out the side of his mouth, dripping sweat in the hot sun. Fortunately he ducks in time and the ball, laughing, lands behind him. This is the game of golf as I play it. 

No one would ever play this game if there weren’t handicaps. It’s like when we were kids and the really fast kid always came up to you and said, “Let’s race.” We all said, “No, you’ll win.” So he says, “I’ll let you start in front of Miss Smith’s house.” Hmmm, you look down the street and the Smith house looks pretty far away. So you say, “Okay,” thinking you might have a chance to actually beat him. Somewhere near the finish line you trip and get a bloody scrape on your knee while you watch the fast kid zoom by.

A handicap gives a stinking player such as myself a chance to win. If it takes a good player 72 hits to finish all 18 holes in a round of golf, he has a 0 handicap. If it takes you, the hacker, 104 hits on a good day to finish 18 holes, then you take your 104 and minus 72, and that gives you a handicap of 32. So your gross score (well named) is 104, but your net score is 72. That way you can compete against any golfer and have a chance to win in the net division.

This is how they get bad players to keep playing golf – it’s the hope that you’ll do enough things right, that you’re be blessed that day, that you don’t get stuck in the sand, that your ball won’t hit every tree along the fairway, that the fast kid falls instead of you – this is what keeps suckers like me playing golf.

It’s also what entices bad golfers to enter competitions, and sometimes we actually win. Last week I played in a two-day tournament and I played great the first day – oh man was I having my best game in a long time. When I putted, the ball dropped into the cup instead of defying gravity and rolling over it. The ball flew out of the sand traps in one hit and stayed mostly in the fairway. Everything went right. People said, “Wow, you were on fire out there today.”

I knew this was the gong of doom. Because the second you do something right in golf, the ball, even if it’s brand new and knows nothing about you or your game, it will sabotage your success. This is a given in my case, and it happened again on the second day of the tournament.

The ball leaped into a sand trap and wouldn’t get out. I hit and hit and hit and hit and it got to the top of the lip and rolled back down. Instead of getting a 4 on the hole like I did the day before, I got an 11. (To explain, 4 is good; 11 is very very bad.)

Have you ever watched a basketball game where the underdogs are so lively at first, their fans cheering; the score’s even. Then the other team steals the ball and makes a dunk. And they do it again. The fans quit cheering. The bad team gets a hang-dog look about them and start acting tuck-tailed. They miss passes, miss shots – everything blows up.

That was me after getting the 11. From then on, the ball zigzagged down the fairway, avoiding the middle, coming up short when I putted, doing everything it could to make me miserable.

Afterwards I had to sit in a room of women golfers as they called out the winners. I didn’t even bother looking at the scoreboard, I just hoped I wouldn’t be last. But here’s the beauty of golf, the reason all us idiots keep coming back. When the head pro came in to announce the winners, he called my name first. WHAT??? Turns out, because I played so well the first day, and with my high handicap, I got 2ndNet in my Flight. Oh, I forgot to mention that in big tournaments they will group the best golfers in Flight #1, the next best in Flight #2, and so on. In this tournament there were three flights, and I was, of course in Flight #3 – the worst golfers. And we were bad. Balls going everywhere, in ponds and rivers and ditches and roads, sand traps, other people’s fairways, bouncing off trees, rolling under bushes. But none of that mattered, because I was 2ndplace Net in a Flight of 13 women. I won $30! You’ve never seen a happier person. 

Even now, three days later, I’m still aglow. 2ndbest of the worst! Does life get any better than this? I just can’t wait to play again. What a sucker.

Lists

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On August 3, 2020

In Humor

Being too busy makes me cranky. I blame it on making lists. As long as I get through my days accomplishing a few things I feel pretty good when I lie in bed at night giving thanks for five things that happened during the day – one of my ways to get to sleep if exhaustion doesn’t give way to peaceful dreams. 

But lists! Yes, I think I get more done if I put the items on paper. But the list becomes the boss of me. It pushes and yanks and prods me, cracking a silent whip at my back, forcing me to do more and more without mercy.

My list of things to do

Putting everything down helps me get all those must-do’s out of my head instead of swimming around like piranhas, chomping at my peace of mind. “Oh, man, I’ve got to…” my brain says, spinning through 8,000 things I want to accomplish today – cooking, cleaning, watering, weeding. A list is a cathartic relief, like when you watch a clogged toilet filling up and then it drains just before it’s about to run over.  

I can look at the things I’ve written down and sometimes think, “Well, there’s not that much to do,” and trick myself into believing I have enough hours to get finish them. I even put times beside the items – 7:00 to 7:30 – water my garden. Then I drive seven minutes to the community garden, eating a protein bar on the way. As I water, everything looks healthy except the stupid squash plant with its yellow leaves. What the heck is wrong with it? I Google on my phone and read and watch YouTube videos that tell me I need to cut those yellow leaves off and, according to one source, make a one-part milk and eight-part water solution to spray on the healthy leaves to protect them from powdery mildew, and I need to do this in the hot part of the day so it dries quickly. After cutting the yellow leaves off and getting itchy squash prickles all over my hands, I notice that my tomato plants need to be tied higher. I’ll do that when I come back with the milk spray later in the day.

I get home and it’s now 8:15: 45 minutes behind schedule. Crap! I do the math in my head and write new times above the old times.

Everything this morning takes longer than estimated, and at lunch I’m standing up at the counter eating, trying to figure out when I’ll wedge in that return trip to the garden with the mildew spray. I despise the smell of spilt milk – the thought of spraying milk in the blistering heat with the frisky afternoon winds blowing that foul odor all over me – I get a little throw-up in my mouth thinking about it.

The day goes on. A headache is creeping up from the base of my neck. I’m doing things in a half-assed way so I can line through another item. I’ll probably get everything done, but I won’t have time for my daily walk, which I’d forgotten to add and it’s already getting dusky outside. I still need to change the hummingbird feeder – the little pests are hovering around the almost empty feeder and I know what they’re thinking. “Don’t come out here without some fresh sugar water or we’ll dive-bomb you.” They will, too. They roar like a fighter jet taking off when they zoom in to feed – doesn’t bother them that you’re going in the front door five feet away. The first few days after I hung the feeder I ducked and ran into the house – they sound like they’re an inch from your head. I love them, but today I wish they’d just buzz off and leave me alone. I’m feeling pretty cranky right now.

At 7 p.m. the list still calls, but it’s time for dinner on the couch in front of the TV with my husband. Back when the kids were home I always made us eat at the table as a family, but with the two of us the TV is fine. We start a movie, and I have good intentions to do the last two things, but I don’t. I’ll change the fish water in the morning. The hummingbirds will have to wait.

That will put me behind tomorrow, and it bothers me, but I can’t do everything, right? If I hadn’t written everything down I would have forgotten half of the things anyway (even if I’m not too proud of the way I did some of them). They’re lined through. That’s what’s important.

In my bedtime prayers it’s easy to be thankful for five of the things I got done, plus my husband, children, family and friends, the hummingbirds, my faithful fish, my garden. Maybe tomorrow I’ll forget to make a list. The thought comforts me, and pretty soon I’m sound asleep.

Mer – the sister in my heart

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On July 26, 2020

In Friends

I had never met her, but I knew her. Loud, annoying, obnoxious – the last person in the world I wanted to be around. I’d seen her at Robinson Junior High, and I social distanced from her in the halls whenever I heard her coming.

Mary Morelock. Round-eyed, high-cheeked, brown bob bouncing as she tromped down the halls jabbering .Me quiet, invisible, squint-eyed, mousy straight blond hair that refused to hold a curl even after sleeping in brush rollers. I loathed her. She never noticed me.

Then, the summer after eighth grade at the Legion Pool where free-range kids lived from one in the afternoon until we had to leave for supper, Mary and I started hanging out because we still wanted to swim after our friends left early. I figured she wouldn’t make noise if she was under water half the time.

The outdoors improved the acoustics of her voice, and she liked to play in the water, not just lie in the sun. She and I became friends, and in high school, when we were in the same gang of girls with the same lunch period, we became best friends.

By then I was Suz to her and she was Mer to me. I spent at least one night at her house every weekend. When we were sixteen, and I had my brother’s Chevy convertible one Friday night, we decided to buy our first beer. We waited until some country boys pulled up in front of the 7-11. The driver took my money and came out with a string of Pabst Blue Ribbon’s.

“Want us to help you drink these?” he said, grinning a piano-keyboard grin with the black keys missing. “No, but thank you so much!”

Mary popped the top of my first personal can of beer. Remember this is 1968 and we were stupid, and the law didn’t do much to drinkers in East Tennessee, possibly the moonshine capital of the world.

We drove on a dirt back road swigging Pabst and feeling quite mature – the late 60’s version of Thelma and Louise – until I dozed off and ran up on a gravel pile. The crunching jolted me awake. My headlights shone out into black nothingness. We were on the edge of a little cliff. I tried to back up but the wheels spun, throwing up gravel and dust.

I looked over – Mary’s chin was on her chest. “Wake up! We’re stuck.”

She slowly turned her head in my direction, her eyes staring past me in a half-open gaze. She opened her door and leaned out, her whole body hanging down like a limp doll. Thank goodness I’d made us put on seat belts or she would have rolled out like a barrel of beer.

“Where are we?” she said when she got a grip on her door and hoisted herself back up. “It’s dark down there.”

Not for long. Two bright headlights beamed into the windshield, blue lights flashing. “Oh no, it’s the law,” I said. That sobered us both up in a hurry.

It was no use lying to him. Empty beer cans told the story. “You girls out joy-riding, drinking Blue Ribbon?”

“We’ve never done it before,” I said.

“Well, you better not do it again. That gravel pile most likely saved your lives.”

A man from a nearby house had come out, and the two of them pushed the car backwards so it was no longer high-centered. “You got a busted radiator. Doesn’t look like there’s much more damage other than a scratch here and there. You girls get on home and don’t let me catch you out here again.”

Slowly driving home, hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, as awake and alert as I’ve ever been, I said, “Can you believe it, Mer? We could have died.”

“I know,” she said. “We could have gotten a ticket too.” Which was even scarier.

We lived to have many more adventures. A couple years later I totaled that car one night after a bunch of us had gone skinny dipping at the Moose pool where she was a lifeguard. At a T-intersection out in the country, someone had stolen the stop sign and I didn’t realize it until too late. I turned too sharp, the right wheel went into the ditch and left the road, rolling several times. Because we weren’t wearing seat belts, all three of us got thrown from the car. Convertibles back then had no roll bars. It landed belly-up in a field, squashed flat, and we would have been too.

Mary was my wild and crazy soul sister. My real, sweet little sister died when I was eight and she was five. I have missed her all these years. I envy those women who have sisters, even those with irritating ones who cause them a lot of grief. They don’t know how lucky they are.

But I realize how lucky I am to have Mary, a sister in my heart. We’ve lived together in Florida and Georgia, and had viscous fights – especially the time in Atlanta when I ate the hamburger she’d saved for after work. Oo-weeee. Talk about red-faced screaming mad!

Decades later, even though we stand on the other side of an awfully tall political fence (what is she thinking????), we are still close. A couple thousand miles separate us, and we only see each other in person every other year or so but it’s like we’ve never been apart. We relive memories, marveling that the good Lord brought us through so many dangerous adventures, happy to spend time with each other, talk about our kids and wonder at how well things turned out.

Joan Carol was my only sister, and I love and miss her, but Mary helped me journey through my insecure teens and rudderless twenties and all the ups and downs of my life, with understanding, sympathy and laughter. Just like little Joanie, Mer will always be my sister.  

Happy Birthday, America!

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On July 5, 2020

In Fears, Holidays, Relationships

It’s our 244th birthday! Ever since July 4, 1776 we’ve spent money buying explosives that light up the sky for several nights, booming so loud that old curse when they go to bed at 8:30 and dogs to bark continuously and pee on the floor. 

On the actual holiday, we gorge ourselves on fried chicken, potato salad, and white sheet cakes with strawberries and blueberries and Cool Whip to make the Stars and Stripes that our bellies refuse to digest, stretching our American elastic waistbands beyond their endurance.

We are a good country, formed on sound principles written in the Declaration of Independence – that revered document we celebrate every July 4. The most famous quote says that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Our country seems like a mess right now with all the protests. We’ve been here before, but my hope is that after this year is we don’t go back again. I hope we will all remember that pursuing happiness can’t happen when you are angry. No matter what side of a political fence you’re on, if you hate others because of the color of their skin or the nation they came from, you cannot pursue happiness. Hate makes you angry. 

Go ahead, think about that for a minute. Has your child (or you, when you were a child) ever had a hissy fit, slammed a door, and shouted, “I hate you?” Are they smiling and happy? No, they’d kick you in the shin if they could get away with it. Now think about that same child looking into your eyes and saying, “I love you.” That’s happiness right there. It’s dang near impossible to find happiness when you’re angry – and pretty easy to be happy when you love someone.

It’s that simple – if we want to pursue happiness, we have to love each other. I know this goes against what you may have been taught by your angry parents, uncles, aunts, teachers, bosses etc., but it is the truth. And the truth will set you free – give you Liberty, and that will give you Life, and free you up to pursue Happiness.

Those old guys were pretty smart back in 1776. 

The video below was sent to me by my 93 year old friend, Pearl. Another very smart person. It’s a short version of a 1985 documentary where a teacher does an experiment in discrimination. It’s only 6 minutes long and well worth watching. The link to the full documentary is below that – it’s about an hour long. Happy 4th of July everyone!

https://www.facebook.com/roberthesselvandijk/videos/3645707652122310

https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-class-divided/

America – It’s Time to Get Strong!

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On March 14, 2021

In Exercise, Food, Health

The American immune system is not a lean, mean, fighting machine. It is soft. It is flabby. It is housed in a muffin-top, beach-ball belly, existing on Cheetos, deep-fried Twinkies, mashed potatoes and gravy, and bacon-wrapped bacon. It doesn’t get any exercise except walking to the kitchen for a cold beer and a bag of chips because clicking through 988 channels of reruns makes a body hungry.

You may ask, “what is an immune system anyway?” Without getting too technical, it’s the boxers and street fighters and soldiers in your body – the guys that fight corona viruses and flus and bacterias when they invade your body to make you sick.

When a virus goes up your nose, instead of standing at attention and shouting a battle cry, America’s immune system lights up a cigarette, leans against a wall and says, “Sup?”

We need basic training for our bodies. We don’t want overweight and out of shape immune systems huffing and puffing on the battlefield, we want soldiers that can drop and give us 50.

We’ve been hearing a lot about compromised people with diabetes and heart disease. They might say, “These things run in my family.” That is absolutely true. Often it’s yo momma who introduced you to unhealthy lifestyle habits, just like her momma did to her.  Those yummy comfort foods she fed you tastes good, and it’s cheap. It wasn’t so bad in the past, when people worked hard and had to carry water up from the creek, build fences, walk to the barnyard to feed the chickens, they could burn off all that cheap creamed corn, potatoes and gravy, bread and butter and apple pie.

Now we eat the same cheap stuff, along with modern-day chips of all kinds – but now we’ve got nothing to do but watch TV. There’s no nutrition in that stuff, it’s just handy and tasty. It’s the same food we give to livestock. How do you fatten up cattle before they go to market? Corn and other cheap grains. They get fat because it’s not their natural food so they keep eating, trying to get nutrition that isn’t there. It’s just calories. A cow will eat itself to death on corn if you let it – it’s stomach will literally burst. I know this for a fact because when we were kids, my brother didn’t latch the door to the feed shed at my grandfather’s farm, and one of the milk cows got in there, Pet was her name, and ate corn all night and her stomach burst and she died. She ate herself to death.

We’re eating ourselves to death, too. The human body is hollering, “Hey, you! We need some food that’s got vitamins and minerals in it! We’re hungry for something healthy!” But all you hear is the “hungry” part, and you grab a bag of potato chips. Your body keeps pleading, so you grab some buttered popcorn and a Pepsi.

You can’t have good soldiers unless you give them the food they need. I didn’t say “want,” because we all “want” unhealthy food. It’s tasty! Our bodies become addicted to sweets and starches. How many times have you said, “I’m not even hungry but I want a little something sweet (or salty)?”

Breaking an addiction isn’t easy, but it can be done. You’ve got to retrain your mouth to like carrots and broccoli and other vegetables. Hey, quit making that barf face! Why do you think healthy people eat these things? Do you see them gagging when they eat salads? No. They love ’em. Their mouths have been trained to like the taste, just like you were trained to like sweet tea even though it gags me because it’s so fricking sweet. Talk about a barf face!

While you’re at it, send your body to basic training. You don’t have to march up and down saying, “hep, deda-hep” or whatever those boot camp marchers repeat on TV – just stroll around the block to start out. Look at people’s flowers, listen to the birds sing, make fun of the paint on someone’s house.

You’ve got to repeat this mantra: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” If your body is in bad shape, it’s because of you. Not your momma. Not your daddy. Not your genes. Your momma may have raised you to be unhealthy because that’s all she knew, and all your brothers and sisters and cousins might be unhealthy, but once you leave home, it’s all on you

Get rid of these excuses:

-“I don’t like vegetables.” (Your momma probably didn’t like vegetables either unless they were floating in bacon grease or butter or gravy or starchy stuff like potatoes and corn.)

-“Diabetes and high blood pressure and heart disease run in my family.” (That might be true, but look at them – do they have unhealthy habits, too?)

“My doctor says it’s genetic.” (Your doctor has also told you to eat right and exercise.)

Now stand up and do something. Walk around the block, up steps, down escalators. Bend over and pick up things rather than letting they lie there. Do you own housework. Quit parking in the handicap space. Walk through the mall even if you’re not going to buy anything. Do your own yard work, mop your own floors. Build up to a couple of blocks and eventually a couple of miles a day. If it makes your joints sore, are you carrying two suitcases full of body fat everywhere you go? Bad eating habits can do that to you.

Find a make-your-body-happy way to eat that makes you strong – I recommend eating the South Beach or Mediterranean way because they’re not weird diets to lose weight. You want something you can do the rest of your life, not just something to drop pounds. You’ll lose weight eating this way in the long run, but that’s not what we’re after. A leaner body is just a nice side effect of getting healthy. Your check-ups with the doctor will get better – lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, so you may be able to get rid of some of the prescriptions you’re taking to treat your unhealthy lifestyle. Remember, the stronger you are, the stronger your fighting team will be.

The way you eat can be an addiction. No one was born to be an alcoholic, a smoker, or a food addict. You may have been brought up in a family with all of those things happening, and you may have generations of addicts in your bloodline, but you are the one who reaches for a bottle, a smoke, or a bag of chips.

Even healthy people want these foods – they’re tasty! The people who make this stuff and advertise it on TV have spent decades figuring out exactly what it takes to make you keep buying their products. Healthy people love potatoes and gravy and chips and dips the same as you do. But they learn how to eat well because they want to be, well, healthy. That’s why people who love to smoke quit smoking, and people who love to drink stop drinking. Unhealthy eaters change because they don’t want to be dependent on doctors and prescriptions for heart disease and diabetes – that “pound of cure” I was talking about, or they don’t like how it makes them look and feel and limits what they can do.

All addictions rob you of your strength and make your body weaker. It’s not about how you look on the outside. It’s about being strong! Next time germs invade, your immune system will stand up tall and say, “Oh, no. Hell no. Not in this house!” I’m not saying you’ll never get sick. But if you do, you may not get as sick. Your soldiers will beat up on those germs and eventually they’ll run off, holding their hands over their bottoms as you pelt them with all your healthy ammo. If nothing else, you’ll look and feel better. You can do this. Start today!!

America’s Bodies and Immune Systems. The strong. The proud. The free! 

Happy Martian

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On March 7, 2021

In Computers, Entertainment, Humor

I made this short animation movie in a Flash class in 2010 as my final project. My instructor must have had a sense of humor because he gave me an A. This thing took many hours and days to make. Recently I’ve been getting alerts from Adobe – the creator of Flash – that Flash Player has some kind of plague now and Adove wants everyone to not only stop using it, but to get it off their computers completely. They came on my computer at all hours with messages like this one: Please remove Flash Player from your computer, then set it on fire, bury it in the backyard in an unmarked grave, and pile some big rocks on it. DO IT RIGHT NOW!!!!

It’s been 10 years since I made this project, and I’ve never done anything with Flash since, but I was worried I wouldn’t be able to watch this little movie again, so I needed to edit it in order to upload it to YouTube, and I couldn’t remember anything about how I made it. So a lot more hours went into revising this, mainly because my old Flash program kept crashing.

Not to get too geeky on you, but when something on your computer just quits, that’s called – in technical terms – stupid, because just about everyone in the world says, “Stupid” computer. Some people say other words too, particularly the one starting with “f.” Anyway, when a stupid program stops working on your stupid computer, it’s really f… I mean, annoying. That’s what Flash kept doing when I tried to export this little animation into a movie I could put on YouTube. Hence the hours and hours of frustration – I’d do one thing but that would break something else.

Finally, after copious notes because I couldn’t remember what I’d done up until the next screw-up, in case I had to start over, I got this little movie exported to a file that YouTube would let me upload.

So here it is for your viewing pleasure. There are lots of nuances – smile turns to frown, stars twinkle, moon waxes – little things. By the way, some snot-nose kid could have probably made this in a couple of hours. That doesn’t diminish any of my ecstatic joy at my own accomplishment!

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Copyright © 2021 by Suzanne Olsen