Uh Oh

When Sheila got home from the jail this afternoon (ah, but that’s another story) I buzzed over to the grocery store where we spend a good part of our lives and our money.  I had just a few things to pick up, mostly for the sweet onion pie I am making for dinner tonight, and the chicken piccata I am making for dinner tomorrow night.

I had scrawled a list of the few items I needed on a green post-it note.  As always, I started in the produce section on the right, and then moved farther and farther to the left around the store.  About halfway around, I consulted my list to see how I was doing.  I read:

Ritz crackers (check)

Ched cheese (last aisle)

Vidalia (sweet onions—check)

Bread crumbs (crossed out—do not need)

Lemon (check)

Walnut pieces (check)

Ice cream (last aisle)

Asp (?????)

Asp?  What the hell??  The image of a dying Cleopatra surfaced in my mind.  What?  What in the world had I meant by “Asp”?  I didn’t need aspirin.  Must be an old post-it note from when I did need aspirin, I thought.  I couldn’t imagine.

I breezed over to the self-service checkout.  Not everyone is smart or clever enough or brave enough to use it, but I am definitely above average, tech-wise.  I confidently scanned my items, bagging them quickly.  When you have produce, the screen asks you to type in the item, and then it shows you some pictures and you select the right item.  Usually it only needs the first two or three letters of the item.   I typed in oni and selected Vidalia sweet, lem and selected lemons, and asp and selected asparagus, which I had thought would go nicely with the chicken piccata.

Oh.

On The Road

For a number of years, I was a divorced working mother living from paycheck to paycheck, and not doing the financial thing very well at all.  When Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again” became a hit in 1980, I started singing it every time I deposited a paycheck in the ATM that would temporarily save us, and I continued singing it through somewhat better times at the end of the workday every Friday until I retired.

I loved the Willie Nelson song, and I also loved books about life on the road, starting with Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, and including Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Blue Highway, Walk Across America, and the several Bill Bryson books.  But although it was published in 1957 and I was an English major in college in the 60’s, I never read Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel On The Road.  As of today, I still haven’t read it.

This week I was at the library and spotted in the featured/new book section On The Road:  The Original Scroll.  Turns out it is the “legendary first draft—rougher, wilder, and racier than the 1957 edition.”  Why not, I thought, and picked it up.  If I don’t like a book, I never feel obligated to finish it, so no skin off my nose to take something home from the library.  I scanned the scholarly essays that introduce the book.  Scholarly essays seldom convince me that I need to read something.  I flipped to the end and read this last paragraph:

“So in America when the sun goes down  and I sit on the old brokendown river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all the raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the evening-star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks in the west and folds the last and final shore in, and nobody, just nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody beyond the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Neal Cassady, I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found, I think of  Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady.”

I cried when I read this, because the writing is so elegant and true, because I was so grateful to be reading Jack Kerouac before my reading time in this life is over, and because it is always such a relief and a blessing when somebody expresses so perfectly what you have thought about passionately and tried your best to say in your own words. 

Yes, I went back to the beginning of On The Road:  The Original Scroll (not including the scholarly essays) and am loving every word in it.  Maybe someday I’ll read the novel it became.

Three or Four

My blog friend Isabelle posed a question on her blog not long ago:  “What were you like when you were nine?”  I loved reading about Isabelle’s nine-year-old self, and I’d like to write about that, too.  But not today. 

Today my blog friend Laurie listed three good things she was thinking about, and that sounds like an excellent practice. 

My three good things for today are:

1) Iced coffee with half and half in the afternoons.  Summer must be almost here.  Just make it yourself with leftover morning coffee.  No trip to Starbucks necessary.

2) Sunflowers.  Tara sent us a bunch for Mother’s Day, and they are still fine and fresh, the happy things.

3) The book I’m reading right now:  Birdology.  The author is Sy Montgomery, who wrote another book I own and love called The Good Good Pig.  Now mind you, I would never even briefly consider owning a pig, but I laughed and cried over Sy’s pig.  Birdology begins with “The Ladies,” Sy’s hens, and although not particularly desirous of owning birds either, I have been known to fall in love with parrots, owls, eagles and falcons from a safe distance.  I love Sy’s ladies, and am hanging on every word of her search for a cassowary in the wilds of Australia, leeches and all.

4) Gotta make this four things because we just came back from dinner with a friend at a little gem of a new Greek restaurant in the neighborhood.  If you have never had pizza with Greek sausage, pepperoni, salami and freshly made feta, you haven’t been anywhere or done anything.  And if you have eaten such a slice of Heaven and then stopped in at Boyer’s for coconut ice cream, and then you sat down in an old leather booth and savored your scoop(s) with full-on lust, you are one lucky devil indeed.  And you know it.

Happy Friday, everyone.  Shabbat Shalom, too.

Eventide

My favorite time of day, when the birds are getting into their pajamas and the sun is setting.  And the word “eventide”:  I love it. 

Today is birthday eve for me.  Tomorrow I will be, impossibly be, 66.  The other day I was laughing cynically to myself and thinking that the only two good things about being 66 are that “6” is supposed to be my lucky number, and that I’m on the right side of the flower bed. 

But I think now, on the eventide before my 66th birthday, that things are a little bit better than I’m making them out to be.  After all these years, I seem to be amassing a drop or two of wisdom, and sometimes those two drops will stay with me for several hours at a time. 

A tattered black and white photo of me taken around the time of my 5th birthday shows me holding an Easter lily.  I can still feel the hot sun as I stood on the dirt driveway, see that clear blue Texas sky, breathe in the delicious smell and feel the soft petals of the lily I held in my hand.  I saw dozens of lilies yesterday at our local botanical garden, and I was 5 again in a flash.

I am not happy about all of my chins, but I am at home with them.  I am grateful to have pretty hair.  I am just as grateful to have a new Rollator, which is pushed like a stroller without the baby and allows my arthritic spine and joints to go places and enjoy things that I’ve been missing out on.  I have grieved the loss of mobility.   Now I’m rolling with it!  I have people and animals who love me and whom I love back with a knowing fierceness.  Every day brings gifts. 

Happy Birthday to me!

Spring

How did it get to be called “Spring”?  Is it because it happens so quickly, this annual resurrection from cold and dark?  One day there are the same old bare branches standing in the bleak landscape, and the next day blossoms are everywhere you look. 

When Tara was little, we used to play a game every Spring called “Whee!  Blossoms!”  This was played driving in the car, and the first one to spot another flowering tree, bush, or clump of tulips had to call out “Whee!  Blossoms!” before the other person did.  After awhile, the game degenerated into continuous “Whee-ing,” shouts of “No fair!” and loud laughter.  If we were in the car together right now, at 66 and 36, I guarantee you the game would be played again, by unspoken agreement.  Who can ever grow too old for Spring?

The Lenten class I’ve been taking at church, called “Broken & Blessed,” has ended.  I am always surprised when I come face to face with cosmologies that are unlike mine.  In answer to the question, “Why is there suffering?” people said things like “Because God wants us to appreciate the good things we have.”  “Because God wants us to learn something.”  “Because we made the wrong choices.”  I’m all for appreciating and learning and trying to make the “right” choices,  but I am startled for the zillionth time hear that there are people who really think God designs not only general suffering, but specific suffering, and that He even selects certain people to suffer because of some plan He has that we want Him to explain when it happens to us.  “Why me?” 

I don’t know for sure why we suffer.  I don’t even think to ask the question.  We do suffer.  Move on.  There are lots of things we don’t know.  The God I believe in doesn’t make us suffer, but She or He is with us when we do, whether we are aware of it or not.

We don’t really have to know the why of everything, do we?  We just need to know that Spring has come again this year, and that the blossoms will be back again next year.  That’s an amazing promise.   One of the women in the class read a prayer by Dag Hammarskjold at the end of the last session:  “For all that is past, thanks; and for all that is to come, Yes.” 

Carmen

Carmen has found her forever home.  She’s a sweet, quiet, calm girl who is slowly discovering love and even a little foolishness.  We’ve had her for eight days now.  Her tail wags more, her eyes meet ours more often, and she responds to her name most of the time.  When she doesn’t, it’s probably because she has better things to do than because she doesn’t remember her name. 

All of our major worries were for naught.  She will not be eating the cats, nor are the cats broken-hearted due to the arrival of a dog.   She will not be pooping and peeing all over the house.  She will not jump on us and knock us down. 

Miss T, the resident supervisor and crab ass, has a new lease on life and seems to think that her world is right again with a dog in it.  Billy is not as sure about that, but he is confident enough to take shortcuts by walking underneath Carmen’s body. 

So far, she has only destroyed an AARP bulletin and a plastic cat ball that the cats never played with anyway.  She does collect items to take to her bed, however, and these consistently include Sheila’s bedroom slippers.  I was flattered the day she added my red ones to the pile.  She has also rounded up Sheila’s book, a wet washcloth, and all the dog toys in the toy basket to carry to one of her two beds.   Nothing chewed on so far except the aforementioned AARP bulletin and cat toy. 

Carmen’s new name (her racing name was “Where’s Rawbone”--yech) does not come from Bizet’s opera but was the name of Sheila’s late and beloved older sister.  It fits the sleek, exotic looking girl that she is.  However, I have made up a little song for her (all of The Pets always have a little song just for them), sung to the tune of  “March of the Toreadors” in Carmen:

I am a hound, a sweet greyhound/My name is Carmen and I’ll be around/I’m long and lean/just like a queen/My name is Carmen and I’ll be around!

Of Journaling, Greyhound Adoption, and Time Travel

Last week we had the pleasure of hearing Phyllis Theroux speak at the Library of Virginia, to kick off the publication of her new book The Journal Keeper.  I had read the book and was re-reading it by that time.  I have been an extremely sporadic journal keeper since college days, but I still have those pages and I treasure them, even the silly, whiny, self-absorbed ones.  One entry lets me know that at age 36 I exclaimed dramatically “I feel so terribly alone, sad, and old.”  Thirty years out, I want to put my arms around the lonely, sad young woman and sympathize, except for the “old” part about which she knew nothing.

Thankfully, by the time I had finished recording that entry, I had concluded that in comparison to some other people in my office I at least had a spark of  joie de vivre, and wrote on at some length in self-congratulation.  The great thing about a journal is that you’re allowed to be self-absorbed, and you might even be able to cheer yourself up by the end of the page.

I love reading other people’s journals and memoirs, and I can never resist at least looking at a new one in the bookstore.  If you are like that too, or think you might be, I highly recommend this book;  and if you know you will never journal but wouldn’t mind meeting someone who knows how to express many of the same inner thoughts and struggles you have, I recommend this book. 

Roger Mudd (remember him from CBS News?) introduced Ms. Theroux.  In case you thought, as I friend of mine did, that he had died, I assure you that is not the case.  He was a hoot, and entertained us with his own very first journal entry, written as a bored Private in the Korean War.  

About rescue greyhound adoption:  we are in the process.  How did it happen that two old ladies looking for an old, small dog seem to be about to adopt a young, tall greyhound fresh from the racetrack?  The story is somewhat convoluted, but it involves being at a Pet Expo a couple of weekends ago looking for the old, small dog and meeting two rescue greyhounds who cast a spell of enchantment with their angel faces and sweet ways.

As we’ve learned more about retired racing greyhounds, we continue to be enchanted as well as quite nervous about rescuing a dog of this particular breed.  We’ve always gotten dogs that we more or less put in the car and took home without a lot of forethought other than “I want a dog and this one seems to need me.”  This time is different and we are reading too many books, in my opinion.  I comfort myself with the memory of reading all the major how-to baby books before my child was born, and then pretty much never referring to them again once she made her appearance. 

And finally, about time travel.  Sheila doesn’t like science fiction or fantasy, and neither do I, although I enjoyed science fiction when I was a young teacher.  That was back in the days of Ray Bradbury and not very many other well known science fiction writers.  There was no such thing, as far as I know, as a vampire genre. 

Anyway, recently I had read a novel which I enjoyed and passed along to She, who also liked it very much.  I had gone on to read another novel by the same author, and was telling She how I didn’t care for that one and she wouldn’t either, because a major plot device was time travel.  “Oh, I wouldn’t like it,” she called out from the other room.  “I have enough trouble traveling through time myself.  I don’t need to read about it.”