What Was I Thinking?

It’s funny what you learn about yourself while cleaning things you haven’t cleaned in some nineteen years. That’s how long my husband and I have been in this house. That’s how long we’ve had to fill every nook and cranny of every drawer and cabinet. Okay, okay…  I’ve already admitted to how we are a couple of packrats. So you know I have a tendency to “keep stuff.” I think I got that from my father whose collection ran more along the line of farm equipment and other rusty, old mechanical stuff. Dad had more room than I do so his collection was far more magnificent than mine. I remember one day when he came home all excited because he found a fire truck for sale. A fire truck! Mom wouldn’t let him buy it though. For obvious reasons.

Dad collected lots of other stuff though—stuff folks thought was pretty useless and didn’t want anymore. And he’d usually find a way to put his miscellaneous assortment to work. Like the time someone rolled their car on the curve that ran in the front of the house. See we lived on a really sharp curve. One that people would constantly misjudge. We saw a lot of accidents while we lived there and somehow dad (always the negotiator) would find a way to capitalize. So there was the time of the rolled Corvair. The engine was good but the body was trashed. So Dad talked the owner out of it, tossed the motor into one pile and the body into another. Long about the time I was to get my license, Dad ran across another Corvair owner, one who’d blown his engine. So he talked the owner out of that too. Then he put the two good parts together and made my first car.

Dad was like that. Practical. Me, I just save stupid stuff. Like the things I ran across when I was cleaning out the master bath. Apparently, I’ve saved every “extra button” that came with every garment I’ve bought in the last nineteen years. Just tossed them into an extra drawer.

And those tiny locks that go on luggage when you travel? Seems I bought a new one every time I had a need for one. 

And then there are the more curious aspects to my adventure in cleaning. I mean . . . really? How many pregnancy test kits and condoms does one pre-menopausal woman need anyway?

Regardless of whether I got my hording hormone from Dad, it seems pretty clear that he was better at it than I am. At least he got to do something with most of the stuff he collected. But me? Pssshhh

Anyone need a button? Or a lock? How about a fifteen year old condom? I think I'm finally going to toss them . . . going . . . going . . .

Oh, maybe not.

Are these things funny? Or is it just me?

There were four of us out to eat that first night in L.A.—Mary, Tina, Dana and I. We’d gone to Rock Sugar, an Eastern cuisine there in the mall close to the hotel. The food was outstanding and we got a chance to share some of it with Dana’s son’s dragon (the one who hitched a ride in her purse). The dragon ended up having many wonderful adventures and met some pretty famous writers during his trip. 

Dragon

But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about funny things people say and the even funnier way other people interpret them. 

Linda, Mary, Dana, Tina

For example, as we were leaving the restaurant, we decided to get a picture in the lounge. I was shooting my three friends when a nice woman came over and offered to get all four of us in the shot.

“Perfect!” I said, and “Thanks!” And I handed her my camera.

So she shot a few pictures and while she was still shooting, one of the nice waitstaff walked over and offered to take the camera from her so “we could all be in the shot.” 

We all laughed. I mean, can you imagine! It could have gone on and on with me having all sorts of strangers in my picture.

Four days later Dana and I shared a flight home. It might as well have been a red eye since we got into Houston so late . . . pretty much the middle of the night. After a really long, brain sucking day, we were pretty fried. Very tired, very giddy. So when we landed and the flight attendant was making all of his normal announcements, the last thing he added set us off way more than it should have.

“Hope you enjoyed your flight and have a pleasant stay here in Houston. Or wherever your final destination may be.”

That was all well and good but then he added: “Whoever needed the wheelchair can come on up and get it.”

Now how the heck was that supposed to happen? 

The eyes have it . . .

I ran across this nifty little tool on my laptop. It's called a snipping tool and you can take little cuts from any image that crosses your screen, morph it with whatever morphing app you have and then do other stuff with it. Or you can just leave it native to how it was snipped. 

Since I've been spending a ton of time lately in the BIC position (butt in chair), I got to watching for images and then snipping out their eyes. It sounds a little morbid putting it that way. You'll have to just trust me though . . . no images were harmed in the creation of this post!  

A close friend I grew up with. I ran across a candid picture that his dad had taken one day when we  were all at the races together. 

Holly in our Skype session.. such fun!

Holly's self portrait.

This is Piper, my Boston. She's wearing a beanie cap complete with propeller and everything. It was really just a sticker I stuck to her head. But she wore it well.  

This is my other Boston, Sampson, when he was just a puppy. It was that one blue eye that drew us in!

Sampson has an evil side to him!

Here's Sampson in Holly's watercolor family portrait. 

And here are Ronnie and Ron in the same watercolor! 

So that was a bit of fun. Stay tuned for future posts featuring other body parts, taken harmlessly from friends, family and critters who happen to wander across my screen.

Human Clay

I was thinking today about a woman I met a while back. I’d been filling in for the teacher in my Core Training class. The class has gotten fairly popular recently and gets pretty crowded. But back then, only a few of us die-hards would show up on a regular basis. And on that particular day, there was only one woman besides me. Needless to say, it was an easy class to teach! 

So it was that the two of us talked a lot for that hour. And somehow we ended up on the topic of how/where/when we grew up. She, it turns out, was raised in New York City where her first nineteen years were spent in an apartment. She talked about how it felt to live sixteen stories up. How the sound of the street was non-existence and how safety was in height.

She told me about when she’d gotten married, taken straight from daddy’s arms into those of her new husband and how the first thing they did was to move. Out of the city and into the suburbs where her one story, single family house freaked her completely out for the first few months. She told me how terrified she was of being at ground level, to hear traffic on the streets outside. To know that the window of her bedroom was all that separated her from the potential stranger lurking somewhere out there.

How odd that I never considered a lifestyle so different from my own. So different from the farm where I was raised, where safety was in distance not in height. In being close enough to the earth to touch the dirt with my bare feet. To walk outside and get lost in the silence of trees and orchard and land and sky . . . for as far as the eye could see.

I tried to place myself in her setting: a taxi cab at the curb instead of an old, rusty truck. Skipping along crowded sidewalks to get to school rather than that one mile walk along a country road where a car might pass on occasion. Tall buildings that reach toward the clouds and crowd the horizon like they own it. As opposed to those endless almond trees, grape vines and barbed wire fences stretching on and on to infinity.

To a certain extent, we’re all carved and shaped by our beginnings. Formed into the persons we become by the mold of our surroundings. I could no easier imagine being rooted in the city than she could envision living out her youth on the farm. And yet, there we both were, together in Tim’s Core Training Class in Houston,Texas, flung together by life, time, age. And possibly the shared need to transcend our flabby middles—a shape we now shared . . . regardless the earlier molds we were cut from.  

July in the mountains . . .

If a picture paints a thousand words then here is the novel about our two weeks in the Blue Ridge mountains, in the little town of Maggie Valley, North Carolina.

Fourth of July in Maggie Valley . . .  

The reason why they call them The Smoky Mountains (the view from our porch): 

And we found another waterfall! 

Here's my favorite picture from one of our walks 

And those baby birds again. 

The End