From the Dungeon of Pain to the Mahjong Table

A week that begins in a wound clinic and ends in a Mahjong classroom is, admittedly, not everyone’s idea of a balanced life — but for Jean, it’s just another chapter in her ongoing quest to stay upright, amused, and marginally patient with the world around her. From medical mysteries to sparrow‑themed tiles and one very inquisitive student, this dispatch wanders through pain, persistence, and the peculiar joys and frustrations of teaching seniors a game with more rules than Carter had little liver pills… AI

I knew I was in trouble when the instructions for my two‑hour appointment at the wound center included, “Take a pain medication before your appointment.” It also warned that if I was more than ten minutes late, the appointment would be rescheduled. Since I’d already waited weeks to get on their schedule, I was not going to be late come hell or high water. I left fifteen minutes early, thinking I’d use the extra time after I arrived to let my blood pressure come down from the stress of driving. What I didn’t count on was a construction zone that added extra time — not to mention extra stress — to my normal route to the hospital. I got there by the skin of my teeth.

I know what you’re thinking: no one has skin on their teeth, but what do you expect from a blogger who also uses the tired phrase “come hell or high water”? The latter is a quaint 19th‑century way of saying you have “an unyielding resolve to complete a task regardless of extreme obstacles.” My mom used to say it often. “Come hell or high water you’re going to finish your dinner or you'll sit there until bedtime. Liver, back in those days, was my biggest obstacle."

The “skin of my teeth” idiom comes from the Book of Job, verse 19:20. The King James Bible, published in 1611, translates it as: “My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.” I wonder if Job ever imagined his words ending up in The Dictionary of Clichés more than three hundred years after that translation. That was one of my favorite reference books before Google came along.

Didn’t I get off track. Now you know what it’s like to live inside my head. Back to the wound center — which I’d rename the Dungeon of Pain if that didn’t sound too much like a video game. But all kidding aside, it went well. The people were super professional and friendly. The LP helping the doctor kidded at one point, “Remember, I’m the one who gives you Lidocaine gel, and he’s the one who inflicts the pain.”

They debrided the wound on my foot and found formations of urate crystals, which was no surprise since I’d already been told I probably have gout. (And no, I’m not a heavy drinker. In my case it’s a side effect of having stage 3 kidney failure.)

But it was a surprise that they also found evidence of venous ulcers, which they suspect are caused by a leaking varicose vein. Now I’m waiting for a referral call to set up an appointment with a vein specialist. God — another specialist to add to my contact list. But the wound center doctor said we can’t get the wound healed until we get at the underlying causes. Why can’t we go back to the horse‑and‑buggy days when one doctor treated whatever ailed you? Never mind the life expectancy back then was 40 to 45. They also had over‑the‑counter cocaine and snake‑oil salesmen to help you cope.

I have to go back to the center every week for God only knows how long. A few days after that appointment I clicked on my patient portal to read the clinical notes. At the end of a bunch of medical terms strung together like popcorn on a Christmas tree, it said: “Estimated time for wound healing: 4 to 6 months.” Four to six months! And for the foreseeable future I need to stop walking for exercise. There goes my progress with losing weight. If it’s not one damn thing, it’s two damn things — another one of my mom’s favorite sayings.

Change of topic: I taught another Mahjong class of newbies today. Five senior citizens, and four of them will probably make it to the end, but one lady is trying my patience. I’ve been teaching classes once a year at my continuum care community for four years, and there’s always one person who gets hung up on the stupidest things.

When I was doing the history segment of the class, I showed them my one‑bams collection of tiles. They all have birds carved or painted on the fronts, and I explained you can date antique sets by the style of those birds. “I don’t get it. Why are they all birds?” Ms. Dense asked. “Tradition,” I replied. “The word Mahjong literally means ‘sparrow,’ and for centuries that’s how one‑bams tiles have been made.” “But why?” she asked again. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand,” I said. “It’s just an interesting sidebar to appreciating the history and artistry of the game.” She took up so much time with her “why this” and “why that” questions. “Why can’t I use a joker in a pair?” “Because it’s one of the fourteen rules for using jokers. Mahjong has a lot of rules, and part of the fun and challenge is remembering them all.” “But why do they have so many rules?”

I didn’t say it, but I wanted to tell her we’d need a time machine to take us back a century or two to get all the answers to her questions. You'd think that would be obvious with a game as old as Mahjong.

There you have it —another exciting week in my world. How did your week go? Bonus points if it involved fewer specialists and fewer people asking "why?" every few minutes. ©

Note: In the early 20^th century a massive advertising campaign inspired the well-known idiom, "He/She has more [things] than Carter has Little Liver Pills." They stopped making Carter's liver pills in 1959 so I can't be the only person old enough to remember this saying.

The first photo below is a collection of very old one bam Mahjong tiles made of ivory over bamboo. My collection (second photo) is much smaller and are mostly Bakelite tiles from the 1930s. 

         

Keeper of Her Memories: Friendship in the Shadow of Dementia

There are friendships that teach you things when you’re young — how to share crayons, how to keep secrets, how to be loyal even when you’re mad. And then there are friendships that teach you things decades later, lessons you never expected to need. Jean’s best friend since kindergarten is teaching her the limits of her patience now. Yesterday she called Jean fifteen time, and had she answered each call, they would have been as fresh to Nancy as the first. Dementia has taken her memory, but not her need for connection. Jean got a little short with her on one of those calls — but Nancy didn’t remember it. Maybe that’s the grace and mercy in all of this...AI

I call Nancy my best friend since kindergarten, where we bonded over the sandbox. It was a large wooden box up on legs, filled with beach sand and assorted toys for the boys to build roads and moats for the sandcastles we girls made. Water was involved, and so were boxes and tin cans—our architectural building tools—and we had a cardboard drawbridge. Kindergarten in the ‘40s was nothing like it is today. It was more like daycare: story time, play time, and learning how to get along. If we learned anything academic, it didn’t register in my memory bank.

Nancy lived around the corner, and we walked to and from school every day from kindergarten through high school graduation — except for a two‑week period when we weren’t speaking. Try as I might, I can’t remember what we were fighting about. If I hadn’t destroyed most of my diaries when I moved into my continuum care community, I could have looked it up. I was a regular Laura Ingalls back in my teens, only instead of writing about frontier life I chronicled the movies we saw, the records we bought, the boys who looked our way, and other silly fluff no one would care about even if those diaries had survived two hundred years.

Nancy doesn’t remember that fight, let alone what caused it. She has dementia now, and if she calls her sons and nieces as often as she calls me, I feel sorry for them. Yesterday she called me fifteen times — not her record. I usually answer once a day and we talk for 12 to 17 minutes. But yesterday I broke my own rule and answered a second time. I wish I hadn’t.

We had just hung up from a half‑hour conversation where I told her about a Mahjong class I was teaching that afternoon. I thought the extra‑long chat might keep her from repeat dialing while I was teaching. It didn’t. When I answered the second time, I let my annoyance show as I told her my class was starting in a few minutes. “Oh, what class is that?” she asked. "We’ll talk tomorrow," I replied then hung up without saying goodbye. 

The next day she was her normal cheerful self, asking how my day was going. I didn’t bother apologizing — she wouldn’t have remembered me hanging up on her any more than she remembers our teenage fight. It’s funny how memory works as people settle deeper into Dementia Village. Nancy can still talk recipes and cooking, one of my least favorite topics. But she was always my go‑to person for anything resembling entertaining. She spent most of her adult life creating fabulous menus and dinner parties in Washington, D.C. Her husband was an economics adviser who worked in the White House when the Democrats were in office and at the Brookings Institution when they weren’t. She loved china and linens and had seven or eight complete sets of dishes to prove it. I, on the other hand, fell apart at the thought of planning a party. And I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I planned a party — assuming I had lost two of my digits chopping cucumbers.

Now that she’s been moved to an Assisted Living facility, she often tells me she feels better after she talks to me. I don’t tell her she leaves me exhausted. We’ve been friends too long for that kind of honesty. Even my brother, when I saw him a couple of times a week down in our Memory Care building, didn’t wear me out like Nancy’s calls do. And they both sang the same songs: the Oh, How I Want to go Home blues and the I don’t Belong Here! protest march.

I also never told her about the time she flew from D.C. to Michigan after Don died and I had to run out and buy a stack of linen napkins to match my collection of antique diner dishes because I knew she thought paper napkins were beyond tacky. She would have died of cardiac arrest if she knew — gasp! — that sometimes I even used paper towels. She wanted to see me with her own eyes to know I was okay. That’s the kind of friend she was.

We were opposites in many ways. Don and I were blue‑collar; Nancy and her husband were white‑collar. They had children; we didn’t. She ignored politics completely; I loved talking about them. She loved to shop; I was allergic to the the upscale stores we'd go when she was in town. But our roots bound us together. And despite the miles between us, we could always sense when the other was stressed and needed a phone call.

I’ve been lucky to have two best friends in my life. One I met in kindergarten, and we were two peas in a pod until she married and moved out of state. For a couple of years, I resented her husband for taking her away. I missed having a best friend until Don came along and took on that role. Now, looking back, I wonder if Nancy and I had lived in the same city all these years, how that might have affected our marriages or friendship. We taught each other how to be loyal best friends, and we transferred that skill to our spouses. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think it’s possible to have two best friends at the same time. And a spouse will usually — rightly so — come first because you’re building a life together.

On the other hand, none of us can be everything to everyone. And as we age, our roles change. A spouse becomes a caregiver. A child or niece becomes our decision‑maker. A friend, like me, becomes a shoulder to cry on when the “mean children” won’t let you go back home. I’m also the only person still alive who knew Nancy during her first twenty‑five years on earth. By default, I’m the only one left who can help her reach back into those years. Searching for those memories in the dark corners of my mind so I can ask, “Do you remember the time…” might exhaust me, but it also makes me feel useful. I accept that new role with both sadness and pride that I still know where the drawbridge went in that old kindergarten sandbox. ©

Photo: The two of us, circa late 1950s. 

The Serendipity of Crossing Paths — Then and Now

Follow Jean as she reflects on how a viral quote about destiny and connection unexpectedly intertwined with a moment from her own past. What began as a simple search for proper attribution — the kind of rabbit hole she falls into with Olympic‑level skill — turned into a walk that reminded her how the roads we choose, and even the ones we avoid, sometimes lead us straight to the people and moments that shaped us the most. In this piece, she follows that thread of serendipity all the way to a dusty construction site and a quiet, unexpected smile… AL

There’s a lovely viral quote going around that I now know is attributed to a blogger named Darius Roman. It goes like this:

In English they say, “I’m lucky to have you.” In poetry they say, “Out of all the people the world has created, of all the roads I could have taken, and all the lives I could have lived, some miracle of timing allowed my story to cross paths with yours.”

If you know me, you’ve already guessed I went down the proverbial rabbit hole to figure out who authored those words. I hate it when people don’t give proper credit to things they copy from one place and paste into their own corner of cyberspace. Even an “author unknown” is preferable to letting people assume the author is the person sharing quotes like this. If you do that, stop it.

After following several false leads, my good old friend Google AI finally found the target of my sleuthing. It describes Darius Roman as “a contemporary internet poet who achieved viral popularity on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. He is best known for his modern, romantic rewrites of common phrases.” Blah, blah, blah — whose “writing relies on accessible language (does that mean he doesn’t use big words?), grand romantic imagery, and themes of destiny, fate, and connection over sheer luck.” I swear, sometimes these AL bios sound like they were written by someone who got paid by the adjective.

The first time I read the quote, I hand‑copied it off my computer screen and carried it around with me on one of my daily walks around campus, trying to decide if I could turn it into a blog post. I do that sometimes for inspiration. Finally I gave up trying to figure out why this quote resonated so strongly with me and asked AI that question — and this was the answer:

Why It Resonates • Contrast: It starts with a simple, everyday phrase and upgrades it into deep gratitude. • Scale: It contrasts the vastness of the universe with a single, specific meeting. • Timing: It frames love not just as a choice, but as a rare accident of time.

Well, of course it does. I could have told you that… if I had sat in a corner from here to next week. Instead, I outsourced the thinking to AL, which at my age feels like a perfectly reasonable life choice.

Back to the walk: I took a route I rarely go on because it means spending a block in close proximity to a large construction zone. It was after dinner, so I assumed the workers had all gone home and it would be quiet enough to hear my own thoughts. I was wrong. A street sweeper was going back and forth, cleaning dirt off the future parking lot, moving around pallets of construction material, scaffolding, and other machinery. I set the brakes on my rollator and sat down to watch him work. Nothing says “wild night out” like parking your rollator to watch heavy machinery.

I had more than a passing interest in the machine across the street. My husband owned a street sweeper before his massive stroke and he used it to clean large malls and a multi‑plex theater around town. He even had a contract to clean the streets in a small nearby town. The sweeper I was watching, though, was 35 years newer than the one my husband had before the turn of the century. Don would have loved the fact that the newer one has water jets underneath that dampens the dirt before the gutter broom spins debris to the center broom that, in turn, spins it into the collection hopper. Street sweeping back in his day was dusty business — but he loved it. He loved big machinery, the bigger the better.

One of the blessings or curses — it can change from day to day — of getting old is that memory triggers come at you when you least expect them. Some days it’s sweet nostalgia, and other days it’s ‘why did my brain save that?’ It was like looking at a snapshot from the past when the man across the street stopped his work to raise a coffee cup to his lips while letting another vehicle go by. I’d seen my husband do the very same thing hundreds of times while he sat high in a street sweeper or front end loader seat.

It also occurred to me that I was experiencing a moment of serendipity. Had I taken my usual route around the lake, I wouldn’t have crossed paths with a memory trigger that brought a smile to my face. And I wouldn’t have been reminded of the simple truth behind Darius Roman’s sentiment — that out of all the people in the world and all the roads any of us might travel, sometimes a small miracle of timing lets our story intersect with someone who changes everything. ©

                                                         How do street sweepers work?

 

If you like Political Humor you might enjoy this AL created video about Trump's claiming to change the name of Lake Ontario. The creator has a Facebook page called Canadian Resistance Army and all of its videos make me laugh. 

On related political note: Google is no longer my good friend. Google Maps changed the name Lake Ontario to Lake America on their map and Mapquest didn't (at least not as of today). Boycott on for me.