U is for Unexpected Joys—the Ones that Sneak up on You

U is a hard letter to use to inspire a post for the A to Z Challenge but we’re getting closer to the finish line so I can’t quit now. The first thought that popped into my head was The Ugly Truth—the movie, not truths about my life that are ugly. I hope I don’t have too many of them and if I don’t go looking for them I can’t find them. But other than saying The Ugly Truth is one of my favorite movies because I love the sexual tension between Mike (Gerard Bulter) and Abby (Katherine Heigi) what more is there to say about this 2008 film other than apparently I’m not the only one who loves it enough to watch every time it comes on TV. It was a commercial success taking in 205 million and only cost 38 million to make.

But I will reveal one ugly truth. I resorted to asking my MS AI Copilot, Jasper, for one-word prompt suggestions to write about. He came up with a list of nine topics. For example, U is for Underestimated or it’s for Unreliable Narrators. Uninvited Guests. Utter Nonsense and Unexpected Joy. At first glance none of these seemed to fit my theme of the humans, habits, hidden joys and heartaches that shaped my world. But on second glance I found my Bingo! I could make Unexpected joys work.

And because Jasper is programmed to never give a simple list or quicky answer when he can write an entire monologue about whatever you asked, he expanded on what exactly I could pull out of my writer’s tool box. This is what AI said: “Jean, this one has your name all over it. You could write about the small, ridiculous, delightful things that happen in community life—Mahjong surprises, a neighbor’s one‑liner, a Toby Keith song drifting through the dining room, a forgotten object turning up in a drawer. It’s warm without being sentimental.”

Nope, I'll come up with my own unexpected joys. Thank you very much. And I did. Here are four of my unexpected joys:

Lemon Meringue pie. We have a pretty good chefs here at my CCC but they don’t offer much for desserts. The wait staff rarely even mentions them because they are mostly young high school kids who are working their first jobs and—my theory is—they’ve figured out if we don’t order them they get to go home earlier. A fellow resident and I have a running joke going of asking nightly if they have lemon meringue pie, knowing the answer is always no. Then it happened. A waitress came running up to our table and proclaiming we have Lemon meringue pie and she’s been saving two pieces for us. If we were allowed to tip, she would have gotten a good one for giving us both an unexpected joy.

Another unexpected joy also revolved around a dessert. It’s not unusual for people in our Independent Living apartments to bake and share their bounty with neighbors—in building two and I live in building one and no one here seems to use their ovens. One day I got a knock on the door and opened it to a resident from building one holding a plate of warm, peanut-butter cookies. She had heard me say that it was my favorite. For her to take those cookies down the elevator, across the lobby, through the piazza, key herself into my building, and track down my apartment—that was unexpected. But when I bit in to one I was quite sure she’d used the same recipe my mom did when I was growing up. My joy eating those cookies can’t be measured.

Another unexpected joy also invoked good memories. I only listen to the radio in the car, and since I don’t drive much I don’t hear a lot of music. Last week I had to go to the sleep lab and when I started my Chevy Trax Willie Nelson was blasting out, On the Road Again. When my husband was alive and we’d go on vacation or to someplace fun on the weekend he had that song first on a play list of road trip music. Hearing that song quite by happenstance brought unexpected joy. 

Side note here: Long time followers of my blog might want to know that I slept like a baby in the sleep lab and it resulted in me getting a BIPAP. It’s been a long five years of sleepless nights but I’m doing much better now.

The last unexpected joy I’ll share is an oldie but the best unexpected joy in my life. First the back story: When my mom passed away I held back a small amount of her ashes and I kept them in a miniature Tupperware bowl attached to a key chain, but somehow it got lost when I moved after Don’s stroke. I keep hoping against hope they’ll turn up but they didn’t. For twelve years. I was looking for something else altogether and I found it in a box of keepsakes from my childhood that I got out to show my brother. When I pulled the little bowl out, he said he hadn't seen me that happy in a long time. Back when I moved I must have put it in the box for safe keeping. It was safe alright...and lost for over a decade.

Even though the prompt I used for the letter U didn’t come from within my aging brain, I think AI’s suggestion did a pretty good job of pulling the warm fuzzy moments out of me. I guess that’s the thing about unexpected joys—they don’t care where the prompt comes from. I’m just glad they showed up for me to write about. ©

T is for Toys—A Road Back to Childhood

Toys was an easy pick for my letter T in the A to Z Blogger Challenge. I did consider writing about the tornado that wiped out my husband’s entire family farm when he was a teenager, but those memories are documented in a past post. That tornado—his family’s second—killed 24 people, injured over two hundred, stayed on the ground for 39 minutes, and carved a 14‑mile path of destruction. It was also the reason my husband spent his entire adult life trying to buy back the toys of his youth. And then some.

If you’ve ever seen the TV series Hoarders, you already know that most hoarders have major losses in their lives coupled with untreated depression. Their common thread is loss—loss that drives them to surround themselves with whatever they collect, be it trash or treasures. Another contributing factor is insecurity so deep most of us can’t understand how they can live that way.

Don was not a hoarder like you see on that show. But he could have been—would have been—if he hadn’t had years of treatment for depression. His thing was collecting: road maps, coins and currency, gas and oil memorabilia. And his gateway “drug” was buying back the antique toys similar to what he and his brothers once owned, the ones that flew over the fields and woods the day of the tornado.

By the time we met, I was collecting antiques too. I started with furniture I restored and used, then I moved on to smaller things—like filling in the missing pieces of the dish set my folks used at their cottage. I also had (and still have) marbles, Cracker Jack toys and wooden nickels. By the time I moved out of the house after Don died, we had a library room full of well‑organized “smalls” in showcases and collector boxes. Some might have called it hoarding; most people labeled us collectors because everything was clean, researched, and neatly displayed. Visitors often said coming to our house was like going to a museum. A friend once gave Don a retractable pointer as a joke because he loved giving tours of our “museum.”

After Don died, it took me two years to downsize—two years of selling things on eBay, hauling boxes to an auction house and selling through an antique mall where we’d been vendors for years.

But I will say this: we never met another vendor who didn’t have at least a few hoarder tendencies. Don’s basement and garage before we married were stuffed, but never as bad as the hoarding situations you see on TV. Don had a method to his madness, and I can already hear someone in the cheap seats of Bloggerland saying, “Sure. All hoarders say that.” But not many hoarders can say their widows sold one bread‑box‑sized item for $19,000 and a half dozen more for $4,000 to $7,000. He studied the collectibles he loved and had the disposable income to buy what he knew would go up in value.

Not everything did go up, of course. As kids we both collected stamps, and it was hard to even get face value out of those. I ended up donating a box of newer commemorative sheets to a place that uses them to teach kids about history. The moral of that story: never, ever buy anything sold as a collectible. No one lives long enough for those “investments” to pay off.

All collectors have a backstory—whether it’s the good stuff with actual value or they have houses overtaken by plastic recycling, rotten food and human waste. I’m grateful my obsessed collector was the former (sentiment‑driven) and not the latter (insecurity‑driven). If he hadn’t stood watching old license plates, pedal cars, live chickens, and ten‑gallon milk cans spinning upward, Don probably wouldn’t have spent his adult life trying to buy back his childhood toys and the family pieces handed down through generations. His grandfather’s pocket watch, for example, was lost to the tornado but after Don died he had a dozen I had to sell.

He couldn’t pass an estate sale, garage sale, auction or antique store without stopping. And we had fun doing it. We even managed to find most of the toys he’d gotten out of cereal boxes in the ’40s. And I still have his Captain Midnight decoder ring, signal‑mirror ring and bomb rings. Small trinkets, but they come with a large box of memories. ©

 

 

Photos: At the top of the post is one of the showcases in our library for our smalls. The photo here at the bottom is of one wall in our garage for Don's signs. The center picture is of Don showing his friends his gas & oil smaller items. Another wall had 1920s, fully restored gas pumps with the glass globes---can't find a photo of those. But you get the idea. Don was a hoarder but I was an organizer so it all worked out. 

S is for Stories—the Ones I Didn’t Tell

I came up with four words for the letter S in the A to Z Challenge: secrets, stuff, snow and serendipity.

Serendipity was the first to go. It’s one of my favorite words in the English language, and I’ve had plenty of serendipitous moments in my life, but none of them fit my theme of the humans, habits, hidden joys and heartaches that shaped my world. Still, who doesn’t love a story about the universe lining things up just right? That thought reminds me of the day I got myself in trouble at book club by using the word serendipity in the wrong company.

The book was My Mrs. Brown. As the facilitator went around the room, women offered comments like, “It was a sweet book,” and “It was a feel-good book.” When it was my turn, I said I thought it was mostly boring. Someone laughed and said, “We can always count on Jean to have a different opinion.”

Then the next woman gushed about how the book was full of divine interventions. “It was so inspirational!”

Say what?

I asked her for an example. She said it was a divine intervention that the main character took a job packing up the house of a wealthy woman who had died. Finding a dress in the closet was a divine intervention. Someone giving Mrs. Brown a book about fashion was a divine intervention.

I couldn’t help myself. “I’d call all those things serendipity. How do you define a divine intervention?”

She bristled. “I don’t believe in serendipity. Everything is divine intervention!”

I took that to mean only non-believers use the word serendipity. Since I’m an agnostic and it’s one of my favorite words, I would have let it drop before we wandered into religion—but someone else asked if I thought serendipity was always happy little events. She threw me a life-line.

“Yes,” I said. “I just don’t think God has time to help someone find a dress when there are more important things going on in the world.”

“So you’re saying divine interventions are more like miracles,” she said, clarifying my words.

Bingo. She won the Kewpie doll.

Next I tried snow as my prompt, but that went nowhere fast. Long-time readers know my husband plowed snow for over forty years and I did it for seventeen. It’s well documented in this blog. But newcomers might enjoy hearing about a game we occasionally played in the middle of the night when conditions were just right. We called it Rat Hockey.

Yes, real rats.

They’d venture out onto the mall parking lot and we’d escort them across it with two or three trucks, turning our plows back and forth to make the rat slide across the icy surface. We’d “steal” the rat from each other mid-slide, and you scored if you were the one who ran it into a snowbank. As far as we knew, none of the rats were harmed. We’d see them dig their way out of the snowbank and look around as if to say, “What the hell just happened?” It’s a wonder none of us ever collided. Imagine explaining that to an insurance adjuster.

Then I moved on to stuff, but that got cut too. I’d just watched a couple episodes of Hoarders, and I didn’t want readers thinking I had—or ever had—stuff in that quantity or quality. But lately I’ve been scaring myself with my inability to throw out three glass jars that once held Meijer-brand peaches. They’re such a pretty shape. Surely I can find a use for them. I’m almost afraid to go to Meijer this week for fear one of those peach jars will jump in my cart like a stray kitten no one could leave behind. If I buy peaches every two weeks, you do the math. Hoarding has to start somewhere.

The last word I crossed off was secrets. As much as I up-chuck my life online, one could assume I’ve already dissected every minute of my time on earth. I haven’t. Not by a long shot. One secret in particular I've been keeping since 1969. I finally told my youngest niece a year ago. She said all the right things—“I’m so sorry that happened to you” blab, blab, blab—but it didn’t make me feel better. It wasn’t cathartic. Remembering that made me realize I can’t write about secrets. Not this year.

Having eliminated all my S word prompts I have nothing left in my writer’s tool box! I guess I’ll have to skip forward to my T topic for tomorrow. Please come back. ©