The Movie Club, Birthday Party and Brand New Baby

There was a time when I could have written, “The mantel clock struck twelve...” which is arguably a more dramatic word picture than saying my atomic clock’s digital numbers just let me know I’ve wasted the entire morning sitting in front of the computer in my bathrobe. Ohmygod I can be lazy when given the opportunity. One side of my brain tells me I deserve it for surviving the past four weeks of over scheduling myself because I feel like I’m returning home after a long, hard trip down a rabbit hole. At least when Alice came back from her trip down the White Rabbit’s hole she had some interesting tales to tell thanks to her creator, Lewis Carroll, who had an extraordinary imagination---or a good supply of psychedelic drugs. Me, I have neither one at my disposal. And what’s the other side of my brain telling me? It’s doing a constant drum beat: Life is too short, use it or lose it! Nothing new to see here, move along little doggies, move along.

Since I last sat down to write a blog post, I’ve been out with my Movie and Lunch club, to a family birthday party and to the gym a few times. The movie we saw was Going in Style, a remake of a 1979 film by the same name starring George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg. You know you’re getting old when you can remember the original movie almost as well as the one you just saw a few days ago. The new version stars Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Joey King and they threw Ann-Margret into the mix so they could add a senior sex scene. (At least they didn't make us look at them nearly naked.) If you’ve seen the trailer for the movie you’ll know it's about three old guys who plot and carry out a bank robbery. In the original version they did it to add excitement to their lives; in the remake they did it because the bank dissolved their company’s pension funds to pay off the company’s debts which put a darker twist to this “comedy” that was a little too real for me, having survived almost losing our pension during the banking meltdown a few years back. I wouldn’t recommend the movie if you pay night rates but we only paid $5.00 for a matinee and it was worth that much. Although I must disclose that others in our group of twelve gave the film a higher rating than I did. What I liked, though, was the opportunity to go to an oriental restaurant afterward and get almond boneless chicken. I miss oriental food since my husband is no long in the picture. We’d pick it up at least once a week. Now, even that close-by take-out restaurant is gone.

Guess what I tried to do at the birthday party for one of the newly minted two year olds in the family? I tried to jump a hop-scotch pattern drawn with pink chalk on the driveway. I did okay until I got to the part where I would have had to hop on one foot three times, then bend down to pick up the stone marker. No way could I do that even though my balance is improving since I bought a balance board. I tried to talk my older brother into trying the hop-scotch grid but he accused of wanting to get him into trouble like he claims I did when we were kids. (It was the other way around.) He recently got a new bathtub and he brought the empty box over to the party with “doors” and “windows” cut into it. The kids loved it for a while then the little balls of energy were riding tricycles and pulling wagons and marking up the cement with colored chalk. Some things never change. I’m impressed by the millennium parents I’m seeing lately. They are in patient teacher mode all the time or maybe it’s just the age of the children I’m around who are all at an age where the entire world is just one big learning tool. The oldest, a three year old is learning how to shake hands when he meets people and he does it like a pro. 

I just got a call from my brother letting me know that we have a brand new baby in the family---the boy I’ve been wanting to carry on the family name. They named him Levi…yes, the same as my dog. My brother named his first born after our family dog-at-the-time. Does that mean another family tradition was born along with this baby? The parents and grandparents, I’m told, all thought I’d get a kick out that. Little do they know but Levi my Might Schnauzer is not the only Levi in the family. Shake our family tree and both the first and middle names of our newest baby will fall out. How cool is that! ©