Birds, Diuretics, Anti-Vaxxers and Fan-Girling Baseball

 Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday went by with a good deal of guilt tagging along behind me. Guilt because I feel like I’m wasting time. I’m in a holding pattern where I don’t want to start packing or selling and giving away art and furniture I used for staging the house because I still don’t have a firm appointment for a closing. (We are one step closer though, the appraisal came back $2,000 higher than the offer I accepted.)  

And I’m worried I might spill my morning coffee on the carpeting or break something now that the house presumptuously will belong to someone else soon and I’ll be like a squatter living rent free for up to 60 days while someone else is making mortgage payments. I asked the realtor what happens if, say, a tree falls down? Do I just have it cut up and hauled away? "They'd notice it missing." He said I’d need to call the new owners and ask them how they wanted to handle anything that gets broken or damaged during the 60 days possession period. "It’s their house, their decision."

I’ve started a mental list of all the things I’m going to miss about this house. Birds ranked in the top ten---added on the list when a white-breasted nuthatch landed on my deck railing and he brought with him a wave of sentimental attachment for all the birds that are attracted to my yard. Over the years I’ve cataloged twenty-five species of birds that hang around this place. In the early evening if I sit on the deck wearing my hearing aids their songs and calls drown out all thoughts and it’s almost effortless to live in the moment. I’m taking my bird call with me but I don’t expect it will get me into the same Man-Bird “conversations” I’ve come to enjoy here. But I might trick the neighbors into thinking their eyesight is getting bad when they can’t spot the ‘bird’ calling its mate.

Did I mention I’m sitting at the Guy Land Cafeteria right now, another high ranking thing I will miss after I move? I stopped on the way home from a doctor’s appointment because it was 3:00 and I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch. I was trying to fool his scales into believing I’d lost a few pounds in the two months since I saw him last. But both my blood pressure and my weight were exactly the same causing me to curse the fact that I’ve given up oriental food, salty snacks and cookies for absolutely nothing. The doctor decided it's time to add another drug to the mix to lower my blood pressure---oh, God a diuretic. Could I pee anymore often than I already do? I know where every single restroom is between home and every place I go. If reincarnation is real I want to come back as a man just so I can pee in a bottle.

My house cleaners were here this week but the house was pretty much still spotless from the showings so I had one of them clean the oven for the new owners. They came to the door carrying their masks and asked if they needed to wear them. I replied, “The Delta variation of the virus is in our county now, so, ya, I’d like you to wear them.” They are anti-vaxxers to the core. “We don’t like the government telling us what to do.” One of them said her uncle just got vaccinated and sent her a picture of a magnet stuck to his vaccination spot. Rather than believe the obvious, that her uncle was poking fun at her anti-vaxxer miss-information, she’d rather believe the government is involved in a vast conspiracy to make us all tractable with magnetic chips. You can’t argue with stupid and I didn’t even try.

Apparently, they’d just lost a large job of cleaning rooms in a motel because the owner only wanted vaccinated cleaners and the cleaning service owner (who was one of my cleaners that day) told the motel owner that she refuses to ask her workers if they’ve gotten vaccinated. "It's none of my business what they do with their bodies," she told me and her former client. Then she said her sister-in-law who works for an OBGYN is “being forced to quit her job of 30 years because she won’t get vaccinated. What an outrage!" I kept my mouth shut because one does not disagree with someone on a rant who could use your tooth brush to clean your toilet.

I’ve written seven hundred and thirty words to here. What can I add to get my writing quota up to 1,000? I could list a few more things I will miss after I move but I don’t want to dwell on that aspect of moving. I’m way past the point where a pros-and-cons list serves a useful purpose. I’ve already caught myself on the verge of crying once while thinking about all the memories associated with this house.

How about I report on my project to teach myself about major league baseball? I’ve watched a game just about every night since I made that declaration. The basics of the game I pretty already knew but I’m still trying to sort out the different kinds of pitches and I’ve printed out a list of baseball slang so when an announcer says things like, “He threw a cookie” I'll have a clue what’s going on. I'm also still trying to figure out why runners throw themselves on the ground and slide to a base instead of just keep running to get there. And are some of those guys wearing man-thongs because they don't all have the telltale underwear lines. And can we talk about the germs they pass around in baseball? What's with all the spitting? One guy even rubbed his spit all over his bat and I doubt he washed his hands before he was out in the field catching a ball in the next inning.

But the most interesting thing I’ve learned about baseball is how easy it is to fall asleep during a game. It makes me smile every time I catch myself waking up when the crowd gets loud because it brings back warm memories of my dad doing the same thing while nestled in his sleepy hollow, red leather chair. He could be snoring but would wake up if we tried to change the channel or turn the volume down and I'm starting to fan-girl those crowd sounds playing in the background of my life. ©