Movie Night, Romance and Selfishness

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a movie coming up for our Friday Movie Night here on the CC campus. I read the book and loved it so I can’t wait to see this movie. I’m going to like movie nights here. It’s a chance to discuss films in real time with real people. Something I’ve been craving in recent years: people around when I want them but solitude and plenty of places to enjoy it when I need it. 

Last week they showed the movie The Radium Girls which was based on a true story of girls who worked in a watch factory. They painted the numbers on the dials with glow-in-the-dark radium and died from being told to lick their brushes to bring them to a fine point after dipping them into the radium. This was in the same time frame when scientists wore lead shields and heavy gloves to handle the stuff. The company knew it was poisonous but hired a so-called company doctor to claim the girls who got sick all had syphilis, knowing back in the ‘20s they’d be too embarrassed to talk about their illness. 

As I was leaving the movie to walk back to my building my favorite security guard and I got into a discussion about labor protection laws and the history of the coal mines. He's taking a class that covered the sit-down strikes and I shared my grandfather's first-hand story of being in one of those strikes when sharp shooters hired by the company massacred sitting strikers. We can thank labor unions for making our work environments safe and anyone who thinks they've outlived their usefulness doesn't know human nature well enough. 

Good employers makes any place better and everyone I've asked here at the CCC seems to enjoy their work environment including the cleaning woman. She’s got quite the love story to tell. She’s an immigrant from France and she met an American guy when she was in college decades ago. He went home and they became pen pals, both going on the marry other people, raised families, lost their spouses. All that time remaining pen pals. When he invited her State Side to attend a party in his honor, she came and never went back. They got married and if you read that in a romance book you’d think the storyline was far-fetched.

When I was in the floral business and servicing weddings for twenty years I used to collect how-they-met stories from all my brides. I loved those stories, even before I started reading romance books. Not to mention I was without a boyfriend half of those years, looking for my own Prince Charming so it was research of a practical sort. I don’t know what happened to that collection of handwritten notes in a spiral notebook. A lot of that happened after my husband’s massive stroke is a blur. Yada, yada, yada you know the rest of that chapter in my story, I've told it often enough. Now, I joke that I was Wonder Woman back then meaning it’s a wonder I didn’t have my own stroke from all the stress I was under. 

The point I'm trying to make it that's it's been a long road getting to a point in life where I virtually have no/few responsibilities and my desire to keep it that way probably just earned me a label I won't like. I turned down an invitation to work with two other x-florists living here to make Christmas decorations for all the public areas. One of the guys talked management out of hiring an outside company and put him in charge. I’d been avoiding him since learning that but he sent me an email asking me to join his planning session. I had no choice but to face my first real dilemma here and I wrote back: “I have zero interest in using what little time and creative energy I have left in life to revisit what I did for 20 years to earn a living...especially the Christmas rush.” I was too blunt, wasn't I. But I didn't want to get locked into a time consuming volunteer role for all the holidays on the calendar. I don't need the jerk circle.

Does that make me a selfish person? I feel selfish. It's flower arranging I'm turning down for crying out loud, not working to save endangered animals from extinction or to put an end to world hunger. So how come I feel like this? Would a softer worded email have made a difference? I'm getting better at turning down things I don't want to do but the feeling guilty part that comes after needs work.

But if there's one thing I've learned in my almost 80 years on earth is that we can't do it all. At my age I have to cut to the chase, do what makes me happy even if it's on a smaller scale than I'd dreamed of doing before life got in the way of my plans. I can no longer be another John Steinbeck or John Singer Sargent but I can be a wordy blogger who paints ugly brown barns in a class full of beginners. ©