A Political Pollster Finally Called Me!

I promised myself I wouldn't write another political post anytime soon but here I am four weeks after the last one and I'm breaking my word. Don't worry, I promise it's not going to be a rant type post that will burn your eyeballs out if you support the Republican ticket. A telephone call from a pollster made me change my mind. At first I thought, Hell no! I'm not taking part in a political poll. But then I remembered how many times I've wondered, who are these people that take those polls? The media loves quoting them.  

Edited to add: The poll itself was taken the morning of the last day of the convention, before Trump's speech and the Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan performances. And this post was written two days before Biden dropped out of the race.

I must say the pollster was very professional. She didn't try to lead me in any particular direction and she didn't react in any way to my answers. It was a long poll taking over 25 minutes. The questions started with the basics: my age, sex, level of education, income, marital status and race. She asked who I voted for in the last election, how likely am I to vote in the next. Did I belong to a union? What are my views on abortion? Then it got down to the nitty-gritty of the call. Did I see any of the Republican convention? "Yes, most of it." Did I see any of the coverage of Trump getting shot? "Yes." Did it make you more likely or less likely to vote for him or no change? "No change." How much do you know about J.D. Vance? And she listed some multi-choice answers. I picked the one that I'd never heard of him before Trump picked him for his Vice President. 

She asked me what two things about the convention stood out the most. I wanted to joke that all the people wearing sympathy patches on their ears cracked me up. Oops, they call them solidarity patches.

But I replied that I thought Sarah Hunkleabee Sanders did a good job fulfilling her mission. The pollster followed up by asking what I meant and I told her Sanders's speech was intended soften Trump's image for women voters, make him seem more likable to that demo-graph as did the speech given by Trump's 17 year old grand-daughter. I had to repeat my answer a couple of times so the pollster could write my answer down word for word. The most genuine smile I've ever seen on Mr Trump's face came after that young girl finished. It made me wonder where has that guy has been all these years. I didn't mention that during to poll.

My answer about my second take-away from the convention was about how much I hated seeing Nikki Haley's speech. That I used to like her and thought she's was a good person to have in government, but her reversal in now kissing Trump's butt after months of saying he's unfit for office proves her values and moral compass can be bought off. (I've since learned that Vance did the same, exact thing.) What I didn’t tell the pollster is the night that J.D. Vance spoke I sat down to watch the convention and I fell asleep while he was on! So there may have been other, more noteworthy take-aways for me if I hadn't slept through his appearance. I did catch some of the highlights later that night but I've been watching both the Republican and Democratic conventions with every election since they've been televised so I felt bad about missing an important part of this one.

After the questions about the Republicans the pollster started in on Biden. She didn't ask me if I thought he should drop out of the race and that omission seemed telling to me. A hint about who contracted the poll? I asked that question but the pollster she said they are not given that information. She did ask me about six other Democrats going up against Trump and how I would vote. For example if the election was between Harris and Trump which one would I pick? If you're a long time reader of this blog you'll know I wouldn't vote for Trump if he was running for the county dog catcher. Which reminds me there was a funny meme on Facebook about Babydog, the bulldog that the governor of West Virginia was pulling around the convention floor in a cart. The meme said something about him keeping the dog away from Kristi Noem, the woman who was on Trump's short list for V.P. She's the North Dakota governor who bragged in her autobiography about how she shot the family's 18 month old puppy in a gravel pit because "he was untrainable." She thought it made her look like she was strong enough to make the tough decisions but it just made her look thickheaded for not taking the advice of her editor and others telling her not to include it. Even after they pointed out the uproar that Mitt Romney caused when a photo surfaced of him on vacation with the family dog in a cage strapped on top of his station wagon, she wouldn't back down about putting the puppy killing in her book. Killing that dog also made her look cold-hearted for not re-homing it to someone who just wanted a family pet and not a hunting dog.

There was only one question I refused to answer and the pollster came back to it three times before giving up. It was the one about do you think the country is headed in the right direction. I've always hated that question because 'the right direction' is too ambiguous. If you answer 'no' they assume you are not happy with the party currently in power. But I think you can say 'no' meaning you're not happy with how the government in general has become so Tribal and how 'compromise' has become a dirty word. We've been on that trend since 2010 when Mitch McConnell announced to the world that his job as senate minority leader was to make sure that Obama was a one term president. That's when the party quit representing the people who elected them and the Cult of Personality was born in the Republican Party.  ©

Until Next Wednesday.... 

No matter how you vote, you've got to admit this meme is funny, given the fact that both Trump and Vance have immigrant wives

 

 

 

 

  

 

Facebook and Green Burials

I love Facebook, especial the Short Reels. I watch them an hour and to an hour and a half every day. I suspect I'm addicted to them so I've resorted to setting a timer to limit my time. I don't feel guilty about spending time this way, however, because I learn things and often I get my post inspirations from the site. One of the most useful things I've learned is to never 'like' something on Facebook unless you want to see a gazillion of similar short videos and/or advertisements. I do follow certain people, though, to make sure I don't miss something they put online: Jon Steward, Stephen Colbert, Josh Johnson, The Good News Girl, and the Texas Beeworks girl are all people I follow for predictable content. 

In addition to these celebrities I follow some zoos for content about silverback gorillas, panda bears, sloths and elephants. I also follow or subscribe to Facebook sites about the following topics: Tiny Houses, Unique Trees, Lost Pets, Mid-Century Modern and Atomic Mid-Century Modern decor, cute puppies and kittens, Mahjong and freeing wild animals caught in dangerous situations. Currently I'm fascinated by the turtle pictured above who runs around on a skateboard tormenting the cat that I've actually seen helping the turtle get on his tiny skateboard. As my husband would have phrased it, "That little guy can really haul ass with those wheels under him!" As a kid I spent my summers at a lake so it's probably a sentimental thing, a throwback to when I had baby turtles as pets, that makes the turtles on skateboards so endearing.

I've seen giant tortoises, too, on what I thought had to be custom made skateboards. But I decided to fact check myself before I made that claim and I was shocked to find lots of sources for "Pet Skateboards" and as cheap as seven bucks. There are photos of birds, turtles, bearded dragons, small tortoises, cats, dogs and pigs acting as catalog models for the boards. You can even buy harnesses that go around the boards and your turtles so you can walk them on a leash like a dog. Please do an intervention for me if I start talking about getting a turtle as a pet. Wouldn't I be the talk of my independent living complex if I start walking a turtle? I did do a wee bit of research and learned I'd need at least a 29 gallon aquatic turtle aquarium for a smallish turtle and the water has to be changed weekly. That leaves me out because I can barely lift my gallon watering can to maintain the plants on my deck. 

Still, I miss having a dog. I'd had one in my life from birth to when Levi died a few months before moving here to independent living. Long time readers might remember when I researched getting a cage of canaries and I decided against the idea. There are seven dogs and five cats living here now so I do get to pet a dog almost daily, but I don't think I could find two people who'd agree to care for a dog if something happened to me which is in a document we have to sign to have a dog or cat living with us, plus we pay a $1,000 deposit. That's one of the disadvantages of not having any children or grandchildren or a big estate where I could hire strangers from the pet trust lawyer here in town to be a dog's guardian. The document makes sense in a place like this where every week someone gets hauled off to the hospital. If that person had a pet, the concierge or security guard would call the pet's guardian to come pick it up for temporary or permanent care depending on the outcome of the medical emergency.

Another one of my current fascinations on Facebook are Neil Degrassee Tyson clips. He's an astrophysicist, author, Noble Prize winner and the host of a National Geographics TV show. Not bad for a man with only 132 IQ, which is notably higher than the average person on the street with sixty-eight percent of us falling between 85 and 115. But Neil's is a far cry from smarty-pants public figures like Bill Gates (IQ 150), Elon Musk (155), Mark Zuckerberg (152) and Sunny Doel's 166. What Tyson has that most of these other guys don’t is an ability to communicate advanced theories and technical stuff to ordinary people in a way that we understand it. 

Recently I saw an interview of Neil's where he was asked what happens to us after we die and they got to talking about 'green burials' which is what Neil wants done with his body. I first heard the term on the Netflix series Six Feet Under and the Green Bureau Council defines them this way: “Green burial is a way of caring for the dead with minimal environmental impact that furthers legitimate ecological aims such as the conservation of natural resources, reduction of carbon emissions, protection of worker health, and the restoration and/or preservation of habitat.” What they aren't saying is your body is wrapped in burlap and placed in a shallow grave where the worms and bugs help decompose the body and the open land itself can eventually be reclaimed by nature. 

Neil says he wants this type of burial "so that the energy content contained within it [his body] gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime.” Not for me! I'd rather have the energy left in my dead body go up the smoke stack of a crematorium while its still legal. The National Death Centre says, "one cremation uses as much energy in the form of gas and electricity as a 500-mile car trip and releases a staggering 400 kilos of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, not to mention mercury vapor and other pollutants." 

Everything comes full circle if you give it enough time. I predict that 100 years from now our choices in deposing of our deceased will be between green burials and 'sky burials.' There are fourteen places in my state where green burials are legal now, but when I checked while I was binge watching Six Feet Under there were only a couple of places. So clearly this trend is becoming a real thing. They've got to be considerably cheaper without embalming, a casket, a cement vault or a cemetery marker which might account for the trend more than people being concerned about the environment.

Sky or celestial burials were used by indigenous populations and on every continent on earth dating back thousands of years. (How historians know this would fill an entire post.) Sky burials are still legal in Tibet and parts of India and there is a movement to bring them back as an Eco-friendly choice. A sky burial, in case you don't remember involve a raised platform or a tree and either fire or vultures. Yikes! I'm off to Facebook to find some puppy and kitten videos to replace that image in my head. But I'll leave you with this: If you haven't put your preferences in writing, you should because your next of kin might be a penny-pincher and choose something you (may) or may not like.

Until next Wednesday. © 

                      

Living Through an F-5 Tornado and its Aftermath

The1965 photograph above is of my husband standing on the back steps of what was left of the farmhouse where he grew up. A tornado hit the farm twice, ten years apart. The last time it was an F-5 and they couldn’t rebuild. Strange stories came out of that tornado like the fact that Don’s 24th birthday cake still sat on the kitchen table on the other side of the window on the far left in the photo---not a fleck of debris on it. The second story and roof above the cake were gone. The wall that was still standing upright to the right of Don had a clothesline running between it and a tree and when the clothesline was cut that wall fell in, starting a chain reaction that took down the wall with the window. (If you look hard enough you can see the clothesline on the right side in the photo.) 

Other strange things included one of their work horses was found miles away after the tornado passed---too far for him to run in such a short period of time. Not a scratch on him while the other horses who ran for the near-by woods weren't so lucky. A heavy china cabinet with a wave-glass front toppled over on its face and while three legs snapped off the wave-glass doors were intact. I still have a set of circa 1910 ivory elephants that were inside that china cabinet. Once a set of seven classic elephants but one was lost to the tornado and another suffered a broken leg. Which elephant got lost---happiness, wisdom, prudence, royal dignity, invincible power, longevity or intelligence---was debated a time or two over the years.

The first tornado didn't do as much physical damage but a scandal came out of it because the local insurance man had scammed all the people who 'bought' policies from him. He took their payments for years but never sent them into the main company to actually secure the policies he 'sold.' Victims like Don's parents were left to rebuild on their own. 

Just days before the second tornado Don's dad had bought his first tractor, a bright blue Ford and the barn it was parked in went flying all over the fields that they previously worked with a team of horses, but the tractor didn't get a scratch on it. The only work that tractor ever did was when the family used it to help drag what was left of the house and barn out to a gravel pit on the farm that they turned into a burn pit. Someone in the family had to camp out 24/7 on the driveway with a rifle close by to stop the looters who came along soon after the tornado left the area. And to the day he died, Don would never pass up a Salvation Army bucket without putting money in it. During that cleanup period someone from the organization would hike across the field to the burn pit every day to give the workers coffee and sandwiches so the women folks didn't have to stop to make lunches. Their job was to comb though the debris and sort out what could be salvaged and what had to be burned or buried.

In the decade that followed the tractor was parked in a garage at a house his parents moved into back in town. Eventually, Don bought it from his parents and he still had the tractor when he died twelve years ago---in storage most of that time. Even after he had a massive stroke in 2000 Don couldn't be talked into parting with that 1955 Ford. I finally sold it as an antique tractor after his death and even though I got a good price for it, it was a break-even thing if you factored in the decades of storage fees we paid for Don to hold on to a piece of his family history.  Some might see it as $8,000 thrown down a rabbit hole---as storage fees generally are---but it was his money that he worked hard for and I can think of worst things he could have done his money. I was glad to see it go, though, and I tell myself that Don would be happy that the buyer planned to enter that tractor in antique farm equipment shows. That was Don's retirement dream, taken away from him by his stroke.

The 160 acres of land that made up the farm had nothing left on it for years except a silo and 60 acres of virgin timber. For decades we could still go up there and pick rhubarb and raspberries and hike in woods. But eventually after the four brothers inherited the farm it was a source of many arguments between the head-strong brothers. Two wanted to develop it into a housing project and two wanted to turn it into a campground with hiking trails. After a half a decade of debating and getting no where, the county came along and wanted to buy it. They agreed to sell, but the family tried to get the buy/sell agreement to include the right to name the proposed 'public park' they claimed they wanted it for but the county was adamant that would be a deal breaker. After the sale went through we found out why. It wasn't a family picnic park they wanted the land for, they built a sports complex there and the corporation fronting the money to develop it wanted the naming rights. After the sale, Don could never drive by the old farm without bad feelings coming back up. He felt they'd been lied to and that they never would have agreed to sell if a family picnic park had not been the carrot held out to them. He always wondered if one of his brothers had clued the county in on how to sway the others to sell.

We humans are resilient creatures, aren't we. We go through horrific events like losing our homes, our jobs, our health or people who are important to us but somehow most of us manage to come out the other side of our tragedies to rebuild our lives again and again, and to dream again. But if you look deep enough those horrific events leave scars behind on our souls. 

Living through two tornadoes effected Don. Not only did he take storm warnings seriously and would go to the basement when the weather bureau issued their warnings. I believe if he hadn't stood  watching things like old license plates, his childhood pedal car, live chickens and 10 gallon milk cans spinning upward he wouldn't have spent his entire adult life trying to buy back his childhood in the form of all the toys and family pieces handed down through the generations. He couldn't pass up an estate sale, garage sale, auction or antique store without stopped.

This has been the backstory about how one memorabilia collector was born. All collectors have a backstory---whether it's the good stuff worth big bucks they collector or their houses are over taken by plastic recycling and rotten, bug-infested food. I'm grateful my obsessed collector was the former (sentiment driven) and not the latter (insecurity driven). If you've ever watched the TV show, Hoarders, you already know that they both have a common thread of a loss in their lives that contributes significantly to their need to surround themselves with whatever they collect, be it trash or treasures.  ©

Until Next Wednesday. 

This photo is of the farm before the tornado destroyed it.

Sick to my Stomach Over the Debate!

By the time this post goes live the first presidential debate for the 2024 Biden vs Trump election will have been hashed over and dissected everywhere except maybe in outer space where it's still not known if there are little green creatures living there and if they are, have they 'cracked' our language enough to understand how seriously flawed this debate was? What is for certain is the 51 million people on earth watched that hour and an half Hot Mess in what CNN is saying was "both the highest-rated program and largest livestream event in CNN history." But like I've said many times in the past I often write to help me sort out my emotions so let this be a warning to anyone who is sick to dead of this topic, you may want skip reading this post. But I hope you don't.

There is no way around it, Biden (81) came out looking fragile and very early on he delivered a word salad at the end of a sentence and he never recovered from that faux pas, even though he stuck to the format of the debate and actually tried to answer the moderator's questions where Trump (78) employed an underhanded and nasty debate technique called The Gish Gallop. Wikipedia defines the Gish Gallop like this: "The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments ...with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments." I used to be on a debate team in college and I have no clue how anyone could ever successfully combat the number of lies and insults Trump threw out at a such a fast pace and usually with no relationship to the questions the moderator asked of Trump, leaving Biden looking befuddled and at a loss for words. Who wouldn't be?

CNN didn't live fact-check the debate because, they said, it was up to the candidates to call each other out on misleading and false stuff. The day after, however, Fact Checkers were going at it all over the place including at NPR that reported Trump's claim that food costs have "double, tripled and quadrupled" under Biden when it actually only increased 21%. NPR also said of Biden's claim that Trump's tariff proposal would drive consumer costs up $2,500 per household that it would actually range from $1,700 to $2,500 per year.

I could be here all day if I repeated all the false claims Trump made so I'll jump on the two most outrageous. 1) He denied that the Charlottesville march with the Proud Boys wearing swastikas and carrying tiki torches while chatting Nazi slogans ever took place, and 2) he claimed that the January Sixth Insurrection only "involved a relatively small number of people who where escorted in by the Capital Police." How on earth he gets his followers to believe lies like these when those events were both live on TV and documented on film by a wide number of trusted media sources is beyond understanding. It's scary that we live with so many low information people who believe the crap coming out of his mouth or worse yet, they don't care that he lies and insults his way through life.

The next day both men were at rallies hashing over the debate and Biden was a totally different person who looked and sounded strong and energetic. I truly wish that Biden had shown up at the debate. A couple of sources said he was fighting a cold the night before but I find it hard to believe a night's sleep would make that much difference unless he'd taken something for the cold before the debate. He admitted he isn't the debater he used to be or as young as he used to be but, he said, "I know right from wrong and how to tell the truth and how to get things done. When you get knocked down, you get back up!"

Obama put out a Facebook post after the debate that said much the same things. "Bad debate nights happen," he wrote. "Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November." 

I have to confess that watching the debate made me sick to my stomach. There's talk among the party big wigs about replacing the top of the ticket and there is still time to do that, but that process is messy. Here's what Reuters reported was said by Elaine Kamarck, from the Brookings Institute and a ranking member of the DNC. "He will not be nominated officially until later this summer, so there is still time to make a change and a handful of scenarios to enact one: Biden could decide himself to step aside before he is nominated; he could be challenged by others who try to win over the delegates he has accrued; or he could withdraw after the Democratic convention in Chicago in August, leaving the Democratic National Committee to elect someone to run against Trump in his place." Doing it after the convention would be less messy and would present a more united front. Governor Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg or Governor Gretchen Whitmer are mentioned by most sources as the most likely to get voted in at the top of the ticket. This all makes me feel better that we aren't locked into running the Biden who showed up at the debate, should he show up more often in the next few weeks. 

But I'll be perfectly honest here, I'd prefer it if Biden stepped down but if he doesn't I will vote for him over Trump even if Joe is in a coma. Our Democracy is at stake and that is NOT hyperbolic. Trump's a dangerous threat to our entire system of government. Especially now that the Supreme Court has ruled that the president has "absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts, even if done corruptly or in violation of the criminal laws," as Chief Justice Robert wrote in the majority ruling.

Trump plans to gut the FBI, the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue, do away with the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, undo all the climate control protocols set in place, not to mention how he'll continue to destroy women's reproductive rights. All that and his allegiance to the NRA, Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation that has already made serious inroads into watering down our Supreme Court will fundamentally change the character of our country from a Democracy to Authoritarian government at best, or a Dictatorship at its worst. And let's not forget that the next president also will get to appoint two Supreme Court justices because Thomas and Alito want to retire. 

This election is the most important one in our lifetime. We all need to stay informed and help people understand that we must go to the polls this fall if for no other reason than for the down-ballot people. Which party controls the House and Senate are is going to be crucial no matter who is elected our 47th president.

Until Next Wednesday. ©

Footnote: I just saw this posted on Facebook by Kati Berg: "I have fond memories of the last time Trump was in office ….. refrigerator trucks full of bodies.”about 100,000. Food shortages, people fighting over toilet paper. And essential workers, being sacrificed. Isolation. School shootings . Good times. "

The Iron Chefs and the Eye Doctor

 

There are eight Continuum Care Communities across three states taking part in an Iron Chef competition. The way it works is each month all eight chefs go to one of the campuses to compete with a theme food they prepare for the residents living there and then the residents and guests vote for the best dish served. They just had their fifth cook-off at our sister campus and our Life Enrichment Director took a bus full of us over to eat and drop a voting chip into---presumably---our own chef's ballot box. The theme this time was 'Food Truck Food' and I had no trouble voting for the women who currently designs our daily menus. She served what she called 'Fried Peanut Butter and Jelly.' It reminded me of those 'pies' you make over a campfire with the round, pie irons. The sandwiches consisted of the centers of two pieces of white bread dipped in pancake batter with peanut butter, jelly, bananas, honey and mini chocolate chips inside, the edges were cut and sealed with a drinking glass before deep frying them for a minute. She took second place. She's placed first or second consistently through out the competition and is the only woman competing. 

If I hadn't voted for the chef from my campus I would have had a hard time deciding between a deep-fried, one bite cheese cake and a loaded baked potato. The cheesecake balls give you a sensation of something warm and sweet going into your mouth followed by a burst of cool and tart cheesecake and it was additive. The Bourbon Bacon Jam Potato' was---duh!---a potato topped with a jam made with bourbon, coffee, brown sugar, vinegar, garlic and caramelized yellow onions. Bourbon was in at least one other contest entry---a peach ice cream topping. I think Bourbon in my new, favorite flavor profile. We got a packet of all the recipes used and the street tacos had the most ingredients of all the dishes coming in at thirty with our chef's peanut butter and Jelly having the least number of ingredients---only eight. There was a Korean short rib dogs with peach relish that was good too and it had 29 ingredients. I've never made anything with that many ingredients in my life!

I'm quite sure this competition is designed to give bragging rights to all the category winners and the top winner for marketing purposes. In the commercial cooking world there's a big competition for good chefs at continuum care complexes and most CCC's serve lunch on the tours use to entice people to come look at their facilities. I almost hate to see our chef placing so well in these contests because then other places will try to steal her away. In the two-and-a-half years I've lived here she's the third or forth chef we've had and she is by far the best of the lot. And get this, she's the only one in the contest without a culinary degree. She used to own her own restaurants, lost it during Covid.  

All in all it was fun way to spend a few hours and we got a free lunch and transportation out of the deal. Plus we got to visit with a guy from our campus who was recently moved over to our sister campus because he has ALS and needs a higher level of skilled nursing than he could get here.

Speaking of Covid I went to the eye doctor yesterday and I remarked about how nice it was that we no longer have Covid protocols to follow and the woman doing the pre-testing before my actual appointment said it was terrible working conditions because so many people tried to argue their way out of wearing masks or bringing in proof that they'd been vaccinated. She said she even had one guy lick the chin rest on one of the machines. (This was the Trump effect---people denying the science.) I remember how careful they were about cleaning those machines after they were finished measuring my macular pucker. I can't imagine dealing with jackasses like Licker Guy or as my niece called the ant-vacciers  'The Spreaders'. 

By the way, my pucker hasn't changed much since my last visit but I have developed "a lot of dry areas on my corneas" which makes my eyes feel like I have grit up inside the lids. I'll now be adding drops twice a day and before I drive. My getting-ready-time in the mornings and at bedtime is getting as long as a teenager addicted to layers of makeup. No matter how many suggestions I follow for getting drops in my eyes I can't seem to do it on the first few tries. Laying down in bed while hold one eye open and using the other to put the drops in the corners of my eyes works the best. I went into this appointment thinking/hoping I'd get a new prescription because I can't read street signs as well as I'd like. But the doctor said the dry corneas are probably causing that more than anything. I'm getting a new prescription for computer glasses that block the harmful light coming from the screens. I'm excited about having prescription glasses exclusively for the computer. I don't know why I didn't get them long before now is a mystery. No more trying to find the right place in my trifocals! 

I love my eye doctor. He used to be a nice piece of eye candy, too, but over the past half decade he's put on a little weight and quit wearing his cute, little surgical scrub cap that he wore during Covid. But he's still got his easy going and confident demeanor which I find to be the most attractive quality in the opposite sex. The way he says, "your other right" or "your other left" has a humorous ring to it that neither makes you feel stupid or nor gives you a sense that he's bored because he's probably said it thousand times to his patients. Actually, I've never thought to ask him if all his patients need the 'other direction' corrections or is it just his dyslexic patients like me. What do you think his answer would be? 

Until Next Wednesday!

 *photo by soydolphin

Farm Table Conversations and More

On an average day, when there are no lectures going on, there are around twenty-five out of the seventy-five people living in my Independent Living complex that I interact with. That includes brief "hellos" in the common areas and the most popularly asked and answered question: "Has Jesse (our mail carrier) been here yet?" Me, I'm more interested in if the Amazon driver has made one of its two stops a day but I rarely have to ask because I can see their truck coming and going from my window. Between them, UPS, Fed-x and USPS our mail room is always full of boxes and puffy bags in all sizes and shapes. We seniors have learned the fine art of online shopping. 

One of my six hall mates has appointed himself the package delivery person on my floor so I rarely have to retrieve an expected delivery. Another guy on the floor tried to give him a hundred dollars in a Christmas card for the mail-room-to-door service but he gave it back. By contrast I gave him a Valentine's Day card with a thank you message inside and a few pieces of Nutella. (The card idea pre-approved by his wife, of course.) Big tipper guy owns a company that makes high school and college class rings and he has two houses and one of biggest apartments in the building. Even though he lives across from me the only time I see him is in the parking garage where our cars are parked side by side. He's always coming or going from the airport and when he's gone lots of packages and the Wall Street Journal build up at his door. Except for his name, you now know as much about him as I do and we've lived across from each other for over two years.

Mr. Big Tipper Guy has nothing to do with the topic I set out to write about so I'll get to that now: I always eat one meal a day in our facility and every chance I can I eat it at one of the common tables. The common tables are where I do most of my interacting with fellow residents. At night it's a table known as the Farm Table, at noon it's just several big tables pushed together to fit fourteen of us. I especially love the Farm Table. Someone asked us the other day what's so special about eating there and several replied that we hate the required system of having to call around to find other people to make reservations with to fill a four or six topper table in the main dining room. We can't just show up and expect to be served in the dining room. We can do that at lunch, but not for dinner. Another reason we like the Farm Table is we like not knowing who we'll dine with on any given night. We still need to make reservations to sit there but we can only make one for ourselves. For me, I like to sit close to the middle of the table and just listen to the conversations around me.  Sometimes there are three-four of them going on at once. It's an eavesdropper's paradise.  Other times we're all engaged in the same topic.

There's a lot of laughter at the Farm Table like the other night the special was an oriental dish with oyster sauce in it and several of us at the table are allergic to shell fish so we were asking Seri and Alexa what's in oyster sauce. (Yes, we are like a bunch of teenagers with our phones out fact checking each other.) I don't know what one of the guys put in the search engine of his I-Phone that it came up erroneously saying that oyster sauce was made from "nut seeds." But we all caught the silliness bug and went with that tidbit: "Who cuts the nuts off from the oysters?" "How do they extract those tiny swimmer seeds out of the nut sacks?" And "who would have ever guested that was a thing?" We were laughing so hard and one of the guys was turning beat red. Laughing over silly things doesn't happen every night but often enough that I'm addicted to eating at the Farm Table.

Living here isn't the first time I've experienced the Farm Table concept of dining. When we traveled we liked to stop at mama/papa style restaurants in small towns. One year on vacation out West we discovered that a lot of the places we stopped at had these long tables for people who wanted to interact with who ever came in for a meal or just coffee. My husband was a good conversationalist and no one was ever a stranger around him for very long. Those Farm Tables gave us a feel for the regions that you couldn't get in the chain restaurants along the main interstates. One time, though, we sat down at a Farm Table and you'd swear we accidentally went to a Klan meeting and for once my husband kept his mouth shut. His mama didn't raise any fools. 

At another Farm Table the locals told us the place was famous for their cinnamon rolls and we each had to order one with the coffee we stopped in for. They assured us they were worth every penny of the $3 they cost (in the '80s). When they arrived, each cinnamon roll covered an 8"x10" baking pan and, of course we ended up passing them around the table. Turned out to be a game they played on strangers like us to get us to treat the table. It's a fun travel memory and I often thought that cross-country Farm Table conversations would make a good book, sort of like John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. I loved that memoir of him traveling with his poodle. We always traveled with a poodle, too, in what we called our Traveling Dog House aka RV.

Our Farm Table seats twelve uncomfortably and ten perfectly. It was made out of the biggest tree that had to be cut down when the facility was built. It was a custom-made gift given to us by the construction company and it sits off to the side of our lobby which leads to another reason why it's fun to sit there. We can see and interact with everyone coming and going into the main restaurant and into the lobby---whose kids are visiting, whose getting a Door-Dash dinner delivered, whose getting a take-out dinner from the dining room, whose dog is getting walked. It took over a year to get the dining manager to allow us to have a Farm Table in the evening and she kept pulling our noon-time tables apart. She insisted it was too hard on the waitstaff. But it took going above her to finally get our way and the waitstaff is doing just fine waiting on the flow of people coming and going from the noon table. At night we have to be there at 5:00 which was our compromise.

So there you have it, another borderline boring chapter in the life of a senior citizen living in an a continuum care complex. 

Until next Wednesday. ©

 

The Farm Table set up potluck style for one of our resident-driven parties. The management occasionally serves buffet style meals on the Farm Table, too, usually around holidays when they'd normally be short-staffed.

 

This photo shows the Farm Table on the near right and at far end of the photo is our fireplace gathering place. The people standing on the left (middle of the photo) are behind the concierge's desk, directly across from the entry door.

Connecting More Deeply with Others

If you've been following my blog you might remember that I've been listening to an audible book by David Brooks titled: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. I'd love to claim that I'm intellectual enough to have known who David Brooks is before I started this book, but I'm not. All I knew was that Bill Gates has the title on his 'Must Read" summer reading recommendations list and that two of his takeaways from the book are about understanding the power of curiosity and how to acquire empathy building skills. After a little more digging I learned that he's a conservative columnist for the New York Times and that Barack Obama is also a fan of David Brook's writing. That was good enough for me to invest my time and money into the book. I fangirl both Gates and Obama.

I was not far into the book when I decided to try out one of the suggestions for how to draw people out when I found myself at a dinner table with The Art Professor and two former child psychiatrists---one is my neighbor who I've nicknamed Robbie's Mom because of her dog. The other psychiatrist at the table I've never written about so let's call her Sarah, which may or may not be her real name. I tried on the nicknames The Caregiver, Liberal Lucy and Sam's Wife (since I know him better than her, having spent six hours teaching him how to play mahjong and having played with him every Wednesday since March). But she is more than all those nicknames as are all my fellow residents who I've given nicknames to.

Anyway, I'm getting off track here. When it came time to ask each other what we did that day (which is always par for the course around here at dinner tables) Sarah shared that she'd taken her husband to the dentist and I replied, "That must have been exhausting." "It was!" she replied and the Art Professor looked confused.  "Why was it exhausting?" she asked. Sam is a big guy and Sarah's petite and he's confined to an electric wheelchair and has to transfer in and out of a manual, transport chair for outings. Long story slightly shorter we got into a discussion about how going to public places you never know how steep the incline ramps are or how disability friendly the parking lots and restrooms will be, not to mention pushing a big guy in a chair is hard physically. And Sarah said, "It takes three people to get him out of his transport chair and into the dentist's chair." Then she turned to me and said, "Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to vent!" Wow, I thought, the book suggestions actually work!

The Art Professor then spoke up to ask how can friends and the community help family caregivers? Sarah hemmed and hawed but didn't say anything so I jumped with, "Time," I suggested. "Offer to sit with a disabled spouse so the caregiver can have a few hours to run an errand or two." 

"I had a friend with a disabled husband, "The Art Professor replied, "and she always turned me down when I offered. I guess she didn't really need a break."

 "Well, sometimes you worry all the time you're gone from your disabled spouse," I tried to explain, "and it's not always as enjoyable as one might think." 

"Worry about what?" 

"About what could go wrong. Bathroom issues. Falls. My husband, for example, had swallowing issues," I said, "and could choke to death if he wasn't watched like a hawk." And here's where I was rendered speechless.

"That could be a good thing. It would speed up the dying process and end a caregiver role." 

So much for empathy! So much for The Art Professor not noticing that I dropped out of the conversation and was boiling over with ambivalent thoughts. I wanted to both rage at the coldness of her careless and/or callous statement and at the same time I wanted to use it as a teaching moment that might embarrass the crap out of her---and tit-for-tat me would have been happy if it did. It's three days later as I write this and I STILL want to tell The Art Professor that choking on some potato chips a friend let my husband have off his plate was ultimately what killed him. Even though a nurse happened to be close by at the restaurant and preformed the Heimlich to save him that day he unbeknownst had ingested potato chips into his lungs where they caused a fungi to grow and by the time he was hospitalized weeks later it was too late. The fungi had taken over and he died 10-15 minutes after being taken off life support. Yup, choking on his food DID "speed up his dying process" but it was by no means a good thing for me or for him. 

That conversation was the only social experiment I did based on David Brook's book but it probably won't be my last. However it will be a while before I strike out again to teach myself to connect with others on a deeper level. Quoting this author: "There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood. And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood." In the course of this one dinner I felt both empowered by helping one of my neighbors be seen but I left that dinner table feeling invisible and if I wasn't a blogger I don't know where I would have dumped the pain and guilt that bubbled back up regarding the way in which Don died. ©