Preparing for Zepbound Like It’s a Baby Shower

 

In this post, Jean chronicles a week filled with medical busy work, sleep apnea victories, and the long, bureaucratic march toward starting GLP‑1 treatment. With her trademark humor and sharp observations, she turns frustration into storytelling — and even finds room for a cameo from “Dr. Cutie Pie,” her ever-charming sleep specialist. ...AL

 

It was one of those weeks where every waking moment felt devoted to either busy work or maintaining my body like it’s a vintage car that requires constant tinkering. Friday afternoon was a prime example: I spent 17 minutes and 12 seconds on hold just to report that yes, I did keep my follow-up appointment with my sleep doctor. This was in response to the medical supply company's strongly worded letter warning me that if I failed to show up — or failed to call to confirm I had shown up — insurance would not cover this very expensive odyssey I’ve been on since last December.

I was actually excited to keep that appointment, and not just because Dr. Cutie Pie looks like he wandered off the set of a medical drama where he plays the heart-throb who keeps millions of women and gay men tuning in each week. He’s also genuinely nice and extremely thorough. I wanted to tell him that except for the fact that my face looks like a relief road map every morning, I’m doing really well.

And wouldn’t you know — he has a “cure” for the puffy-face-with-ruts look. Witch hazel wipes. Not the fancy expensive, cosmetic-counter potions I’ve been trying. Witch hazel. I could have kissed him, but I didn’t want to smudge his imaginary TV makeup.

The good news is that treating my sleep apnea and hypoxemia has already changed my life. My morning bed no longer looks like I’ve been wrestling alligators all night. And I don’t dread going to bed, especially after learning at the sleep lab that I was quitting breathing 64 times an hour. Now, with my BiPap machine and my pseudo-astronaut headgear, I only stop breathing 1.5 to 2 times an hour — and when that happens, the Bi-in-the-Pap yanks the breath right out of my lungs and puts another one in like a tiny, bossy life coach yelling, “Breathe, damn it, BREATHE!”.

I’ve been 100% compliant with the machine, which is extremely important if you don’t want Medicare to stop paying for supplies then send you a bill for $1,000 if you don’t return the machine ASAP. And how would they know if you’re using it...or if you’ve strapped it to your dog? Oh, they know. The machine has its own Wi-Fi and sends a daily report to Medicare: how many hours you were hooked up, how often you took off the mask to pee, raid the refrigerator, or — in the case of my youngest niece — go sleepwalking down a flight of stairs. (She’s just beginning her own sleep apnea diagnosis journey.)

Back to that phone call: after my 17-minute hold time, I finally talked to someone, then left my apartment — and my phone — to go to lunch. When I got back, there was a voicemail from the same person asking me to call back Monday because they “need more information.” Busy work. Waiting around for a medical supply company to data-mine my brain may not technically fit the definition of busy work, but it sure feels like a stupid waste of time. They've called me four days in a row, now. Why can’t people do their job right the first time?

Speaking of which, here’s another example. Over a month ago, my Nurse Practitioner started the process to get me on the GLP‑1 drug Zepbound for weight loss. First she sent the prescription to my short-term pharmacy instead of my mail-order pharmacy. Then she forgot to include dosing instructions. Then I had to go through Prior Authorization, which is basically the insurance company looking for a reason to deny the drug. This back-and-forth took place through texts and MyChart messages and still isn’t over. But OptumRX assured me that one phone call from the NP is the last hurdle, and they’ve sent her two faxes. I sent her one message. We waited. Then they canceled the prescription when they didn't hear back from her. More calls and text messages and finally everyone is on the same page and the prescription is being filled as I write.

Since I’ve had a month to prepare, I’ve been nesting for this medication like a woman setting up a nursery. I bought the hardcover “bible” on GLP‑1 to learn how to get the best results and manage side effects. It’s not a miracle drug, not a quick or easy fix — I’ll still have to track my food — but the strange part is that everyone on the support sites say they track their food to make sure they’re getting enough calories, protein, and water. Every other diet I’ve ever been on required tracking to make sure I didn’t overeat. The drug stops the ‘food noise’ that goes on inside your head. If you experience it, you’ll understand what that term means. GLP-1 a natural hormone that our bodies product that tells us when you’re full and apparently on GLP-1 we listen.

I also bought a tracking journal specifically for GLP‑1 users. If you’re smart and you want good data to show your doctor so you can keep on the drug you should record everything: injection sites, calories, protein, water, side effects, and what goes out of your body — by mouth or… you know where. Like pregnant women who vomit at the smell of certain foods, some people on GLP‑1s do the same. So my pantry is stocked with ginger gummies and ginger tea. I’ve got high-protein snacks and shakes because apparently protein is key and they don’t mean red meat.

Just doubling my protein and staying under a 500 calorie deficit a day from what my body weight requires in preparation for this big adventure helped me lose six pounds in eleven days. Hopefully, when I finally get to do my first injection, I won’t be projectile vomiting. But if I stick with the program, I’ll get to see Dr. Cutie Pie sooner than my one-year follow-up because all my sleep apnea settings will need to be recalibrated. He’s confident I’m a rule follower and will do well on Zepbound. Did I mention he’s also a psychiatrist as well has a sleep specialist? He’s says there’s a lot of overlap regarding why we have sleep issues.

Surviving in today’s medical community requires equal parts patience, paperwork, and circus‑level flexibility. But if it gets me better sleep, a healthier body, and another appointment with Dr. Cutie Pie, then I’ll deal with feeling like I’m living in a full‑blown medical montage. All I’m missing is a soundtrack and a slow‑motion shot of me bravely opening the Zepbound box — when it finally gets here. Fingers crossed. ©

See you next Wednesday.

On Chin Hairs, Sam Hill, and the Stories We Collect

Jean has a talent for taking the small, ridiculous indignities of aging and turning them into stories that make people laugh, nod, and mutter “oh thank God it’s not just me.” In this piece, she tackles one of the great universal mysteries of womanhood after a certain age: the stealth chin hair. Along the way she wanders into euphemisms, Michigan history, hormonal betrayal, and the sacred friendship pact involving tweezers. It’s part rant, part folklore, part confession — and Jean at her silliest best. ...AI

How in the Sam Hill do whiskers on women over a certain age manage to grow three inches long before — with great embarrassment — you finally see them in the mirror? I look at my face with a magnifying mirror every morning. I wash my face every night. I see my face in between when I refresh my lipstick or wash my hands. Still, it’s always when I’m driving to an appointment or running errands that I’ll glance in the rear‑view mirror and see a foot‑long, gray chin hair waving at me like it’s hitchhiking. I swear these things grow overnight like they’re auditioning for the stage production of Jack the Beanstalk.

Someday I’m going to rear‑end someone, and when the police officer asks if I was texting, I’ll probably say, “No sir, but do you happen to have a pair of tweezers? I can’t get a mugshot taken with this mile‑long hair on my face.”

Turns out I’m not alone in this battle. One of my fellow residents here on my continuum‑care campus confessed recently that she has an agreement with her daughter: every visit includes a mandatory chin‑check. She hates to see old women with long, curly strands of hair bouncing up and down as they talk. Don’t we all? Especially when it’s on our own faces and we’re trapped in a car with a chin hair that’s trying to get us killed in an accident.

I’ve resorted to keeping a pair of tweezers in the car because there’s something about the light coming in from all angles that makes those stray hairs pop like neon signs. Not that it makes them any easier to grab. They like to play peek‑a‑boo in my chicken‑like wattles, darting in and out like they’re training for a covert ops mission. Yes, I know I could go to one of those fancy waxing places, but for one or two stray hairs, is it really worth what they charge?

And speaking of things that sneak up on you, here’s a tangent I promise is connected: did you know the “Sam Hill” in the “How in the Sam Hill…?” euphemism was an actual person? If you didn’t grow up hearing it the way I did, you may not know it’s basically a polite stand‑in for “what the hell.” It’s one of those versatile expressions that can convey confusion, exasperation, or disbelief. “How in the Sam Hill am I supposed to know that!” or “How in the Sam Hill did you do that!”

According to Google, Sam W. Hill was a 19th‑century surveyor and mine developer in Copper Harbor, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He was well known for his “colorful vocabulary,” which is a polite way of saying he swore like a lumberjack with a stubbed toe and a pint of whiskey in his hand. His friends and neighbors would retell his stories but substitute “Sam Hill” for the cuss words. From there, the phrase spread beyond the Keweenaw Peninsula and somehow survived all the way into the 21st century.

It amazes me how euphemisms born before radio, before TV, before social media still manage to hang on. Maybe the slower pace helped them stick? Maybe clever phrases had time to settle into the language instead of being replaced every three seconds by whatever TikTok is doing today. Or maybe Sam Hill was simply the 1800s version of going viral — just slower and with more flannel.

According to AI, the fine, wispy facial hair on the chin and jawline of older women is caused by “shifting hormone levels — specifically, a drop in estrogen alongside a relative increase in androgens during menopause.” I am well past menopause, but I was recently prescribed estrogen as part of my sleep apnea treatment, which begs the question: Why in the Sam Hill am I still growing chin hairs? Perhaps instead of applying the estrogen cream down there, I should try slathering it on my chin.

And why in the Sam Hill is it socially acceptable to poke fun at the biological realities of menopause? I don’t know who first said it, but I’ve never forgotten the joke about The Friendship Test: it’s about which of your friends will pledge to come to the hospital if you’re ever in a coma and pluck your chin hairs. I tried to Google the origin, but there were dozens of references in blogs and TikTok videos. So instead of going down that rabbit hole, I decided to vent about this First World Problem by writing about it too.

Aging hands us plenty of indignities, but it also hands us stories — and the older I get, the more I’m coming around to realize the stories matter far more than the stray hairs ever will. And if the day ever comes when I’m too old or too out of it to pluck my own chin hairs, I hope someone I love will lean over my hospital bed, sigh dramatically, and say, “Well, Sam Hill help us — she’s sprouted another one.” ©

See you next Wednesday!

A Kiss, a Memory, and the Long Road Between Then and Now

Jean has always believed that memory has a mischievous streak — especially the kind triggered by music. One moment she’s driving to the grocery store, minding her own business, and the next she’s dropped straight into a full moon‑drenched scene from the 1960s involving rum, steel drums, and a kiss that would age into something far more complicated than it felt at the time. What follows is her attempt to braid that long‑ago moment with the world she lives in now, and the distance between the two...AI

Music has a unique way of hooking us up with memories buried deep in years past. When a song manages to bring a vivid memory alive, you can’t help but marvel at our brain’s computer‑like ability to retrieve data our conscious self had long forgotten. That’s what happened to me on the way to the grocery store when Riley Green’s voice came over the country station singing, “...I know I can’t stand or sit, but if I was hammered, could I dance like this?...I ain’t as think as you drunk I am.”

I can count the number of times I’ve been truly drunk on the fingers of one hand. And all those times were in the last century — the 1960s, to be precise. There are different kinds of drunks, and I was a happy drunk, the kind who wanted to be on the move, dancing and singing. One particular time I was on vacation with another twenty‑something girl down in the Bahamas.

If you’ve been to the Bahamas, you might remember, as I do, the buttery‑smooth rum and the steel drums those notes rang like laughter as they tumbled through the warm air while the rum settled me into my happy place. As I remember it, it was the kind of intoxicating combination that loosened my world at the seams, making everything feel a little softer, a little friendlier — the perfect prelude to that warm, tipsy, rum‑drunk joy with a side of “I love you, man,” delivered to bartenders, strangers, and possibly a palm tree.

And to the Black taxi cab driver who delivered us back to our hotel that night. After he opened the taxi door and let us out, I gave him a long, deep kiss, much to his surprised delight and much to the disgust of my friend. Later she said she couldn’t believe I actually touched a Black man, much less kissed him shamelessly. And in a public place, no less! It was sometime after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law and before the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed, better known as the Fair Housing Act. But in my friend’s world, Blacks and whites mixing was still a sin.

Try as I might, I can’t remember her name or what she looked like, but I still remember that taxi driver’s sparkling eyes and wide, toothy smile as he enjoyed my drunken state as much as I was. 

It’s a sad statement about how limited my world has been that when I got home from that vacation, I’d have to fast‑forward to when I moved here, four‑and‑a‑half years ago, before I’d have real contact with Black people again. And those in my daily life, now, are all employees of my continuum care community — the wait staff, the cleaning staff, and our CEO. As a flaming liberal I, of course, loved having Obama as our president but that's not the same as actually talking with someone from another race on a daily basis.

When I see our very capable CEO at our monthly Dialogues, standing in front of my fellow residents, his skin as dark as the night, I can’t help noticing the irony: a Black man confidently leading a room full of old white people in a country where that simple image would once have been dangerous, even impossible. I sometimes wonder if he feels that history humming under the floorboards the way I do.

The universe has a way of pairing my life experiences so neatly that it often feels like a deliberate plan to call attention to something I might miss otherwise. When I got home from the grocery store with that feel‑good memory still lingering in my mind, I went to a lecture here in our all‑purpose room. It featured an Abraham Lincoln impersonator who put on a fabulous one‑man show about the Civil War.

There’s roughly a hundred years between when the Civil War was fought that ended slavery and my trip to the Bahamas, and over another half‑century between that trip and now. Still, I’ve always been proud of the fact that my generation has done so much to move race relationships forward — although I’m not sure Black people would see the progress in the same light as most whites do (not to mention the backtracking our current administration is attempting). In terms of history, it wasn’t all that long ago when a Black man would have gotten strung up to the nearest tree for kissing a white woman, even if he wasn’t the one who initiated it. Few days go by when I don’t see someone hug our CEO. I wonder what my long‑ago travel companion would think of that. Has she changed over the decades, or does she still hold onto the belief that races shouldn’t mix? Is prejudice so deeply ingrained in some of us that we can’t change?

I didn’t know where this post was going when I started, but somehow it feels like I’m at the end except for saying that sometimes a silly, rum‑drunk memory from sixty years ago can remind you how far we’ve come, how far we haven’t, and how strangely a single impulsive kiss can echo across a lifetime. And looking back now, I can finally see what I couldn’t then: the kiss was never the scandal. The scandal was the world that insisted it should be. ©

See you next Wednesday!

Memorial Day, MAGA Men, and the Art of Living Together

 

In her ongoing chronicle of life inside a Continuum Care Community, Jean returns to Memorial Day with equal parts honesty, humor, and hard‑won perspective. What begins as a reluctant decision to attend a campus ceremony becomes a meditation on patriotism, personality clashes, and the strange intimacy of communal living. Along the way she encounters the usual cast of characters — the generous, the sentimental, the maddening, and the unforgettable — and finds herself, almost despite herself, grateful for the complicated little world she now calls home…. AI

Last year I skipped our Memorial Day event here at the Continuum Care Campus (which they hold four days before the holiday but that's the way they do things to give employees time off with their families). I had two reasons for skipping it, and I’ll quote myself from the post I wrote back then: "I couldn't bring myself to go because a guy from my building planned to read the entire Constitution, and I'd have a terrible time hearing it from the lips of a rabid Trump and MAGA supporter. And two, because I felt like a fraud last year singing along with all the patriotic songs when I wasn’t all that proud of our country. Asking God to bless our ‘Great Nation’ felt like pretending we were still the same beacon of freedom and hope we used to be.”

I’m not alone in avoiding this man. At our Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner event (more on that later), I learned that at least half a dozen residents have asked the dining staff never to seat them with or near him. He’s surly, swears at the servers, and tells anyone who asks about our Independent Living community, “Don’t come here. It’s awful.” His bad attitude started when management informed him that we are a gun‑free campus and his massive collection had to go home with his sons or they'd take legal action to evict him. He still warns people that we’ll be sorry if a mass shooter storms the building because he “could pick them off from his balcony.” A surly old man with a gun. What could go wrong?

This year I still didn’t want to sing God Bless America. Blessing America when our leader behaves like a spoiled child feels a bit like saying, “You’re doing great — here’s your reward.” But I decided I shouldn’t let one person keep me from honoring the other veterans who would be participating. We have roughly a dozen Vietnam vets here, all of them former commissioned officers. You can draw your own conclusions about why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the upper‑middle‑class backgrounds that CCCs tend to draw from. During Vietnam, these men had families who kept them in college long enough to get deferments, then commissions. A couple have even admitted they enlisted after college so they could choose their military branch and job rather than wait to be drafted into the infantry.

This year our Life Enrichment Director took the lead instead of Mr. MAGA, and the difference was noticeable. She read a lovely two‑page essay which I later learned was written by Artificial Intelligence. When I complimented her, she said, “I put some ideas into ChatGPT and let it compose something much more eloquent than I could.” She also read three poignant poems and showed a nine‑minute video titled Flanders Field: Remembering Their Sacrifice. The YouTube description says it “serves as an orientation to the Great War, the cemetery, and the American Battle Monuments Commission.” Several of the clips from black‑and‑white newsreels shocked me — and I don’t shock easily. The image of hundreds flag-draped caskets waiting to be loaded onto ships took my breath away.

Near the end of the Memorial Day event, our LED invited anyone to share a story about their own service or that of a loved one. Five or six did. Mr. MAGA did not. And while I still refused to sing God Bless America with the others, I was glad I went.

The next day brought a very different kind of gathering: the 90th birthday party for our resident retired lawyer. He has two sons and a daughter and a gaggle of grandkids and great-grands and 17 of them flew in from all over the country. They have a charming tradition of a nightly 7:00 p.m. Zoom call — sometimes twenty people on the call,  other times just four or five but they’ve never missed a night in the four and a half years their dad has lived here. The party itself was first‑class and catered and everyone who lives or works here was invited. He and I both moved in the first week the CCC opened, and I can’t imagine this place without quirky him and his generosity. While I might donate ten or twenty dollars to various collections, he donates a hundred. Five hundred. A thousand. He calls himself the Mayor of our CCC and insists on sitting at the head of any dining table. He also has tender ears and will flee the room if anyone mentions menopause or female anatomy issues. He's also sentimental and cries easily and he didn't make it through the party without shedding tears. Yes, we have characters here.

Speaking of characters, I promised to circle back to our Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner event. Communities like this naturally form cliques — nothing malicious, just people gravitating toward others with similar interests. You often see the same four to six people eating together. But these cliques aren’t exclusive. Anyone could call any group and ask to join their reservation, and they’d make room. New residents are routinely invited to various tables as we get to know them. We even have unofficial ambassadors who make a point of introducing newcomers and connecting them with people who share a background or hobby.

A couple of high‑octane women decided to shake things up. They created a sign‑up sheet for anyone willing to sit with someone new, then they matched us into mystery dinner groups. We didn’t know who we’d be eating with until we arrived at the dining room. It was something like speed dating — not that I’ve ever done it, but I’ve seen it on TV — in that we all asked and answered the same questions: Where did you live before this? What was your career? Where did you go to college? Kids? Grandkids? Hobbies? Two people at my table found out they both taught in the same school district and knew some of the same people. 

This is the third year we’ve done a 'Guess Who' dinner, and I enjoyed it twice. The year I didn’t, I was seated with Mr. MAGA. This year he didn’t sign up, so the rest of us were free to enjoy the excitement of meeting people we knew by sight and name but had never had a real conversation with. And as the two lady organizers say, "If you don't click with your assigned tablemates, it's just ONE dinner." 

Community living isn’t always peaceful — it’s more like being adopted into a sitcom you never auditioned for. But weekends like this remind me why I keep showing up anyway. Between the veterans, the birthday party and the mystery dinner, I found myself oddly grateful for this cast of characters. Even the ones who make me mutter under my breath. Maybe especially them. After all, every good ensemble needs at least one antagonist to keep the plot moving — and to give me blog fodder. © 

  Flanders Field: Remembering their Sacrifice

 

Borrowing Trouble From the Future (Again)

Jean didn’t plan on writing about dreams, grief, or the strange places the mind wanders at night. But then she woke up crying—something she hadn’t done in months—and the moment insisted on being examined. She’d cried at the doctor’s office the day before, too, which was even more unusual. Jean is not a woman who cries easily, not even when life has handed her the kind of losses that would buckle most people. But something about that dream, and the day that came before it, tugged at her in a way she couldn’t ignore. So she followed the thread, the way she always does, to see where it led…. AI

I woke up crying. And yesterday I cried at the doctor’s office. What’s going on with me? Waking up with tears in my eyes from a dream has happened before, but crying at a doctor’s office? That hasn't happened since 1968 when a doctor lectured twenty-six year old me about the evils of having premarital sex. And trust me, I’ve had plenty of reasons to turn on the waterworks when doctors delivered bad news about my husband. I didn’t even cry after I had to make the decision to pull the plug on his life support, and ten minutes later he died. I saved those tears for when I got home.

The dream-tears that woke me featured my mom hanging clothes on the line at our family cottage, my dad tinkering with something nearby, and my husband driving his yellow Chevy Cutlass convertible. I was walking home from a sleep lab in a far off city and I woke up when Don pulled up alongside me and said, “Why didn’t you call? I would have picked you up.” Since I’ve been using my BiPAP machine, I haven’t remembered many dreams, but this one was an exception. I can’t wait for my follow-up appointment with the sleep doctor to ask if not recalling dreams is normal when getting treated for Central Sleep Apnea.

I used to keep a dream journal and spent time analyzing my dreams each morning. The long walk from a sleep lab wasn’t hard to figure out. I had my first appointment with the sleep doctor last December, and it took until a month ago to finally get a BiPAP machine because his final diagnosis didn't come until after he'd sent me to three additional specialists plus an overnight stay at the sleep lab. Getting all those appointments scheduled took time. I had to see an ears, nose and throat doctor, a gastroenterologist, a urogynecologist, the sleep lab technician and last but not least, I had to go in for an out patient surgery plus go to the durable medical supplies place to get fitted for a mask. 

My mom hanging clothes in my dream was no doubt symbolic of airing my “dirty laundry” at the doctor’s office—the thing that made me cry. I had asked my primary doctor’s Nurse Practitioner if I was a candidate for one of the new weight-loss drugs on the market, and she listened—actually listened—to my history with weight gain. Unlike my primary, who told me several months ago to “just move more.” She said severe sleep apnea is one of the qualifying factors for the weight-loss shots. She ordered a bunch of blood work and will submit the request for Medicare approval. (Fingers crossed.) I’m not sure how long that will take, but that’s what made me cry. Not the full-blown ugly cry of a toddler whose candy was snatched by the family dog, but she could tell I was trying to hold back tears. I would have managed it, too, if she hadn’t turned around as she was leaving to ask, “Do you need a hug?” I thanked her for listening while wiping tears from my cheeks.

When Don drove up alongside me in the dream—now that has a scary interpretation. Was it a death wish? Just hop in the car and go to the Great Unknown? Or a comforting thought that I won’t be alone when I do die? In the back of my mind, the predictions on the insurance actuarial table still weigh heavy: that my time in Independent Living will be up by October, when I’ll be moved to Assisted Living. Being a two-person lift in a place like that would be fertile inspiration for a horror movie plot. And that thought is what my mother used to call “borrowing trouble from the future.” I may not have mastered putting on compression stockings, but I am a master at borrowing trouble and trying to prevent it from happening. She may have called it borrowing trouble but I call it long-range planning. Tomato, tomatoes.

According to the online Dream Dictionary, “Dreaming of the dead can be both rewarding and terrifying depending on the context of the dream. There seems to be a fine line between actual contact or repressed memories or emotions that have come back to pay you a visit...” Are they coming for me? That was my first question. My second thought was that my dream was expressing my anxiety over running out of quality time. (Most likely the best explanation.) But my third thought—the Little Miss Mary Sunshine version—put a smile on my face: If I had hopped in Don's convertible, I would have been able to tell Mom that I finally learned to enjoy tea as much as she did. I probably wouldn’t tell her I make it the English way, with cream in the cup before pouring in the properly steeped tea. She drank it straight.

Our brains, especially during sleep, are mysterious places. They spin stories vivid enough to feel like time travel, dredge up fragmented memories we thought were long settled, and nudge us toward truths we’ve been avoiding. They can scare us or thrill us to death—a figure of speech. And maybe that’s the real purpose of a dreams like this one: they are a reminder that even in the strangest corners of the mind, something is still trying to move us forward. ©

See you next Wednesday! 

If you have fifteen minutes for something upbeat, inspiring and fun, watch this video of Kermit the Frog at the University of Maryland giving their commencement speech. Several Fox News reporters were bashing it but Facebook was showing this video along with Trump's commencement speech video at West Point where he talked about getting bored with trophy wives and owning big yachts. Kermit's speech ended with the entire audience singing the Rainbow Connection.

Confessions of a Woman Who Bought Her Own Mother’s Day Bouquet

Jean spent an hour staring at her keyboard, waiting for a theme to behave itself and show up. It finally did, wearing petals. Maybe it was the Mother’s Day bouquets stacked on the concierge’s desk, or the tangerine roses she bought herself, or the memory of a Tom Jones look‑alike sending her miniature rosebuds decades ago. Whatever the reason, flowers marched in and took over—as they tend to do in Jean’s life—demanding to be written about….AI

I’ve been drinking coffee in front of my keyboard for an hour, and I hadn’t written a single word until now. No theme was jelling in my head until I decided to write about flowers. Saturday I’d been over to the other building, where the concierge’s desk was completely covered with Mother’s Day floral deliveries. Except for one bouquet—the one our resident retired lawyer sent to all the ladies here at the Continuum Care Community. He does that for every holiday, and when I thanked him for his thoughtfulness, he said it makes him happy. I replied, “It makes us happy too.”

Never being a mother, I’ve never gotten flowers for the holiday unless you count the tangerine roses I bought myself last weekend. If anyone asks about them, I’ll joke that they were from the dogs in past chapters of my life: Levi, Cooper, Jason, Sarah, Cindy, Jody, Scottie, King, and Blackie. With the exception of the two dogs from my childhood, they all had human names—which should tell you something about the surrogate‑baby relationships I had with the dogs in my life.

When I met my husband, I was working as a floral designer and continued for another decade into our relationship, giving me access to all the flowers anyone could want to bring home. So my husband got in the habit of never buying me flowers, especially given the fact that it took me five years after I left the floral industry before I even wanted fresh flowers back in my life. By then the mold was set. No flowers from Don. He was also not known for giving romantic gifts. Long‑time readers might remember the time he gave me an auxiliary gas tank for my pickup truck for Valentine’s Day when I actually longed for a single red rose. More precisely I longed for the symbolism of getting a single red rose. Yes, I was one of those women who thought a soulmate should be able to read my mine.

Other than corsages for proms way back in high school, no guy has ever given me flowers—with one notable exception. Back during the first six months after meeting Don, I was also dating one of his friends. I’ve told this story before, but briefly: the three of us often found ourselves hanging out together on Fridays after bowling. It was where we all met on the same night. His friend looked like he shared the same gene pool as Tom Jones. His first name was even Tom, and he had the same voice quality. He took full advantage of looking like the famous singer in his fashion choices. “It's not unusual to be loved by anyone, It's not unusual to have fun with anyone, but when I see you hanging about with anyone, It's not unusual to see me cry…” Oh my god, I can still see him serenading me with that song. Tom made the bold move of sending me a bouquet of two dozen pink miniature rosebuds to the flower shop where I worked. Don’t think that didn’t make a splash—seeing a delivery van from another shop bring flowers to one of their employees.

Romance novels (and later, movies) have programmed women for a couple of centuries to be wooed with flowers. And I suspect one reason the custom has held up as long as it has is because it’s an easy gift to give a woman for holidays and special occasions. Easier back in my day when a guy would call up a flower shop and get something delivered. They can still do that, of course, or they can just go to a supermarket and pick out a bouquet themselves. I’ve seen guys at Meijer struggling to choose just the right bunch, and I struggle not to jump in and help them.

The kids of many of my fellow residents here must have the nearby flower shops in their contacts lists, because it’s not uncommon to see deliveries on our concierge’s desk waiting for the recipient to come down and pick them up. And no one seems to be in a hurry to do so, giving everyone a chance to check the card to see who it’s addressed to—a sure sign someone is having a special day. My oldest niece has made me the talk of the day on several occasions, and I have to admit it’s a good feeling to have everyone ask who sent the flowers and why. Not to mention the fact that I really do love having fresh flowers in the house. And I make them last, reworking arrangements as some of the flowers wilt and others are still good. For example, the greenery in the bouquet above is what was left over from my mid-April birthday bouquet. Its the third reincarnation. Last week that greenery was the backdrop for three tulips that were given out at a Memorial held here for one of my mahjong players. 

A few people scoff at their kids “wasting money on something that doesn’t last,” but to me a CCC is the ideal place for fresh flowers, for the same reason they’re so appropriate at funerals. Flowers remind us of the cycle of life. “To every thing there is a season…” When you think about it, flowers don’t truly die—they still hold seeds within their dried-up blooms that could spark life again. When I had a house with an open field-like area in the back I'd bury the heads of flower shop flowers and many of them did come up. And, who knows, maybe the Great Unknown does something similar with some unseen essence we leave behind.

At births and weddings, we use flowers to symbolize growth and our hopes and dreams for the future. At birthdays and anniversaries, they remind us to cherish our benchmarks. They are life‑affirming. The connection between the timeless cycle of birth, growth, and transformation and flowers may be symbolic, but it’s pure perfection in the realm of symbolism.

But even though I was formally schooled in the language of flowers at Hixen’s Floral Design School in Cleveland, Ohio, as a young woman who once received a bouquet of miniature pink rosebuds—known to symbolize innocence and the new beginnings of romance—all that went out the window when they were delivered. I was as giddy as any other young woman that my coworkers saw proof positive that I actually had a boyfriend. And that’s only one example of the power of flowers.

Maybe that’s why flowers still have such power, even after all these years and all these seasons. They don’t last long, but they don’t need to. Their job is to remind us that beauty is worth noticing, that love is worth expressing, and that every life—even ours—keeps blooming in ways we don’t always see until someone hands us a bouquet. And if that bouquet happens to come from a niece, a neighbor, or nine dogs with suspiciously human names, well… the heart doesn’t care. It just opens, the way flowers do. © 

 See you next Wednesday. But if you get notices by email from MailChimp I'm not sure how long it will be before they will start in again. The A to Z Challenge messed them up. I'm on the free service and I don't have enough credits built up yet to get back to my normal schedule.

Relections...What We Tell Ourselves When No One’s Looking

If April felt suspiciously quiet from Jean’s corner of the continuum care campus, that’s because she spent the month living a double life. By day, she was the same woman who shows up for Wii bowling, Mahjong, and medical appointments that require more specialists than a NASCAR pit crew. But by night—and by “night” it means any hour she could barricade herself in her apartment—she was secretly hammering out posts for the A to Z April Bloggers Challenge like an undercover agent with a keyboard instead of a badge. And somewhere along the line she stumbled across a phrase that lodged itself in her brain and refused to leave through out the entire Bloggers Challenge.….AI

It seems like a month of Sundays since I’ve written a regular blog post. Oh wait—it has been that long since I’ve written the kind of essay that's about what’s going on in my life here in the continuum care community. The A to Z Bloggers Challenge was fun and energizing, but it devoured a month when my calendar was already full. And since none of my fellow residents know I keep a blog, I felt like an undercover agent who couldn’t reveal what was really taking up my time or why I was staying in my apartment more than usual. I was the Cheshire Cat of the CCC—smirking my way through April, wishing I could blurt out my secret but knowing I couldn’t. Shouldn’t.

Some of the other things I did during April:

• I got the results from my overnight-in-the-sleep-lab study, which confirmed that I have Central Sleep Apnea which means my brain is failing to signal the muscles that control breathing at night that it needs to do so. 

• I kept up with my weekly Wii bowling team and Mahjong group.

• I had an outpatient surgery to implant a Bravo device  which led to a diagnosis of Barrett’s Esophagus. Another puzzle piece on why I kept waking up. When I lay down, acid reflux crawls up my esophagus and wakes me up. Treatment is easy. Two pills. 

• I was in the audience—instead of the cast—for the first time at our annual mystery dinner theater. Boohoo.That was hard to explain since our Life Enrichment Director was begging for actors right up to the day before.

• I finally saw a urogynecologist after waiting five months, even though the original problem of getting up to pee seven to nine times a night has been cut down to three or four times thanks to my handsome, young sleep doctor and being put on estrogen cream. (I'll leave it to your imagination on how to get it where it needs to be.) The urogrynocologist and Dr, Google agrees, it helps with sleep issues. Strange, eh? 

• I got a BiPAP machine, which puts me to sleep like a baby and—gasp—might be turning me into a morning person but is making my face look like a relief map when I get up. In case you're wondering, a BiPAP differs from a CPAP because it puts air in and takes it back out where the CPAP only puts it in.

• And I went to book club unprepared because the assigned book couldn’t hold my interest. Watching ants march across my floor would have been more exciting than A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler.

But I believe in facing the music when I haven’t finished a book—unlike a few others who simply skip the discussion. And I’m glad I went, because the facilitator tossed me a comment that stayed with me all month as I wrote my A to Z posts. I don’t remember what excuse I gave for not finishing the book, but she replied:

“We all tell ourselves stories about the stories we tell.”

Her words smacked me right in the place where blog posts are born. I said, “I want to get that embroidered on a pillow,” and she shot back—tongue firmly in cheek—that I couldn’t because she had it copyrighted.

Naturally, I googled the phrase to see whether she made it up or borrowed it. The closest match was Joan Didion’s famous line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” but that’s not quite the same thing. What I did find was an interesting idea about the four stories we tell ourselves: who we are, where we came from, where we’re going, and why things happen the way they do.

And Google completed the concept with:

“The stories we tell ourselves are internal narratives constructed to make sense of experiences, often acting as filters that dictate our reality, self-worth, and behavioral limits. These scripts, often formed by past traumas or habits, can either empower us or create self-limiting beliefs that hinder growth. Recognizing and rewriting these narratives is essential for personal agency and overcoming emotional traps.”

That explanation gets at exactly what the book club facilitator meant. And I used her phrase as a magnifying glass while writing my A to Z posts. With every post I'd ask myself: Was I being totally honest? Was I sugar coating parts to protect myself or someone else? Was I being unfair or too harsh in my assessments of events or people?

And now I’m asking you: Do we tell ourselves stories about our stories so often that we stop recognizing where fact ends and fiction begins?

Maybe it depends on how scarred some of our realities are—whether we invent stories to protect our inner child or to shield an abuser who’s still in our lives. The latter is, of course, one of those emotional traps Google warned about.

I don’t know the answer. But I do know it was pure serendipity that I heard that phrase at book club on the first day of April, and I thought about it with every post I wrote for the challenge.

So yes, we tell ourselves stories about our stories, and sometimes those stories are accurate, and sometimes they’re stitched together with wishful thinking, duct tape, and whatever scraps of memory haven’t wandered off. But if the A to Z Challenge taught me anything, it’s that the act of examining those stories — even briefly — is its own kind of honesty. And if I ever do get that phrase embroidered on a pillow, I’ll make sure it comes with a tag that reads: “Warning: Jean tries to tell the truest version of her stories — or at least the version that makes her look only moderately unhinged." ©

See you Next Wednesday. 

Z is for Zen-Buddhism—from Arrowheads to Enlightenment

It’s here — the final day of my writing marathon, otherwise known as the A to Z April Bloggers Challenge, where a certain subset of us cyberspace masochists dedicated ourselves to posting something every day but Sundays. Back on April 1st, I introduced my theme: the humans, habits, hidden joys and heartaches that shaped my world. And now that I’m a hair’s breadth from the finish line, it feels like I’ve written my entire life story one letter at a time. I’ve covered:

• April, the most important month of my year

• Brother, my only sibling

• Cottage, where I spent every summer of my youth

• Dogs, my four‑legged babies

• Education, a never ending saga

• Friendships

• Goofs I’ve made

• Happiest Day of my life

• Independent Living, where I’m at now

• July Fourth, my favorite holiday

• Keith, of the Toby variety

• Letters — so many letters

• Manual for the Care of Me

• Nieces and Nephews

• Overtime Employment

• Philosophy

• Questions I Wish I’d Asked my Mom

• Romance

• Stories, the ones I didn't tell

• Toys, lost and found

• Unexpected Joys

• Volunteering

• War Music

• X’s in the Margins

• Yearnings

And now can I have a drum roll? My final entry is: Zen Buddhism.

According to Google, Zen Buddhism is “a Mahayana school focusing on direct experience, meditation (zazen), and mindfulness to achieve enlightenment, emphasizing that individuals already possess Buddha nature.”

Lovely. But my path to Zen didn’t start with enlightenment. It started with an allergy to Christianity. I don’t say that to offend anyone. I say it because, from the time I was in first or second grade, Christians weren’t always kind to me starting one day when a little girl in pigtails informed me she couldn’t play with me anymore because I was a heathen. We’d played at her house the day before and apparently I’d failed the neighborhood’s Litmus Test: my family not only didn’t go to the “right” church, we didn’t go to any church.

I didn’t know what a heathen was, so I asked my mom. I don’t remember her answer, but soon after that my brother and I began walking to one of the four or five churches nearby. Mom didn’t care which one and we sampled them all.

My only memory of Sunday school was sitting in a basement where a woman used a felt board and cut-outs of cows, clouds, Jesus and other figures to teach us Bible stories. I liked the stories but it was years later before I figured out why I didn’t fit in. In my high school class I was one of only four kids with brown hair and eyes in a sea of blue-eyed blondes who mostly all went to the same Christian denomination.

Eventually my brother got sick of the whole Sunday routine. Instead of church, he took me to the nearby Indian mounds. We looked for arrowheads while my parents thought we were learning about Moses. Those quiet mornings in nature—imagining ancient lives, listening to the wind—were my first taste of meditation, though I didn’t have a name for it yet.

My mother eventually discovered our little rebellion. I suspect an arrowhead in my brother’s pocket gave us away. Years later, when I asked why she’d sent us to church in the first place, she said, “You needed to know the Bible stories.” She wasn’t wrong. In America, biblical references are woven into everyday conversation whether you’re religious or not.

In high school there were the usual cliques. The cheerleaders. The drama queens. We four dark haired, brown eyed kids who didn’t fit in with the sea of blue-eyed blondes. Oddly enough, I did manage to get a date for the junior prom, a kid from a different school and the son of a deeply religious dairy farmer who beat him badly for dating outside their church. He showed up at my house a week after the prom, still black and blue with raw bruises, to tell me he had to break up with me or his father would disinherit him and give the family farm to his cousin. He love farming, and said it was the only future he could imagine himself doing.

I got over the breakup, but that set me up for searching for an answer to the question: Why would a God worth worshiping condone cruelty toward children? Between a priest pretending to throw dad into a fire for throwing spitballs, a little girl in pigtails ostracizing me on a playground and a boy beaten for liking me, I spent the better party of the next two decades trying to understand why religion so often seemed to bless the bullies, and why He tolerated wars.

Over the years, I learned a lot about many faiths. If you doubt it, click over to my satirical take on the Seven Deadly Sins. But I eventually accepted that I’m too scarred—and too cynical—to ever belong to any Christian denomination. So when the Church Question comes up, I do what I’ve always done: lie through my teeth and say I’m “between churches.”

It was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who gave me my first taste of formal Meditation, even before he became a guru to the Beatles and the Beach Boys. I was never very serious about it but somewhere in the back of my head was implanted the principles he taught about self-realization, deep meditation and the idea that stillness could be a doorway, not a punishment.

Earlier this year, the Walk for Peace led by Bhikkhu Pannakara rekindled my interest. He says Buddhism isn’t a religion. Google’s AI disagrees. I’m not here to referee. What matters is that something in that walk reignited a spark I’d forgotten I carried.

A path back to myself.
A path without gatekeepers.
A path where no one gets beaten for loving the wrong person.

The next time someone in my City of Churches asks me where I worship, if I’m in the right mood, I might just tell them I’m studying to be a Buddhist. I know it would shock more than a few people. But more than likely I'll lie. Again.

Some things never change.

You’re probably still wearing yours socks—a joke you’ll get if you read yesterday’s post—but that’s okay. I’m just happy you got to the end of this one. ©

Note: I'll be back to my regular schedule of posting on Wednesdays. If  you normally get notices by email, I'm not sure if that will resume right away, or not. I'm on the 'free' plan and it might take until the end of May for that to straighten out. Posting daily has screwed things up. I just added the follow by Google feature at the bottom of the right hand column if you're interested.

Y is for Yearning— Puppies, Puzzles and Other Impossibilities

I’ll admit that I’m getting burned out on this A to Z Bloggers Challenge but I’m so close to the finish line that I’d have to be ten times the fool to quit now. At first I was going to pick ‘Y is for Yesterdays’ as my writing prompt but I asked my MS AI Copilot, Jasper, to suggest something else because I thought yesterdays would inspire me to waltz down Memory Lane and haven’t I done enough of that with these April posts? When Jasper generated a list of nine Y words, I told him he had me at number two. Yearning because it had the potential to let me be serious (think yearning for world peace) or be ridiculous (think yearning to lose 30 pounds by midnight on a diet of ice cream and Oreo cookies).

Jasper is like a year-old golden retriever with a tennis ball. He/it is never satisfied with giving you only what you asked him for. After I picked Yearning he wanted to be Helpful Hank and suggest ways that I could lean in writing my post. Since this eighty-something person living in a continuum care facility couldn’t put a finger on what I was yearning—aside from world peace and a body that’s agile again—I told him to give it his/its best shot. This is what he came up for.

1. The Yearnings You Outgrew—The ones that once felt urgent but now make you smile at your younger self.

2. The Yearnings You Still Carry—Not in a heavy way—more like a pocket stone you rub without thinking.

3. The Yearnings You Didn’t Expect—The ones that arrived in Independent Living, or in writing this alphabet, or in discovering that you still have things to say.

4. The Yearnings You’re Glad You Never Got—This is where your humor can really shine. A little self‑mockery, a little hindsight, a little “thank goodness that didn’t work out.”

5. The Yearnings That Keep You Human—The ones that remind you you’re still in motion, still curious, still reaching.

I don’t know what you think, but in my world MS AI Copilot is spooky good at what it does spooky good. When I tried to brainstorm ideas on what I am yearning for I came up with: A) A place where you can check out puppies like library books. B) The guts to flash my grumpy old neighbor hoping to get a smile out of him, and C) I yearn to be able to solve The New York Time’s ‘Connections’ game every single day. I don’t know enough pop culture to do that.

The trouble I’m having with feelings of yearning is I’m a realist. I don’t long for impossible things because—duh!—they are impossible. A desire for past relationships to return belong in sappy songs. Yesterday’s sunset has to go to make room for tomorrow’s sunrise I could keep these platitudes going but instead I’ll let Fernando Pessoa wax poetically on why it’s dangerous to yearn for what we can’t have:

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

They don’t call Pessoa “one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language” for nothing.

And now that I’ve filibustered my way through this post I will put a pin in it here so I can go on to tackle the closing essay in this April Bloggers Challenge where I yearn to spin a memorable ending to this fun event that will blow your socks off. ©

Painting at the top by Andrew Wyeth 

X is for the X in the Margins—Those Bookish Breadcrumbs

Okay, I’ll admit I’m fudging a little by claiming I put X’s in the margins next to passages in books that speak to me. I’m more of a highlighter‑underliner and occasional‑pencil‑circler. But X is a stingy letter in the A to Z Challenge, so here we are. And apologies to longtime readers if you recognize a few of these quotes. I warned you on Day One that I’m old and starting to repeat myself both on and offline.

The first passage I can remember metaphorically put an X beside comes from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Decades ago I would have said he was my favorite author, though I eventually outgrew him. Still, I’ve kept my battered copy for one circled paragraph. It appears halfway through the book, when three characters debate how a single translated word in Genesis shaped entire branches of religious thought. The Hebrew timshel — “thou mayest” — struck me hard when I first read it. I was in a state of flux about religion back then—even after taking several classes on world religions both at a secular and a Catholic colleges—and the idea that we are given a choice, not a commandment depending on that translation, fit perfectly with an issue I’d been wrestling with.

My second quote to share is from Dean Koontz’s Seize the Night. I’ve always been overly sentimental about objects, and this passage explains why: “…we remember best those that are linked to places and things; memory embeds in the form and weight and texture of real objects…” In other words, it’s not the value of objects that keeps us attached, they are anchors helping us hold on to our memories. I’ve often wished I could play that on a loop whenever someone dismisses sentimentality. Being sentimental turned the Hall family (of Hallmark fame) into billionaires, so clearly I’m not alone.

Next is a quote from Stephen King’s Different Seasons, a book with many invisible X’s in the margins. I’m not a huge fan of his scare‑you fiction, but I adore his nonfiction. (Give me his writing advice and his reflections on childhood and keep the clowns and haunted hotels.) This line has stayed with me for years: “The most important things are the hardest to say… words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head.” If you’ve ever tried to explain something tender and been met with a blank stare, you know exactly what he means.

King’s book On Writing is practically a forest of metaphorical X’s. Another one of my favorites: “Come to the act of writing any way but lightly… you must not come lightly to the blank page.” I’ve carried that with me through every blog post, every essay, every attempt to tell the truth without flinching. He's also been influential in helping me develop a style of writing where I hold nothing back.

Moving on. Somewhere along the way someone told me my writing style was like Erma Bombeck’s, which sent me on a mission to read everything she ever wrote. Her self‑defeating humor and sharp observations nudged me deeper into my slice‑of‑life memoir style writing, while King reminded me to be honest — even when it’s uncomfortable. Over the years I’ve exposed all my foibles and quirks, the good, the bad and the ugly, because Bombeck was right: “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.”

If I’ve done my job as a blogger, somewhere in this long, April trail of posts there’s a line you’ve marked in your own mind—a little mental X beside something that made you laugh or cry or feel less alone. I can only hope. ©

W is for War Music---From Bugle Boys to Buffalo Springfield

 

Even before I knew about the A to Z Bloggers Challenge, I’d planned to write about the music born from wars and protests. The idea came from a Facebook Short Reel I stumbled on—filmed in Minnesota during the ‘ICE invasion.’ It sent chills down my back, not just because of what was happening there, but because the soundtrack was Buffalo Springfield singing those Vietnam‑era lyrics. Suddenly I was right back in those days, when so many of us made the painful shift from supporting the war to realizing it was a pointless conflict that cost countless innocent lives— not unlike the dog‑and‑pony show unfolding in the Middle East now.

“There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
A-telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop
Children, what's that sound?
Everybody look what's going down.”

I did what I always do: a deeper dive. Stephen Stills wrote that song in 1967, and it’s widely considered one of the most iconic protest songs of all time. While it became an anthem of the anti‑Vietnam movement, it was actually inspired by the Sunset Strip Riots of 1966. You can even download it as a ringtone. For a hot minute, I considered doing just that, but I decided that if it went off here on my continuum‑care campus, it would either send my MAGA neighbors into a pantie‑twist or make the heads‑in‑the‑sand crowd wet theirs.

I cut my teeth on war music, but it was a different breed than the Vietnam soundtracks. Mom had a large collection of WWII records that she played over and over. The Andrews Sisters singing Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy is tattooed inside my head. I can’t hear a gung‑ho WWII song without remembering the day Dad and I cleaned out the basement—decades after we’d had a working record player—and we took her vinyl collection to the dump. We had a great time sailing those 33s across the trash and garbage field like Frisbees. She hadn’t played them in years, but when she found out what we did, she didn’t speak to either of us for a week. She was the queen of giving the cold shoulder.

Her favorites were The White Cliffs of Dover, I’ll Be Seeing You, and I’ll Be Home for Christmas. If memory serves me right, I once read that the U.S. government actually commissioned some of those nostalgic songs and films designed to boost the morale for soldiers and their families. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition was one I could sing before I could tie my shoes—which isn’t saying much, come to think about it, considering my dyslexic and being left-handed battle with learning that skill from my right‑handed mother. Oops.

Vietnam‑era music was a different animal entirely—more protest, more rage, more longing to go home. Besides the Buffalo Springfield classic, there was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son, a blistering critique of the draft that favored the wealthy, and Country Joe & the Fish’s I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag, with its dark humor about the war’s purpose. Other anthems included We Gotta Get Out of This Place and Leaving on a Jet Plane.

And now it’s happening again. Songwriters are once more putting into words what so many people are thinking. Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Minneapolis and Jesse Welles’ No Kings are destine to be the new anti‑authoritarian anthems for the times we’re living through.

My theme for this A to Z Challenge is “the humans, habits, hidden joys, and heartaches that shaped my world.” Long‑time readers know I’ve followed politics my entire adult life, but I try to limit my politically driven posts to one in every thirteen. So I surprised myself that I hadn’t revealed my flaming‑liberal side earlier in this challenge. But this post isn’t one of my typical political rants—just a piece of the mosaic. A part of me I needed to include to round out the picture.

Before I leave the letter W behind, I should say this: these songs didn’t just mark the times, they helped me navigate them. War music doesn’t just soundtrack the world around us; it teaches us how to listen, how to cope and how to remember we’re not alone. ©

V is for Volunteering---From Phone Banks to Mahjong Tables

 

Volunteering seems like a no‑brainer for the A to Z Challenge. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few others pick it too. After all, opportunities to volunteer outnumber the do‑gooder types willing to work hard for no money. I'm not sure if I’ve done my share over the years, but I know I’m nowhere near the level of a certain cousin who has always been the Angel of Good Deeds in our family. Her church and the local election board are lucky to have her lifelong devotion. There may be more than one angel lurking on my mother’s side of the family tree. I just don’t know. But my oldest niece may be close contender in the field of education. 

But we do have a very famous volunteer in the family tree. If you like American Revolutionary War history, you might recognize her name: Mercy Otis Warren, the first person to write a history of that war. She was also a ghostwriter for several key men who ended up signing the Declaration of Independence. She knew people in high places, and their correspondence is well preserved. Not so well preserved are the pamphlets she wrote—the ones handed out in the streets to whip up sentiment against the King of England.

My volunteering is a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to my cousin and niece, let alone Mercy. Still, I like to think the political posts I’ve written over the years may have inspired or educated someone. And there were those years in the ’50s when I was a teenager working the phone banks for the Democratic Party on election day. My dad got me into that gig through his union.

My next stint came when I joined a sorority, Beta Sigma Phi. It wasn’t the kind of sorority people picture—no frat houses, no keg parties. It was service‑oriented. Our parties involved tea cups, finger sandwiches and brainstorming ways to serve the community. Back in the ’60s, BSP was a big deal, known for its philanthropy. According to their archives, they “created their own International Funds that donate millions of dollars to health research groups, hunger projects, and other worthwhile causes.” My most vivid memories are of the secret pledge ceremonies, where you were likely to get your fingers burned by hot wax dripping from the candle you held.

In the early ’70s, I volunteered at Planned Parenthood. Mostly I helped with monthly mailings — probably fundraising and updates on the long road to Roe v. Wade. It’s hard to believe those rights are being eroded after all these years. I had known a girl who died days after getting a coat‑hanger abortion, at her father’s insistence—he was also the father of her baby. It was all in her diary. Back then, and even more so now, I believe that abortions should be safe, legal, and rare.

I’ve never claimed to be an altruist selflessly bounding from one good cause to the next, and the ’80s and ’90s proved it. But shortly after the turn of the century, I made up for lost time when I started working for a large website for stroke survivors and caregivers. I mentioned this in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat the details, except to say I worked long hours—many in the middle of the night. My boss was a paraplegic who typed with a forehead pointer and he had worked for NASA before his stroke. But he was demanding, and no matter how many hours I put in, he wanted to pile on more and more responsibilities onto my shoulders. I finally had to quit for my own well‑being. 

A few months later he tried to stop me from writing caregiver articles elsewhere, claiming he had taught me everything I knew. But my caregiving knowledge came from caring for Don and being present at every single one of his therapies and treatments. My x-boss didn’t win the cease‑and‑desist order. Still, it was a sad ending for a relationship that lasted almost six years. 

 Next came a 3-4 year run with a Red Hat Society Chapter that myself and other woman started and we all tried our hands had entertaining at Assisted Living facilities, helping them do arts-and-craft projects at holidays. The chapter grew and so did the length of their fun outings and I had to drop out because I couldn't leave Don alone more than two hours. 

I didn’t volunteer again until after Don died. I answered a call for help at a small‑town museum. I was lonely and thought it might help me make friends. But everyone there had grown up together, and while they were nice, I always got the jobs that required working alone. At the anniversary of my first year, I quit and I didn't try volunteering again until I took over the mahjong group in the Independent Living building where I live now. I taught classes and built the group up and two years ago I organized our first tournament with our sister campus. So no, I’m not the family’s Angels of Good Deeds (both of whom I greatly admire, by the way). But I do keep the Mahjong group running, and around here, that counts for something. ©