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 is 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. ©

U is for Unexpected Joys—the Ones that Sneak up on You

U is a hard letter to use to inspire a post for the A to Z Challenge but we’re getting closer to the finish line so I can’t quit now. The first thought that popped into my head was The Ugly Truth—the movie, not truths about my life that are ugly. I hope I don’t have too many of them and if I don’t go looking for them I can’t find them. But other than saying The Ugly Truth is one of my favorite movies because I love the sexual tension between Mike (Gerard Bulter) and Abby (Katherine Heigi) what more is there to say about this 2008 film other than apparently I’m not the only one who loves it enough to watch every time it comes on TV. It was a commercial success taking in 205 million and only cost 38 million to make.

But I will reveal one ugly truth. I resorted to asking my MS AI Copilot, Jasper, for one-word prompt suggestions to write about. He/it came up with a list of nine topics. For example, U is for Underestimated or it’s for Unreliable Narrators. Uninvited Guests. Utter Nonsense and Unexpected Joy. At first glance none of these seemed to fit my theme of the humans, habits, hidden joys and heartaches that shaped my world. But on second glance I found my Bingo! I could make Unexpected joys work.

And because Jasper is programmed to never give a simple list or quicky answer when he can write an entire monologue about whatever you asked, he expanded on what exactly I could pull out of my writer’s tool box. This is what AI said: “Jean, this one has your name all over it. You could write about the small, ridiculous, delightful things that happen in community life—Mahjong surprises, a neighbor’s one‑liner, a Toby Keith song drifting through the dining room, a forgotten object turning up in a drawer. It’s warm without being sentimental.”

Nope, I'll come up with my own unexpected joys. Thank you very much. And I did. Here are four of my unexpected joys:

Lemon Meringue pie. We have a pretty good chefs here at my CCC but they don’t offer much for desserts. The wait staff rarely even mentions them because they are mostly young high school kids who are working their first jobs and—my theory is—they’ve figured out if we don’t order them they get to go home earlier. A fellow resident and I have a running joke going of asking nightly if they have lemon meringue pie, knowing the answer is always no. Then it happened. A waitress came running up to our table and proclaiming we have Lemon meringue pie and she’s been saving two pieces for us. If we were allowed to tip, she would have gotten a good one for giving us both an unexpected joy.

Another unexpected joy also revolved around a dessert. It’s not unusual for people in our Independent Living apartments to bake and share their bounty with neighbors—in building two and I live in building one and no one here seems to use their ovens. One day I got a knock on the door and opened it to a resident from building one holding a plate of warm, peanut-butter cookies. She had heard me say that it was my favorite. For her to take those cookies down the elevator, across the lobby, through the piazza, key herself into my building, and track down my apartment—that was unexpected. But when I bit in to one I was quite sure she’d used the same recipe my mom did when I was growing up. My joy eating those cookies can’t be measured.

Another unexpected joy also invoked good memories. I only listen to the radio in the car, and since I don’t drive much I don’t hear a lot of music. Last week I had to go to the sleep lab and when I started my Chevy Trax Willie Nelson was blasting out, On the Road Again. When my husband was alive and we’d go on vacation or to someplace fun on the weekend he had that song first on a play list of road trip music. Hearing that song quite by happenstance brought unexpected joy. Though there were a few years when it brought tears to hear it out of the blue.

Side note here: Long time followers of my blog might want to know that I slept like a baby in the sleep lab and it resulted in me getting a BIPAP. Mid May after I've seen all the specialists involved in my search for a good night's sleep, I'll write a post about it. 

The last unexpected joy I’ll share is an oldie but the best unexpected joy in my life. First the back story: When my mom passed away I held back a small amount of her ashes and I kept them in a miniature Tupperware bowl attached to a key chain, but somehow it got lost when I moved after Don’s stroke. I keep hoping against hope they’ll turn up but they didn’t. For twelve years. I was looking for something else altogether and I found it in a box of keepsakes from my childhood that I got out to show my brother. When I pulled the little bowl out, he said he hadn't seen me that happy in a long time. Back when I moved I must have put it in the box for safe keeping. It was safe alright...and lost for over a decade.

Even though the prompt I used for the letter U didn’t come from within my aging brain, I think AI’s suggestion did a pretty good job of pulling the warm fuzzy moments out of me. I guess that’s the thing about unexpected joys—they don’t care where the prompt (or the joy) comes from. I’m just glad they showed up for me to write about. ©

T is for Toys—A Road Back to Childhood

Toys was an easy pick for my letter T in the A to Z Blogger Challenge. I did consider writing about the tornado that wiped out my husband’s entire family farm when he was a teenager, but those memories are documented in a past post. That tornado—his family’s second—killed 24 people, injured over two hundred, stayed on the ground for 39 minutes, and carved a 14‑mile path of destruction. It was also the reason my husband spent his entire adult life trying to buy back the toys of his youth. And then some.

If you’ve ever seen the TV series Hoarders, you already know that most hoarders have major losses in their lives coupled with untreated depression. Their common thread is loss—loss that drives them to surround themselves with whatever they collect, be it trash or treasures. Another contributing factor is insecurity so deep most of us can’t understand how they can live that way.

Don was not a hoarder like you see on that show. But he could have been—would have been—if he hadn’t had years of treatment for depression. His thing was collecting: road maps, coins and currency, gas and oil memorabilia. And his gateway “drug” was buying back the antique toys similar to what he and his brothers once owned, the ones that flew over the fields and woods the day of the tornado.

By the time we met, I was collecting antiques too. I started with furniture I restored and used, then I moved on to smaller things—like filling in the missing pieces of the dish set my folks used at their cottage. I also had (and still have) marbles, Cracker Jack toys and wooden nickels. By the time I moved out of the house after Don died, we had a library room full of well‑organized “smalls” in showcases and collector boxes. Some might have called it hoarding; most people labeled us collectors because everything was clean, researched, and neatly displayed. Visitors often said coming to our house was like going to a museum. A friend once gave Don a retractable pointer as a joke because he loved giving tours of our “museum.”

After Don died, it took me two years to downsize—two years of selling things on eBay, hauling boxes to an auction house and selling through an antique mall where we’d been vendors for years.

But I will say this: we never met another vendor who didn’t have at least a few hoarder tendencies. Don’s basement and garage before we married were stuffed, but never as bad as the hoarding situations you see on TV. Don had a method to his madness, and I can already hear someone in the cheap seats of Bloggerland saying, “Sure. All hoarders say that.” But not many hoarders can say their widows sold one bread‑box‑sized item for $19,000 and a half dozen more for $4,000 to $7,000. He studied the collectibles he loved and had the disposable income to buy what he knew would go up in value.

Not everything did go up, of course. As kids we both collected stamps, and it was hard to even get face value out of those. I ended up donating a box of newer commemorative sheets to a place that uses them to teach kids about history. The moral of that story: never, ever buy anything sold as a collectible. No one lives long enough for those “investments” to pay off.

All collectors have a backstory—whether it’s the good stuff with actual value or they have houses overtaken by plastic recycling, rotten food and human waste. I’m grateful my obsessed collector was the former (sentiment‑driven) and not the latter (insecurity‑driven). If he hadn’t stood watching old license plates, pedal cars, live chickens, and ten‑gallon milk cans spinning upward, Don probably wouldn’t have spent his adult life trying to buy back his childhood toys and the family pieces handed down through generations. His grandfather’s pocket watch, for example, was lost to the tornado but after Don died he had a dozen I had to sell.

He couldn’t pass an estate sale, garage sale, auction or antique store without stopping. And we had fun doing it. We even managed to find most of the toys he’d gotten out of cereal boxes in the ’40s. And I still have his Captain Midnight decoder ring, signal‑mirror ring and bomb rings. Small trinkets, but they come with a large box of memories. ©

 

 

Photos: At the top of the post is one of the showcases in our library for our smalls. The photo here at the bottom is of one wall in our garage for Don's signs. The center picture is of Don showing his friends his gas & oil smaller items. Another wall had 1920s, fully restored gas pumps with the glass globes---can't find a photo of those. But you get the idea. Don was a hoarder but I was an organizer so it all worked out. 

S is for Stories—the Ones I Didn’t Tell

I came up with four words for the letter S in the A to Z Challenge: secrets, stuff, snow and serendipity.

Serendipity was the first to go. It’s one of my favorite words in the English language, and I’ve had plenty of serendipitous moments in my life, but none of them fit my theme of the humans, habits, hidden joys and heartaches that shaped my world. Still, who doesn’t love a story about the universe lining things up just right? That thought reminds me of the day I got myself in trouble at book club by using the word serendipity in the wrong company.

The book was My Mrs. Brown. As the facilitator went around the room, women offered comments like, “It was a sweet book,” and “It was a feel-good book.” When it was my turn, I said I thought it was mostly boring. Someone laughed and said, “We can always count on Jean to have a different opinion.”

Then the next woman gushed about how the book was full of divine interventions. “It was so inspirational!”

Say what?

I asked her for an example. She said it was a divine intervention that the main character took a job packing up the house of a wealthy woman who had died. Finding a dress in the closet was a divine intervention. Someone giving Mrs. Brown a book about fashion was a divine intervention.

I couldn’t help myself. “I’d call all those things serendipity. How do you define a divine intervention?”

She bristled. “I don’t believe in serendipity. Everything is divine intervention!”

I took that to mean only non-believers use the word serendipity. Since I’m an agnostic and it’s one of my favorite words, I would have let it drop before we wandered into religion—but someone else asked if I thought serendipity was always happy little events. She threw me a life-line.

“Yes,” I said. “I just don’t think God has time to help someone find a dress when there are more important things going on in the world.”

“So you’re saying divine interventions are more like miracles,” she said, clarifying my words.

Bingo. She won the Kewpie doll.

Next I tried snow as my prompt, but that went nowhere fast. Long-time readers know my husband plowed snow for over forty years and I did it for seventeen. It’s well documented in this blog. But newcomers might enjoy hearing about a game we occasionally played in the middle of the night when conditions were just right. We called it Rat Hockey.

Yes, real rats.

They’d venture out onto the mall parking lot and we’d escort them across it with two or three trucks, turning our plows back and forth to make the rat slide across the icy surface. We’d “steal” the rat from each other mid-slide, and you scored if you were the one who ran it into a snowbank. As far as we knew, none of the rats were harmed. We’d see them dig their way out of the snowbank and look around as if to say, “What the hell just happened?” It’s a wonder none of us ever collided. Imagine explaining that to an insurance adjuster.

Then I moved on to stuff, but that got cut too. I’d just watched a couple episodes of Hoarders, and I didn’t want readers thinking I had—or ever had—stuff in that quantity or quality. But lately I’ve been scaring myself with my inability to throw out three glass jars that once held Meijer-brand peaches. They’re such a pretty shape. Surely I can find a use for them. I’m almost afraid to go to Meijer this week for fear one of those peach jars will jump in my cart like a stray kitten no one could leave behind. If I buy peaches every two weeks, you do the math. Hoarding has to start somewhere.

The last word I crossed off was secrets. As much as I up-chuck my life online, one could assume I’ve already dissected every minute of my time on earth. I haven’t. Not by a long shot. One secret in particular I've been keeping since 1969. I finally told my youngest niece a year ago. She said all the right things—“I’m so sorry that happened to you” blab, blab, blab—but it didn’t make me feel better. It wasn’t cathartic. Remembering that made me realize I can’t write about secrets. Not this year.

Having eliminated all my S word prompts I have nothing left in my writer’s tool box! I guess I’ll have to skip forward to my T topic for tomorrow. Please come back. ©

R is for Romance—And the Kindle Under My Pillow

Why did they put all the hard letters near the end of the alphabet, making the A to Z Blogger Challenge harder as we go along? My prompt word for the letter R was an easy choice, but looking ahead to V, W, Y, and Z has me shaking in my proverbial boots. You may have noticed that I overuse the word proverbial. But then I also lean on trite little sayings like “shaking in my boots.” So the root solution is for me to quit being lazy in my writing.

Okay, I’ve filibustered enough. Time to explain why I picked Romance for my word prompt. I have three answers.

One: I was boy crazy in my teens. I mean really, really boy crazy—so much so that if one so much as looked at me, I’d break into giggles that telegraphed the fact that I was jailbait. I’m sure my mother appreciated that.

Two: I was hooked on reading romance novels in my 40s and 50s. I don’t remember how I found my first one, but I do remember being shocked at how fast I could read in my 40s compared to college. My mom always had Regency romances in the house, so maybe that was my gateway “drug.” But that sub-genre reminds me of Hallmark movies where the main characters don’t kiss until the last five minutes. I quickly moved up the sensual ladder where I discovered historical romances. (Don't tell anyone but I even tried writing a historical romance once.) 

Like men who claim they bought Playboy for the articles, I was quick to say I liked historicals for the history. But all kidding side, they often sent me to the library to fact-check because I didn’t always believe what I read. Soon I learned which authors did solid research and which ones didn’t. When I downsized nearly five years ago, I had hundreds of romance “favorites” to dispose of. I kept only three: Morning Glory by LaVyrle Spencer, The Outsider by Penelope Williamson, and The Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux. The next time I downsize, I’ll only keep the latter. Not that I’d need to—I have it on my old Kindle, which I keep under my pillow. 

Until recently, I used to listen to bits of that book to fall asleep. I’d set the timer for a half hour, and when I got up in the night to pee, I’d reset it for ten minutes so I wouldn’t start thinking about the day past or the one ahead. I’ve logged so many hours on that book that Amazon sends me emails that translate to: Hey, lady-in-a-rut, Jude wrote other books. We think you’d like such-and-such.

Three: While I might be old, I still enjoy looking at eye candy in the form of good-looking men and occasionally daydreaming about what it’s like to be young and in love again. I blame it on being artistic. In college I had to take a lot of figure drawing classes with nude models. Now, I might admire a man’s chest or well-chiseled arms, but only because I can imagine drawing his form in pastel chalk. Are you buying that? You should, because I’m not a cougar type who wants to touch what catches my eye.

And please know that the ages of my preferred eye candy have changed over the years. When I was in my teens, any male over twenty scared the pants off me (another overused expression). And here’s where I should probably admit that eye candy has more to do with sexual attraction than romance. Oops. Forget I wrote this paragraph.

That was fun. Now I need to get serious and explain why I have such fond memories of reading romance novels and how I owe the genre for giving me an amazing turnaround in my love of reading. I shared in my post for E is for Education that I’m mildly dyslexic, and although I still won’t read out loud in public—some words still don’t compute in my brain—I’m no longer ashamed to admit my past struggles with the written word. And maybe that’s the real gift romance gave me. I may not chase romance anymore, but I still chase stories to blog about — and that’s enough of a happily‑ever‑after for me. © 

Q is for Questions—The Ones I Wish I’d asked my Mom

Thanks to fellow blogger, Beth, for suggesting this topic, I have something to write about for this edition of the A to Z Bloggers Challenge. My mom was in her early seventies when she died and I’ve written about that before so I won’t go into detail. But I will quote myself below so new readers will understand why it was traumatic, and why it left me with no time to ask the questions I didn’t yet know I’d want answers to.

“She’d been going to the doctor every week for a dozen weeks complaining of pain. Near the end my brother started going with her to get some answers about what was going on and the doctor told him Mom was just getting old and looking for attention. Mistakes one through ten. Unbeknown to anyone she had a small hole in a kidney and blood was slowly seeping out and filling up her body cavity. Mistakes eleven and twelve came the day she died and the ambulance got lost trying to find my parents’ house. (They lived on a lake in a rural area where the township didn’t keep their maps up to date.) Mistake thirteen through fifteen happened on the way to the hospital when the ambulance caught on fire and they had to wait for another. She died of septic shock ten minutes after arriving a the hospital and a doctor told me later that dying that way is very painful. Her death was a series of human errors and oversights and it was filled with the kind of shoulda, coulda anguish that only comes with hindsight.”

My mom had a way of answering questions that didn’t really tell you anything. (Remember me writing about how when asked what's for dinner she'd say things like, "An old dead cow.") Another example of her non-answers was when I asked her where I came from and I thought I’d get the birds and the bees story I heard rumors about. The idea that the daddy bee stings the mommy bee with his—gasp!—penis was so outlandish that I counted on her to set the story straight. She did. She told me she found my brother and me under a pile of rocks. A few years later she finally did set the story straight—not with a conversation, of course, but by handing me a pamphlet from the health department.

One of those things she didn’t want to talk about was a screw-back, silver and blue Air Force wings pin that I found in her jewelry box. I didn’t have any uncles or grandfathers who served in the Air Force. Where did it come from and why did she let me wear that pin to high school during the period when I had an imaginary boyfriend named Roger who was off serving our country? And did she know about Roger? Did she read my diaries when I was at school? Years later I thought she might have had a boyfriend before she married my dad who died in a ‘dog fight’ in the air space over Europe during WWII. In my golden years I still think she had that boyfriend, but if so, why was she willing to let me wear that keepsake? I would have snatched it out of any daughter of mine’s hands and locked it away. Maybe she trusted me more than I realized. Or maybe she didn’t think of it as a keepsake at all. Maybe she found it under a pile of rocks.

After she died I went through her cedar chest and another mystery was discovered among the mostly photos and knickknacks. A pair of soft pink satin and cream-colored lace panties that buttoned down the side. 1940s boy-cut style. Why did she keep them for thirty odd years? Who does that? My parents were married in the late ‘40s so maybe it was her version of keeping a wedding dress? She was married in a drab gray suit trimmed in brown fir over a weekend spent in Chicago. I have pictures of that trip and she and my dad both looked really happy. Oh, and that drab suit? Mom cut it up to make a coat for a doll I got one Christmas and I still have them both.

What did I do with the panties? You ask. I put them in a fresh plastic bag with a note about when and where I found them and put them in a small trunk that is earmarked to go to my oldest niece. She still has the cedar chest I found the panties in and I suspect they will end up back in that chest for my great-niece to discover one day. Some families hand down grandfather clocks and quilts. I’m thinking I might be starting a tradition of handing down underwear.

In all seriousness. The questions I wish I’d asked my mom before she died are about gaining more details of her childhood and her parents. I know the basics of how her own mother died when she was nine and all seven siblings where separated and sent off to various places. It was like an informal foster care known as ‘farming children out’ that was arranged between families rather than the state. But knowing my mother, she probably wouldn’t have told me very much. Her childhood ended too soon, when she went off to live with a grandmother who ran a boarding house where she was expected to work for her keep. In her teens she was working in other people's homes as a housekeeper and by the time she met my dad she'd been a waitress for several years. 

My mom was not a reminiscing type like I am. Maybe the past held too much pain? She focused on the future, always planning and plotting for ways to hedge her bets against bad luck and foul play, so to speak. We all leave a few blank pages behind; but with the brief outline she did leave, I’m pretty sure I could flesh her story out. But I know the important part: she was a strong woman who loved her family and I wish I'd have told her more often how much I loved her. ©

Photo at the top: Mom and dad on their honeymoon. 

P is for Philosophy— Lessons from my Dad

I’m going to live dangerously here for this edition of the A to Z Bloggers Challenge and try to form a picture of how, why and where my interest in philosophy came from. Hopefully it won’t look like I’m bluffing my way around a topic I once knew something about...more than a half a century ago. Any "book learning" I had decades ago is running for the hills as if Godzilla just stomped into town. If the Blogging Police want to tisk‑tisk me for bluffing, I can live with it. But stick with me to the end and I may eventually write something profoundly philosophical—and I don’t mean a review of the perfume by that name. (Which I do like, in case anyone wants to know.)

AI defines philosophy this way: “The systematic study of fundamental questions concerning existence, knowledge, ethics, reason, and language. Derived from the Greek for ‘love of wisdom,’ it uses rational argument and critical analysis to understand the world, rather than relying on empirical observation alone. It analyzes concepts like truth, reality, and morality.”

My ideas on philosophy are deeply rooted, and they got their start at my dad’s side. I absorbed them by listening to his Will Rogers‑style way of viewing the world. I don’t know how he picked up his respect for knowledge and education. He dropped out of school in grade school. Except for the newspaper, he wasn’t a reader. Yet when I was in college taking classes in philosophy, world religion and logic, we could discuss those topics and he held his own talking about Socrates, Plato, mythical utopian cities, and the origins of our values and laws.

Life was his teacher. He’d witnessed Ku Klux Klan hangings while hiding in the woods as a kid. He saw the unfairness of Blacks, Italians and Irish getting paid less than whites in the coal mines while they all worked side by side. And I’ll never forget the look of horror and disgust on Dad’s face on Bloody Sunday in 1963 when the nightly news showed fire hoses and attack dogs turned on the peaceful marchers in Selma.

I’ll also never forget the look of sheer happiness that lit up his face when Tiger Woods won his first PGA in 1999. He was proud of Tiger for breaking the color barrier in a game Dad loved his entire life. I’m glad he isn’t here to see how far Tiger has fallen, but Dad was the most fair‑minded person I’ve ever known. He’d probably express forgiveness. Why? Because he knew Tiger spent his whole career carrying a heavy load as a role model for an entire generation of dark‑skinned kids. Dad always looked for the story behind the actions of others, and the story usually came with an empathetic twist.

Case in point: decades ago my cousin and brother took my dad to a strip joint, thinking they’d shock him and prove how “grown up” they’d become. After the stripper did her act, my cousin asked what Dad thought about a woman who’d do that. He expected a lot of things, but not Dad saying, “Well, she probably has a baby at home that needs milk, and this is the best job she could get.”

When I downsized nearly five years ago, twenty‑seven books on philosophy and religion made the cut. And I’ve read every single one cover to cover. I can’t say the same about all the other books on my shelves. Some of the titles range from the Bible and The Good Book (aka The Humanist’s Bible) to Aristotle Would Have Liked Oprah, Working on God, The Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy, Seinfeld and Philosophy, Man’s Search for a Soul, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, The Nature of Man, and The Republic of Plato.

Many of my books aren’t hard‑hitting textbooks. But books like Seinfeld and Philosophy (by William Irwin) can teach concepts in a way most of us can understand. One blurb on the back says the book “nicely illustrates how the comic can illuminate the profound.” Yup. Jerry’s constant questioning of everything is very much like what Socrates did to teach. As the book puts it, “Both Socrates and Jerry Seinfeld manage to make something considerable out of seemingly obvious questions and trivial subject matter.”

Kramer, in the same book, is portrayed as being stuck in Søren Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage of life. In case you’re rusty on your Danish philosophers, Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was the father of the Three Spheres of Existence: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. The first stage is marked by pleasure‑seeking. Kramer is in constant pursuit of whatever interests him, and what interests him changes daily. He has no ability to commit to anything.

If I believe in the three spheres — and I can certainly name long periods when I was stuck in the aesthetic stage — then I can also pinpoint when my ethical stage began, when I started taking on more responsibility and living a more purposeful life.

But Kierkegaard believed it takes a leap of faith to enter the third stage, and that most people remain in the ethical stage, never taking that leap to fully commit to God. Think nuns‑and‑priests‑level commitment. You can be a steady churchgoer and still not be in the third stage if you’re not willing to give up your creature comforts.

Right about now, if anyone is still reading, you’re probably asking what does it matters what some old Danish dude thought. To answer that, I’ll share a quote from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy: “Kierkegaard’s work gave rise to the major trend in twentieth‑century philosophy known as existentialism, a philosophy that focuses on the meaning of existence for the individual.” And I dare say nearly everyone reading this flirted with that branch of philosophy in the late ’60s and early ’70s—the counterculture years—when we were all searching for meaning and purpose. Some of us still are. I know I am.

Maybe that’s why the recent Walk for Peace fascinated me so much. It reminded me that there are still people willing to give up their earthly comforts to reach a higher plane of faith.

Sometimes life is a gentle ride in a canoe, and other times it’s like riding in an overloaded ferry boat while holding your breath until you reach the other side. Have you ever written or said something, then Googled it to make sure it originated in your own brain and wasn’t something your subconscious coughed up like a cat with a hairball? That’s what I did with the first sentence in this paragraph. I wrote it as a reply to a comment on my blog, then deleted it because it seemed too richly philosophically for me to have “invented” it. Google couldn’t find anything remotely similar, so I’m pretty sure I can claim the line as my own.

And with that, my promise to write something philosophical is fulfilled. © 

Note: The painting at the top was by Raphael and its titled The School of Athens. I still have the term paper I wrote in 1961 about the gathering of philosophers portrayed in the piece. It's the only term paper I've kept all these years. I read it very few years just to remind myself that I once knew things. 

O is for Overtime—When Work Was Just What You Did

 

A few posts back in this A to Z Blogger’s Challenge, I wrote about my dad working long overtime hours during WWII, and that got me thinking about all the overtime Don and I worked over the years. At no point in my adult life did I ever have a tidy nine-to-five job like Dolly Parton sang about in her 1980 movie song with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.

I never “tumbled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen” to pour myself a cup of “ambition” before heading off to a predictable shift. In the floral industry, where I worked for twenty years, there was no such thing as nine to five. We worked when there was work to do. Funerals, holidays, and weddings didn’t care what time the shop or greenhouses closed. Brides often needed evening appointments, and grieving families needed casket sprays and pedestal pieces with gold-foil letters proclaiming labels like “Mother” or “Grandfather.” Those letters are still the same fonts they were sixty years ago. And yes, I still have the same hand-held Clipper #700 stapler I used back then. The letters, however, now come with sticky backs.

Funerals were unpredictable, but weddings guaranteed overtime on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Not ideal for my man‑hunting days. (Girls who met their spouses in high school or college missed the era of wondering where on earth you’d find a decent man.) Most of the guys I worked with were either married or gay. One was deep in the closet, circa the ’60s. With my hours, my default social life became Sunday skiing or after work bar‑hopping with two single co‑workers—a gay girl and a gay guy. None of us ever found what we were looking on those after work bar hops. Surprise, surprise .

We did have some fun after hours, the kind you can only have when management is nowhere in sight. Flowers came in from all over the world, and once in a while cockroaches hitched a ride. One shipment must have included a pregnant one because they multiplied fast. When we told the boss, he said the monthly spraying would take care of it. We didn’t want to wait. So we trapped a dozen in a jar and planted them in his desk drawers. The next morning, he walked into his office with his coffee and came shooting right back out like the hounds of hell were after him. That night the chemical guy was waiting for us to punch out. The boss? We didn’t see him again all day, and he never found out what we’d done.

Holidays were the worst for overtime. My bosses did wholesale as well as retail, so we prepared artificial arrangements by the hundreds to ship to four states before switching to retail fresh flower orders. We also decorated houses—inside and out—for wealthy clients and big parties. Twelve-to fourteen-hour shifts weren’t unusual. I learned early on to finish my Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. I also learned that if I wanted a break, I had to learn to drink coffee, because my boss didn’t like the image of someone sitting in the break room “doing nothing.”

When I left that job, I started my own weddings‑only service out of my home. A one‑woman operation with part‑time help from my nieces, my mom and Don. Anyone who’s ever had their own business knows who ends up working the longest hours. After ten years of that—and more than a few Bridezillas—I gave it up and went back to college, which I wrote about in E is for Education. At the same time, I worked part‑time for Don, plowing snow in the winters and doing parking lot maintenance the rest of the year. He had five or six part‑time workers, but it was he and I who worked the most overtime. Exhausted was our default condition during the nineties. Oh, and did I mention he also worked a full time job at GM where, went we first met, they had a lot of mandatory overtime?

Those years blur together now—the late nights, the early mornings, the holidays spent working instead of celebrating. At the time, it all felt ordinary, just the way life was for us. Maybe that’s the thing about overtime—you don’t notice the hours until you finally step outside and see how far they carried you. ©