Party Time and Wasting Time on Widowhood Lane

I nearly forgot to write my Saturday sacrifice to the gods of cyberspace because all week I’ve been burning up the internet shopping for birthday décor for a party that isn’t going to happen for two and a half months. I’m so one tracked when I’ve got a bee in my bonnet like that. I should be working on my income taxes or cleaning the insides of my kitchen cabinets which I usually do this time of the year. I’ve got a whole house full of similar projects I could be doing but, no, instead I’m driving myself crazy looking at Alice in Wonderland theme napkins, drink me bottles, keys, pocket watches, pink flamingos, tea party menus and other things that have nothing to do with the age of the guest of honor. And who would that be, you ask? Me. I’m throwing myself a party. An English Afternoon Tea Party with finger sandwiches and eatable gemstones---rubies, sapphires and diamonds, oh my! Well, unless I change my mind which I’ve been doing all week.

I’ve probably driven my best friend since kindergarten crazy right along with me with e-mails flying back and forth. N.B. is my go-to person when it comes to questions about cooking and entertaining. She’s spent most of her adult life creating fabulous menus for parties and get-togethers out in suburbs of Washington, D.C.  She creates and cooks. I buy and warm up. She loves entertaining. I fall apart at the very thought. She owns lots of china and linens in different patterns and colors. Back two years ago I decided to downsize my large collection of Buffalo 1940s diner dishes that I used every day and instead I completed my mom’s set of lily-of-valley dishes by Primrose China to make up place settings for six plus a few serving dishes. The internet is great. It only took me a two month of shopping e-Bay and the China Replacement LTD and more money than I care to admit to find what my mom probably got free with her groceries. It seems fair since my brother and I were probably responsible for breaking more than our share of her favorite dishes back when we were kids.

I got off track here. Back to the party. This week I’ve been to Hobby Lobby twice. Once to buy and once to return the table décor. In between I discovered that my one and only table cloth isn’t big enough when I put the extensions in the table so the color scheme I was going to use had to leave town before dark. Can you tell I don’t entertain enough to even know a basic fact like that? That wouldn’t happened to N.B. and I panicked over the discovery. She had a great work-around solution only by the time I read her e-mail I had combed the World Wide Web and found a set of six placemats that will go with my mom’s dishes and my vintage moss green Fenton thumbprint stemware. Yes, the party will be small---my Gathering Girls friends---and I’m not sure what I’m going to do for a seventh place setting but I’ll come up with something for the birthday girl.

What I’m most proud of finding on the web are little glass bottles with corks and tags that read, “Drink Me!” Do you think women in their 70s and 80s---my guests---will remember that Alice drank a potion from a bottle to shrink her size so she’d fit through the door to the magic garden? I’m thinking of buying the “Eat Me!” tags too to put on cherry tarts like Alice ate but I think we all know that eating sweets makes us grow bigger. I may have to read Lewis Carroll’s book again in case someone quizzes me on how some of the Alice in Wonderland things fit into the story, include pink flamingos, pocket watches and Victorian keys.

At Hobby Lobby they had an entire featured display of flamingo stuff---from pillows to signs to salt and pepper shakers to glasses and dishes. They grew on me as I walked around and around the display. They made me smile and reminded me of vacations with warm weather and blue skies. If the dollar store has some flamingo yard ornaments this spring I might buy one to put by my front door for the party and make a sign saying, "Go this way!" But I'm not sure how many adults will remember the book well enough to know about those signs and flamingos.

In my travels around the internet this week I found an article at Smithsonian.com titled, The Tacky History of the Pink Flamingo. I wasn’t really surprised to learn they’ve been around since 1957. Talk about staying power! They were first created in Massachusetts, of all places, by an art school sculptor who’d been hired by a local plastics company and the rest is history, a history that early-on included Andy Warhol helping to make the fake birds become a cultural pop-icon. And that’s your retro-cool aficionado lesson for today. Oh, no! Should I/could I change my party theme---again---this time to Flamingo City? This week should go down in The Big Book of Wasted Time as a classic example of a widow with too much time on her hands. ©

Baseball, War and a Month of Memories

I’d rather watch grass grow than to go to a baseball game. I’m not a sports fan of any kind but I am a fan of cultural history and when the senior hall offered a lecture on the history of baseball during the Civil War I signed up. The bus picked us up Thursday evening for the event that took place at our state’s presidential library which is located in a city near-by. The speaker, a professor/author and well-known baseball historian is a member of The Chicago Civil War Round Table, an organization a Google search tells me is very large and active in its endeavor to preserve all things related to the War Between the States. It seems odd to me, at times, that we’ve romanticized a war to the extent we do with that war, but that’s a debate for another day. It’s enough to say the results of the Civil War merit that treatment on one side of the debate and on the other side, yearly reenactments of the deaths of so many men seems beyond morbid. The older I get the more of a pacifist I become so you won’t see me in the role of camp follower, doing what some women did during that war. The reenactments remind me that fighting is so deeply bred into humans that, I guess, romanticizing fake fighting is better than the real thing. Too bad we can’t get the rest of the world on board with that thought. Keep them so busy with reenacting past wars they don’t have time for new ones. 

Back to baseball: Dispelling the myth that baseball was invented during the Civil War by Abner Doubleday, a general in the Union Army, was the centerpiece of the lecture. The fact is scholars all agree, now, he had nothing to do with baseball---the game actually evolved from games played with balls during medieval times and no one person invented it. But the myth held on long enough for the National Baseball Hall of Fame to be built in Doubleday’s home town in 1937. An interesting and often funny lecture, I learned that the soldiers on both sides of the war spent more time playing baseball than in actual battles. It was also interesting that Lincoln had a ball diamond on the White House lawn. Who knew!

Speaking of Don---I wasn’t? Oops, that reference got lost in a rewrite. Anyway, April is a month filled with memory triggers for me. Don’s and my birthday fall in April as well as our anniversary and that of my mom and dad’s. My mother died in April and both my brother and brother-in-law share a birthday on the same day in April. And now I have a great-great nephew with an April birthday and soon they’ll be a great-great niece’s birth to celebrate in April. Last weekend I went to the first ever birthday party for little C.S. His mother made an assortment of homemade quiches and the best ever strawberries dipped in dark chocolate. Gifts and cake, too, came with the afternoon. It was good to build some new memories for April, happy memories filled with hope for such a young life. What a bright little boy. Already he’s learning how to point to letters on a wall chart. I may not live long enough for him to remember me, but I’ll bet one day he’ll read the words I wrote in the family genealogy books and learn about his connection to the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. His grandparents, both retired teachers, will see that he learns to love written words. And that pleases me.

I’m looking forward to summer and one of the first signs I get that its coming comes from my neighbor. They are so deep into medieval reenactments that they actually use handwoven clothe to hand stitch into costumes that are very specific to certain centuries of medieval life. Every summer weekend they’re off to reenactments, medieval fairs and jousting tournaments. I’d like to go to one. I heard the pig roasts are great. One day soon they’ll empty out the shed where they keep all their medieval gear---lances, shields, chain-mail, goal posts, a white tent with a pointed “roof” and colorful flags---no horse back there, but someday I expect to see one. Every knight with shining armor needs one. Can you believe it, they actually met at a jousting tournament. How’s that for a romantic way to meet. I can’t wait to ask them if the fairs include ball games. It’s nice to see a young couple so emerged in something fun that teaches at the same time. And maybe that’s the value of Civil War reenactments, too. Maybe it’s not so much about romanticizing war as it is about teaching history. ©

Note: The lithograph at the top is of a baseball game at the Civil War Salisbury Prison in North Carolina. A prisoner from the north recreated the scene when he got back home after the war. 

The Week That Flew By

It’s been one of those weeks when I was busy all the time but at the end, there wasn’t much that stood out as being worth taking up space in my memory bank or my blog. Not being memorable can actually be a good thing because that rules out a whole host of bad things that could have happened. No funerals to attend. No falling down and going boom in the night that required a trip in an ambulance. No bills came I can’t pay. I’m still old---that hasn’t changed---but, jeez, I’m not dead and according to Marlo Thomas’ new book, It Ain’t Over…Till It’s Over, I still have plenty of time to reinvent my life and chase my dreams. Sometimes we just need to be reminded of obvious things like that.

I did have one outing this week that is worth mentioning. For our April walk-about my Red Hat Society Chapter finally made it downtown to the dinosaur exhibit. We tried to go once before but the line was too long so we went to plan B. I don’t really care about dinosaurs. As fast as the world is changing I’ll be one myself soon enough. Like yesterday when my WiFi quit working and it took me over an hour to get the darn thing working again. A seven year old probably could have done it in five minutes. But as exhibits go, it was impressive and it took us two hours to view all the animatronic dinosaurs, the feather, dung and head fossils and the full skeletons. I learned that dinosaurs are now believed to be the ancestors of modern birds, not reptiles as people in my age bracket were taught decades ago and they are still digging up dinosaurs fossils today which are in big demand on the black market. Who knew you could get millions of dollars for a pile of old bones to reconstruct? And what does one do with a dinosaur in a private home? They don’t have folklore properties like ground-up rhino horns that are erroneously believed to help a guy get a hard-on. But who decides these things? And why can’t we just supply the rhino horn buyers with a lifetime supply of Viagra and save the destruction of those butt-ugly-but-still-beautiful-at-the-same-time animals? Let those rhino buying guys wear themselves out to the point of extinction. Sometimes the simplest answer to a problem is right before our eyes.

This week I also got two phone calls on my husband’s birthday from longtime friends. It was nice to know that others still remember and miss him as much as I do. It’s weird knowing I’m now officially older than he was when he died. And my brother and sister-in-law are taking me out for dinner on Sunday to mark the occasion of both Don’s and my birthday. I won the in-law lottery with those two. About the only thing I could ever do wrong in their eyes is to shoot a polar bear. I could understand their admiration back when Don was alive…they had a big stake in me staying healthy and happy to take care of Don since they were next in line as power of attorney. But with Don no longer in the picture they still hang in there with me and not all widows can say that about their in-laws. In fact, I can say that about all of his family. I am still one of them and for that I am grateful.

Next week is move-in time for my new antique booth and this past week was devoted to getting everything ready. Thankfully, I have a good friend who will help me move in my heavy showcase. He’s like the son we never had. He’s one of these extremely busy, do-good types who spreads himself too thin and has a big family that he is devoted to. So I don’t see him more than a handful of times a year, but he calls often and has always been there to volunteer to help when I’ve needed it. In fact, this time he actually called me to tell me about this booth opening up and urged me to rent it. He’s got a booth in the same mall, so I’m hoping we’ll cross paths often as we restock. He’s a crazy, upbeat kind of person who never seems to age. Just fun to be around and don’t we all need more people like that in our lives.(Wow, who knew I'd be writing an ode to Tim today?)

I’ve got a busy but fun week ahead. Besides the move-in mall business I have a Thai cooking class on my schedule and my Movie and Lunch Club meets. Then at the end of the week I’m going to a surprise birthday party for my brother---not to worry, he doesn't owe a computer and won't see this. I can’t wait to visit my family. I haven’t seen them since last fall. (Well, except for a baby shower in January where I saw the female half.) I wish they didn’t live so far away, but they do so that just makes the times when I do see them all the sweeter. ©

The Widow's Birthday Card

 

My computer has been crashing when I open up too much stuff at the same time. It’s been this way a month or more and the computer guy that checked it out says I need a new one, that he can’t fix what’s wrong with my old baby. Then two days ago I thought it was finally time to plan its funeral in the land of obsolete equipment. It was turning itself off within a few minutes of turning it on. Long story short, after two days of hand ringing I figured out the surge protector was cutting in and out and that was turning the computer off.  A new surge protector later and my old baby gets a reprieve. I hate the idea of shopping for a new computer! I don’t want to leave the land of XP for Windows 8 but it’s got to happen one of these days. When am I going to get too old to navigate the learning curves that come with updating computers?

When my computer was down these past two days I was going through withdrawals from spend my mornings online. So I started sorting out a couple of boxes in the garage and I ran across a birthday card I’d given Don on his 50^th birthday. I didn’t know he’d saved it. Inside of the card I had written the following:

Dear Don,

From the beginning of life to the end, we use our birthdays as benchmarks to our accomplishments. By five years old we’ve learned to walk, talk and go to the bathroom by ourselves and those who love us celebrate these things and all we have to look forward to in life.

Our thirteenth birthdays mark yet another milestone, an era when our potential and promise are formed and when we’re ready to embark on a voyage into adolescents.

Like everyone else, we took the passing of our sixteenth and twenty-first birthdays for granted, like they were our God given right.  Now, we smile at the memories of those carefree days and sometimes we wonder why youth is wasted on the young.

Then came our thirtieth and fortieth birthdays and with each we questioned where we’d been in life and where we’d hope to be.  The joy, the celebrations of our birthdays diminished over those years as we forgot how to examine the accomplishments we’d made---learning to stand on our own, career building, the friendships we’d been able to keep through the years, and the mental strength we’d honed.

Like all the others, our fiftieth birthday marks another bank of accomplishments. We’ve just come through a tough decade in our lives. An era of losses---our parents, our once perfect health and our youthful looks, dreams that can never be. All these losses have the power to make us stronger and more appreciative of everything we still have. It’s a time for reevaluation, for setting different goals. But most of all, fifth birthdays are a benchmark to celebrate life and the fact that we’ve still got 30 or 40 years left before we forget how to walk, talk and go to the bathroom by ourselves.

With all my love, Jean

It’s funny how a widow keeps finding things and people who pull her back to forgotten memories and events. I hadn’t seen that card for over twenty years. I also found it on a day when I had met a guy when I was out walking the dog who knew Don from Don’s trips around the neighborhood in his electric wheelchair. He knew who I was from seeing me pass by with Don in our Traverse but I wasn’t aware of him. He said he thought Don left behind a great legacy, a legacy of showing others how to accept living with a disability with grace and making the most of what he had. The neighbor also told me a funny story of how one time he was having a birthday party and Don cruised right into the outdoor event like he’d been an invited guest and before they knew it, Don was entertaining everyone with his aphasia driven antics. That was Don, the guy whose stroke taught him how to be a mime. Running into this guy was like getting a new surge protector for my computer. He made Don come alive to me again. And that reminded me of how much I still miss him! ©

Birthdays and Butterfly Tales

 

A few days ago I woke up to find the sky was crying its heart out. One could think: It’s spring and it’s just RAIN! No mystery or message there. Or the poet in each of us could say the universe felt my pain, the sadness of it being my deceased husband’s birthday. Looking at the world through the prism of our emotions and life experiences makes us hear and see things differently. Well, duh! No mystery or message there either… unless you have the soul of a poet or song writer or you’re a drama queen of a widow like I am. Then you see symbolism, analogies and paradoxes every where.

If I lived near an ocean I’d probably put a message in a bottle and send it off each year on Don’s birthday. The vastness of the water appeals to me. It’s a place where my tear drops could merge with a million other droplets and hide in plain sight. (Yup, only a drama queen could write that last sentence.) If I lived near the Badlands I’d probably wander around the buttes and spires seeking peace being out in the forces of nature that created them. If I lived in Alaska I’d want to be where I could see the pristine glaciers and tundra plateaus on Don’s birthday and in Florida it would the subtropical wilderness in the Everglades where I’d want to touch bases with the wonders of nature and my inner most thoughts on life and loss. But since there are no oceans or national parks near-by I went off to the Butterflies in Bloom exhibit, another place where if we listen hard enough we can hear our own hearts speak their Truth.

In the huge conservatory I sat on one of benches along side a brick path that meanders its way around the tropical garden and pair of Common Morphos---four-five inch iridescent blue butterflies from Central and South American---kept flying within arms length of where I sat. Around and around they went, always flying in the same direction as they circled the greenhouse. I learned later that this particular species likes to follow river beds and paths and the two butterflies were most likely males patrolling and defending their territory. If you read my March 31st post about my less than admirable thoughts should I find a pair of butterflies that seemed to speak to me more than the others flying around, you’ll be as relieved as I was to know that this pair won me over. They made me smile right down to my toes.

Last week I wrote the following quote in someone's blog comment box: “It's spooky sometimes how the universe seems to speak to us...how it always seems to know when we need to hear this or that to help us break through the silence and shame in our own lives or to touch bases with our inner most thoughts, dreams and memories. I have a theory, though, that those messages are always out there for the taking but we don't usually tune into them until we're ready to hear them.”

So what message do I think the universe was sending me this week? I’m not sure but it probably has something to do with the Common Morpho having pure black bottom sides and bright blue top sides and when they’re resting on foliage with their wings folded up all you see is their drab black coloring, but when they open up their wings and take flight you get treated to long flashes of iridescent beauty….kind of like we widows who are working on finding our way out of our sorrow. We get flashes of a rich life we could have back if we just have the courage not to huddle on the sidelines in our drab widow's weed too long. ©

P.S. For all the widows out there who have dealt with plugged toilets and are wondering how my appointment with the plumber turned out: my issue came about---this time---because the fill value was leaking causing the bowl not to fill up with enough water. Over time not enough water was going through the pipes to keep stuff moving. If you’ve ever had a plugged toilet that you can’t plunge through but it would go down all by itself 5-6 hours later, he called that a soft plug which is caused by low water flow and the plug point is usually lower in the pipes (rather than inside the toilet)---this was what was happening to me. I even got to look down the sewer connection in the basement when he checked to make sure it wasn’t a more serious issue than described above. I like my plumbing service. They don’t mind teaching you stuff as they work. Anyway, all is well again in my kingdom. My toilets flush and I didn’t kill an innocent butterfly.

"I Will Always Love You" and Celebration Cakes

The dog’s fifth birthday is a few days after the first anniversary of Don’s death but I’m thinking about celebrating it early so I’ll have something positive to do on the 18^th instead of remembering Don’s last day on earth. Don was big into celebrating doggie birthdays. When we first started dating he had neighbors with six kids between them and both couples became good friends of ours, still are to this day. Anyway, those little kids were the guests at a couple of birthday parties that Don threw for the poodle I had at the time. He’d buy ice cream cakes from Basken-Robbins, balloons and gifts for Sarah to open and he’d enlist the parents to take pictures of their wide-eyed kids and the guest of honor. The kids went home wanting to know why their dogs never got parties. It was quite the talk at their elementary school.

There have been other celebrations that went to the dogs since those days but Levi has never had a birthday party. We made sure his birthdays included a trip to the pet store, though. Then we’d go to Starbucks where the people at the drive-up window always ask if our dog would like some whipped cream in a cup. Is Big Bird yellow? It didn’t take many trips to Starbucks for Levi to figure out that a treat from their window is a cut above the dog biscuits they give out at the bank.

How do other widows mark the first anniversary of their husband’s passing? Many  women go to the cemetery, I’m sure, but its January which in my state means the cemetery is closed for the winter---same with the road leading down to the beach where part of Don’s ashes reside. The nature trail is open but I don’t walk in the winter on snow-covered trails. It’s against the old people’s oath I took about not doing things that could potentially break my bones slipping on ice. Still, it feels like I should be doing something. I can’t cry in my beer, I don’t drink it. Hey, does that mean I can’t hang out with Toby Keith? Have you ever noticed how many songs he writes about beer, bars and drinking? Does that Oklahoma boy need a recovery program? Since I got side-tracked here by Toby let me just say I wish I could write country western songs. There’s a huge niche that needs filling. I mean, where are the old people songs about aging widows with too much time on their hands, fighting osteoporosis and finding comfortable shoes being better than Godiva chocolate martinis?

Back on topic: I’ve always been an insecure hostess stemming from the fact that I could qualify to be on the reality show Worst Cook in America. But I’m very proud of how one party I threw turned out. It was on the fifth anniversary of Don’s stroke and I billed it as his “Thank God I’m Alive” party. It was such a wonderful gift to give to my social butterfly of a husband and it was a way to acknowledge all we’d been through to get to that point---the long stroke recovery in the hospital and rehab, selling two houses and two businesses, downsizing in every way possible including having two auctions, then designing and building a new house. The guest list started out at sixty but nearly a dozen more people had heard about the party and invited themselves. Everyone was so happy that day, so filled with joy and laughter. It was a real turning point in our lives---victims turned survivors. I suspect that rebuilding my life after Don’s death will be the same way. At some point in the future it will dawn on me that I’ve turned off Victim Road and I’ll once again be walking on Survivor Street with my head held high in the sun.

The whole reason I’m thinking about that ‘give thanks’ party now is to remind myself that it doesn’t matter one whit what I do or don’t do to acknowledge the first anniversary of Don’s death coming up on the 18^th. I gave him my best while he was here to appreciate it. The depth of my grief and love aren't measured by how well I decorate a grave site or throw rose petals in Lake Michigan or spread wild flower seeds along the nature trail where Don’s ashes reside. Whatever I do now to mark the day is for me…and I think I’ll take the dog shopping then stop by Starbucks for coffee and a cup of cream. I may even go to the florist to buy myself a single white orchid which during bereavement expresses “I will always love you.” The x-florist in me can’t ignore those twenty years of my life and the symbolism of flowers. A single flower on my counter top will remind me that all growing things---including humans--evidently peak in their beauty then wither and die leaving behind their seeds for the cycle of life to begin anew. ©
 

Cupcakes for Don's Party