Soup and Medicare Wellness Tests

I was influenced by a late night TV commercial to crave a bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich that I could have made at home but cooking didn’t appeal to me anymore than having a Slim-Fast diet drink for lunch which I contemplated doing in an attempt to lose twenty pounds by the next morning for my bi-annual appointment with my internist. The choice between being good and letting the Campbell’s commercial rule my life was postponed because I needed to get to the post office before they closed for lunch. As it turned out, they hadn’t even opened that morning because it was Columbus Day. Bummer! 

On my way home, my Chevy Trax auto-turned itself into the Guy-Land Cafeteria’s parking lot, probably thinking I needed some comfort food to compensate for my disappointment at the post office. They usually have tomato soup but that day it was vegetable beef and barley. I moaned and groaned and the chief cook and bottle washer assured me that it goes great with grilled cheese. He had no reason to lie to me so I went for it. Ohmygod! Was he right! It was the best soup I’ve had since my mom was alive to make vegetable beef and barley soup. I’m surprised I didn’t have a Meg Ryan, When-Harry-Met-Sally organism right there and then which would have been embarrassing, given I was the only woman among the twenty male patrons. Am I wrong? Women would have understood it was the soup, not the sea of gray-haired old men I was excited about.

The next day on my way home from seeing the doctor my Chevy Trax did it again! Only this time it turned into the Breakfast-Only Café. Apparently it thought I needed to celebrate the fact that the god of doctor’s scales was kind to me and didn’t give my internist any reason to tisk-tisk me for being a bad girl in the kitchen. Or maybe he couldn’t get a word in edgewise, my mouth was running like a rabid coyote. Not that I’ve ever seen a rabid coyote but fast moving coyotes are a common thing in old cartoons, aren’t they? The doctor was going over the Medicare Wellness questions about depression which got me started on how excited I was about my future move to the CCC. Or maybe I was trying not to get caught in a lie about having throw rugs on the floor. What’s Medicare going to do if you answer that you have them? Send the rug police to your door to confiscate them? 

The doctor said he goes right by the lake where I’ll be moving to on his way back and forth to work and I joked that he could stop by for surprise throw rug checks. He laughed and said he’d do that. He’s been my doctor for over twenty years, was my husband’s doctor, too, and I can joke around with him but I don’t usually talk so much at my appointments. I shouldn’t have this time either because he was already running forty-five minutes behind schedule. I guess I wanted to be sure he didn’t think I was one of those depressed old people that the Medicare questionnaires are trying to root out because I really needed a refill on my Ambien sleeping pills. 

Medicare would probably frown on a doctor giving a depressed senior a prescription of Ambien. Or maybe not. Maybe they’d encourage them to prescribe a double dosage to save the system money if we offed ourselves. Just kidding, of course. I can’t take those wellness test questions seriously. I will go to my grave lying about the Oriental rug in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. I just hope I don’t go to my grave because of that Oriental rug. If that happens, my niece has my permission to add a sentence to my tombstone that reads: “She lied on her wellness questionnaire and this is what happened.” 

This week the dog also had an appointment with the vet technician for a recheck on his teeth. At his spring appointment, which covers everything a dog can get at a yearly wellness and vaccinations appointment, the vet pronounced that Levi’s teeth were clean enough not to need his yearly cleaning but he wanted this recheck in the fall. This time the vet tech said he's got some tartar on one side of his mouth which means he's only chewing on one side of his mouth. "We should probably get in there and check out why he's doing that." They made him an appointment for cleaning on the first available appointment which was the Friday before Thanksgiving. But on the way home I decided I might cancel it. I only chew on one side of my mouth and I don't have a bad tooth. He's been getting his teeth cleaned every spring since he was three and I'm mad at myself for allowing the cleaning to get postponed to snow season. Not going to happen again! ©

Hissy-Fit Rant and my Three Day Time Out

It was Saturday morning and I found myself at the Breakfast only Café. I hadn’t been there in a month but I go there often enough that the waitress knows what I want: no straw with my water, cream with my coffee, scrambled eggs, bacon, English muffin with one tub of orange marmalade. She probably remembers me because I tip three bucks on the $9.95 bill. Why 30%? Because older women are notoriously stereotyped as being bad tippers and if there is anything I don’t want in life, it’s to be stereotyped based on gender. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I took the gunslingers’ table in the far corner of the room, my back to the wall, where I could see everyone because I’m a voyeur at heart. The annual 15K and 25K races took place in town earlier that morning and the restaurant was busy with people stopping on their way home from running, watching or cheering from the sidelines. I don’t get how and why people from all over the world come to run marathons. Where do they find the time and money for that? A woman at a near-by table was wearing a tee-shirt that read: “I make this shirt look good.” Really? She was coat hanger thin, probably ran to the restaurant from two counties over. I don’t wear message tee-shirts but if I did, I’d want one that said,” Bored women, please talk to me!” 

In this age of mass shootings I don’t understand why there aren’t fist fights over the gunslingers’ table. The people sitting just inside the door would be the first to die if a shooter came in and isn’t it a sad statement on our society that anyone has passing thoughts like this or that on the first day of school teachers have to talk about what to do if an active shooter comes in. How many more mass shootings has to take place before we all stand up and demand that our lawmakers get their noses out of the RNA’s underpants and do something meaningful? Kids shouldn’t have to decide between fight and flight. Heck, no one should! For starters, close the gun show background check loophole. It could be done in a day because back in February the House passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019 but Mitch McConnell won’t let the Senate vote on it. It’s just sitting there, stonewalled like McConnell did with the Merrick Garland up or down vote on Obama’s pick for a Supreme Court Justice and we all know how that ended. Mitch needs to go so we can get someone in there who will let Congress work the way our Founding Fathers intended it to work!  Rant off, well maybe not off but it's put on the back burner.

Monday through Wednesday the body shop had my car tied up to repair the hit-and-run damage to my back bumper and adjacent parts. When I went in for the estimate the guy told me they would arrange for a rental car to meet me at the body shop but when I got there to drop off my car the young Chicky-Poo at the front desk said they hadn’t done it and claimed they never do that. She was about a minute and half older than the socks I was wearing so I stereotyped her as either being incompetent or she just got the job and ‘never’ in her book only goes back a few days. She ended up driving me to the car rental place and she turned out to be a nice kid with a baby still in diapers. But in the future I’ll be keeping notes of all my conversations with service people with names and dates because who would invent a detail like them arranging for a rental car to meet me if the guy hadn’t said it? If your answer is an elderly person on the edge of dementia, don’t say it out loud.

I left the car rental place, drove home, and parked the rental in the garage which fascinated the dog when he found a shiny brilliant blue Ford in the space where my generic gray Trax usually sits. Every time he had to go outside to pee he walked around the Ford, making sure it was still there. On the third day I drove back to the rental place, putting a grand total of 15 miles on the car in three days at the cost of $75 for the optional insurance which in hindsight was stupidest decision I've made in years. When the rental rep was explaining the option he was talking at Ferrari sports car speed and I was processing the information at horse and buggy speed. It only covered the $1,000 deductible left over from what my insurance company would have covered, should I have gotten in an accident with the rental. Yes, the one that sat in my garage for three days. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! The actual rental fee was another $81 paid for by the insurance company. Damn hit and run driver that started this whole chain of events! The body work cost $991.66 and thankfully, the insurance company covered it all but they will probably find a way to up my premiums. Isn’t that how it works?

The month of May has been and will continue to be the Money Pit Month. If I was a drinking woman, I’d drown my sorrows about now. But I’m not so I think I’ll go to Starbucks instead. I’ve been wanting a S’Mores Frappuccino, which is back for the summer by popular demand. Hooray for small blessings!  ©

The quote is attributed to Gloria but I guess she didn't say it. The author is still unknown.

Cold Weather and Warm Waitresses

The thermometer read five degrees below zero but the view beyond the deck railing where it hung was so bright with the sun glaring off the pristine snow that I was tempted to put on sunglasses just to look out the window. The sky was stone-washed denim blue, the pine trees standing as still as fence posts in an Andrew Wyeth painting. If I still owned a snowmobile suit I would have been tempted to go outside and make snow angels on the lawn, give the neighbors something to talk about on my sleepy cul-de-sac. Even with the proper outdoor gear and knowing the fridge weather was not people friendly, I probably would have nixed the idea. But I longed to go somewhere. It had been too long since I had a conversation that didn’t include the question, "Do you want a snowpea or a Milk-Bone?"

That was the day our monster storm was due to smack us full on the lips, but it wasn't due to hit until 4:00 and it was barely past noon when I slid into a booth at the Breakfast Only Café, so I wasn’t in a hurry. It was a good thing, too, because the waitress was slow in making her rounds which was easy to forgive considering she had fifteen tables full of people on her side of the place to wait on. If I’d been new to the business I would have thought someone didn’t show up for work on this bitter cold morning, but I knew better. Two waitresses is all they ever have on duty plus two cooks, a busy boy and a cashier. The latter has been known to help out by pouring coffee but she was nowhere in sight. Every time I go there I thank the powers that be for keeping me from ever working in the food industry. Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique did a good job indoctrinating me into believing that pouring coffee for bosses was the root of all workplace evil. I took it a step further in my mind to conclude that serving coffee to anyone was evil if I was the one doing it. Just call me Little Miss. Hospitality.

The waitress has been working at this café at least fifteen years and maybe for the local chain even longer. I used to know her cheating-x-husband-did-her-wrong backstory but I’ve forgotten the details. The owner has several places around town and decades ago we used to go to one on the other end of town. It was the only place around that was open all night and even though half the employees had prison tattoos we always felt safe there because the place was full of cops coming and going. It took the owner getting an award for his prison-out-reach program recently for me to have an 'ah ha moment' that explained why so many of his cooks and busboys sport facial tattoos. Anyway, one night my husband’s nephew was doing a ride-along with our snowplow crew and after finishing our work we were eating at the Breakfast Only Café when the nephew started bemoaning that fact that he couldn’t find a girlfriend.

“What about the waitress?" My husband asked. "She’s pretty nice. Cute too. Why don’t you ask her out?”

His nephew made a point of checking her out then replied, “Nah. Her ankles are too skinny.”

“Her ankles are too skinny? Are you serious?” It took a lot to shock my husband, but that comment did.

“Yes, I like girls with nice ankles.”

“No wonder you can’t find a girlfriend,” my husband shot back, “if you’re going to be that picky!” And for years to come that her-ankles-are-too-skinny line became a joke told every so often by our snowplowers when one of them would get caught checking out a waitress. Although I think ‘ankles’ morphed into a euphemism for ‘breasts’ after a while. It was a ‘70s when guys did things like that without being labeled sexist pigs like they would be today.

Speaking of dogs, Levi my Might Schnauzer has been driving me crazy with the bitter cold temperatures. He’ll beg to go outside then he wants to come right back in, before he’s had time to do his business. Then he’ll want to go out again after he’s had a minute or two to warm up because he still has to pee or poop. In and out, in and out. He’ll even beg at different doors because he thinks the weather might be more to his liking on the other side of the house. He does that in rainy weather too. But on the good side, he’s helping me make my Fitbit steps goal every day which I haven’t been doing since last summer. If you're wondering why I don’t just leave Levi outside until I’m sure he’s accomplished his mission to that I’d say, “I wouldn’t leave child outside in sub-zero temperatures as naked at the day he or she were born either. Why would I do it to the current love of my life?” He's also a nudist who refuses to wear a coat in case also you're wondering why he goes outside without one. It would take two men and a boy to wrestle him into one. © 

When the polar vortex comes to Michigan you might as well have fun with it like this school superintendent and principal did with announcing a school closing 1st and 2nd days. They can sing!

 

From Phone Fantasies to Hugging Widows

I took a small table in the corner and sat with my back against the wall, facing the door. If you grew up in the ‘40s or ‘50s on Spaghetti Westerns you’ll know why this location is strategically important. I haven’t been in a gun fight since I was ten and wearing my Gentry Autry six shooter but there’s no point in letting my guard down now just because I’m old enough to have gray hair and an AARP’s card in my wallet. I ordered a quesadilla because they’re hard to make at home, but even if they weren’t I cook like a 3^rd grader who can’t be trusted not to lose interest in between chopping the onions and the green peppers. 

I should rename the Breakfast Only Café in my blogs. I call it that because they close at two in the afternoon and the only thing my husband and I ever ordered there was their huge omelets which we’d split. I’ve been working my way through their lunch entrees to find another 'favorite' and that’s a mini widowhood hurdle that I’ve successfully jumped. “What hurdle?” some non-widows would ask and I’d have to explain that ordering an omelet would mean taking half of it home only to make me feel lonely the next day when I ate it. I fell down that rabbit hole a few times before I learned my lesson---and that was after avoiding the place for over a year post-Don.  

I’m used to seeing waitresses at the Breakfast Only Café but this time there was a new twist in the place---a tall, near-perfect specimen of sun tanned arm muscles working as a waiter. He was in his late 50s and super-efficient at his craft. I thought about moving to his section but I decided I’d probably empty out my pocketbook tipping him as penance for lusting after the pleasure of hearing his sultry voice when he’d ask if I wanted my coffee warmed up. I don’t remember ever having phone sex---that wasn’t a ‘thing’ in my heyday---but Mr. Waiter could have looked like a toad and still make good money working at 1-800-Sex-Male. Who knew a woman of my advanced age could find a fantasy while eating a quesadilla? He didn’t look like a toad, by the way. His face matched the rest of him. Funny how those things work out.

The next day was my second time going to my new book club. We discussed Darlene Gee’s Friendship Bread and I wasn’t surprised that someone made a batch and brought some still-warm bread plus starter bags for those us of who wanted to try it ourselves. The bread was surprisingly sweet, more like cake than bread, and now I have nine days ahead of me to punch the yeast fermenting starter bag daily before it will be ready to split and bake. If I forget, it explodes. I’m going to like the ladies in the club, most of whom are better read than me, but I held my own in the discussion of the book. The only one who was quiet the entire time revealed at the end had she lost her husband just six days earlier. She had been his sole caregiver for five years. As we were leaving I walked up to her, said a few words I’d hoping would be helpful and she hugged me. That was so cool because I had wanted to ask her if I could give her hug her. I used to hug people without asking until recently when a blogger friend confessed that it makes her uncomfortable when other women hug her and one of her commenters wrote that she felt the same way. I might go back to trusting my instincts on this one, though. I’m not a serial huger but sometimes you can look into someone’s eyes and sense a need. 

When I read I like to save and savor a line or two from the book that speaks to me. This time it’s an entire passage from the Friendship Bread: “She's come to realize that life is a bit like doing laundry---you have to separate the darks from the lights. One's not necessarily better than the other---they're just different. They have different needs, require different levels of care. She knows plenty of customers [in the laundry mat] who don't give it much thought and throw all their laundry in together, and maybe that's the chaotic part of life that just happens, that no matter how hard you try, you can't always keep things separate. A red sock gets mixed in with a load of whites, or a delicate black top gets washed in hot water by accident. These things happen. All you can do is learn from it and move on. Tell your husband to enjoy his pink underwear, give your shrunken top to your little sister or niece. But it doesn't mean that you stop sorting your laundry. You keep sorting--lights from darks, darks from lights--and hope for the best.”

After book club I went out to lunch. Yes, again. I’ve been going out a lot this past month. Going to restaurants alone isn’t hard since I learned to take a notebook and write like mad, making a point of closing the notebook when the waitress comes by. I like the fantasy of being a bit mysterious, of someone maybe mistaking me for a real writer. Other customers---people watchers like me---look and wonder and wouldn’t they be shocked if they knew I’m usually writing about them...or maybe their waiter with a voice that reminds me of love making in a far away place, long ago. ©