Widow Running out of Words

‘Flash Back Thursdays’ and ‘Wordless Wednesdays’ are bloggers’ tricks for taking a break from writing a post. Since my box of ideas was as empty as holes in Swiss cheese I thought, why not try that! So this morning I got lost in my old Planet Aphasia blog and in my first few years of this blog looking for something I could repost to save some time and effort. It took me so long to read and discard one post after another that I could have written Moby Dick….at least its syllabus. Not finding anything that fit my current frame of mind but a few puff pieces about how well “this little widow” is doing trying to make omelets out of the broken eggs in her Basket of Life Events, I turned to Facebook to distract me from my widow-ran-out-words problem and maybe find something to solve my gotta-write-something dilemma. 

The first thing I saw was a meme quoting J. Iron Word that was posted by a great-niece. It said, “The problem is you see yourself every day. So you don’t realize just how amazing you are.” I had no idea who J. Iron Word is so I googled him and along the way I landed on a photo of Jeremy Irons instead. He was all polished up looking like the successful English actor he is and I thought, if I had that face to look at in the mirror I’d be in love with myself. It didn’t take long to discover that poet J. Iron Word and Jeremy Irons are not one and the same, so back to Facebook I went. This time what caught my attention was a meme posted by another great-niece: “They don’t serve champagne at pity parties,” a quote by Cara Alwell Leyba. I’m sorry, life-coach Cara, but that simply isn’t true. I’ve read enough pity party posts written by widows to know that drinking too much sometimes come with the territory. Champagne doesn’t care if it’s invited to a celebration or a wake. Sparkling wine is sparkling wine if you’re grabbing what’s in the house to drown your sorrows. (If you're doing that, stop it! It doesn't help.)

It occurred to me that when I was the age of my two great-nieces I was getting my philosophical thoughts from reading Dr. Seuss to children. “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” But after fact checking myself I discovered that’s not exactly true. When I was their age I was studying the late, greats Socrates---“An unexamined life is not worth living.”----and Aristotle, “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” Crap! Of all the quotes by Aristotle, why did I have to run into that one right out of the gate? Pass the champagne, in case a pity party breaks out as I digest those words. 

It’s no secret that I love Country Western music, more precisely I love how the artists who write in that genre are able to tell stories using so few words. This afternoon I took myself out to lunch and on the way home I heard Lee Brice singing I Drive Your Truck. It’s about grieving someone and how driving that person’s truck makes the narrator feel closer to the deceased. I don’t remember ever hearing the song before and at first I wasn’t really listening to the lyrics and by the time I tuned into them I mistakenly thought they were about a man missing his wife. I’ve had pickup trucks on the brain recently---missing the one I used to drive---and it never occurred to me that a man would be singing about another man, his brother as it turned out:

“I leave that radio playing that same ole country station where ya left it. Yeah, man I crank it up. And you’d probably punch my arm right now, if you saw this tear rollin’ down on my face. Hey, man I’m tryin’ to be tough. And momma asked me this morning if I’d been by your grave but that flag and stone ain’t where I feel you anyway…..I find a field, I tear it up, ‘til all the pain’s a cloud of dust. Yeah, sometimes I drive your truck.”

The minute I got home I googled the song and I learned that it was co-written by three people and it was inspired by an interview of a Gold Star father who mentioned he drove his son’s truck to feel closer to him. From that one simple sentence a whole, award winning song immersed, a song that touches people where we live. And it’s easy to understand how driving a vehicle that belonged to another can make you feel closer. Many things that my husband loved make me feel that way…like his fleece-lined, rubber rain coat that I wear from time to time. It’s several sizes too big but when I’m folded inside it, protected from the elements, it doesn’t matter if others might mistake me for a bag lady. I feel his presence inside that coat. And I felt his presence inside his beloved 1978 Silver Anniversary Corvette before I sold it, a heart-breaking transaction of epic proportions. “Of epic proportions”---I can’t believe I’m going to end two blogs in a row with that phrase. I guess I really am running out of words.  ©

"These days when I'm missing you so much, I drive your truck."

Jeremy Irons

Dr. Seuss and Don

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.“ Dr. Seuss

Thedor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, had a strong connection to Essomarine motor boat lubricants, a brand produced by Standard Oil. He was working in the 1930s as their illustrator for advertising campaigns. I just found this out this morning while googling Dr. Seuss quotes. Don would have loved knowing this bit of trivia about a brand of motor oil he had in his gas station memorabilia collection. That’s assuming he didn’t already know it. He didn’t just collect, he studied. He knew the histories of the companies he collected and what he didn’t know he kept researching and asking questions until he found answered.

One time Don bought a cast iron pot with two spouts marked Oil City, PA patented in 1872. He didn’t know what it was and he carried a photo of the curious pot around to all the oil collector conventions and swap shows for years before getting an answer. That year we were on our way to a Romance Writers of America convention that took place in Texas. I was publishing and editing a 28 page bi-monthly readers’ book reviews newsletter back then and this was a business trip mixed with pleasure. So finding out what the two spouted pot was on this trip came totally unexpected.

Anyway, we had stopped at a tourist information center at the state boarder and there on a brochure for the Kilgore Oil Museum was a picture of our mystery pot. Off we went, 100 miles out of our way to go to the museum where we found out that the pot is called a “yellow dog.” The story goes that President Roosevelt was the one who coined the name for these pots that were used to light up oil derricks using fresh crude. He thought they looked like a dog’s yellow eyes in the night and when he said so in front of a gaggle of reporters, headlines back east proclaimed: that “Roosevelt sees yellow dogs in Texas.” In political circles “yellow dogs” has since come to mean something else as well but this is the kind of trivia that kept Don collecting and researching. Who would have guessed that Dr. Seuss and President Roosevelt could be connected in a ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ kind of way?

Last week I had lunch with a friend in a little town not far away. As I pulled off the highway there in view was a big sign proclaiming an antique mall was ahead. Having time to kill I went inside and came out with information on renting some showcase space. Should I do it? I don’t know yet---I can’t stop thinking about it---but I do know what Dr. Seuss would say about my chances of being a successful mall vendor again:

“Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)”