Goodwill Hunting, Senator Angus King and Ismo

On the way to the grocery store I dropped off a heavy-ass blender to Goodwill and decided to go inside on the off chance that they'd have a vintage mahjong set for pennies on the dollar. No such luck but I did notice they were selling sweaters for half off their normal price of $6.00. I have never bought clothing at Goodwill or The Salvation Army although I've shopped both places for collectibles off and on my entire adult life. But I've gained enough weight this winter that I'm running out of clothes that fit so I looked through the sweaters. The first and only thing I picked off the rack was a Ralph Lauren, shawl collared sweater with leather trim. With the help of Google's Reverse Image Search I found the same sweater for sale at vintage clothing stores for prices ranging from $180 to $60. I snatched that sweater up and headed toward the puzzles and game department but found an unlocked dressing room along the way. The sweater fit! I had intended to take it home and if it didn't fit I'd just donate it back. For less than a cup of coffee I could do that. Isn't that amazing! The only regret I had in buying it is I got so excited I forgot to read the care tag and at home I learned it couldn't go in the dryer. It tied up my kitchen table for twelve hours while it air dried over a large towel and garbage bags. That's a sweater that won't be moving to assisted living with me, where they turn every special care garment into Barbie doll clothes. Not that I'm planning that move any time soon. But one can never plan too far ahead...that's been a life-long motto that doesn't work as well now that I'm older than television and silly-putty.

My old blender was glass and nearly impossible for me to lift with my right hand and arm which is bothering more and more to the point I'm dropping stuff and a few months ago I had purchased a Ninji, Fitness blender for $59 which only makes single serving size blended drink. Smoothies are all I need a blender for these days. Still, I was reluctant to give up my bigger better, bad-ass blender but my days of trying to make fresh cranberry sauce and forgetting to put the top on the blender thus blasting the ceiling with red berries bits are over. It sounds stupid, I know, but it was a hard decision to close that door of my life even though that blender was just another reminder that I'm getting old and I have to make concessions for my decline in physical dexterity and strength. Boo-hoo. I am not bad-ass anymore. 

In case you haven't figured it out by now the word I'm enamored with today is "ass." There was a comedian from Finland in Facebook Short Reels yesterday named Ismo and he was making fun of how many ways Americans used the word 'ass.' Dumb-ass, badass, lazy ass, grown ass man, move your ass, half ass and a piece of ass. He joked that you can add 'ass' to anything to make it sound cooler. So expect a few more 'asses' in this post.

Another uplifting thing I saw in the Shorts was a speech given by a Senator from Maine, named Angus King. I would call it a profile in courage and I hope it's the beginning of more people in government pushing back. He stool before the senate and asked the Republicans if there are no red lines that they won't cross. It's a long speech about protecting the constitution and how Elon Musk is at odds with how the constitution is supposed to work. If you get a chance to listen to this speech it will make you feel hopeful. Like hearing the opening solo in what you assume will be an opera of epic proportions as other voices join in.

“We’re experiencing in real Time exactly what the framers most feared,” King said.“The framers were so fearful of concentrated power that they designed a system that would be hard to operate. And the heart of it was the separation of power between various parts of the government. The whole idea, the whole idea was that no part of the government, no one person, no one institution had or could ever have a monopoly on power, Why? Because it's dangerous," King explained. "History and human nature tells us that. This division of power as annoying and inefficient as it can be, particularly to the executive, I know because I used to be a governor, is an essential feature of the system, not a bug. It's an essential, basic feature of the system, designed to protect our freedoms. Now, this contrasts with the normal structure of a private business, where authority is purposefully concentrated, allowing swift and sometimes arbitrary action. But a private business does not have the army, and the President of the United States is not the CEO of America.” 

I have a busy week ahead with something going every day starting with a super bowl party tomorrow. (I write on Saturdays for my upcoming Wednesday posts.) I don't care a flying fig about the super bowl but our social committee here at the CCC has ordered a meal from a great Italian restaurant in town so I'll go with my little tray of lemon curd tarts to add to the desert table. It's my go-to, always-have-the-ingredients-on-hand dish to pass. I've also got two appointments off campus this week that I'm dreading. 

One of those appointments is with my primary doctor. He never talks about the elephant in the room---my weight. In the twenty years plus I've been going to him he's seen me loss and gain back the same 50 pounds several times over. I want to talk about it this time but at my age and with other medical complications I predict he won't give me anything to help other than sympathy. He's as skinny as the proverbial rail and can't gain weight..."Can't change our genes." I feel quite hopeless on the topic. Stay tuned. I'll let you know in a coming post if my fat ass has a chance of dropping a few pounds. ©

Until Next Wednesday. 

Leaving Time...or is it Time to Leave?

Have you read Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult? I probably shouldn’t be discussing the book in public on the chance that someone reading this has it sitting in their to-read stack. But I can’t help it. I just finished it last night and book club is a week away and I want to sort out my reactions to it. I read a few reviews this morning to see how they handled the plot twist in the last forth of the book and none of them gave away the fact that---spoiler alert!---the characters you think are alive are actually ghosts and the character/s you think are dead are not. For most of the book you think you’re reading an interesting mystery of sorts about a 13 year old girl who wants to find out why her mother ran off ten years ago and she gets a down-and-out private detective and a has-been TV psychic to help her.

The story line of the book takes place mostly at an elephant sanctuary and the mother was a researcher studying the grieving habits of elephants. I love elephants. I mean I REALLY love them! I have an elephant bell sitting four feet away from me as I type. I follow the Elephant Listening Project on Facebook. I donate to elephant causes so I was racing through this book like it was on fire. All the main characters were extremely interesting…until the big reveal and then I felt let down, disappointed. Cheated. I wanted a happy ending, not one that opens up a bigger can of worms to sort out. Jodi Picoult is a good writer and her research about the elephants was spot on and, sure, the mystery got solved by the end of the book. BUT I don’t believe in ghosts. At least 95% of me doesn’t believe in ghosts. Jodi via way of the psychic character had some interesting things to say about our after-lives for lack of a better way to describe the supposed spirits milling around our space after leaving our time.

After closing the book last night I said out loud, “Okay, Don, if you’re a ghost you’d better come by and haunt me tonight.” And he did! It wasn’t a pleasant dream that made me wake up smiling and trying to hold on to that haziness as long as possible. Nope. I woke up in a panic. I’d been running from an elephant chasing me and Don was on a motorcycle behind the elephant driving him to me. I remember my dreams often enough that I have the dream dictionary bookmarked on my computer and this is what I found: “Dreaming of an elephant coming towards you at an unstoppable speed means that you are going to face a situation that you cannot control. You have to let things be and wish that it will all work out in the end.” I’m guessing the “situation I can’t control” is the fact that I’m going to die one day and I’m really not in the mood to go any time soon. And I don’t even want to guess why I dreamed that Don was herding the elephant in my direction. 

Change of topic: The next morning I loaded up the back of my Chevy Trax with things left over from my recent redecorating project. I had so much stuff the back bumper was dragging on the ground. A slight exaggeration, but it was a big load that included eight sets of sheets for twin beds. I had sets in red, black, and gray---prints, solids, flannel and jersey. I didn’t even know I had so many sets stuck on the top shelf of my closet. I also took a whole trash bag full of towels sets in the same colors and two boxes full of stuff I knew if I didn’t get them out of the house right away, I’d be tempted to keep them in the garage until they grew roots. I set aside all the framed photographs I had in my bedroom with plans to hang them on the pegboard wall in the garage where my husband’s collection of gas station memorabilia was displayed. Why not? These are my people. I’ll see them more often in the garage than I will if I un-frame them and put the photos in albums.

After dropping off my loot at Goodwill I headed north five miles to the tourist town where my husband grew up and my Mad Hatters Society sisters meet the first Wednesday of every month. But I was a half hour early so I back-tracked a couple of blocks to make an early visit at the cemetery---I usually don't go until May. I had dug the sod out around Don’s tombstone last fall and I was surprised to see the ‘ditch’ filled up with pine cones and pine needles still attached to small branches. Holy crap, that pine sap is sticky! I’d forgotten about that. It was a common childhood curse at the cottage where we kids played cowboys and Indians in the woods behind the lake. Back then, mom used gasoline to get pine pitch off our skin and out of our hair. I wasn’t about to try to get some gas out of my Chevy Trax so I tried the only liquid I had in the car besides water---Windex. To my shock, it took the pine sap off my fingers.

When I left the cemetery I told my husband---just in case he does happen to be a ghost and was hanging around---that I’m not speaking to him until he apologizes for trying to get me trampled by an elephant which, by the way, is how someone in the Leaving Time book died. But for a while, you're really not sure which character it was who got her head crushed under the elephant's foot. ©