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. ©

My Eclectic Reading List

Sometimes the reactions the women in book club have to certain things that happen in books make me feel like I was brought up in a brothel or a shack on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak, because I'm rarely shocked by some of the life experiences we've read about. And for the record I probably didn't even know what a brothel was until I was in my twenties, I was as naive back then as a few of my fellow residents around here still seem to be. But I am a woman who cut my reading teeth on romance books and over the years I've read all the sub-genres of romance from super straight-laced Victorians to Historicals to erotica to Amish Romances and Rom-Coms. The latter is my current favorite. Quick to read, don't tax my brain, occasionally make me laugh out loud. What's not to like?

The point I'm trying to make is that I'm rarely offended by what an author thinks a reader needs to know to carry a plot forward but when an author crosses over to write gratuitous sex scenes it's pretty easy for me to spot and that can get pretty boring. I quit reading Susan Stoker's military romances, for example, because she included S&M in two books and I don't care how much she tried to justify her characters liking the Fifty Shades of Grey antics in the bedroom, I don't believe they belong in any book marketed as 'Romance.' It's not mentally healthy nor good for women (or men) to be sold a bill of goods that whatever happens between two consenting adults is just fine and dandy. It's not. Don't even try to tell me about safe words and how pain and pleasure are supposedly only a fine line apart. I'm never going to buy it. 

Our book club here on the continuum care campus is reading a coming-of-age book that no one seems to be enjoying and no one is owning up to having picked it for our reading list. It was the conversation at our Monday dinner table and I was shocked to learn that two women in the club were offended by the description of the sexual scenes. One woman quit reading Maame after the first one (Chapter 5) where the protagonist lost her virginity and another lady was considering doing the same after the second one (chapter 7). I was totally confused because I couldn't recall either scene and I when I got home, I searched the book and I found out that neither scene was more than a page of description and rather bland description at that. What did that say about me that I read them and they didn't even register, much less register as something that could easily offend anyone. I was even more confused by the third and final sexual encounter which was a four on a scale of ten for hotness. I was braced for a down and dirty, page after page affair based on the negative comments I'd heard. Didn't happen. But I was happy that the main character finally got some pleasure out of these consensual encounters. All in all it was forgettable book.

Our December/January book club selection (discussed in February) was The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. It was over 700 pages long which is why we allowed two months instead of one to read it. It's a family saga style book that covers three generations and I've never liked that kind of book. Every day for two months I spent an hour in India and at first I was enjoying the expert writing and colorful descriptions of a part of the world and a culture I knew little about. But about three-forths of the way through the novel it felt like I was back in the work force with a quota to make every day. I ended up quitting the book about 125 pages short of finishing. I just didn’t care anymore. The others in book club told me I missed the best part. 

We also read The Book of Lost Names by Kritin Harmel which was based on a true story about a young woman who used her art talents to forge documents for Jewish children who were being smuggled out of harm's way during WWII. I loved that book. I also loved The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christry Lefteri which was about another part of the world I knew little about---the Syrian War, the refugee camps the displaced population lived in and what it took to immigrate to a safer part of the world. In both of theses books the authors were able to make you care about their fictionalized characters. When reading stories based on real events I'm often amazed at what the human spirit can endure and come out the other side with most of their marbles still intact. 

Other book Club sections: An Immense World by Ed Yong is a book that I'm sure I wrote about already and How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith which I'm sure I haven't written about. All I have to say about the latter book is that it's always interesting in book club when we read something that involved black history or a black point of view that our resident Trump fan feels obligated to defend racism. Gotta give her credit for standing up for her beliefs no matter how out of touch with reality and common sense they are.

Other than book club selections I've read three popcorn romances by Pippa Grant---books you read in a hurry and quickly forget. But based on the reaction the ladies in my book club had toward the sex scenes in Maame I'd never share this author's books around here. Reading Pippa Grant's descriptions would put a few ladies into cardiac arrest. ©

 Until next Wednesday.

From Sinful Pleasures to Stubborn Streaks

My most sinful pleasures in life have always been simple. A good piece of dark chocolate, a medium rare steak, a summer afternoon spent at an art-in-the-park show, an occasional day trip along Lake Michigan with the t-tops down on our classic '78 Corvette that wasn't a classic when we had it. It was just old back then. Now that I'm on a fixed income I have to think about where I'm at on my monthly budget before I can indulge in a gooey chocolate dessert or a steak. The Vet is long gone and even if I still had it, it was built too low to the ground for me to get my old bag of bones into it now. And I haven't been to an art-in-the-park show since Ring was a pup.

I’ve never had a dog named Ring but that phrase was a favorite of my husband’s to denote that something happened a long time ago. Don didn’t have a dog named Ring either. He picked the phrase up from his dad who got it from Don’s grandfather who---family folklore claimed---actually did have a dog named Ring that resided in the back pasture with a rock rolled over the grave to keep wild animals from digging up his childhood dog. I love family verbiage like this and wish I had another generation to pass it down to. A few years ago, out of curiosity I googled 'since Ring was a pup.' (Or maybe it was suspicion that made me want to fact-check three generations of males who were all gifted storytellers.) I found ten listings for the phrase, three of which were links to my own blog entries, four to other people’s blogs and three appeared in newspapers dated 1911, 1914 and 1922. I wish I could break that little tidbit to my husband! He would have laughed and loved to have one of his grandfather’s tall tales get exposed after so many years of blind faith in its accuracy. 

Digging even deeper in the google weeds today I learned that the 'since ring was a pup' phrase was derived from another phrase widely used in the 1860s---'As Dead as Hector.' According to the Historically Speaking website, 'As Dead as Hector' "was a reference to Hector, the son of King Priam of Troy...and one of the chief participants in the tale of the siege of Troy by the Greeks in Homer’s epic The Iliad.  King Priam, as we all know," the website wrote, "was killed in single combat by the Greek champion Achilles." Maybe you, dear blog readers, know the storyline of the The Iliad  but it's all Greek to me. I could go on like this all day drifting from one idiom to another. But I'll bet half of you already know that the phrase 'it's all Greek to me' was coined by one of the conspirators who assassinated Julius Caesar. <end of history lesson> But first I've gotta predict that Taylor Swift's lyric line 'just shake it off' will probably still be in use hundreds of years from now.

Yesterday I spent the entire day in my nightgown writing. It felt good and decadent and I produced a book report for book club, a poem, two writing prompt assignments for my creative writing group and a blog post. The latter of which disappeared into the jaws of my writing app never to be seen again. So here I am trying to reconstruct it and not doing a very good job of it. In that post I was mourning something that hasn't happened yet and may never happen but I've always been good at borrowing trouble from the future. I was poking fun of this foible of mine regarding if and when I get moved into Assisted Living or Memory Care and I won't be allowed to hang around in my nightgown all day long. The powers that be in geriatric care assume an old person is depressed if the don't care about getting dressed. Down in those buildings they wake you and and help you get dressed by 8:00 when breakfast is served and because it's the morning shifts duty to see if anyone died in their sleep.

Recently, in one of our morning emails here in Independent Living we got word that a woman who used to live in my building but was moved to Memory Care four months ago died in her sleep. We'd just been talking about her the night before and the general consensus was she had adjusted remarkably well and seemed to be happy and content with the extra layer of care. She had a room across the hall from where my brother was when he was still alive so I saw the change in her firsthand. She no longer had a panicked look on her face, no longer looked lost and afraid.

Change of topic: I downloaded a new audible book to listen to on the recommendation of Bill Gates titled How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Seen by David Brooks. (And that should tell you volumes about what I see as a character flaw that I can may be improve on before I die.) I like to listen to books while I'm getting ready to face the outside world. But usually it's a book we've picked for our book club. This coming month we're supposed to read Just like that by Gary Schmidt, a book written for ages 9 through 12 by a professor at a near-by faith-based college and is a friend of our retired art professor. I have a stubborn streak and I refuse to buy a children's book for book club---we usually get them free from the library. I'll probably be sorry I'm sitting this month out because Ms Art Professor is going to get the author to come to our discussion. We won't be discussing the book until July so I have time to change my mind. I've been known to do that from time to time.

Speaking of book club, in case you're wondering why I wrote a book report for the club: One day a year we pick a year's worth of books to reserve. The popular books in the Book Club in a Bag program get reserved very far ahead. This year we're asking everyone to review a favorite book to campaign for it to be added to our reading list so we don't get one or two people's choices dominating the list---that's how we got the children's book. I'm campaigning for You Before Me by JoJo Moyes which on the surface is a little too chick-flickest for this group to pick but is actually a good segue into a discussion of assisted suicide.

Until next Wednesday. ©

"I live in my own little word, but it's okay…they know me here."

quoted from a beverage coaster

Rumor Mills and Plants that Talk

Image © Friends of Acadia National Park / Yehyun Kim

If you’re a long-time reader you might remember that I’ve hated being pared for dinner with only one person living in my Independent Living facility. I’ve nicknamed her both Ms Manners and Vinegar Lady, the latter because she’s like vinegar to my oil. The former nickname is because of her oh-so prefect table manners and vast knowledge of proper British and Downton Abbey decorum which she talks about in her canary soft voice that barely makes it across the table. She never fails to find something to pick apart about the food---how it’s prepared, how its platted or how its served. She makes me want to lick my knife and watch her faint.

When she’s not talking about the above topics she talks about her world travels and gourmet cooking techniques. Rumor has it that she’s a trust fund baby because she’s never married and never worked. To balance all this out she’s by far the most creative and gifted knitter I’ve ever seen. Every single day, year-around for the two years I've known her she's worn one of her own creations of intricate stitches and the finest yarn money can buy. If I could steal her talent I would do it with no remorse.

Recently we got a notice in out daily email that the elevator in my building would be experiencing long waits that day which means someone was moving in or out. Since we didn’t have any empty apartments everyone was trying to figure out who moved out before the birds woke up. You guessed it. Ms Manners moved which she kept close to her vest (or sweater in her case). One person reported she hadn’t been happy here for a long time, doesn't think the place is managed well. But her next door neighbor had a long conversation with her just the day before the move and she never even mentioned the move nor said goodbye to her circle of line-dancing friends save for one person. We’re all trying to figure out how much money she lost moving out of this continuum care facility then buying into another. Gossip mills have to turn and this was a high-powered surge of gossip turning that metaphorical wheel.

I wondered if my oil vs vinegar reaction to the woman made it past my careful applied, fake smiley face and she sensed my true feelings and that contributed to her discontent with living here. As quickly as the thought ran through my head I dismissed it. In all our interactions she never once asked a question about me, my history or hobbies. We had the no children and knitting things in common so I did try in the beginning to befriend her before I decided I couldn't fake interest in her topics of conversation longer than over dinner. (Don't you hate it when you have to work at being nice? It's exhausting.) I’m sad, though, that she’s gone and I’m not sure if it’s the shock of her leaving or because for a blogger always on the lookout for blog fodder my world lost one of the quirky characters in my sphere of existence. Yup, you guessed it. I do enjoy/tolerate some people for all the wrong reasons.

Change of Topic: In our book club we’re reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Blinklist.com says it’s “a powerful exploration of the relationship between humans and nature, weaving together indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and personal anecdotes.” The author is an enrolled member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a college professor in the Environmental Sciences and Forestry Department at a university in New York. I was surprised Blinklist categorizes the book under the heading ‘Religion & Spirituality’ but I can’ think of a better one because they don’t have a category titled ‘Lyrical Prose that Rolls off your Tongue Like Poetry.’

The retired Art Professor here is the one who suggested the book and she’s been freaking out (my words, not hers) but when I asked her if she was nervous about the coming discussion. She shook her head ‘yes.’ My question was precipitated because The Professor put on her teacher's hat and sent us several emails on how to approach the book and a couple links to videos of the author interviews, etc. She really wants us to love the book as much as she does and most of us were complaining that we were having trouble getting into the book.

I’m still Fangirling the professor so I downloaded the audio version---which I often do if a book is too hard for me too read---and finally by the end of chapter three the book grabbed me and I fell in love with the smoothness of the author’s writing style, the language she uses and the stories of indigenous people that she wove together with modern environmental issues. Jane Goodall says it better in her back cover review: “….Kimmerer shows how the factual, objective approach to science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of indigenous people. It is the way she captures beauty that I love the most---the images of giant cedars and wild strawberries, a forest in the rain and a meadow of fragrant sweetgrass will stay with you long after you read the last page.”

 Until next Wednesday. ©

 One of my Favorite Quotes from Braiding Sweetgrass 

 "Tom unlocked the door and we stepped inside. What words can capture that smell? The fragrance of your mother's newly washed hair as she holds you close, the melancholy smell of summer slipping into fall, the smell of memory that makes you close your eyes for a moment, and then a moment longer."

Sleepless Nights, Wokeness and Brain Farts

I woke up at four-thirty to pee and couldn’t fall back to sleep. Don’t you hate when that happens! Everything that I had heard or saw the day before waltzed through my head like it had all the time in the world to linger in the silence. One particular topic was growing like mushrooms in the dark and what was keeping me awake in the wee hours of the morning was spelling and punctuation, of all things. Finally I got up, made myself a cup of Land O Lake French vanilla cocoa and sat down at my computer. Coming up that afternoon was our monthly creative writing group and I had a confrontation to face. Confrontation is not quite the right word, maybe perplexing mystery would better describe the editing one of the guys in group made on the round-robin story we’ve been working on and I had typed up. Situations like that---when writing is involved---make me nervous because I never know when my dyslexia, unbeknownst to me, will or did show up.

I’ll give you an example. The text in one of the segments I wrote for our round-robin read: “All families have their secrets but B.J.’s is safe with me.” He highlighted ‘families’ and he tagged the ‘alright’ in my dialogue, “B.J.? Are you alright?” With all the problems in the world why would something so silly be the thing that drove me out of bed? After a google search I decided, yes, the ‘families’ (vs ‘familys’) was right but a case could be for using either ‘alright’ or ‘all right.' Even after checking and rechecked each highlight on the document I dreaded going to group that afternoon to debate things that trivial. We are setting world records for weather events and mass shootings, we have an x-president under indictment as the front runner going into the primaries and a proxy war between the USA and Russia still rages on in Europe rages. But my subconscious mind apparently can file those things deep enough that they don’t deprive me of sleep. Maybe that’s because no one on campus is talking about that stuff. It’s like it only exists on our television sets. At lunch lately the main topic of conversation has been the high cost of strawberries this season and why did management take the later risers breakfast off the menu. Maybe it’s because talking and worrying about the big things that we can’t resolve on our own makes us all feel hopeless so we focus on the trivial stuff? Or maybe we’re just a group of boring, self-centered old people?

I’m tired of people being confrontational over nothing, though. In book club this week we were discussing Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes du Mez. Everyone with a brain can see how this book could cause some tension in a book club but I didn’t expect to get jumped on for what I thought was a neutral statement of fact. I was one of the first people to speak up and all I said was, “I read a lot of the negative reviews on Amazon. Out of 4,688 reviews 76% gave the book 5 stars and 3% gave it one and two stars.” At that point our resident racist, Trump supporter and devout Catholic jumped in with, “It’s called free speech!” You could have cut her hostility with a knife. She was obviously gunning for us liberals and for the entire hour her only contribution to the the discussion was her chiming in with: “In your opinion” or “in the author’s opinion” with a hostile accent on 'opinion.' At least she showed up. I overheard another Trumpests say she wasn’t going to go to book club anymore because “Some of those people don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.” We are a pretty ‘woke’ group and we don’t usually read fluff which makes for some interesting discussions. It’s one of the highlights of my month when the twelve us meet.

 

Can you believe how quickly one person---namely a certain governor from Florida---can popularize a word like ‘woke’ in such a short time? I guess it’s been around since the mid-1900s and was coined by progressive Black Americans. Trump throws the word around a little as well, but DeSantis is the king of trying to turn it into a dirty word only to be spoken in disgust and something to fight against if you’re an ultra-conservative. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to be woke means you are “informed, educated and conscious of social injustice and racial inequality.” But governor DeSantis’ website defines woke as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." His website also says, "We reject woke ideology.” I’m pretty sure most woke people reject him as well.

 

I started writing this post the morning the edited round-robin document kept me from falling back to sleep. That afternoon our creating writing group was meeting and I wasn’t looking forward to going this time. But as it turned out the document I typed up and the guy in group edited---the document that drove me out of bed----not only was it highlighted it had also been corrected under the yellow highlights. So when I looked at the document and saw ‘families’ and ‘alright’ highlighted and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them it was because there wasn’t anything wrong. It was my dyslexia driven insecurities causing me to freak out. I’ve been used to my husband’s style of editing where he just highlighted mistakes for ME to go back and fix. It took awhile in group for me to finally understand where I was leaking IQ points but I was deeply relieved when I finally did understand the source of my brain farts. 

By the way, our round-robin story is a fun read. We each write in the voice of one of the characters and I'm the oldest sibling in a dysfunctional family. I wish I could share it here but I'd have to ask permission from the other writers and so far no one on this campus knows I blog. We're talking about doing a reading of it in our fireside lobby later this year, though, as a way to get more people involved in our writing group.

 

Until next Wednesday…©