Post-Pandemic Socializing or Oh My, I'm getting Old!

Coming up with blog titles is not my thing. I had two for this one and couldn't decide which one to use, so you're getting them both. When my husband was alive he was the one who named any creative endeavor I did. He had a gift for boiling down what he was seeing or reading to a few well-chosen words which amazed me because as a storyteller he couldn't edit down himself. If you told him, "I've heard this story a thousand times!" he'd keep on telling it, full-throttle with all the details he always included. Friends would joke, "That's story number 42!" but he'd keep on telling it. Fortunately most of his stories were fun, so there was that to keep people from running in the other direction when they saw him coming.

Do you know how to tell if you're getting old? When you find out that the hair dryer you’re using is listed as a collectible antique. I kid you not that happened to me this week. I’ve been replacing things right and left for my big move coming in October and the dryer I have has a plug that is hard to get in and out of electrical sockets, and somehow after all these years of being that way I’ve started worrying that it isn’t safe to keep using it. So I googled the brand thinking I’d get their updated version because I really like that little hair dryer with its folding handle. That’s when I discovered that it was made in 1973 which means I’ve been using mine for nearly 50 years! If I was still doing e-Bay I could sell it and buy at least two new hair dryers for what I’d get. Who in the heck wants old hair dryers besides people procuring stage props? It boggles my mine and I’ve been around collectors most of my life. I wish I hadn’t looked it up because now I don’t want to junk the old dryer if it still has intrinsic value to someone but it doesn’t feel right donating something to Goodwill if it’s something that I don’t feel is safe use. No matter what I do with it it’s going to come with a serving of regret.

I got invited to go out to an Irish Pub for beer and hamburger night by a couple of women in my now-defunct Gathering Girls group. I felt silly asking about getting home before dark but I had to because I’m now restricted by law and common sense not to drive at night. As it turned out they said they’d go early enough to get us home before the stars come out but during our texts back and forth my cushion guy called and wanted to stop by after he closes the shop to do a fitting of the foam on my settee and chair. I didn’t want to do anything to derail that train coming down the tracks so I told the girls I'd have to pass and to ask me the next time they go.

And they did, we’re going out on the 14^Th. I’ve been to this Irish Pub before. It’s dark and noisy and the bathrooms were built for midgets but it’s fun and it seems like a great choice to meet and greet our new after-the-pandemic life. Talking with strangers without masks on is weird after over a year of not seeing anyone’s faces and I’m still not completely comfortable doing it. But I’m getting there. The pub should help. The place is a middle-class hangout with good food where people friendly-flirt back and forth between tables and with people walking by. Friendly-flirt as opposed to sexy-flirt and there is a difference in expectations and goals and anyone in any age bracket from toddlers to octogenarians can friendly-flirt. It’s kind of fun in a voyeuristic way, though, to watch young people sexy-flirt in a bar. (Or is it just me, the Romance Book Junky who thinks so?) Watching them you know that if they don’t steal a few kisses out in the parking lot (or even if they do) that one of them is likely going home to a vibrator with a silly name and the other one is going home to burp the balded-headed guy in his pants who coincidentally has a silly name as well. (Why do guys do that, name their penises?) 

And speaking of socializing, I recently saw the unvaccinated member of my defunct group of six. We had lunch together in a riverside park. I loved catching up with her and her experiences having a vendor booth in a resale mall because sometimes I miss that part of my past. Puttering around changing displays and adding and subtracting stock to a little retail space often made me feel like a kid again. In fourth grade my teacher had a 'store' in her classroom where we took turns being the cashier or the customer to teach us how to make change. Now, counting back a person's change is an obsolete custom. I tell you, the signs of aging are all around us! By the way, my favorite job in the pretend store was lining up the can goods and wax produce. (I'm so old that plastic fruit hadn't been invented yet.)

After having lunch in the park, I swung around to small town's cemetery to dig up around his headstone to keep the quack grass from taking over. I’ve been doing it twice a year since he died in 2012. Once I’m no longer living in this end of the county I wonder how long it would take that pervasive grass to cover over the writing on the granite making it only visible after a killing frost in the fall if I don’t dig it up as often. 

I’m not a stickler about visiting and maintaining grave sites. But my husband was. Before his stroke we decorated nearly a dozen graves every Memorial Day and for a few years afterward until I put my foot down and told him it was too hard hauling him and his wheelchair around to four cemeteries and me doing all the plant hauling. I’d never met most of the people buried in those graves but my husband was keeping a promise he made to his mom and he was a man of his word. I know me, and I know neglecting his (and my) headstone in the future will come with guilt. I also know as I age my world and driving range will get smaller and smaller and the neglected headstone will become to pass.   

In the meantime I'm going to propose a few Irish toasts next week at the pub while I'm stilling living where I'm at and I'm starting with: "Always remember to forget the things that made you sad. But never forget to remember the things that made you glad." ©

P.S. I don't know when it happened but my blog view counter hit over 1,000,000 recently and I didn't even notice. Took me nine years but, what the heck, I'm not living the life of the rich and famous, so I'm pretty proud of that number. It should have been a moment to celebrate. It should have been a moment to thank everyone who stops by to read from time to time. So here's my belated 'thank you!' Life is a series of adventures and misadventures and I'm grateful, humbled, and flattered when others spend time reading about mine.

From Tattoos to Cemeteries, Oh My!

It finally happened. I went on a senior hall outing that turned out to be a waste of time except for the fact that writing about it will take up space in my blog. We took part in a pilot program at the art museum that involved viewing of a classic black and white movie plus an extra hour to check out the museum’s exhibits. I’m not a fan of black and white films but I signed up because I haven’t been to the art museum since the last century---I love saying that. It makes me feel old and wise to have lived in two centuries. (I know that’s crazy. Everyone old enough to buy beer can say the same thing.)

Before my husband’s stroke we used to love going to the old art museum but after seeing our new one, I don’t care if I ever go again. The beloved permanent collection is gone and they had a whole gallery devoted to “collections”---mostly filled with tennis shoes and tiny rubber toys none of which were as old as the bra I was wearing. I’ve got better collections in my house. The other main exhibit was all about a tattoo artist who lives in Hawaii and has popularized tribal tattooing. People from around the world apparently pay good money to go there to take one of his classes and get a small, trademark tattoo to prove they’ve met him. I hate tattoos and I especially do not understand people who feel the need to turn their skin into a facsimile of a zebra or an ancient piece of pottery unearthed in an archeological dig. Tattoos in an art museum: we’re supposed to respect the artistry but the term ‘circus freak’ crossed my mind a time or two while viewing the photographs. But what the heck, if I had stayed at home all I would have done is knit and feel guilty about wasting that time. 

One of these days I’ve got to have a serious conversation with myself about what I’d have to do to feel like I’m not wasting my time. The older I get the more often I think of my days as wasting my time and I suspect that bothers me because it’s closely connected to the term “bidding my time” which is scary close to saying I’m just sitting around waiting to die. But I’m not gonna go there today, not when I’m celebrating the rebirth of my ergonomic keyboard. I spilled water on it, gave it firstaid then stopped at the computer shop for an expert opinion on whether or not I’d electrocute myself testing it out, and after impatiently waiting the required four days they suggested I leave it sitting upside down and wrapped in a towel, I’m now using it. They said it could take a week for malfunctions to show up so I’m not out of the woods yet. 

Whether I’m debating on political sites or blogging, sitting at my keyboard is one of those times when I vacillate between feeling like I’m accomplishing something and wasting too much time. When I’m blogging, the computer prompts me to leave the house at regular intervals because the cold, hard fact is I need a life in order to have something to write about it. It’s a catch-22 and I'm okay with that. Blogging has been the single most driving force in widowhood that keeps me from drying up like an unidentifiable object in a vegetable crisper. That may be a little melodramatic but it was one hundred percent true in the first few years after Don died. Now, I recognize that getting out and about is reconnecting me to the life-long learner part of my personality. It’s always been there, but during my years of caregiving I was learning things I didn’t necessarily like having to learn. My do good days are behind me. Pencil on some eyebrows, put on some Bert’s Bees lip gloss and I’m out the door.

Speaking of learning things, this week I also went to a travelogue about eastern Canada---a Maritimes and Newfoundland tour covering New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. It made me homesick for our old motorhome and the days when Don and I poked around wild and woolly places. The video was filled with untouched land, lighthouses, water, sunsets, sailboats, birds and beaches. And I don’t know why it never occurred to me that Canada also has places where you can whale watch. Duh! This tour also stops at Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the maritime museum and the cemeteries where people are buried who lost their lives when the Titanic sunk. 1,500 people lost their lives that night but only 328 bodies were recovered and 118 of those were never identified. I used to collect North Star Lines memorabilia and that stop at Halifax calls my name. I’m glad the White Star Line set up a trust to maintain those gravesites. Jeez, that’s the least they could do!

Now that I’ve taken this blog entry down to death and dying I might as well share something I got in the mail recently. A survey from the funeral home I used for Don’s service, mailed out shortly after his 5^th sadiversary. “In order to assist others with sensitive, caring and professional help when they need it, we need to know real thoughts and feelings of individuals like you.” My first impulse was to write across the top: IF YOU WANT TO BE SENSITIVE, DON’T SEND WIDOWS SURVEYS NEAR THE ANNIVERSARY DATES OF THEIR SPOUSE’S DEATH! I didn’t do it, but the stupid survey still sits close at hand taunting me. ©

Finding the Past, Seeing the Future

Family is so important---past, present and future. This fact was driven home on Monday when I spent a beautiful summer day with my niece roaming a couple of cemeteries looking for ancestors. We found my great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran, within two minutes of entering the veteran’s cemetery. The lots, plots and rows were well marked and easy to find without even getting out of the car. As my niece said, “That’s the government.” Given the fact that he died in 1917, his stone was in remarkable condition (see photo above). He was only in my mother’s life for six years before he died but his life and military service took up three pages in the family history book I wrote last winter. It still amazes me that I was able to find details about the type of bullet he took in the head and the various hospitals where he recuperated but I don’t know how he took his morning coffee. Note to future family historians: I like mine with Italian sweet cream.

In another cemetery it took us quite a while and an iPad with a screen shot of the cemetery map plus counting plots, rows and tombstones to determine that my grandparents never got markers placed on their graves. Nothing that says, “I was here, don’t forget me.” Guessing the reasons why makes sense when we thought about what was going on in the family in 1922 and 1945, when they died, but it was a bit of a let-down for our “stones and lunch quest" and it made me sad that they ended up in unmarked graves. I never knew my grandparents. Still, the stories told over the years made them “real” to me. Growing up, I was so jealous of my best friend because her grandparents lived within walking distance and I’d go there with her after school sometimes. I credit them for teaching me to love antiques. Her grandfather’s face lit up when he’d tell stories about his treasures. Now I’m the one with stories about the obsolete things I have collected over years. Hopefully, what goes around comes around and I’ll spark a love of old things in someone born in this century.

I asked my niece if she thought her descendants will be walking around a cemetery in a 100 years looking for her granite marker. She didn’t know but afterward I thought about it and I realized that in the not so distant future it won’t be necessary. With the popularity of “living headstones” aka QV codes growing rapidly, GPS will take people right to a grave and when they get there they’ll be able to use their smartphones to view pictures, movies and the eulogy of the deceased. I keep thinking I want to get the QV code for Don’s stone---they only cost $50, the last time I checked---but that task keeps hanging down at the bottom of my ‘to do someday’ list.  Maybe I’ll put a clause in my will requiring my heirs to create QV files for both Don and me before they get any money. “That sneaky Aunt Jean,” they’d say, “reaching out from the grave like that to blackmail us into doing her bidding!” 

My niece and I had lunch at a quirky restaurant, a former railway station that only has two booths and thirteen counter seats for customers. They make the best malts and hamburgers in town---not just my opinion. They’ve been voted as such a few times. The place has been “in the family” since, well, forever it seems. Owned by my cousin then passed down to his daughter and son-in-law, it’s a city landmark that’s fun to visit. It’s too bad restaurants with L-shaped lunch counters lined with stools went out of fashion. No one stays a stranger long in a place like that. It’s the kind of place where the customers introduce themselves when you sit down. Cooking in that fishbowl on the other side of the counter, though, would be my nightmare job. You’d not only have to know what you’re doing on the grill but you’d also have to be able to kibitz and kid with the customers, tell jokes and keep the politician debates from getting out of hand. I don’t multi-task well when cooking is involved and I’d probably want to burn the burgers of a few people whose outrageous political views seem to come straight out of the twilight zone. 

When I got back home I got a call from my nephew’s very excited wife. She had good news. Both of her kids have been married awhile and both of them just found out they are having their first babies within weeks of each other. Her son’s baby---my future great-great nephew or niece---gives the family a 50-50 chance of having someone to carry on the family surname. That’s something I’d very much like to see before I die. Whether my nephew and his wife become the grandparents of two boys or two girls or one of each, I will need to get my knitting needles back out. Life is good when you can see family far back in the past and far into the future at the same time---that’s the pure joy of continuity that bridges the centuries. ©