An Afternoon with my Two Favorite People

Friday night I packed the back of my Chevy Trax up with an oddball collection of stuff, all with one thing connecting them to another---my parents.  There was a coat and hat rack from the turn-of-century, a small side table/book case my dad made, a box of silverware, a box of containing embroidery pieces my mom did, a few of her hand crocheted dollies, a baby quilt she made for either my brother or me, a quilt she made for my dolls, a set of embroidery quilt blocks that never got put together and my brother’s and my baby blankets. I was actually worried I’d get into a rear in collision on the way to the lake and these things I’ve been holding onto would get destroyed before I had a chance to put them up for grabs.

The next day I almost fulfilled that car accident vision in my head and it would have been a doozy. I was in the right hand lane of the expressway going through the busy city and after passing a large convoy of slow moving military equipment in the center lane, I put my turn signal on to pull in front of the head truck in the convoy and at the exact, same time a car in the far left lane was doing same. We came towards each other like two fat and happy sports fans coming together for a belly bump. And like a synchronized ballet we both saw each other at the same time and jerked ourselves back to where we came from, the belly bump not completed. Thank goodness! I would bet money that the young guy driving that head military truck was peeing his pants. I know I would have been if I hadn’t just emptied my bladder at home five minutes before the almost pileup of heavy equipment that surely would have closed the highway down for hours. At least my obituary would have noted the fact that I always follow the rules of life. “She died in a fiery crash, her turn signal still flashing when the fire department arrived.” 

I met my two nieces at a popular bakery/restaurant for lunch before going over to the family cottage to have what one of my nieces dubbed an episode of the Antiques Road Show. After the waitress took our orders my oldest niece told the waitress to bring her the check and I protested telling her to give it to me. The waitress said, “The first one to speak up wins.” My younger niece laughed and said, she told her husband that’s exactly what would happen. Niece #1 always has an excuse for taking the check, this time it was because niece #2 had a birthday in August and I was bringing family treasures out for them to pick through. One time niece #1's excuse for taking the check was, “I just got a new credit card and I want to see if it works.” When hearing that, her nephew naively asking, “Why wouldn’t it? You have to apply to get them” which had everyone howling with laughter. 

Niece #1 is enamored with all things mid-century and she was thrilled to get my mom’s silverware. Before I gave the set to her I researched to find the pattern name on Replacements Ltd. and I had to go through 28 pages of flatware before it popped up. When I saw that ‘1950’ release date, I was so excited that she’s lucky I didn’t call her because it was after midnight. Replacements Ltd. is a great resource for finding missing pieces of vintage and antique crystal, china and flatware sets. I love Google. I was also able to find the building plans for the revolving book case/end table that my dad built for my mom’s 1958 Christmas present. I have my ways of paying my niece back for lunches. I snapped those plans up on e-Bay. She was a teacher and will enjoy that show-and-tell prop.

But the most fun part of the day was when niece #2 told a long-drawn out story about a trip she made to Pet Smart to buy a goldfish and they wouldn’t sell it to her after asking what size tank she had (15 gallons) and how many fish she already had (three). She was told her a fish would die with four in a tank that size and then she’d come back wanting a replacement. “What if I sign a pledge not to bring back a dead fish for replacement, would you sell it to me then?” “Nope.” “You’re serious!” “Very.” “Can I see your manager?” After telling the manager she’s got four grandchildren and she wanted a forth fish so they’d each have one to name the manager told her if she didn’t quit trying to buy a fish they’d have to ask her to leave the store. She ended the story by saying she went to another store that confirmed the fact that four fish in a fifteen gallon tank is too many. PETA guidelines. “So you won’t sell me one either?” “I’ll sell you anything you want,” the clerk said. Niece #1 and I had tears running down our cheeks we were laughing so hard. Niece #2 has always had a great sense of humor and a personality that makes her fun to be around but until that afternoon I didn’t realize that she could easily do standup comedy. ©

Laughing, Over Sharing and Passing the Baton

 

Six days under my belt this week and three of them were spent in Nirvana and two more days spent basking in its afterglow starting out on Monday when we Gathering Girls got together for bunch. We laughed so loud and often that I thought we’d get kicked out of the Guy-Land Cafeteria. In a study done at Stanford University Medical School they established that the average adult laughs seventeen times a day and I’m not over stating the truth when I say that we Gathering Girls got our quota of laughter in over our eggs, bacon and pancake specials. I read another article recently in Psychology Today that said, “Both sexes laugh a lot but females laugh more---126 percent more than their male counterparts.” I don’t know how they go about measuring a thing like that but I can say I’ve never seen a table full of guys having as much fun as we do.

Wednesday a guy I’ve known for nearly a half century and I met for lunch at a tavern in my adopted home town. I don’t drink except for hard cider. They don’t serve it but they have the best white fish bar none in between here and the east coast. When the waitress first came to the table I told her, “Separate checks. We just met on internet and this is our first date.” (I was a silly mood.) Her face lit up the way only a young person’s face can do when they love their grandparents and they think we old people are “cute” when we come in pairs. But I had to confess, “I’m just kidding. We’ve known each other for decades.” She laughed but I wasn’t finished. “We’re not a couple, so we still want separate checks. My husband and my friend here went to high school together and I’m babbling. I don’t have to tell you my life story to order the fish.” “I’ve got the time to listen,” she said, a huge grin on her face. But I said I was too hungry to tell her about my years as a CIA agent. By then we were all laughing including a couple of eavesdroppers sitting at the bar behind us. I couldn’t blame the eavesdroppers. It was a bar after all and when the situation is right, I don’t mind being the designated eavesdropper. It’s a wonderful pastime for bloggers.

Gary and I have been having lunch together twice a year---spring and fall---since my husband died and we talk on the phone maybe once a month. We’re each other’s bitch-to-person when something ghastly happens in the Trump administration. And don’t make the mistake of reading anything romantic into our relationship. I’d rather eat dog poop and he probably feels the same way. We both know too much about the skeletons we keep in our closets. Okay, I’ll admit it. He kissed me once, shortly after my husband and I started dating all those years ago, but he apologized profusely afterward and there hasn’t been anything remotely out of line since. He and I are all that’s left of our old gang who live close enough to get together---him divorced and me the long suffering widow who likes separate checks.

Friday I went out for lunch again but I didn’t win the war over who pays for lunch. I rarely get to pay for my own meal or buy my niece’s when we go out together. I usually drive out to her rural area where she knows everyone and their brothers so she conspires against me with the waitresses or waiters. And with those she doesn’t know she speaks in that confident teacher’s voice of her that makes the wait staff listen. When I protested, “You bought my lunch the last time!” she said, “You brought me gifts today.” I did but they weren’t gifts that cost me money.

I brought her a wicker suitcase that my grandfather used in 1895 to carry all his worldly possessions when he immigrated to America and an oil lamp that came from my dad’s boyhood home in Illinois. She’s been lusting after that suitcase a long time and I decided she should have it now rather than when I die because I know she’ll pass the suitcase's history down to our newest crop of babies in the family. I'm thinking if these little ones grow up associating that suitcase with their grandmother or great-aunt's stories the more likely someone in that generation will want that wicker wonder someday. Her mission, I told her, is to figure out who should get it next when the time comes---who cares the most about genealogy and family trees. After lunch, we went over to the family cottage where we found the perfect place to show it off. She owns the cottage, now, but it was the background for a huge chunk of my best memories growing up. 

According to vocabulary.com ‘nirvana’ is a place “of perfect peace and happiness, like heaven.” All the laughter, teasing and sharing I did this week brought me perfect peace and happiness. It was like taking a vacation in Nirvana and I wish I didn’t have to come back. ©

My grandfather's suitcase that came through Ellis Island in 1895

Highlights and Disappointments

This past weekend relatives of my husband were supposed to pick up a Hoosier cabinet that had belonged to Don’s parents and that we had restored back to its original glory a few years back. I was giving it to them, just to keep it in the family. It took me two days to unload, sort and pack up all the pressed glass I kept inside. She was thrilled about the idea and had since last August to discuss the decision to take the piece with her husband. She knew just where in the house she was going to put it and less than a week ago she was excited about the idea of searching eBay to complete the original canister set that came with the cabinet when it was new back in 1920s. You can guess what’s coming, can’t you. Saturday I got a call. The husband doesn’t want cabinet, refuses to pick it up and talk about an awkward conversation that one sure was! She felt bad. I was in shock. She suggested she could call around to see if she could “find someone else to take it” and although her saying that shouldn’t have ticked me off, it did. Big time. If I’m going to give away something that I could easily sell for upwards of $700 I’ll be the one to decide who to give it to, thank you very much. No one needs to do me a favor to “take it off my hands” when the auction house’s pickup service is just a phone call away. Thankfully I didn’t say that but the words were itching to roll off my tongue.

After hanging up the phone, I tried moving the Hoosier out to the garage but even though it’s on casters it wouldn’t budge. I walked around the house looking for another place to put the restored ice box when it comes back from the refinisher after Christmas---it was earmarked to replace the Hoosier in my dining area---and I found a place on my sun porch that just requires me to move a small chest of drawers. I spent the rest of the day unpacking my pressed glass and putting it back in the Hoosier. That cabinet can damn well sit where it’s at until and if I have an actually moving date. Between this experience and the bed that took months to pick up, I'm threw with the drama of giving things away! Well, that’s not true. I have some pieces in my basement promised to someone on my side of the family. And Wednesday I’m delivering a mantel clock to my brother-in-law. At least he and his wife discussed the acquisition and are in agreement. I know they did because I was there to witness it. Isn’t it fascinating when the internal power structure of a marriage is revealed like it was with the Hoosier cabinet fiasco? How could a woman know for three months that she wanted to take a piece of furniture and not talk it over with her husband until the pickup was supposed to take place? Or maybe she did talk about it, he listened without saying anything and she took his silence as agreement. Women and men do that. 

On to the highlights. Last night I went to the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas show, a live concert billed as having “dazzling multimedia effects.” I had no idea who or what the Mannheim Steamroller is, but I signed up for the show through the senior hall, hopped on their bus and let the multimedia effects dazzle me for a few hours. And I was dazzled. It was only the second off Broadway show that I’ve ever attended so I’m still wowed with the techno lighting at the performance center---how its colored images flows off the stage and drifts across the fifty ceiling screens above and how the side walls of center changes colors turning the people sitting in the boxes into silhouettes and how the colored lights from the stage flicker across the entire audience, turning us into part of the show. On the huge screen behind the Mannheim Steamroller performers, was an eclectic collection of images going nonstop and most of the time they didn’t seem to connect to the music, so your mind was always challenged to figure out, for example, why ruins in Greece where paired with whales swimming. (Duh, I think I just got it! They probably whale watch off the coast of Greece.) A lot of famous artwork was on the big screen, too. One whole song was taken up with works of Leonard da Vinci’s work. Twenty-seven songs in all were performed, about a third of them Christmas music. It was a good show and, yes, it was worth the $66 for the ticket and bus ride. The senior hall sponsors three or four off Broadway shows a year and they are popular. We had eighty of us in our group. And the more I think about moving away from this townships’ senior hall, the less certain I become about the idea.

It’s good I had the Mannheim Steamroller performance to see so close on the heels of the Hoosier cabinet fiasco because without it to offset that drama I could have got sucked down into a funk. Downsizing is hard enough as it is. The morning after the show I got a Facebook message from the relative asking if I found anyone to take the cabinet. “Yes,” I replied. “Me. And when I no longer have room for it, it will go to the auction house.” I ended the message with a joke about getting my glassware thinned down and washed so she’d know there’s no hard feelings even though, just between you and me, that’s not 100% true…but give me a week or so and it will be. As soon as my back quits hurting from moving around heavy boxes of pressed glass then I'll be able to forget the whole thing happened. ©