It’s Mueller Time in the Suburbs

Bob Barr gave a speech a few hours before he released the redacted Mueller Report and shortly afterward I got a phone call from a decades-old friend who started yelling about how Trump was going to slip out of all his wrong doings without even a slap out on the hand and how Mueller turned out to be just another puppet for the Republican party. “Two years spent on investigating that ‘prick’ was a waste of time and money!”

My friend, W.G., went to high school with my husband and when Don died, the political conversations those two had every few weeks transferred to me but yelling is not part of our usual M.O. I tried to interject the idea that he was buying into Bob Barr’s interpretation of the Mueller’s Report and that no pundits, no Democrats and no legal experts had had a chance to look at it yet to see if Barr was puffing for the president. To which he screamed, “It’s not going to make any difference! Trump is destroying our country and they’re all going to let him do it!”

“W.G., we’re on the same side here,” I said in the calmest voice I could muster, “Let’s just let the dust settle and talk again next week and see if things look any different by then.” I didn’t add that I didn’t agree with him about Mueller’s creditably. I didn’t want to argue that or any other point in his rant. He was too upset to reason with, so I just said a few "give it some time" before finally saying "good-bye and hanging up.

Two days later I got home from the grocery store and found this message waiting for me: “I think you’re mad at me. I hope not," my friend said. "Not for voicing my political views. We’ve been friends too long. Give me a call when you get home. I want to know if you’ve started reading the Mueller Report yet.” I called him back but the phone went directly to voice mail and I left a message telling him I wasn’t mad but I was worried about him having a stroke over Trump. “I don’t think you realized how loud you were yelling at me. I’ll be home the rest of the day. Call me.”

I hung up the phone thinking, my God, if the Russian interference in our election’s sole purpose was to cause discord in our nation they sure have been successful. Then I remembered a comment I sent to the spam folder on this blog before I went to the grocery store. It was another one of those comments that claimed Baby Boomers are evil. “White people, black people, Asians, Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, millennials, GenX, GenZ. There is not one single demographic that does not hate you.” Blah, blah, blah. What if the Russian troll farms are behind that kind of disinformation, too? I see those kinds of topic threads on message boards and internet bots could leave comments like that on blogs. Human or computer generated, their whole purpose is to make Baby Boomers feel afraid and distrustful of others. But my first thought upon reading that comment was, Gee whiz, I guess I have the audacity not to be living under a bridge. Now pass me another stack of hundred dollar bills to count. The idea that the Russians are trying to pit us against each other in other areas besides our political leanings cheers me up. Why? Because that’s easier to accept than the idea that raw-hate is wide-spread in America. However, the field of cultural rifts the Russians could use to stir the pot into a frenzy is fertile and we have to be on guard against that.

It would have cheered me up if my friend would have apologized for yelling at me when he returned my call, but he didn't. He wanted to discuss the Mueller Report and he was disappointed, maybe even irritated when I told him I’m not going to read it which may or may not turn out to true. I haven’t decided yet but I have decided to back off from talking politics with him because it’s just not right to let the likes of Donald Trump come between me and one of most loyal friends my husband ever had and me by osmosis. When I had my knee replaced this guy stayed with Don and Levi while I was in the hospital. He literally wiped my husband’s butt, helped him with showers and wheelchair transfers and fixed his meals just so he wouldn’t have to go to a nursing home while I was gone and Levi wouldn’t have to go to a kennel. When others friends fell by the wayside when Don lost his mobility and speech after the stroke, W.G. kept the same, exact pattern of friendship they’d had since high school. The phone calls, the stopping by for coffee, and the meetings for an occasional meal---those things never missed a beat. That’s the kind of friendship that is worth something and it’s the kind of loyalty our president will never know.

Whatever happens or doesn’t happen to Trump in the afterglow of the Mueller Report, I don’t really care as long as he doesn't get re-elected. His daily drama-queen activities is wearing out the nation. But Trump is not the problem as I see it, the people who support him are. What I care about is how are we going to get his followers to value facts, Truth and the rule of law again? How do we get them to value voting candidates into office who are ethical and have good characters, who don't try to divide us and erode the Fourth Estate? How do we educate people to tell the difference between fake stories from troll accounts and well-researched and verifiable reports? I fear our democracy depends on doing those things. ©

The Power Outage Refugee

I survived the Great Ice Storm of 2019 without becoming a weather related statistic. 268,000 people in Michigan lost our electricity this past week starting on Wednesday and most of us got ours back on Sunday afternoon minus 1,368 rural residents still waiting for power on Monday. My county was ground zero and thick ice was covering every surface, taking trees and power lines down. Temperatures outside got down in the low teens at night and in the 20s during the day. Add high winds to the mix and it was dangerous for the linemen who were working 12 hour shifts around the clock. One school a mile from me had a sewage line freeze and burst and a hallway filled up with raw sewage. And here I thought having a water pipe freeze would be a nightmare.

The first day of the outage I was spared but the following morning I woke up to no heat or lights. Even though the house was 50 degrees inside I thought I could tough it out. I’d been camping in cold weather but I’d forgotten how nice it was to warm up with hot coffee, a campfire and going inside a tent rated for use in Alaska. I became obsessed with wanting a cup of coffee. It wasn’t until the second morning I was without power that it dawned on me that I could bypass the electric igniter on my gas stove by using a match. Last month I had almost thrown out an old box of instant coffee during a purging session and as I heated up water I smugly told Marie Kondo, “See, this is why we keep stuff!” 

Tidy Girl Kondo’s name came up a few times during the outage.“Marie, I wish I’d kept that propane heater that my husband used at disability deer hunting camp!” “Marie, I’m glad I didn’t throw out my drawer full manuals because you said they’re all online. You can’t google without Wi-Fi!” If I had done that I wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to get my garage door open during the outrage---not that I’d drive with all the ice, but I envied neighbors using their cars to get warm or charge devices. But I couldn’t reach the power override cord and I doubted I could have lifted the oversized door if I could have and I wasn't about to fill up the garage with carbon monoxide. I also had an old cassette tape player that I couldn’t figure out how to open without its manual. I’d kept the player because I have cassette tapes of an interview I did of my dad back in the ‘80s. But I bitched at Marie Kondo for guilting me into donating a bunch books on tape. I only kept two. 

The first night after dark I laid under a mountain of blankets listening to A Knight in Shining Armor, wishing I had one. Late afternoon the second day the house was down to 42 and I wasn’t looking forward to the other book, The Grapes of Wrath which is about the hardships of the Dust Bowl, hardly something a woman fearing that she might not wake up in the morning wanted to hear and at one point I thought about Scarlett O’Hara at Tara saying, “When this war is over I’ll never go hungry again!” I couldn’t even make a peanut butter sandwich because I keep my bread in the freezer and you can only eat so many sardines and crackers before you start speaking with a Norwegian accent. By then I was wishing I could google ‘chilblains’ to see if I had them. I was getting the shivers that started deep under my ribs and I was so sleepy that I knew I should do something but I didn’t know what. My phone only had 10% battery life left, even my emergency dialer needed charging. I turned them both off so I’d have some power if I had a true emergency requiring 911. And that decision probably saved me a world of hurt. 

One of my Gathering Girls pals knew I was without power and when she tried to text me and it wouldn’t go through she got worried and sent her son-in-law over to check on me. He turned out to be my Knight in Shining Armor. He introduced himself and offered to help me turn off my water and drain my pipes and talked me into coming back to M.J.’s house where she had already taken in five other power outage refugees and a dog. Her son-in-law could have literally saved my life because I know I would have just politely refused an offer to come over if it had been sent in a text. When help was standing in my living room it was too tempting to refuse. I was so cold and there was no hiding it, as bundled up as I was. 

M.J. is the only one of my Gathering Girls pals who is a Trump supporter. On the second morning I was at her house, she got a phone call and one of the first things she said was, “We have the same thing here. We’re avoiding watching CNN and FOX.” The conversation went on for ten minutes about the “witch hunt.” When she got off the phone I told her it’s fascinating that two likeable ladies like us with similar upbringings and life experiences could view the world so differently and that I blame that on having so many cable channels with too many “news commentary” shows. She agreed. Then she did a monologue about how Trump doesn’t get enough credit for undoing all the “bad things that Obama did" and he was getting the world to respect us again after Obama’s disastrous presidency. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I sat there listening without speaking and when she finished I said, “We should probably change the subject but first I want to say that it’s amazing to me that all the words you use to describe Obama are the same words I use to describe Trump.” It was all very civil, like two friends trying to figure out the answer to a calculus equation.

When I got back home I was telling my niece about the conversation and she said words to the effect that the big take-away was that we (meaning everyone) need to quit judging each other along party lines and start judging each other by the humanity we show each other because dividing our country is exactly what the Russian disinformation campaign was/still is all about and we can't let that happen. In my case, a Trump supporter took me in at a time of need. We played a few board games, had a great time and she doted on Levi to the point she became his “aunt M.” By the time her son-in-law was able to take me back home my Gathering Girl pal and I had deepened our friendship and I wish I could figure out a way to thank her. I was truly touched by her kindness and generosity. ©

From Boredom to our Laugh-Fest

Just click along to another blog if you don’t want to hear a bored widow wailing about stupid things that she has no right to be wailing about in the first place. That’s what happened when I hadn’t talked to another human in several days and it didn’t have to be that way. I have both a landline and a cell phone that I could have used to chat with someone plus a car in the garage that could have taken me to some people populated place when I got tired of being alone with no one but the TV to get fat, sassy and nasty with. Not that I’m ever nasty with people but I’ve been known to use a few nasty words when I talk back to the TV news pundits.

Since I got my new landline phone with the ‘block caller’ button I don’t get nearly as many junk calls as I used to get every night between five and seven. I did get one yesterday from a guy who wanted to warn me that my computer was being taken over by hackers. He said he was from Microsoft and was calling to help me fix the breach. I took great delight in saying, “Oh, no, that’s terrible! Please tell me what to do!” and then I pressed the ‘block caller’ button to disconnect the jerk. It’s hard to believe that people still fall for that scam, but apparently enough people do so they keep trying to find those suckers in the haystack.

Monday I got up at the crack of dawn if dawn came at 7:30. I hate getting up with an alarm clock but I had places to go and fun to have with my posse of Gathering Girls. The seven of us had plans to meet for an early lunch at a popular bar slash restaurant. They have a lunch menu that offers ten things for $5.50 each. Such a deal. The acoustics in the place were so bad I hope never to cross over their threshold again. But I would have loved the place if I was young and slightly buzzed at happy hour. The place was noisy and filled to the rafters with grey-haired old women and a few working class guys who had me thinking about the Village People singing Y.M.C.A. "Young man, there's no need to feel down. I said young man..." At one point we Gathering Girls were attempting to discuss a thrift store that unbeknownst to me is named ‘Y.E.S.S.’ and it was like the old Abbott and Costello baseball nicknames’ skit, “Who’s on first.” “No, Y.E.S.S. is closed today.” “Which is it…yes, or no?” “Africa’s Child is open, Y.E.S.S. is closed.” I was confused until I actually saw the thrift store sign a half hour later.

At the first of several thrift stores we went to after lunch, three of us put our purses in one shopping cart and it was like keeping track of the president’s nuclear codes football. “You’re in charge of the cart now.” “I’m taking charge of the cart.” “Where’s the cart?” “I thought you had the cart.” “I thought you did!” You can’t be too careful wandering around a place where a hundred dollar bill could probably buy out the entire glassware and china departments. Slight exaggeration. It might take closer to ninety dollars.

After leaving the last thrift store three of us stopped at the Guy Land Cafeteria for dessert and we laughed so hard two of us were ready to burst and the third Gathering Girl wasn’t far behind. It all started when lady number three shared that she goes to Bible Study every week because, she said, “I like the stories.” Then she leaned as if to share a succulent secret and in a voice barely above a whisper she said, “Sometimes I have doubts. Do you believe in the Immaculate Conception? I mean I’m just not sure… We’re supposed to believe everything in the Bible is true.” I leaned in and replied, “I don’t care if it's in the Bible it takes a man to make a baby!” Then I babbled on, as the other two laughed, about how back then they didn’t understand how a lot of natural things work, "why the sun comes up every day, how babies are made," etc. Lady number two chimed in, “We think we know the sun will come up every day but we really don’t know that for sure” which led to a remark about Trump blowing up the world. Yadda, Yadda and a lot of laughter later we noticed the man in the next booth had slid over in his seat so he could eavesdrop better. He probably wanted to point out that today a virgin could---with the help of modern science or a turkey baster---have a baby without having sex. It was one of the funniest, gut-splitting and most fun conversations I’ve had in a long time and I wish I could have recorded it to savor later.

Unbelievable, isn’t it, after me trying so hard for so long to find friends after my husband died, that I finally have some. Making new friends is not easy at any age but in widowhood it’s probably the hardest, and maybe that’s because so many of us have lost our best and longest standing friendships when our spouses died---that one person we could truly be our unguarded selves around. At least that’s my Truth to take or reject. ©

A Hike in the Woods

I got an unexpected workout over the weekend when a friendly acquaintance I had chatted with on Facebook recently asked me if I wanted to go on a photo safari with her. She’s working on putting together a chapbook of her poetry and needed some illustrations and all I knew about our destinations was we’d be looking for trees, boats, boat houses, churches and a few other things that didn’t sound like they’d take us too far off mowed grass and asphalt. Our first stop, however, was at a near-by Nature Preserve that has as its goal to preserve 63 acres of a rare sphagnum bog and a mature oak-hickory forest and remnants of an oak barrens. I had no idea what an ‘oak barrens’ was until I got home and my friend Google directed me to the Michigan Natural Features Inventory where it was explained that an “oak barrens is a fire-dependent savanna type [forest] dominated by oaks, having between 5 and 60% canopy, with or without a shrub layer.”

We were naïve hikers. We had no idea where or how far the trail went---it could have gone to the Upper Peninsula and we’d still be on it. We only knew the posted rules of “don’t dos” at the trail’s beginning. We didn’t take our water bottles or cell phones and no one in the world---including Ms. Poetry’s husband---knew where we were going so getting lost was not an option in this place where we didn’t see another living creature save for one squirrel. Seriously, how can anyone get lost when six inch blue dots mark a tree every 500 (?) feet, up and down and around the hilly terrain? I wasn’t too worried; I was wearing my 5-Star Emergency Responder that tracks me by GPS so I knew we could get connected to the state police, if necessary. I did start worrying about that possibly, though, when the trail dead-ended at a place where we had to make a decision between going right or left, not knowing which trail will take us back around to the car and which one would take us to the bog we didn’t even know existed until the next day.

It was near that point on our hike when I had to pee but I didn’t have a Kleenex on me and if I had it wouldn’t have been fun packing out a used Kleenex without a plastic bag to put it in. That list of posted rules was quite specific about leaving paper goods behind and I have a healthy respect of the Gods of Rules. So I decided to take a change that my brain was getting a faulty signal from my bladder---happens sometimes---and I kept my pants pulled up. As it turned out, it was a good decision even though it was well over a half hour before we found our way out of the woods. At one point the trail seemed to disappear entirely but at the same time we could see glimpses of the backs of the cottages along the lake. We made a decision to traipse through what looked like poison ivy to me but Ms. Poetry said wasn’t and we headed for the road we knew would be along the front of the cottages. Soon after, we found a friendly man to point us in the direction of where our car was parked at the trail’s entrance and from the humorous tone in his voice, I’m quite sure we weren’t the first ones to chance cutting through private property to freedom---Castle Doctrine and all.

Hunger, thirst and a bathroom call brought us to a tavern out in the boondocks where Ms. Poetry used to go with colleagues when she taught school in the area. She warned me that it’s a dive but I’ve been in far worse. It’s the kind of place where locals hang out to play pool, watch a football game and get an order of frog legs or broasted bass. The woman’s restroom was labeled an eye-rolling “Her-Pees.” When we arrived there was a line of motorcycles out front and when we left they were still there.

We didn’t lack for conversation while waiting for the slow service and as usual for my area of the world, she brought up the topic of religion. On the spot I decided, I’m not hiding from this woman! I straight out told Ms. Poetry that I don’t go to church which I haven’t uttering out loud since my late twenties. I gave her the CliffsNotes version of how I came to be churchless in the City of Churches ending with, “I believe there are many paths to God” to which she replied something like, “I would strongly disagree with that.” Okay, I thought, she seems be open-minded on Facebook so maybe she just wants to discuss theology. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but my voice got a tad icy when I answered that we’d have to agree to disagree on that point and just like that we went on to another topic as if the exchange never happen. Daring to be vulnerable, who knew I could do that so late in life?

All and all I had a good time on a beautiful day, even though neither one of us thought we’d be spending so much time hiking in the woods. And even though it was totally out of character for me to hike without being Boy Scout prepared with a fanny pack of supplies. At least I wasn’t wearing glorified flip-flops like Ms. Poetry was! I wouldn’t want to be her if she gets poison ivy. Flip-flops or not, the outing was a hike in the direction of turning acquaintances into possible friends. ©

Photo Note: The controlled burns in oak barrens are done to reduce invasive species and stimulate the germination of native fauna. We saw signs of burning everywhere and we thought it was from vandalism or a lightening strike. This burning, I learned the next day, took place last spring in the preserve where we hiked.

Friendships and Crime Waves

An old friend moved to Florida a few years back to care for her ailing parents and she was up visiting the rest of her family this month. We had a three hour lunch on Wednesday and that made me long even more than I already did for a good friend who lives near-by. I have three very good friends who live in other states but the distance, of course, changes things. The warmth, laughter and caring about each other is still there, and when any of us gets a chance to visit, talk on the phone or email it’s always welcome and a good reminder of how important friends are and will always be in the grand scheme of things. But you can’t hug a long-distance friend. You can’t look into each others eyes and know when there is something one or the other needs to talk about. Yada, yada, yada. Since Don passed away---talk about putting distance in a relationship---it’s been impossible to fill the emptiness of not having someone to share life’s little details with which made lunch on Wednesday all the more special. We talked. We shared. We laughed and even shed a tear or two.

My Florida friend was married to one of Don’s oldest and best friends and I’ve known her probably thirty years, but we became closer after Don’s stroke. Anyone who’s gone through living with a severely disabled person knows there are friends who will run in the opposite direction when a disability comes into your life and those who will run towards you. She ran towards us and that’s more uncommon than you might think with family and long-time friends. Disabilities, divorces and widowhood change the dynamics of relationships. It's just the way the cookie crumbles. Some friendships fall off the radar, so treasure the ones that stay put.

Sadly, my friend and her husband are divorced now but we managed to stay friends with both of them. That wasn’t easy in the beginning because he went through a short period where he thought we should pick a side. Thankfully, they found their way back to being on civil terms again and I do my best to not carried tales back and forth between them. It works. But since she moved, I miss her can-do attitude and the ease in which conversation flows between us. She’s had a tougher life than mine but you’d never know it, given the way she powers through adversities. It saddens me that I only get to see her once a year and on Facebook. Good old Facebook.

Speaking of moving, unless you want to scare yourself out of moving, don’t ever look at a crime mapping site for the areas where you’re thinking about moving. I'll look at the crime mapping for where I live two-three times a year and it never turns up much of anything. This week I was killing time while waiting for my irrigation guy to show up to do my fall shut-off when I fed the address of a condo community I like into a crime mapping search box. There’s a registered sex offender living within the place. Great! I’d be walking the dog and wondering which friendly guy got caught doing heavens knows what to land him on the list. I kept feeding addresses into the site and at one point I learned there are over 1,600 registered sex offenders in the greater metropolis which, I guess, isn’t so bad considering the population but they sure seemed to be ganged up in my old neighborhood. You can see break-ins, assaults, drug busts and robberies on crime mapping sites, too, and comparing my current neighborhood with others south of town I realize how safe this area truly is. I tend to think of all bedroom communities to a center city as being safe but they certainly aren’t all equally as safe. What was an eye opener!

Back to friendships. The divorced guy in the couple mentioned above is talking seriously about moving to a state where he doesn’t know a single person. I don’t blame him for wanting to leave the Snow Belt behind but it sure isn’t in my wheelhouse to do something like that. I think he's under-estimating how important family and friends are in our lives---how much we all help each other out from time to time, how much joy we get out of just getting together for a few laughs. He gets credit for being gutsy though. I’m driving myself crazy researching an area I’ve lived in my entire life. I’d be in a loony bin if I had to research communities in the entire Bible Belt. His plan is to just go and roam the South (all by himself) until he sees something he likes. No research. No planning. If it were me, I’d worry I’d end up in the morgue, an unidentified victim of a crime, and no one would know I was missing to come claim my body. Five years from now it will be interesting to compare the outcome of our diverse methods of moving on with our lives. Good old Facebook, bless its heart, will keep us in touch.  ©