Flaky, Polite and Joyful Conversations

But first a message from the whine-like-a-baby-department: Have I mentioned lately that beds are evil? For the second time in my life I tripped while making my bed. The first time was in 1999. That resulted in a long elbow surgery and months of physical therapies that I found out last summer has totally failed. All the screws backed out and a bone is swinging in the wind and gives me pain if I don’t remember not to do certain things. This time I fell on my knee then my hip and only hurt my pride but it took me fifteen minutes to get off the floor with my two fake knees and damaged elbow. I finally did it by butt-crawling to the bathroom where I threw myself over the toilet and used a grab bar to pull myself up with good arm while Levi, my Might Schnauzer, got all concerned from a safe distance. At first I wondered if he thought my whining was catching like the flu but a couple of days later it dawned on me that when my disabled husband would fall Levi was trained to lay down out of the way and wait until Don was back in his wheelchair.  

Monday my Gathering Girls group got together for a two and a half hour brunch at the Guy Land Cafeteria where I suspect eavesdroppers had laughter or friendship envy. We’ve got a lot of life experiences between us to draw on and whenever something gets too serious someone makes an off-the-wall comment that has us all roaring with laughter. About the only topic we don’t discuss is Donald Trump because one of ladies is a supporter so politics only comes up with she’s absent. Mostly we poke fun at ourselves. This week one of the ladies did a rant about how much she hates Wayfair (the online homes goods store) because they send her too many emails and I was trying to explain to her and a couple of other computer literates at the table how to unsubscribe and how not get signed up in the first place. I love Wayfair and I never get emails from them. A guy in his early twenties at a near-by table was no double enjoying our conversation and probably went back to work to tell his buddies about the horse-and-buggy era grandmas at the next table. I can’t complain since I get a lot of blogging material in that place. 

The I-hate-Wayfair lady loves to shop on QVC and I haven’t got a clue how that works. I told her she needs to give me a clothing shopping class---I desperately need a new wardrobe. She said when she was back in the working world she was ‘Mrs. Got Rocks’ and could buy good quality clothing and I guess on QVC you can shop in different price ranges. She’s no longer Mrs. Got Rocks but she still dresses a whole lot better than I do. Earlier, I told everyone about my DNA test results from 23andMe and the line “but I don’t have the Alzheimer’s gene” became my running joke whenever I miss-heard or needed something repeated. Someone asked, “Do they had a gene marker for being flaky?” And I replied, “If they did, I’d probably have that variant.” Like I said, we all have a talent for poking fun of ourselves.

The next day I had lunch with my Movie and Lunch Club. I’d already seen the movie but the restaurant was one I hadn’t been to since before my husband died and I wanted to go there again. I sat at a table with seven others who’ve I’ve known twice as long as my Gathering Girls group but our conversations are day-and-night different…friendly but never getting below the surface, never a belly laugh. Nice women but we’re still in the acquaintances zone where my Gathering Girls group have crossed over into the friendship zone. Wouldn’t it be nice to know the magic ingredient that makes that happen with some people but not others? I suspect that magic ingredient---at least for me---is humor.

New Topic: My house cleaner is such a joy to have in the house. She’s the new-ish one who’s in a grad program to become an art professor and she’s already teaching a couple of freshman classes at a prestigious college of art and design. I showed her a painting I’m working on and she gave me a critique and I hope she wasn’t blowing smoke up my butt when she said she liked what I had going on. She pointed out a place where I had the sunlight showing on the wrong side of the boy’s hand and she suggested a color to try adding to his shirt. We talked so much that I’m sure my cleaning hours will get billed extra this month. But I don’t care.

We also talked about the new guy she’s dating, a boy she knew in grade school but hadn’t seen since she was ten. They had crushes on each other all those years ago and she still has a love letter the 10 year old version of this 27 year old guy wrote to her back then. They reconnected on Facebook recently, talked for five hours on their first ‘phone date’ and they spent a lot of time together over the holidays. There isn’t anything sweeter than seeing the glow in a young girl’s eyes when she says, “I think he’s the one!” I love that girl. She’s not the greatest cleaner the service has sent me but her company is worth the trade-off. After she graduates she’ll no doubt hang up the cleaning job. So for now I’m riding the serendipitous wave that brought her into my life. ©

From Ding-Bat Relatives to Ocean’s 8 and Penny Lane

I have a couple of niece-in-laws who I don’t see often since my husband died. It’s not just the lost connection of my husband/their uncle but their mother passing away as well and I still miss her living close by. After Don died I’d stop by often when I didn’t want to go home to an empty house. I could always count on my sister-in-law’s ‘ding-battiness’ to make me laugh. She was a terrible gossip, too, and I guess I like gossip because now I have no clue what’s going on in her large Catholic family. We all fall victim to the seasons of other people’s lives. With her gone, the family parties have all ended. She was the one who’d rent a cottage for Fourth of July get-togethers and a banquet room for Christmas parties and who hosted all the Easter and Thanksgiving dinners. She loved to cook, hated leftovers and we'd go home with enough food to keep us eating for a week. Even stopping by for coffee, would earn you a half a honey ham or roast when you left.

Since my sister-in-law died, one of my niece-in-laws has moved into a nursing home and her older sister does daycare for her grandchildren and grand-dogs. She’s over committed and not in the best of health herself, but the three of us managed to have lunch together recently. It was great to be around people I’ve known and loved for decades! So different than trying to build new friendships, no matter how nice your new friends are. There’s nothing to prove, no Litmus Test, no wondering when you’ll reveal something that will stop a budding friendship in its track. Growing older sucks! Lost connections suck! And I really hate the word ‘suck’ but I’m not in the mood to work at finding a more lady-like word to use in its place. Why did it take putting a phone call on my job list to make getting together happen? Even doing that, I moved the phone call from list to list for weeks before I finally followed through. Calling someone we love shouldn’t get relegated to a job, like calling a plumber to get a leaky faucet fixed.

In my younger days---and probably yours---I could throw together my social life on the spur of the moment. “Want to go clubbing tonight?” “Sure, let’s meet at Oscar’s at---what time is it now? I can be there at 8:00.” But septuagenarians and octogenarians are different. We have a basket full of complications that have to be factored into having a social life. Things like we have to pace our physical endurance or the medical community has us jumping through hoops. Some of us can’t do mornings or can’t do afternoons and many of us don’t drive after dark. And then there are money issues for some who have to make sure a social engagement won’t result in having to eat cat food for the rest of the month. My Movie and Lunch Club, right now, is voting on whether or not to move from going on the 3rd Friday of the month to a Tuesday when the theaters offers a three dollar discount. With nearly fifty of us on the email list, my in box is getting flooded with pros and cons but no one has yet suggested splitting the group into two clubs. Duh! Sometimes the easiest solution is the hardest to come by because people get so intent on having things their own way that they forget about looking for compromises or logical solutions.

Speaking of movies, I saw Ocean’s 8 with my Gather Girls pals. IMDb condenses the storyline like this: “Debbie Ocean gathers an all-female crew to attempt an impossible heist at New York City's yearly Met Gala.” I’ve never been a fan of the Ocean’s franchise or the ‘heist’ genre, but this one is riding the new wave of movies targeting women and if we want them to keep making chic-flicks-on-steroids we have to support them. Did I like it? More than I thought I would but not enough to give it more than a 3 ½ star rating. The five of us had lunch afterward and some of the comments made were: “You couldn’t let your mind wander even a minute or you’d be lost” and “it kept us on our toes, especially with the twists near the end” and “I loved all the dresses and jewelry” and “Sandra Bullock and Anne Hathaway are great actresses!” James Corden plays an insurance investigator in the movie and I don’t mind telling you that I’m developing a mini crush on that guy, solidified all the more after a blogger friend over at My View from Here posted his Carpool Karaoke video with Paul McCartney. I’m “borrowing” her link because it’s such a feel-good experience to watch---well worth the 23 minutes it takes to go back to Penny Lane and other places special to the Beatles. ©