The Season of Parties

Saturdays are a crap shoot when it comes to trolling for conversation at the cafe’ here at the continuum care complex where I live. We old people seem to be creatures of habit honed to perfection back in our working days when Saturdays were for shopping and catching up on laundry and housework. It was never my day off day per se. Being in the wedding business for twenty years, my Mondays were other people’s Saturdays but here Saturdays are slow. No classes take place, no card games. It’s not unusual for me to be the only one keeping the waitress and cook off the unemployment line. Today, however, they were hosting a viewing party for residents who are into college football so they could watch a game together. Me, I don’t like contact sports---baseball isn’t one, is it?---so when I came down for lunch I sat in the farthest corner I could get away from the TV.

My brother played football in high school so I understand the objective and rules of the game and I spent a year during my chameleon dating era pretending an interest in more than the chips and cheese at tailgate parties while my jock of a boyfriend went full-out fan supporter. His life, thus my life by the rules of The Chameleon Girlfriend Club, revolved around college and professional football schedules. I really thought he was THE ONE and I can’t help thinking about him when ever I hear the song, Unanswered Prayers.

Speaking of parties here, birthday parties are fast becoming my favorite thing to do around. The guy they hired for our latest monthly party is well known at the local bars and summer outdoor parks where he makes his living singing Jimmy Buffet and the playlist of my life from the ‘50s to the ‘70s. He even throws in a little Willy Nelson who was my husband’s favorite country western singer/song writer. I don’t know what they pay the people the activities director hires but it’s got to be their standard rates because we don’t get amateur hour entertainers here, even though the number of people who show up for these parties is often an embarrassingly low number under two dozen.

Another activity was added new to our holiday calendar this year. A gingerbread house building contest. They furnished the kits with all the trimmings but I made a run to the Dollar Store to buy alternative candy so mine will hopefully look different. Stupid me, at the Thanksgiving dinner table we were talking about the contest when someone said, “That won’t be any fun. The houses will all look the same.” I had to open my mouth to mention my trip to the Dollar Store. "Is that against the rules?" someone asked. "Not that I read," I replied, "but all gingerbread house contests require everything on the house to be eatable so I'm assuming that rule applies to us." I'm having fun making mine and I'll take photos when they are due for the judging. I really hope the 'only edible' rule applies to us because someone has already waved it off and is adding plastic figures. A friend from my writing group is making spun glass/sugar windows and I want him to win. He showed me photos, his house is spectacular!

We also had a holiday decorating and tree trimming party. They had one last year and I didn’t go. Even the promise of hot chocolate and gingerbread cookies couldn’t make me cancel my standing haircut appointment, but that was only half the story. I was also avoiding getting involved with the other x-floral designer here on campus who was trying to volunteer my services (along with his) to decorate all the public spaces. It was a good call. I have zero interest in reliving my past glory the way he does. Now, every holiday large or small he has taken to provided our lobby with decorations. Although at one point I felt sorry for him as he sat alone at table making dozens of bows for a Christmas tree. I stopped to talk to him but I didn't cave when asked to stay awhile and help. This year I fully intended to help decorate the lobby but as I walked through the staging area there were 12-14 people standing around discussing their own ideas. When it comes to creative decisions, I don't like making them by committee so I kept on walking. They printed one of my poems in the newsletter, so no one can say I don't contribute to the community.

The holiday season is bringing lots of musical events to the residents here but I have very little interest in going downtown to hear Christmas concerts or to churches in the area to hear their choirs sing so I can’t write about what I don’t see and hear. I’m just not into that kind of music but if I was we do have new transportation that will make it safer and more dependable than what we’ve been using. We actually have our own bus now! I’ve been in the tin can they rented last summer but I wouldn’t ride in it during the slip and slide, crash, boom season. I have an unnatural fear of dying in a car accident. Had it ever since the '80s when we had a neighbor who worked as an EMT driver and she’d come home from a shift all excited to share her experiences like holding a person’s eye ball or an amputated leg in her hand. She loved the gore at bad accidents, but she described the gory details to the wrong person once and got fired. After that she worked in a hospital drawing blood. The  'vampire' nickname people have for blood draw techs fit her to a tee.

We have a wandering choir coming to campus to sing Christmas carols up and down the road. I'm sure that will remind me of a Hallmark Christmas movie. And, yes, I'm one of those who binges on Hallmark Christmas movies starting in November. At least they aren't fattening and they point out a little known secret to all the single women of the world. The secret is that all the hot guys who are ready to settle down are back in the small towns of America. So if you're out there looking for Mr. Right, go home and visit your parents or grandparents this holiday season. ©

Loss, Love Affairs and Old Movie Lines

One of my Gathering Girls pals has a daughter who volunteers at a place that’s like a food pantry only instead of giving away people food and goods the store-front charity gives away pet foods and gently used pet supplies to people living on the edge of poverty. The idea is to help them keep their dogs and cats from being surrendered to animal shelters. I have not disposed of much of Levi’s stuff---not ready for that emotional roller coaster yet. But that first week after he passed I did, however, drop off everything with an expiration date...food, treats, medications for fleas, ticks and heart worms and water additive for dental care to the above mentioned charity.

Fast forward to now when I just dropped off three baby/pet gates and two dog beds. I know in the long run it would be easier to pull the band-aide off and get rid of all of Levi’s stuff at once, but I can’t seem to do it. Before this turns into a Country/Western song about a girl whose dog died and she lost her pickup truck in a poker game and she feels low enough to do a duet with a whippoorwill, let me say that I haven’t owned a pickup truck since 2002, we don’t have whippoorwills in Michigan and I haven’t played poker since my teens when all I owned of value to lose in a card game was my roller skates, a bike I rarely rode and a bunch of diaries that my best friend and I occasionally used to play Diary Roulette. The key to winning that game was to remember key dates in each other’s daily activities…say when I knew my friend got a phone call from a boy she liked and there was a good chance she’d rambled on in her diary about Harold or Stan or whoever was her current crush. We can’t all have poignant, Anne Frank-type diaries and thank God for that.

Not even in my twenties when I was dating a guy who’s idea of going on a date was to spend Friday nights at his married sister’s house playing card games was poker among the games we played. Those people and their endless, empty-headed chit-chat that went with the card games drove me crazy but that was back in my Be-a-Chameleon days to get a man so we played cards every Friday night for a year. If we hadn’t broken up we’d still be playing cards on Friday nights and there would never had been a Levi in my life because he didn’t think animals belonged inside the house. I dated two guys from farm communities and while I'm not sure if the other one felt the same way about turning animals into household pets, his stick-up-his-butt father surely wouldn't have approved.

Aaron. Ah, yes, that other country boy: Remember the Grant Wood 1930s painting of the gloomy farmer with the pitchfork and his equally gloomy wife? Had we gotten married, that would have been me, living a life where I disappointed my in-laws because I’d never won first prize at the county fair for my apple pie or anything else for the matter. Not much call for an art major on a farm. My lack of interest in all kitchen related activates didn’t put the odds in my favor of marrying a guy in line to inherit the family farm. If I had known that going into that relationship maybe I would turned up my Chameleon Charm and brought his father a few casseroles. But I didn't and one day Aaron took a severe beating from his father when he got a little too dreamy-eyed over having a future with me, "that ‘college girl’ who was unsuited for farm life." Nothing breaks up a sweet, cream-and-sugar romance faster than a few cracked ribs and a lot of black and blue bruises from a leather belt.

He came to see me a couple of days after that beating, before hopping on a bus to Chicago where he’d planned to get a job that didn't involve milking cows and plowing fields. A few weeks later he was back on the farm. His physical wounds had healed but I doubt his spirit ever did. Gone was his sexy smile, his sweet touches and our easy-going banter and laughter. I didn’t see him again for 5-6 years and he introduced me to his perfectly-suited-for-farm-life-and-father-approved wife. If that chance introduction had happened after instead of before the movie, The Way We Were was released I would have quoted Barbara Streisand’s character Katie when she said, “Your girl is lovely, Hubbell.” And after we parted Aaron, like Hubbell with Katie, would have given me a longing, last look from across the street that telegraphed he wished things could have been different while his wife looked like she had a thought bubble drawn over her head that read, Ohmygod, that was HER wasn’t it! 

And maybe it did happen that way. After 50 years memories and imagination tend to blur. All I really know for sure is that life is messy and our summer romance would have made a great country/western song about a guy with a pocket full of regrets who was haunted by his memories of laughing and singing and being silly with a city girl. Or maybe that song would be more along the lines of Garth Brook's Thank God for Unanswered Prayers where a guy and his wife have a chance meeting with a girl he wanted way back when, before he found the true love of his life. 

I don’t even remember Aaron’s last name. It doesn’t matter. He’s a single thread woven into the Tapestry of my Life, a rich tapestry of people and events that sometimes make me wish I'd quit reading romance books and write a couple instead.

And by the way, if you think you're hearing the theme song to The Way We Were about now, you'd be right. That's me singing...  ©

Memories
Light the corners of my mind
Misty watercolor memories
Of the way we were

Scattered pictures
Of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were

Memories
May be beautiful and yet
What's too painful to remember
We simply to choose to forget....