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.

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

T-Shirts and Old Girlfriends

A few days ago I took myself out to lunch and while I was waiting for my plate of cholesterol to be served a couple about my age walked in. The woman was wearing a t-shirt that read, “Friendship League” and the guy was wearing one with the word 'Superman' plastered across his chest. And that was all it took to transport me back to the '80s when Don had one of those silly superman t-shirts only he didn’t wear his like this man did, for all the world to see. Don loved to wear his superman shirt underneath a dress shirt, suit jacket and a tie. It put him in a silly mood, like he had a secret and was waiting for an opportunity to expose that t-shirt at a party, wedding reception or similar dress-up event. I don’t remember him doing it more than twice---once when a hostess couldn't open a bottle of wine---but he wore that shirt under his dress clothing for years, until it got too small and it went into a box labeled ‘Memory Shirts.’ Most of the t-shirts in that box got donated after his stroke and our downsizing to move but some of them ended up in a quilt that I had made. That was probably the best gift I ever gave my husband and he used it almost every day until he died. 

Did you know that t-shirts evolved from the one-piece union suits (underwear also known as long-johns) that men wore in the 19^th century? They’d cut the bottoms off and wear the tops to do farm chores in the summer months and the cut-off union suits also became popular with miners and stevedores. By the 1920s the word t-shirt was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but it wasn’t until Marlon Brando, in the 1950s, wore a t-shirt in A Streetcar Named Desire that t-shirts came into their own as a stand-alone fashion garment. Silk screening on t-shirts for self-expression, souvenirs and advertising was popularized in 1960s, but in between the end of WWII and the '60s they could be found in veteran groups. 

In April of 1970 when I met my husband, silk-screened t-shirts were not universally accepted as proper attire in Don’s family, a fact that I didn’t know when I wore one the first time I met his family. It was navy blue and had two large white footprints over my chest--far from a hippie protest t-shirt but close enough, I guess. It was probably the single most notable thing I did to cause one of his three brothers to spend the next four decades looking down his nose at me. I heard stories a few years later about how that t-shirt became the topic of the family gossip mill, with Don’s dad taking my side and declaring me to be "the perfect girl for Don.” Don, at 29, was the unmarried baby of the family and a mystery as to why he let two perfectly nice girls slip through his fingers when either one would have made a wonderful wife and mother. The t-shirt hating brother deemed him to be immature and lacking an anchor. Those two never did understand what made the other one tick.

One of the girls Don dated before me was his high school sweetheart and I have the photos to prove it. She was a red-head who still lives near-by and after graduation she broke up with him because he didn’t produce an engagement ring in a timely manner. She was engaged to someone else a few months later. We used to see her and her husband at class reunions or house parties back in the day and they came to our ‘Thank God, I’m Alive’ party that I threw to celebrate Don’s stroke recovery at the five year benchmark. I don’t even know how that came about; they weren't invited. I was okay being around her---it was high school after all---but her husband always acted uneasy being around the "high school sweethearts." Don’s second serious girlfriend gave up on getting a ring out of him after five year. She joined the WAC, ended up marrying an Army engineer and lived happily ever after in Fiji. I was always glad I never met her. I suspect she was too classy to ever wear a tacky t-shirt with big feet on the front.

Over the years both my husband and I had many favorite t-shirts. Some from places we’d been on vacation like the Gene Autry Museum and Steamboat Colorado, others made statements like “Kiss Me I’m Irish”---Don was and he wore that shirt once a year until it got too tight. Other favorites were for local causes like “Save City Hall!” and a covert protest tee against a local soap manufacturer that depicted a bar of soap on a rope. A giant bar of "soap" on a robe was an entry in a local raft race and that t-shirt was a gift from the artist who made the raft. We took part in that the race for four-five years. We had an old, ten-man military surplus rubber survival raft with a roof that we made into a turtle one year, a whale another. I see that soap t-shirt in the quilt and all those memories come back.

I doubt logo and silk-screen t-shirts will ever fall out of fashion. Though I don’t wear them anymore since my husband died. I gave them up in an attempt to update my wardrobe, not look like a caregiver anymore or an aged-out hippie. But if I ever see a shirt that says, “Friendship League” I  might be tempted to buy it. While I was at lunch I had a terrible time resisting going up to the woman wearing that t-shirt and asking her, “What the heck is a friendship league and how can I join?” I think that's the reason why my husband loved t-shirts---they're great conversation starters. Even after he lost his speech with the stroke, he'd roll his wheelchair up to someone wearing an interesting logo and point to it. Ohmygod, I could write a whole blog entry about some of the situations he got himself into doing that. And I probably did in my caregiver blog. ©

The photo at the top was taken in 1959 of Don with his high school sweetheart. The photo below is of the t-shirt quilt I had made for Don.There are 19 shirts and five patches in the quilt. It's not a pretty quilt but it was the perfect size for lounging in his La-Z-Boy and a prefect memory trigger.