I'm Sick of Everything!

I’m so sick of life right now! I mean it! I’ve reached my limit of tolerance. My give-a-damn is broken in half. Yup, I’m sick of everything to do with anything especially the cold and snow that's finding its way to parts of the country where it doesn't belong rubbing our noses in the fact that it's still winter. If we didn’t have a world pandemic still taking people out like balls rolling near the gutters at bowling alleys take out the seven and ten pins I’d say I need a vacation. A nice trip to any place, even to the local sculpture park would brighten my mood. When are the butterflies coming to their tropical conservatory? March? April? Oh, ya, they’re be there for both months but will it be safe for humans to attend the normally shoulder-to-shoulder exhibit? Will school kids be bused in one load after another, day after day? I have gone most years, often meeting my youngest niece there with her grandkids. After not seeing her for a whole year, I’ll bet she wouldn’t even recognize me with my pandemic hair style. Make that two years! The pandemic closed the butterflies down last year, and I'm sorry World but emails, text messages, phone calls and Facebook postings aren't slicing and dicing my loneliness enough to make a tablespoon of cure.

I suppose the state of my mind was inevitable after weeks and months of being invested in things I have no control over like the pandemic, the state of our political climate and now with Republican Senator Ted F'ing Cruz making his "excuses tour" on the media for flying to Cancun while the people of his state were/still are suffering during a nearly state-wide power outrage due to a harsh weather event. In the meantime, Democrats and private citizen Beto O'Rourke and Senator A.O. Cortez stepped up to do what Cruz shoulda'/coulda' have done---care about people, help them! Beta organized a massive phone bank to check on seniors and AOC raised 2 million dollars to fly food and water to Texas food banks.

Is it possible for an entire nation to have a collective mental health breakdown? If so, call me the Indian scout who goes out to test the route the tribe behind is about to travel. You all, turn around, find a kitten to pet and calm down! Meditate. That's what scouts did, they'd find trouble up ahead and warn the tribe to change course. Yes, I’m of that generation who grew up watching Western movies, double features on Saturday afternoons which begs the question: What were our mothers doing with their time when we sat in the movie theaters for four hours? I don’t remember ever going to the grocery store with my mom as a kid. Did mothers in the 40s do their shopping after dropping us off to see the latest shoot-em-up or Lone Ranger film? It was the only day my mom had access to the family car. Did they also have ‘private time’ with our dads? Yuck! Parents shouldn’t have sex! Gouge that image out of my head! My dad was perfect, my mom had her faults but I don’t want to think about them playing kissy-face even though I know they did it at least three times. (They miscarried a baby in between me and my brother.)

I’ve often wondered how much different my life would have been if I’d had a second sibling, a brother closer to my own age. Would we have shared friends, done more things together than my older brother and I did? As kids we did our share of ice skating, sledding, playing board games and hanging out in the woods behind our cottage growing up but by the time he was a teenager with a large posse of friends we grew apart. Then he got married right out of high school, moved a good distance away and they spent the next few years popping three babies into the world while I finished up high school and started college. I don’t think my brother understood me at all during the entire 1960s when I dated a lot but didn’t get married. I’m pretty sure he thought I was freakish for not having the same goals that most of the girls he graduated with did---the big wedding, babies and a nice house. He even told me once that I was too picky. It’s not that I didn’t want those things and a white picket fence I just had other goals as well.

Boy, has this post gotten derailed from the original topic I started writing about. Oh, well, that’s probably a good thing because my little I’m-sick-of-life temper tantrum wasn’t getting me anywhere…and they never did. As a kid my mom had little sympathy for my tears and she discouraged my dad from showing empathy when I cried. And clearly empathy was his first reaction to any sign of discomfort anyone around Dad was experiencing. Hardened by life, I never saw her cry. Around her ninth birthday her own mother had died and my mom got separated from her siblings to earn her keep working in a boarding house. She was a product of her times---a child during the last world pandemic, a young woman living on her own during the Great Depression, a mother during WWII and, boy, did she come out the other side of all that societal stress a strong woman.

Looking back, people all tend to put on rose colored glasses and think past generations had it easier than we do in real time. We romanticize. We generalize. We gloss over. And some day in the far future people will look back at 2020/21 and do the same thing. They will romanticize our pandemic driven stay-at home orders and generalize it to the point they'll only remember the closeness many families were able to achieve during this time---the TicTok videos, the zoom choirs---like the fun stuff they portrayed in all the USO movies of WWII. Pain always lessens with the passing of time. People in the future will gloss over the political unrest, too, that we are living through and only remember those among us who get through it stronger and more principled than before---the political heroes yet to rise to the top. Until then I’m taking two aspirin and living in a house of silence for a week which has always proven to be cure for what ails me right now. Sensory overload. My media block out will be akin to my mom sending me to my room until I quit feeling sorry for myself. ©

The snow now piled at the top of my driveway

Snow along the sidewalk to my front door. I just shoveled what I could reach off my shrub.

The path I shoveled on my deck for the dog to get to his pen.

Snow in the dog's pen. That fence if 3 foot tall.

 

And last but not least my front mailbox and the path I shoveled to its back side. All photos taken to remind of what I'm leaving behind if I start missing this house next winter.

Passion and Parents

“Old people talk about the past because they have no futures and young people talk about the future because they have no pasts.” I’ve probably shared that Ann Landers quote before because it’s one of my favorites. The older I get the more I understand the scary truth in those words. Sure, I’ve got plans that go beyond daily living but none of those plans go beyond where my 2016 day planner ends---unless we count my 2017 colonoscopy, assuming I can find a ride by then. With so many decades in my rearview mirror and only one, maybe two decades in front of me, thinking of the future doesn’t come with the same optimism that it did in the past. Ya, I know it’s all in my head. There are people my age who are doing exciting things. Climbing mountains, jumping out of airplanes, running for political office, traveling the world, helping to solve the world’s problems. Developing a passion for projects and adventure can happen at any age. On the other hand it’s very First-World, New-Age of me to wish I could find my muse and live happily ever after wallowing in a passion project---that certain something that lights my fire every morning and makes me quit thinking about the fact that I’m drifting. How long should it take to retool a widow’s life? 

My dad always gave credit to my mom for the assets they were able to accumulate in their lifetimes. Not that accumulating assets is what anyone should use as a measure of success. However, setting aside the obvious----the love and caring my parents gave to whoever came into their lives, the examples they set regarding good values, humility and humanity---I’m amazed that they managed to accumulate not only a house in a middle class neighborhood but a cottage as well and all the creature comforts that went with them including two cars and a motor home. Both of my parents grew up dirt poor in hard times and without mothers in their lives from an early age. They both entered the work force before their teens and when they got married Dad was a machinist and Mom was a waitress. They lived in an apartment, often taking in my mother’s father who from all accounts was a penniless drunk dating back to the time his wife died fifteen years prior. 

My parents bought their first home at a time when the banks were eager to sell off all the houses they’d accumulated during the depression and couldn’t sell until the WWII came along, so they were able to buy it without a down payment. My mother was a long-range planner. She convinced my dad to turn the house into a two-family and rent out the upstairs apartment. I don’t remember that house but over the years I’d heard plenty of stories about it. My brother used to tell about all the mice that were in it when they first moved it. It was his job to whack them with a board when they came up through the heat register while my dad was in the basement making them scatter. Mom hoarded the rent money for a few years until she had enough for a down payment on a house in a better neighborhood, just in time for me to start first grade. And while they were landlords, my parents also bought a lot on a lake, contracted to down a house and used its lumber to build a cottage. 

When I look back over the first twenty-five years of my life, it seems like I was always living in a house that was either under construction or a project was in the works. Mom had remodeling plans running in her veins and Dad, over the years, taught himself how to do the plumbing, electrical, roofing, carpentry and cement work involved. And when my folks were winding down from their remodeling---they’d just finished upgrading the cottage for year-around living---Don came into my life with his newly acquired, little run-down house with a pink stove, another rental house and a four family apartment house and remodeling came on the my stage, again, for the next fifteen years. A lot of our earlier “dates” involved putting up drywall and painting. The pink stove, by the way, was the first thing Don moved out of the house and he never replaced it. The kitchen in his little bachelor pad was just a room he walked through to get to the garage and where he kept his coffee maker and a massive collection of coffee cups. It was a big deal to pick out a cup because it reflected his mood. If he used the “Don’t Let the Turkeys Get You Down” cup I knew something on the news was bothering him. But I digress. The point is my folks could see the same Remodel-the Nest genes in me that they had. 

Parents probably spend less time than me obsessing about the legacy they'll leave behind. They can see their families before them---their passion projects, so to speak. The years of work it took to guide their kids and how those traits and values are getting passed down to the next generation must be gratifying to see as you age. That gives me an idea. I wonder if I could find a vet to reverse Levi’s vasectomy. There’s a sweet Schnauzer that comes into the groomer on the same day as Levi. They could make cute little grand-puppies that I could train, spoil and knit sweaters for next winter and I’m not too old to accomplish all that before I die. ©

NOTE: The circa 1947-8 photo above is the front of the cottage my folks built. The boy on the tree on the left is my brother, the woman on the right is my mom and the guy kneeing is my dad. They were taking down a huge tree so they could add a porch on the cottage.