U is for Unexpected Joys—the Ones that Sneak up on You

U is a hard letter to use to inspire a post for the A to Z Challenge but we’re getting closer to the finish line so I can’t quit now. The first thought that popped into my head was The Ugly Truth—the movie, not truths about my life that are ugly. I hope I don’t have too many of them and if I don’t go looking for them I can’t find them. But other than saying The Ugly Truth is one of my favorite movies because I love the sexual tension between Mike (Gerard Bulter) and Abby (Katherine Heigi) what more is there to say about this 2008 film other than apparently I’m not the only one who loves it enough to watch every time it comes on TV. It was a commercial success taking in 205 million and only cost 38 million to make.

But I will reveal one ugly truth. I resorted to asking my MS AI Copilot, Jasper, for one-word prompt suggestions to write about. He/it came up with a list of nine topics. For example, U is for Underestimated or it’s for Unreliable Narrators. Uninvited Guests. Utter Nonsense and Unexpected Joy. At first glance none of these seemed to fit my theme of the humans, habits, hidden joys and heartaches that shaped my world. But on second glance I found my Bingo! I could make Unexpected joys work.

And because Jasper is programmed to never give a simple list or quicky answer when he can write an entire monologue about whatever you asked, he expanded on what exactly I could pull out of my writer’s tool box. This is what AI said: “Jean, this one has your name all over it. You could write about the small, ridiculous, delightful things that happen in community life—Mahjong surprises, a neighbor’s one‑liner, a Toby Keith song drifting through the dining room, a forgotten object turning up in a drawer. It’s warm without being sentimental.”

Nope, I'll come up with my own unexpected joys. Thank you very much. And I did. Here are four of my unexpected joys:

Lemon Meringue pie. We have a pretty good chefs here at my CCC but they don’t offer much for desserts. The wait staff rarely even mentions them because they are mostly young high school kids who are working their first jobs and—my theory is—they’ve figured out if we don’t order them they get to go home earlier. A fellow resident and I have a running joke going of asking nightly if they have lemon meringue pie, knowing the answer is always no. Then it happened. A waitress came running up to our table and proclaiming we have Lemon meringue pie and she’s been saving two pieces for us. If we were allowed to tip, she would have gotten a good one for giving us both an unexpected joy.

Another unexpected joy also revolved around a dessert. It’s not unusual for people in our Independent Living apartments to bake and share their bounty with neighbors—in building two and I live in building one and no one here seems to use their ovens. One day I got a knock on the door and opened it to a resident from building one holding a plate of warm, peanut-butter cookies. She had heard me say that it was my favorite. For her to take those cookies down the elevator, across the lobby, through the piazza, key herself into my building, and track down my apartment—that was unexpected. But when I bit in to one I was quite sure she’d used the same recipe my mom did when I was growing up. My joy eating those cookies can’t be measured.

Another unexpected joy also invoked good memories. I only listen to the radio in the car, and since I don’t drive much I don’t hear a lot of music. Last week I had to go to the sleep lab and when I started my Chevy Trax Willie Nelson was blasting out, On the Road Again. When my husband was alive and we’d go on vacation or to someplace fun on the weekend he had that song first on a play list of road trip music. Hearing that song quite by happenstance brought unexpected joy. Though there were a few years when it brought tears to hear it out of the blue.

Side note here: Long time followers of my blog might want to know that I slept like a baby in the sleep lab and it resulted in me getting a BIPAP. Mid May after I've seen all the specialists involved in my search for a good night's sleep, I'll write a post about it. 

The last unexpected joy I’ll share is an oldie but the best unexpected joy in my life. First the back story: When my mom passed away I held back a small amount of her ashes and I kept them in a miniature Tupperware bowl attached to a key chain, but somehow it got lost when I moved after Don’s stroke. I keep hoping against hope they’ll turn up but they didn’t. For twelve years. I was looking for something else altogether and I found it in a box of keepsakes from my childhood that I got out to show my brother. When I pulled the little bowl out, he said he hadn't seen me that happy in a long time. Back when I moved I must have put it in the box for safe keeping. It was safe alright...and lost for over a decade.

Even though the prompt I used for the letter U didn’t come from within my aging brain, I think AI’s suggestion did a pretty good job of pulling the warm fuzzy moments out of me. I guess that’s the thing about unexpected joys—they don’t care where the prompt (or the joy) comes from. I’m just glad they showed up for me to write about. ©

The Widow With a Bad Memory and a Full Day Planner

I’ve been so busy this week and yet I can hardly remember what I’ve been doing.  One thing I do recall is that this week brought with it the best quesadilla I’ve ever had in my entire life and on the same day that I saw one of the biggest, waste-of-money movies of my life. I could live on the Fajita Republic’s chicken and lime quesadillas and I nearly had to because I was so busy I didn’t have time to go to the grocery store. I ran out of everything except oatmeal, bananas, lemon ice tea mix and pickle relish and that’s what I lived on for three days. (See why that ‘doggie box’ came in handy!) I’d like to see the HGTV Chopped cooking show offer up that combination in one of their mystery baskets. Today I finally went grocery shopping and came home with a receipt that reached from the tip of my fingers to my elbow listing things that are too mundane to share.

The highlight of yesterday, I do remember, was having an electrician/nephew-in-law come to the house to install five new smoke detectors. I am now the proud owner of smoke detectors with lithium power cell batteries in them that don’t have to be changed for ten whole years and the piece de résistance of the deal is that they are no longer hard-wired together. As a widow with bad bones and an aversion to standing on ladders, it’s a huge deal that I no longer have to go through the twice a year ordeal of finding someone to help me do the despicable job of changing batteries on the ceiling. This last time---that prompted the new installation---a friend and I spent two whole hours trying to get the stupid old detectors to quit beeping after the new batteries were installed and that included getting online to find a troubleshooting website and calling the fire department for advice. We finally took them all down from the ceiling, took the batteries out and even then they each had to give out one final wail of disapproval. I was ready to bury them in the back yard. My sweet nephew-in-law wouldn’t let me pay him but did request a batch of cookies. Oh, great. I haven’t made cookies in fifty years. I wonder how many I’ll have to bake before I make a batch worthy of bringing over to his house. Thankfully, he wants peanut butter cookies “like his grandmother used to make” and I seem to remember they are quite easy to do.

This past week I also volunteered to help do spring cleaning at the senior hall. I won’t be doing that again. I had forgotten how much the smell of bleach bothers my asthma and breathing. It’s been years since I’ve had it in the house. I half expected I’d be making a trip to ER that night, but by morning I was fine again. The senior hall director would like everyone who goes there to volunteer twice a year to help with something and I’m getting my second work commitment done next week when I’ll help set up and serve refreshments at an enrichment lecture about South Africa. I’m really not good with serving people but I can fake anything for a couple of hours. They will never guess I never went to the Nancy Reagan School of Charm and Decorum.

e-Bay researching, listing and closing auctions and finding stock for my mall booth took up the better share of two days this week and probably will continue to do so until fall when I’ll wind both activities down. It’s a lot of work but I’m good at it and it’s kind of fun at the same time. So far, it’s not as emotionally taxing this year to see Don’s stuff go up for sale as it was last summer so that’s a plus. And I know he’d be happy with the judgments I’ve been making. For example, I have a one inch can cap up for auction right now that has 78 watchers on it so tonight I’m expecting a bidding war on something that most people---including my heirs---would throw out. It belongs on a can that goes for upwards of $2,000. Some guy with a cap-less can will be really happy when the auction is over and he can upgrade his can’s value and its coolness factor. If you happened to have watched American Pickers this week and saw Frank pay $3,500 for a rusty can you’ll understand how much fun it can be to make a crazy collector guy happy. Tonight I’m also testing putting some of Don's collector guide books up for auction. I would love to be able to make room in the library for all my how-to crafting, cooking and quilting books. I have not been able to lay claim to that room in the house yet...it still belongs to the dog and Don.

This is how my world turned this week and as a country song I heard today said, “Busy doesn’t mean I’m happy but I’m happy I’ve got something to do.”  Well, that not exactly what the song said but I lost the scrap of paper I wrote the line down on, so this paraphrasing will have to do for now. ©

Dying, Planes and Peanut Butter Cookies

 

We still have snow here in West Michigan but the piles are getting lower and the roads are blissfully dry and safe again. I can even see patches of grass underneath my pine trees and along the foundation on the south side of my house. The daytime temperatures are in the 40’s, the lows at night are in the 20’s and I saw my first robin. In this part of the world, seeing the first robin of the year is a big, folklore deal. Although my cousin who lives 70 miles south of here said several robins have been hanging around her house all winter. “The weather was so bad,” she wrote on her Facebook page, “their flight south got canceled.”

It’s been a busy week here on Widowhood Lane. I went to two lectures, my Movie and Lunch Club, a Red Hat tea, and a craft show. The coffee and donuts they served at one of the lectures was the best thing about the event. It had a bait-and-switch topic but I am a polite little old lady who doesn’t like to make waves in public so I listened without showing my annoyance at having to sit through an hour long commercial. The second lecture was titled, “I’m Dying to Talk to You.” Its speaker had been a Hospice volunteer for twenty-five years and his talk was packed with a lot of laugh lines. Who knew talking about death could be so funny? And I’ll bet you’re asking yourself why a widow would want to go to a lecture about dying. The answer would be that I was so bored when the senior hall newsletter came out last month that I would have signed up for a class on how to turn dog poop into folk art. I was that, crawling-the-walls bored and it seemed like a good idea of at the time to sign up for everything and anything.

The audience for talking-about-dying was large and after the lecture many of us shared warm/funny/tender/comforting etc., experiences that happened while being at someone’s death bed. I told the story of my dad dying in the wee minutes of Christmas Morning. He was in a Hospice home and he had been unresponsive for several hours. We knew the end was very near when his hard-of-hearing roommate turned on the televised Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. Pipe organ music filled the room and my dad opened his unfocused eyes and said, “Am I there yet?” I just knew he was looking for the Pearly Gates of Heaven. He died shortly after that and I was still laughing through my tears. I cherish that memory from my Dad’s last minutes on earth as much as a cherish the at-peace look on my husband’s face when he passed over. Being there when someone dies can actually give you a sense of comfort.

At my Movie and Lunch Club on we saw Non-Stop, a film that involves an airplane, murders and a bomb on aboard. IMBd describes it this way: “An air marshal springs into action during a transatlantic flight after receiving a series of text messages that put his fellow passengers at risk unless the airline transfers $150 million into an off-shore account.” At first I thought whoever picked that movie to see---given the mystery of missing Flight 370 going on right now---had their head screwed onto to a tree stump. But I went without voicing that opinion out loud because, as I said before, I’m a polite little old lady who doesn’t like to make waves in public. Sometimes its easy to see where filtering your thoughts saved you from the embarrassment of having to eat your words and this was one of those times. The movie turned out to be a good one with lots of twists and turns that kept you guessing who the bad guys were right up until the end. Of the eleven of us who went, though, another “little old lady” did voice her reservations about seeing the film and it made me wonder how many of the dozen or so others in the club who didn’t show up were acting on their qualms about seeing an aircraft hi-jacking. A movie and lunch club is like a book club. They both serve the purpose of pushing you out of your comfort zone and that’s usually a good thing.

This morning I got up at the crack of dawn to go to a craft show out in the boondocks. A couple of my Red Hat sisters were vendors there so I wanted to see their handiwork. Up and down hills I went as I traveled country roads to a place I’d never been before. Taking in the long vistas of snow covered orchards had me yearning for the days when Don and I took car trips. Living in the suburbs it’s hard sometimes to remember there is a whole different way of life out there in rural America and when the city got too much for us we’d take a day trip poking around the back roads to no where in particular.

The very first vendor I saw at the craft show was selling cross-stitched tea towels that read: “A house without Jesus can never be a home.”  I’m still baffled by a message that seemed Church Lady snotty and judgmental to me. Four or five other vendors were likewise selling crafts with Christian messages and I was starting to feel like I was back in grade school and being judged not good enough to play with so and so because Jesus was not living where I did. About the sixth Christian themed vendor booth I came across I was thinking, where are the baked goods? I feel a sugar binge coming on! I found them and I went home with a plate of peanut butter cookies that looked and tasted exactly like those my mom used to make. ©