Is There Any Subject I Won't Write About?

I woke up this morning thinking that I had to pee like a Russian race horse. I haven’t been around horses enough since my teens to remember how they pee but it’s phrase my husband used all the time. I hadn’t thought about that idiom in years and I’ve never tried to track down its origin before today. 

My husband was brought up on a farm that used work horses to plow the fields before 1955 when his father bought their first tractor. A brand new blue Ford that I had to sell after Don died in this century. I tried to get him to agree to sell it after his stroke when we had an auction at the pole barn where we stored his heavy equipment but I was afraid it would give him another stroke if I sold it without his agreement. So I had it moved to a small storage unit where it sat eating up money until he died. Well, not really. The antique value of the tractor off-set the twelve years of storage fees. Tip for the day: Never try to have an argument with a stubborn stroke survivor with only a 25 word vocabulary. Sympathy will make you lose most of the time, especially when his face gets beet red and he’s holding on to your hand for dear life and repeating the word, “Please” over and over again.

I could not find a source that I totally trusted for an explanation for the ‘pee like a Russian race horse’ idiom but someone on a Reddit forum said it came about when Americans started betting on race horses only the phrase was “pissing like a rushin’ horse.” Another forum user wrote: “Some claim that the expression is negative because Russian trainers (or the Russian mafia) cheated by feeding their horses a lot of water…and somehow prevented them from urinating thus making them nervous and faster. People saw the horses nervously peeing before a race. If a horse did this before the race it was an advantage since it could lose up to 10 pounds. In the ‘70s trainers started giving a drug called "lasix" to their horses.”

Another Reddit user from Southern Indiana wrote this: I've always said, "I have to pee like a rushin' racehorse". Meaning that the horse was in such a hurry (or rushing) to get to the finish line, because he had to Pee so bad. That's how all the people around me interpret it. I can see how Rushin' can get mixed up with Russian.”

None of this gives me a clue how and where my husband picked up the idiom. My best guess is he heard it at basic training. Anyway, today was the first time in my life I remember comparing myself to a Russian race horse and I hope it’s the last. But it does occur to me that I’m being drugged like a race horse to pee on queue. I take a pill at night that cuts down on me waking up to mild bladder urges so that I can get a better quality of sleep---and no, I don’t wet the bed taking them. I get 'false' urges when my bladder isn’t full. Isn’t that amazing. They have pills to make you quit peeing and pills to make you pee.

Getting enough sleep has been an ongoing problem since I moved to the continuum care campus. First it was the bright parking lot lights that lit up my bedroom like its daytime, messing with the circadian rhythms that ques us to when to sleep. After six months of complaining about that the management agreed to buy us all black out shades to address the problem. Then I got into the habit of watching two hours of TV in bed before I turn it off. Actually, I’ve been watching TV in bed for the better part of my life but the TV in my bedroom, now, is smarter than my old bedroom TV that is now in my living room. The smart ones emits UV rays which also mess with your circadian rhythm. Don’t suggest I swap my TVs around. It wouldn’t work. We have no cable connection in our bedrooms here and to watch Netflix's in the living room I’d have to buy a new TV that can stream. If you’d ever dropped off a TV at the county electronics recycling center you’d understand the sick feeling I get when I think of getting rid of a TV that still works great with cable. I just can’t do it. My parents were Depression Era people who imprinted on me the habit of never throwing out things that still work and around here, The Salvation Army and Goodwill will not take TVs.

But for ten dollars I may have solved my screen-time-in-bed problem. I bought a pair of clear glasses that block the UV light. I put them on when I go to bed to watch TV. I thought it would take time to experience a difference in my ability to fall asleep---if it did at all. I’ve only had them five days and all five nights I got sleepy at 12:30 to 1:00  instead of 2:00! If this keeps up I’m going to have my next pair of prescription glasses made to block out the UV rays for all the hours I spend in front of my computer. In the meantime I've learned to use my Kindle safer by using the Blue Shade timer setting and that’s got to help too---assuming I remember to grab my Kindle instead of looking up random idioms on the computer in the evening hours.

Until Next Wednesday. ©

Photo Note: You haven't lived until you've let someone drag you to an antique tractor show, not once but every year for a decade. It was Don's dream to show his farm tractor one day. This show was in Sussex, UK. We didn't go there but they all look (and smell) the same. If my memory serves me right the idea with the steam powered tractors was to see how slow you could go before killing the engines or maybe it was the goal with the gasoline engines? Or both? Not sure and I'm too lazy to look it up.

Dew Drops and Tear Drops

I used to be a night owl before the pandemic. Going to bed at 3 AM was not unusual and a throwback to my working days…or I should say working nights. I did a lot of writing after midnight and I like the quietness of the neighborhood when everyone is tucked into their beds. No little kids dominating the sidewalks, no barking dogs. No lawn mowers or snow blowers filling the airwaves. You learn a lot about your neighbors in the middle of the night. The young couple across the street, for example, are afraid of the night. They leave their porch light on from dusk to dawn. The neighbors next door are very trusting. They leave their garage door up all night, confident no one will come along to steal the guy’s fancy tools and medieval gear---they run renaissance festivals across three-four states. And, yes, I’ve seen more than a couple of sword fights out my bedroom window. They’re interesting people and if you want to weave your own fabric, spin your own yarn or make your own chainmail, they’re your go-to couple. 

When the pandemic first started I couldn’t fall asleep and when I did I’d wake up an hour or so later then worry would take over my mind and not let go. So I got into the habit of taking sleeping pills and sometimes even that didn’t work. Long story short now I’m falling asleep at midnight and waking up at seven and I’ve almost weaned myself from taking the Ambien bottle out of the drawer except on full moon night which is why it was prescribed in the first place. Seven o’clock in the morning has a lot in common with the middle of the night. For the first hour anyway and I have to admit it’s a pretty time of the day. The dew on the lawn before the sun tops the trees to burn it off is the stuff poets write about. 

"How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity

under roses and violets and morning dew!"

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 “Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”

Rabindranath Tagore

When I was in my twenties I wanted to be poet when I grew up. I never felt like a grown up until my husband had his stroke. I had adult responsibilities—the job, the house, the car---but not having kids made me feel like a kid looking for the next great learning experience as I waited for my ‘real’ life to begin. I can’t say I didn’t go through a mourning period for what never happened, but it was short lived on the missing parenthood front. Of course, the dream of being a poet had no medical excuse holding me back. I held on to that dream a lot longer although now I acknowledge if I have any writing talent at all it’s not in the poetry genre. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe as Lord Byron once hinted at, maybe I can make my wordsmithing mark without having to rhyme. 

"But words are things, and a small drop of ink,

Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces

That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."

We might not all want to reach thousands with our words but the desire to communicate with our fellow man, to be understood and to understand others, is rooted in our prehistoric past. How exciting it must have been to develop a language when there was none. I visualize a caveman grunting out the word ‘hunt’ and being understood for the first time like Helen Keller at the well when she first made the connection between the letters w-a-t-e-r being spelled out on her hand to the water running through her fingers. As she wrote in her autobiography years later, “That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away."  

If you’ve read the introduction at the top of this blog you know my husband lost his ability to speak and write after his stroke. When you lose that connection with someone you love you mourn a part of your relationship. Family caregivers know all too well you let go in stages until the final moment comes and you mourn one last time. I went to the cemetery to visit my husband’s grave this week. The pandemic lock-down prevented me from going in April when I’d normally go to dig up the quackgrass around the stone and for the first time ever, I sat in my car crying. I cried for him. I cried for me. I cried for the whole bloody world. I cried like I haven’t cried since 1983 when my mother died. And I cried because I really, REALLY wanted a Little Miss Debbie Swiss Cake Roll to fill the emptiness I felt. ©

Ordered this tee shirt the next day, figured I needed the reminder. Thanks to the Boomer Girl's Guide blog for the link.

Sleepless Night, Day of Laughter and Evening of Indecision

I couldn’t sleep. Even after taking 10 mg of Melatonin at 11:00 PM and an Ambien sleeping pill at 2:00 AM my brain just wouldn’t give up on plotting and planning my future and related life choices. At one point in the night I heard a train whistle coming from the tracks five miles away which was probably the toxic chemicals train that moves ever so slowly through our states in the dead of night and the sound of it made me think of a song Elvis Presley used to sing and Hank Williams before him:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill

He sounds too blue to fly

The midnight train is whining low

I'm so lonesome I could cry

I've never seen a night so long

When time goes crawling by

The moon just went behind the clouds

To hide its face and cry

It was after 4:30 AM when I finally fell asleep according to my Fitbit and I woke up at 10:00 because the dog wanted to go outside. I’m so lonesome I could die. Yup, I admit it. If not for the dog I’d measure time in between meaningful contact with other living beings in weeks, not days. And I have no one else to blame but myself. My social life for the past nine months has been pared down to one lecture a month at the senior hall, two brunches a month with my Gathering Girls pals and one house cleaning appointment. 

It was bright and sunny the day after my sleepless night when I met with six if my gal pals and it was just what I needed to turn my dark mood around. We talked about silly things like how many of those at the table were crushing on football player Jimmy Garoppole who, they said, looks just like Tyrone Power. I had no idea who Jimmy is and I couldn’t remember how Tyrone looked but like a table full of teenagers, someone got out her phone to google their photos. I never crushed on Tyrone back in my youth but I have to admit that Jimmy’s got the most kissable-looking lips I’ve seen in a long time. Not that I made a habit of looking at men's lips...I'm just sayin'. And since the Super Bowl was on the table for conversation another crushable guy in the senior set was brought up---Sam Elliot. He was in the Doritos commercial and, of course, when I got home that commercial was the first thing I entered into my computer's search bar. I have a hard time separating him from his politics but my friends were right, the commercial was fun to watch.

Oops, make that four living beings I connect with each month. I forgot about a monthly call I get from a high school friend of my husband’s. We talk politics and have been since my husband died, and before that it was my husband who got the calls to talk about the state of the union. I used to enjoy our talks but this past year he’s been a pot that’s boiled over and if I try to temper his anger he yells so loud I have to hold the phone away from my ear. Several times I’ve told him, “We’re on the same side, guy. Please don’t yell at me.” That usually happens if I try to explain why the Right sees an issue differently than we do. Every coin has two sides, I tell him, and if we're ever going to find our way back to a world where compromise in government is not a dirty word we need to listen to what others have to say.

The idea of listening to the other side was tested a few nights ago when one of my in-laws posted a meme on FaceBook that supposedly revealed the name of the whistle blower that led to Trump's impeachment. I struggled with posting a comment something like, “How are you going to feel if this person gets murdered and it turns out he wasn’t even the whistle blower?” I didn’t do it because I know I’d get labeled “ignorant.” It happened once when I did comment on this in-law's political post and of all the words in the English language that one is capable of wounding me more than most. In the same hour she posted the whistle blower meme she posted another one from a Catholic Church site about being kind to one another. I don’t understand how someone can separate the promotion of kindness from their own mean-spirited action of sharing a conspiracy site meme bent on outing a whistle blower whose identity is supposed to be protected by law. Does goodness and evil so easily live side-by-side in all of us? Granted in the realm of good vs evil actions my in-law’s Facebook posts are minor. But maybe the more often we allow ourselves to do small acts of wrong doing the easier it becomes to commit bigger and bigger acts until they truly do cross the line over to evil? I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know a mean girl's post when I see it and if I were her priest I'd make her stand in a corner until she admits that Jesus would not support a man like Donald Trump.

In the whistle blower meme it said to share the post “right away before Facebook takes it down.” The next day Facebook did just that. ©

Thank you, Facebook!

Spying on Myself and Finding Ghosts

March 16^th. How did that happen? Life goes by too quickly and sometimes I think that happens because I tend to over schedule myself but I know if I didn’t the Lord of Boredom steps up to harass me. And he has a wicked sense of humor. Monday I took Levi to the Foo-Foo Doggie Beauty Spa, then I picked up some lunch, stopped at the pet store and on to the grocery before swinging back around to collect the dog. Tuesday and Wednesday I emptied out my bedroom and bathroom of everything I could carry to get ready for the painters to come beautify my rooms. (You should have seen all the stuff I purged out of my media cabinet and my medicine cabinet!) Wednesday I went to a lecture on Music Theory and how it affects the brain. Thursday was book club day and I’m composing this post before the painters are due on Friday. Is this lineup enough to qualify as over-scheduling my life? It wouldn’t have been back in my heydays when if I didn’t have a half-dozen things to do each day I was on vacation.

Meanwhile back at the ranch I’ve been playing with my little spy tape recorder. Years ago when I was using it a lot, I had a bad habit of not labeling the tapes I made. And since I wanted to recorder myself sleeping to see if I snore with and without the Snore Stopper device I wrote about last week, I decided I should listen to a few tapes to see if there was anything worth keeping before I recorded over one of them. The first two I listened to were conversations with my dad---he died in 1999. Worth keeping. The third tape I pop in was a shocker. It was my husband’s last out-going message from his telephone answering machine. The forth tape had me cracking up laughing along with myself laughing on the tape. I was attending a lecture given by the humor columnist from our local newspaper but there’s no denying the other voices on the tape were mine and my husband’s from 25+ years ago. A few minutes into the lecture the speaker had asked the audience members to each state our names and why we came to the lecture. Here’s what I heard…

“My name is Jean and I’m here because I don’t get a lot of humor.”

The speaker: “Are there any comedians or comedy shows you do get and like?”

I like Barry Miller,” I answered, “but I don’t get Woody Allen. I really don’t!” Then the speaker explained the differences in the two kinds of humor employed in my examples. 

Next up was my husband. “I’m Don and I’ve got to agree with her. She doesn’t get all humor and I think she’s funny when she’s not getting humor.” I’m laughing in the background as he went on…and on. “Barry Miller is a classic and Night Court. I predict in the future there will be tapes of those shows we can watch over and over again and still see the humor in them. Robin Williams is another. When he gets on a roll---say on the Johnny Carson Show---he can have us laughing until our stomachs ache. Another thing I find funny are your columns.” Don was being a kiss-up, but I could tell he was nervous speaking in public because he always talked faster when he was. It made me feel warm and fuzzy inside to hear the two of us having a good time laughing and interacting with the group. But I’m glad he wasn’t around to see what happened to Robin Williams. Don dealt with a few periods of deep depression in his life---which few people knew about---and Robin’s suicide would have hit him hard.

The first night I set the voice activated recorder to find out if I snore I was in bed from midnight to eight in the morning but my Fitbit claimed I only got three hours of sleep, the rest of the time I was restless. Now I know why. I’m not snoring but I sure am having a lot of conversations in a language that would take an intergalactic interpreter to translate. Pure gibberish punctuated with laughter and some whimpering and apparently I must look at the clock because at one point I said, “Three o’clock” as clear as a bell. Interestingly enough it was after 3:00 when Fitbit said I actually slept deep enough not to be labeled ‘restless.’ The second night I set the recorder I was wearing the Snore Stopper “baskets” up my nose and my Fitbit said I slept 6 hours and 53 minutes with only 49 minutes being labeled ‘restless.’ But the funny part was the words I was saying were easier to understand and there were less of them. 

Talking in your sleep is generally harmless, according to my online search and the only treatment needed is having your bed partner wear ear plugs, but have you ever tried making a dog wear them? I’d probably forget to take them back out in the morning and spend all day wondering why he’s ignoring me. It’s the Lord of Boredom who makes me do experiences like this, but all kidding aside, how much does a sleep study cost these days? A $1,000+? And I’ll bet I wouldn’t have learned a whole lot more. ©