From Boredom to our Laugh-Fest

Just click along to another blog if you don’t want to hear a bored widow wailing about stupid things that she has no right to be wailing about in the first place. That’s what happened when I hadn’t talked to another human in several days and it didn’t have to be that way. I have both a landline and a cell phone that I could have used to chat with someone plus a car in the garage that could have taken me to some people populated place when I got tired of being alone with no one but the TV to get fat, sassy and nasty with. Not that I’m ever nasty with people but I’ve been known to use a few nasty words when I talk back to the TV news pundits.

Since I got my new landline phone with the ‘block caller’ button I don’t get nearly as many junk calls as I used to get every night between five and seven. I did get one yesterday from a guy who wanted to warn me that my computer was being taken over by hackers. He said he was from Microsoft and was calling to help me fix the breach. I took great delight in saying, “Oh, no, that’s terrible! Please tell me what to do!” and then I pressed the ‘block caller’ button to disconnect the jerk. It’s hard to believe that people still fall for that scam, but apparently enough people do so they keep trying to find those suckers in the haystack.

Monday I got up at the crack of dawn if dawn came at 7:30. I hate getting up with an alarm clock but I had places to go and fun to have with my posse of Gathering Girls. The seven of us had plans to meet for an early lunch at a popular bar slash restaurant. They have a lunch menu that offers ten things for $5.50 each. Such a deal. The acoustics in the place were so bad I hope never to cross over their threshold again. But I would have loved the place if I was young and slightly buzzed at happy hour. The place was noisy and filled to the rafters with grey-haired old women and a few working class guys who had me thinking about the Village People singing Y.M.C.A. "Young man, there's no need to feel down. I said young man..." At one point we Gathering Girls were attempting to discuss a thrift store that unbeknownst to me is named ‘Y.E.S.S.’ and it was like the old Abbott and Costello baseball nicknames’ skit, “Who’s on first.” “No, Y.E.S.S. is closed today.” “Which is it…yes, or no?” “Africa’s Child is open, Y.E.S.S. is closed.” I was confused until I actually saw the thrift store sign a half hour later.

At the first of several thrift stores we went to after lunch, three of us put our purses in one shopping cart and it was like keeping track of the president’s nuclear codes football. “You’re in charge of the cart now.” “I’m taking charge of the cart.” “Where’s the cart?” “I thought you had the cart.” “I thought you did!” You can’t be too careful wandering around a place where a hundred dollar bill could probably buy out the entire glassware and china departments. Slight exaggeration. It might take closer to ninety dollars.

After leaving the last thrift store three of us stopped at the Guy Land Cafeteria for dessert and we laughed so hard two of us were ready to burst and the third Gathering Girl wasn’t far behind. It all started when lady number three shared that she goes to Bible Study every week because, she said, “I like the stories.” Then she leaned as if to share a succulent secret and in a voice barely above a whisper she said, “Sometimes I have doubts. Do you believe in the Immaculate Conception? I mean I’m just not sure… We’re supposed to believe everything in the Bible is true.” I leaned in and replied, “I don’t care if it's in the Bible it takes a man to make a baby!” Then I babbled on, as the other two laughed, about how back then they didn’t understand how a lot of natural things work, "why the sun comes up every day, how babies are made," etc. Lady number two chimed in, “We think we know the sun will come up every day but we really don’t know that for sure” which led to a remark about Trump blowing up the world. Yadda, Yadda and a lot of laughter later we noticed the man in the next booth had slid over in his seat so he could eavesdrop better. He probably wanted to point out that today a virgin could---with the help of modern science or a turkey baster---have a baby without having sex. It was one of the funniest, gut-splitting and most fun conversations I’ve had in a long time and I wish I could have recorded it to savor later.

Unbelievable, isn’t it, after me trying so hard for so long to find friends after my husband died, that I finally have some. Making new friends is not easy at any age but in widowhood it’s probably the hardest, and maybe that’s because so many of us have lost our best and longest standing friendships when our spouses died---that one person we could truly be our unguarded selves around. At least that’s my Truth to take or reject. ©

First World Problems and Trump Era Conversations

My Red Hat Society chapter did their annual thrift shop crawl this week, an event where they carpool to a sting of secondhand stores with a break in the middle for lunch. I’ve been on the go so much lately that I am burning out so I just met the group for lunch at a Mediterranean grill. The service was so slow I think I grew an inch long chin hair while waiting for my chicken shawarma. (I’m quite sure it wasn’t there when I left the house.) And if I’m being entirely honest here, I’m not fond of carpooling with other drivers my age and older. Once in a carpool, the driver was running on fumes---that point where your dashboard says you only have one mile to find a gas station. I’m too old for preventable stress, I get enough of the other kind. Another time the woman driving joked that her family wanted her to stop driving and I could see their point. Still another time the carpool driver hit a cement pillar in a parking garage. Car size is an issue with carpooling too. I recently learned I can’t fit a walker in my Chev Trax unless I put the back seat down. One problem with that: The back seat won’t go down without pulling the driver’s seat too far forward for me to get in and drive.

My problems are so first world, middle class that I feel guilty writing about them, but it’s my life and I can’t write about someone else’s who may be living with incurable diseases, violence in the streets, famines, water shortages, in refugee camps, touched by natural disasters, etc., etc. I can empathize and some might say my empathy runs too deep and that’s why it seems hollow to me when we wear our colored ribbons of support and solidarity, hold candlelight vigils, maybe donate some money then we go about our middle class lives believing we did all that we could, effectively pushing our caring thoughts aside until something else happens that primes the pump and spills our empathy all over the place, muddying up our comfortable lives again. These days, we are getting fewer and shorter periods in between those pressure-cooker-blew-its-top moments around the world. And now we have the pressure cooker sitting on the stove in Washington D.C. 

Sitting with some friends recently the Trump tweet criticizing the mayor of London was brought up and one lady was quick to announce that she is firmly behind the president and all he wants to do and she saw nothing wrong with his tweet. Shocked by that, I made a joke about looking for devil’s horns on the top of her head because, I said, “I thought all Trump supporters had them.” She laughed as I knew she would, but it didn’t lessen the tension in the air as another woman made an anti-Trump remark. Since I was the one who brought up the tweet---I honestly thought the five of us were all democrats---I felt it was my responsibility to avert a heated conversation. I took out my imaginary pen and notebook and announced that we should make a list of topics we shouldn’t talk about. “Shall we put politics at the top?” I asked and several others at the table quickly agreed. “How about religion and money?” I joked, the three Victorian no-no topics of conversations in mixed company. The Victorians meant ‘mixed’ as in men and women but in this decade, in this country mixed company is quickly getting redefined as politically mixed. 

I’m beginning to wonder if politely avoiding these kinds of conversations among friends and family isn’t a mistake. Maybe by not talking it out with people we otherwise like and respect aren’t we encouraging the polarization that is driving our country off the cliff? It’s easy to visualize devil’s horns on no-name strangers but not so easy when we know and like someone. How can we ever understand where each other is coming from if we don’t listen to one another? I was brought up to find a way to lessen tensions that come up, not encourage them, so I’m a fish out of water to do anything different than what I described above. But as the British statesman, John Morley, once said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” So maybe people like me who try to avert or avoid potential confrontations are just as guilty of intolerance as the people who shout others down into submission. We each get the same results: We are silencing the voices of people who don’t have a carbon copy view of our own. The danger in that is, of course, we are eroding a fundamental building block of democracy, of civilized societies---our ability to compromise and build a consensus at all levels of human interaction---as messy, annoying, maddening, exhilarating and wonderful as that process is. ©

“Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism, 

for it permits us to assume superiority without personally boasting.”  

 Sidney J. Harris

Gray Hair, No Hair and Widows Shopping

 

Okay, it’s official. They’ve got me brainwashed. I’m not old I’m just entering a new phase of life called elderhood. Old is now a four letter swear word---unless we’re talking about fine wine and high quality, aged meat. I’ve already started the process of being ‘elder and proud of it’ with the decision not to do low-lights in my hair anymore. Last week I had my four inch long hair all chopped off to pixie length and by the next hair cut or two all the darker tones will be gone. It’s not like I’m giving up a long standing habit, though, so no applause, please. I started the low-lights as part of the widow-finding-herself make-over that we each seem to go through at some point in the grieving process. I’d never colored my hair before that and who would have ever guessed I’d be looking at gray-haired women with wistful thoughts, thinking I, too, could have pretty silver hair like hers. We shall see. Six months from now I might be back to low-lights. The real reason I made the decision, though, was because I couldn’t stand the way my colored-treated hair felt---soft and limpy. All my life I had course hair, thanks to my Italian heritage, and I’m inept at dealing with soft hair. Old---oops---elderly dogs can’t learn new tricks in this household.

According to The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology there is a cure for gray hair just over the horizon, a discovery that scientists made while working on a treatment for vitiligo, a condition that causes patchy pigmentation in skin. Great. Just about the time the movement to make old be cool gets into full swing they will have a cream ready to market that will actually restore your natural color hair, not just cover up the gray.

While I’m on the subject of hair, Saturday I had breakfast with Red Hat Society members---six of us in all. While five of us sat at the table with our hats on the whole time, one woman took hers off the minute she sat down and she is as bald as a proverbial billiard ball. She’s had ovarian cancer for four years and is at the end of any treatments they can give her and at best, she’s got until mid-summer before the cancer finally wins. She will proudly tell you that she’s not FIGHTING cancer, she’s LIVING with it. And from what I’ve seen of her at Red Hat events, she knows how to party hard. When she’s absence from a Red Hat tea others in the chapter say she is their hero for the way she is handling her illness. At breakfast we had the most surreal laugh-fest talking about funerals and cremations versus burials and she started it by telling us what to expect when her time comes. (Hint: She's calling it a party.) Young people sitting near-by in the busy restaurant probably thought we were a weird cult, talking about having husbands made into diamond rings and lockets and feeding their ashes to the crabs down in the Florida Keys.

After breakfast we dropped the bald-headed lady back home and headed downtown with plans to see the dinosaur exhibit or as one woman put it, to see the pets we used to have when we were kids. But after waiting in line for a few minutes and hearing how long it would take just to get inside the first set of doors we decided to go on a thrift shop crawl instead. Having been a fan of the Advanced Style blog for a few months and learning that a lot of the ‘elderly’ women there shop the thrift stores I was excited about the idea of a crawl. I’ve never bought used clothing before and as we shopped I kept saying, “I can’t believe how cheap this is!” Every place we shopped at had tags with three prices on them plus dates when the mark-down prices would take effect. What a clever way to keep customers coming back. And now I understand how some of those women at Advanced Style can put together such arty-farty outfits without breaking the bank. I bought an L.L. Bean vest in hot pink for $6.50 and it was just like a black one I’d bought online last fall for $49.95! I would never paid $49.95 for a vest that wasn’t in a neutral color so I was a happy shopper. Normally I dislike shopping with other women because years ago I kept getting talked into purchases I later regretted. Always the people pleaser back in those days, I couldn’t say no. Apparently thrift shop crawls is something this chapter likes to do a couple of times a year so shopping in groups might be returning to my life.

Next week I have two lectures lined up to attend---one with a rather bizarre topic, Also on my calendar is a Red Hat tea and my Movie and Lunch Club. Life here in the still snow covered north is starting to wind back up.  ©