Everything that is Old is New Again

It’s one of those mornings when the thoughts in my head are as hard to nab and put down in writing as bobbing for apples in a tub of water at a Halloween party. As the game goes, you try to pick an apple up with your teeth but the apples keep slipping away and you get your face wet trying, to the delight of everyone watching. No one is watching me try to come up with a cohesive topic to write about but if someone were here, they’d snicker and poke fun of how many stall tactics I’ve been taking to the whole write-a-blog-entry-or-die-trying thing I’ve set forth to do today.

I learned during one of my stalling side trips that in recent years the game of apple bobbing has come under fire for being “unsanitary and it could lead to blindness.” Sounds ridiculous to me, given the fact bobbing for apples has been around since the Romans invaded Britain in AD years. If it were true, billions of kids and young adults would have been asking for white canes and Seeing Eye dogs for Christmas. I suppose it could happen but I prefer to believe it’s a rumor started by the makers of an iPhone app that takes apple bobbing to a place I don’t care to go. Everything that is old is new again.

After getting sidetracked googling apple bobbing, I tried to remember if I’ve ever played the game with an old friend I had lunch with this week. Nope, the Halloween party for adults I’m thinking of was with a different group, a group for singles sponsored by the YMCA, a group I joined in my twenties when I was in hot pursuit of husband material. But the old friend I had lunch with was part of a package deal I got when Don came into my life---three guys who met in high school and who stayed close their entire lives. Since Don died, Gary and I have been getting together spring and fall, meeting half way between where we both live. And we talk on the phone whenever the political world heats up and we want to bitch to another member of the choir. This year was special for him because we met at a bar/restaurant the three amigos hung around in their school days. It burned down last year and was recently reopened. Brand new, but with enough nods to its history to make the hometown people happy to see it back. Everything that is old is new again. Ever notice how many times we can say that as we age? 

Letty Cottin Pogrebi, founding editor of Ms. Magazine and co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus once wrote, “We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.” I don’t know about the staying young part but forming new friendships does add value to one’s life. And in that pursuit I met with my Gathering Girls pals on Monday at the Guy Land Cafeteria. This past summer we’ve been meeting at different places and while that was nice, so many places now days have such poor acoustics that carrying on a conversation is a challenge. I just ran into an article that said the new decorating trend in restaurants of high ceilings and hard surfaces has resulted in the number one complaint of diners being “noisy” and a couple of new apps have been created to measure the decibel levels in restaurants so it can be posted in reviews. People talk at 60 decibels and anything over 70 in public places causes you to raise your voice. If they keep developing more and more apps for this and that, will phones have to grow in size again? How many apps can those little buggers hold before they'll squeal like greased piglets in a county fair game? 

After lunch I was pulling one of my hearing aids out and pulling it in my change purse, something I often have to when I go to the movies. One of my Gathering Girls pals and I went to see A Star is Born with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. Everything that is old is new again. I remember going to an earlier remake of this movie---this is the fourth one---with Barbara Streisand and Chris Christopherson in the leading roles but as I sat in the theater this time I couldn’t recall how the story line was going to end, so I was as shocked as any newbie to the theater. As I sat listening to Lady Gaga sing the finale---God, can that girl sing---it struck me that the song she was singing will become a classic. Spoiler Alert: It’s a perfect anthem for anyone who has lost someone they loved. ©

“Wish I could, I could've said goodbye

I would've said what I wanted to

Maybe even cried for you

If I knew it would be the last time

I would've broke my heart in two

Tryin' to save a part of you…”

All of the film’s music was written by Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper and Lukas Nelson (Willie Nelson’s son). Such a powerful trio of talent! If you’re as interested in Nelson’s contributions to the film as I was, you can find an article about it here.

 

The Think Piece --- from Pancakes to the Dalai Lama

Every so often I try to write what I call a ‘think piece’ which, to me, means I have to dig deep and write something that makes me and others think rather than just record diary-style what’s going on in my world. Looking for inspiration is the tough part and I tried to find it at the Guy-Land Cafeteria. It’s a great place for people watching and it’s big enough that the seating is never full therefore you can stay as long as you like nursing your coffee or going back through the line for dessert without feeling pressured to give up your seat to someone waiting. No one ever has to wait at the cafeteria, at least at the time of the day I haunt the place. And best of all, I’m not the only one who is there pretending to be John Steinbeck or J.K. Rowling.

The cafeteria has a breakfast special that’s a great buy: two eggs, two pancakes and two pieces of bacon for $4.80. They also have a mini breakfast of one each of the before mentioned items but I’ve never ordered the mini in the thirty-odd years I’ve been going to this local chain. I clearly said ‘special’ as I touched the poster advertising this golden oldie but when they called my ticket number and I got my order back to the table, I noticed it was a mini breakfast. I grabbed the plate and was heading back up to the pickup station, thinking I’d picked up the wrong plate, when I noticed my ticket actually said mini breakfast. The manager who took my order must have been on auto-pilot when he saw an elderly lady standing in front of him. Most senior citizens of the female persuasion probably order the mini plus the manager was frazzled trying to supervise a new line cook and taking orders at the same time. I weighed my options of just eating what was on my plate or waiting for a corrected order and I decided that I didn’t get what I wanted but I got exactly what I needed. I even heard my hips thank him for his screw-up. 

“I didn’t get what I wanted but I got exactly what I needed.” I googled that sentence and it turned up 817,000,000 hits. Yup, I am not the only person on the planet who thought that idea was somehow more profound that the sixty-one characters it took to write it. At the top of the list was an essay about praying for one thing but God giving you something else. There’s a whole lot of that going on in google-sphere. People expounding on the inspirational value of what someone got that was better than what they asked God for is a popular theme. There’s even a Garth Brooks song titled Unanswered Prayers about a guy and his wife who ran into his old flame at a hometown football game. “She was the one that I'd wanted for all times,” Garth sings, “And each night I'd spend prayin' that God would make her mine, and if he'd only grant me this wish I wished back then, I'd never ask for anything again.” And then he sings the punch line in the chorus: “Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers.” 

Obviously, all those the-universe-had-better-plans-for-you type articles were not talking about getting one pancake or egg instead of two. But still, when you go to a place looking for writing inspiration you’ve got to asked yourself if a restaurant manager I’ve known since the last century making that mistake was serendipitous or was it just the fact that I was actually noticing every single thing in my surroundings, looking for signs and points of interest to hang a ‘think piece’ on. If I hadn’t been there intent on finding a writing prompt maybe I would have just been annoyed at what happened and forgot about it before noon. Or worse yet, I would have brought the mistaken breakfast to the attention of the manager so he could feel bad and then I could feel bad for making him feel bad. I used to have a friend who made big scenes over things like that, even if it happened to someone else’s order at the table. We quit going out to eat with her and her husband because it seemed as though she was looking for reasons to berate and embarrass service people. Why do some people go through life twisting the simplest mistake or ill phrased sentence into a personal affront worthy of a hissy fit?

Have I ever mentioned that I love the Dalai Lama? He says wonderful things that make perfect sound bites and memes, like: “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito” and “Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.” But one of my favorite Dalai Lama quotes is: “Time passes unhindered. When we make mistakes, we cannot turn the clock back and try again. All we can do is use the present well.” Okay, I did it again. I set out to write a ‘think piece’ but I ended up letting the wise words of someone else be the catalyst to make myself and others think. ©

Writing Prompts and Secret Blogs

I had to resort to looking at writing prompts to come up with a topic today. That won’t be true come Saturday, having several fun things on my day planner to report on by then. But today I’m still in a dry spell. So what writing prompt did I pick from the list of 365? I went with the one listed for July 9^th…the day I’m actually writing this post which is: “Keep out! Who is the one person you hope isn’t reading your blog and why?” If you want to challenge the writer within---and I do---you can’t pick and choose the prompts that come easy for you.

I was, however, tempted to pick July 16^th which was: “Dream home. You win a contest to build your dream home. Draft the plans.” I drew my first set of house plans when I was 13 or 14 and I haven’t stopped designing houses in my head and often on paper ever since. Dead center of my first house was a three stories high, round foyer containing a spiral staircase with a glass dome overhead. Two wings went off the foyer---one the formal living room and a library, and the other for the kitchen and dining room. Upstairs were four bedrooms and a massive landing overlooking the foyer. Kids. What do they know about anything? When I ran across those plans as an adult, the house looked like a brick prison with its flat roof and with all the windows at the back. Over the years my house planning aspirations have changed. The last set of plans I drew up since becoming a widow was a one bedroom house the size of a two car garage. But both my first and last imagery houses were built on Lake Michigan.

“Who is the one person you hope isn’t reading your blog and why?” It wasn’t my husband when he was alive and I was blogging on a stroke support site. I was writing about my experiences as his caregiver and I'd often read what I wrote to him as a way of communicating. And I have Oprah’s back-then fad of writing a gratitude journal to thank for finding humor in my upside down world. After Don’s stroke I was under enormous stress. He had lost his ability to walk, the use of his right arm and his speech. It took six months of speech therapy just to learn to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and they weren’t reliable even at that, so having “conversations” literally took hours where I had to debate both sides of what we needed to do to move forward. He thought he was going to get his old life back and I knew that was impossible.

The other person in world who I really want to read my blog is oldest my niece and she often does. It keeps me striving to be fair, honest and without embellishments when I write about my family. I love her like a daughter and wouldn't most people want their daughters to understand where you’ve been and where you’re at in life? (Patience, I am getting to the list of those who I don’t want to read my blog.)

Only a few others have had a personal invitation to read my blog: 1) a friend I've had since I was five; 2) a friend I met through my husband 48 years ago; 3) one of my Red Hat Sisters and 4) one of my Gathering Girls pals. The two old friends are...well, everything you'd want in an old friend (except they both live out of state) and like my niece, the thought that they might see what I've written keeps me striving to be as accurate as possible when I share memories here. The Red Hatter is a writer of immense talent and she understands that you have to dive deep into your head to write memoir and journal-type stuff---spilling the good, bad and the ugly along the way. She's only read my blog a few times out of curiosity. My Gathering Girls friend may be reading more frequently but she’s a genuinely nice person who’d never intentionally hurt anyone by repeating something negative I might have written. Trust. The bottom line is I trust all these ladies not to use what they read here as gossip fodder.

As you can see, I don't make a habit out of inviting people in my offline life to read my blog although I make no secret of it. A link to my blog is even in my bio on Facebook but to the best of my knowledge only one person has actually found it buried in the fine print and have been here to read---Tim, the son-I-wish-I-had. Tim and I are extreme opposites in our politics and Pro-life/Pro-choice support. He’s very religious and I call myself an agnostic but we’ve had many respectful, in-depth conversations so I know he wasn’t and won’t be shocked or offended by anything he reads here. I can’t say that about most of the people I come in contact with in this very conservative county in West Michigan and I have not been willing to take that chance. Until the past few years, I’ve gone above and beyond to hide my opinions on controversial topics and core values. I'm still very careful. Why? Out of fear of being ostracized. If someone in the blog community doesn't like you based on your world views, they'll just move on and you’d never know about it. In person, it's more complicated.... ©

Easier said than done.