e-Bay, Diaries, Babies, and Alexa the Bitchy Virtual Assistant

I have my dining room table back! Since the end of August it’s been e-Bay Central and since I don’t like listing in the winter when the roads are iffy and unpredictable, the last of my auctions for 2018 ended this week. No more running to the post office. Ya, I know I could arrange for pickups but I’m a control freak when it comes to e-Bay. I have a 100% feedback rating and I want to see with my own eyes that packages I put in the system get scanned---proof that can keep an e-Bayer out of the weeds. In just under three months I sold nearly $3,000 worth of mostly lighters and tobacco related advertising pieces. My husband had weird collections and of all the things I’ve sold since he died, this batch was the hardest and least fun to list. Why? Because tobacciana collecting has dropped off significantly here in America but it’s really hot in the Orient so I was getting a lot of messages written in broken English that had me scratching my head. I will start do some more e-Baying next summer---I have a box of transportation advertising under my bed that needs to go next---but for now, I’m free to tackle other projects.

One of those projects I’m tackling this winter is to go through decades’ worth of old diaries that I think I’m finally ready to dispose of but I’m thinking about picking out a few passages here and there to put all in one book along with some old photos. One or two pages with an iconic passage from each year of diary keeping. I could start from a point in the 1950s when I saw Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis at a live concert. I’m pretty sure I can make a book like that work (just for myself, not for mass marketing) and it sounds scary fun to try. Scary because once I commit to a project like that there’s no turning back, no restoring pages and diaries that I’ve read and shredded.

I’ve often wondered if the fact that I’ve never been a mother plays into my obsession about wanting to create something that will last longer than I will. It must be nice to look at a child that came from your womb, that you’ve mentored and influenced and think, “I made that, that’s my legacy to the world.” A fellow blogger who has cancer and is near the end of her life gave a baby up for adoption 50+ years ago and through a popular DNA test she was recently re-connected to that child. Reading her story and her bio-son's loving post about his adoptive mom---he’s a blogger too---was amazing. I don’t have a secret child out there but it was not uncommon in my generation for unwed mothers to go away to have and give up their babies in secret. And secrets like that revealed later in life come with unpredictable results.

I remember a day when I teased my husband that someday he’d answer the door and there on the steps would be a stranger with a suitcase who’d say, “Hi Dad!” It never happened but that day he and a neighbor went around and around about whether or not he’d feel instant, fatherly bonds with a child he never knew about. She said he would, he disagreed. She was a parent. Don never was. Recently, I was reminded of our ‘hi dad’ conversation when a random guy was being interviewed on TV and was asked if he had any children. He replied, “God, I hope not!” Cracked me right up. A woman might answer a door someday to hear “Hi Mom” from a stranger but at least she’d know with 100% certainty that the ‘hi mom’ scenario was in the realm of possibilities. Guys who might have sown a few wild oats in their youth could never be sure that it couldn’t happen to them.

Change of topic to my fur baby: Levi my mighty schnauzer had to go back to the vet’s office this week to get a follow up test on his Lyme disease. It’s been six months since his diagnosis and treatment, and I haven’t noticed any difference in him. He’s still doing the chicken-on-a-hot-plate dance that’s an early symptom of the disease, but he's as spunky as ever. I won’t know the test results until Monday but before leaving the place we’d run up a $350 bill that included the blood work, a winter’s worth of flea, tick and heartworm prevention meds, two ear cleansings, two weeks’ worth of antibiotics for something on his lip and a tissue analysis of the junk that came out of his lip. We have to get the infection cleared up first before the vet can see if there’s an underlying issue causing the lump that apparently bothers Levi because he's always digging at it.

And while writing this I learned that Alexa won’t spell ‘pussy’ as in pussy infection. She just told me, “I’d rather not answer that.” Okay, turning ‘pus’ into an adjective probably isn’t a real word which is why I wanted confirmation on how to spell it in the first place, But come on, she didn’t have to cop an attitude about it! I tried to ask a couple of times, enunciating clearer each time, but the bitch wouldn’t spell what she wrongly thought I was asking. And how does Alexa know I wasn’t writing an article for Cat Fancy Magazine and really wanted to spell 'pussy' as in pussy cat? Instead, she probably put me on a list of people who sexually harass virtual voice assistants! ©

The Food was Great but…………

I haven’t been going to the monthly luncheons at the senior hall since my Gathering Girls group got organized and is giving me the kind of interaction with others that I was craving. In fact I haven’t been to one since last Thanksgiving but I found myself signing up for this year’s turkey dinner again. I figured if I don’t get any invitations for the holiday at least I’d have this one turkey dinner under my belt. I love turkey and it’s not like I can bake a whole bird all for myself. Well, I could but how depressing would that be? As many widows have no doubt experienced, in the first few years I got the ‘pity invitations’ for Thanksgiving Day which are well intended and do---in hindsight---help us more than we’d like to admit. In the beginning of widowhood that feeling of being alone in a celebrating group of people is not fun and what better way to walk through that fire for the first time than to be with people who would understand if our tears appear? So we find ourselves seated at a decked out table and it all looks so normal while the newly minted widows are anything but normal on the inside.

That was me six Thanksgivings ago and the pity invitations no longer come. Life go on after a spouse dies and I know a few widows who resent that those pity invitations don’t continue coming but, in my mind, that’s to be expected. Family sizes change---yadda, yadda, yadda---and new widows or widowers come along that need the pity invitations more than seasoned widows. Widows at a holiday table are like outfits in the fashion industry, you’re either in or you’re out. Very few become classics that return year after year. As Waylon Jennings used to sing, “Lawdy Lawd woe is me. Ain't a body would care I got a slow rollin' low…” coming into my head. 

Actually, any slow rollin’ low I might feel coming on is more seasonal related than holiday or widow related. We got our first snow over the weekend, a prelude to 3-4 months of never knowing from one day to the next if I’ll get sidelined at home by bad roads and cancellations. I know, I know, it’s time to get out the knitting needles or paint brushes or otherwise keep myself so busy being Suzie Homemaker that I don’t have time for the winter blues to settle in, not to mention that it’s way too early to let thoughts of pity parties dance around in my head like sugarplum fairies. 

By Monday the snow we got was nearly gone---just patches left in the shade and a sweet little snowman smiling at me from across the street---and I had things to do. One of those things was getting a haircut, $38 including tip and not for the first time I wish I could get my haircut at the dog’s foo-foo beauty spa. He gets a bath, haircut, pedicure and lots of loving hugs and kisses for $50. Such a bargain. Levi goes to a shop that has a 50-ish year old guy groomer who specializes in schnauzers and he tells me that Levi is the best natured and best mannered schnauzer he’s ever met. Put a feather in my dog mothering cap. Back in the day when we'd go "over the meadow and through the woods" to my mom's house for holiday dinners our dog was always as welcome as her grandkids.

Yesterday at the luncheon a guy about my age asked if he could sit next to me and the two of us started a free-wheeling and friendly conversation. As it turned out he was the after lunch entertainment and by the end of his act, he was crying like a baby and he wasn’t the only one in the room doing so. He’s a chalk artist who drew a mural of the bronze statue that memorializes the six Marines raising the U.S. flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945 while the artist’s wife---ya, I was disappointed that he had one---read Veterans Day stories including one about those six particular Marines. Only two of them survived the battle and one---Ira Hayes, a full-blooded Pima Native American---was memorialized in a song that both Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan recorded. “When Ira started drinkin' hard, jail was often his home. They'd let him raise the flag and lower it like you'd throw a dog a bone! He died drunk early one mornin' alone in the land he fought to save, two inches of water in a lonely ditch was a grave for Ira Hayes.” 

The artist had been working in 'invisible' chalk that looks white until illuminated by a black light, all very boring to watch until the end when a panel of lights came on and made the statue and flag mural appear as if by magic while a burst of patriotic songs cane over the loud speakers. One by one the audience stood up until everyone was on their feet in a silence tribute, broken when the crying artist finally spoke a few words of apology for breaking up then everyone started clapping. I left the senior hall wishing I’d stayed home and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The food was great but that hour of patriotism-on-speed was emotionally draining.  ©

Busy Week, Book Club and May-December Romances

This week has been a ballbuster if I had balls to bust. What a curious word ‘ballbuster’ is and after looking it up I’ve been ‘educated up’ on the fact that I don’t need balls or to be talking to anyone with them to be a ballbuster. The word has been around since the 1940s, a U.S. slang for “a person who is relentlessly aggressive, intimidating, or domineering” according to the Merriam Webster online dictionary and backed up by my yellowed and falling apart paperback dictionary of slangs and euphemisms. That book is an old-timers version of the online urban dictionary and I love it. I just checked at Amazon to see if it’s still in print. Jeez, I can get another used paperback for a mere $59.00! Time to get the Scotch Tape out and do some damage control. Wow, did I get off topic. Where was I and what was I planning to write about?

Oh, ya, it’s been a relentlessly busy week with too many activity, too many days in a row for my old bones. I’m worn out! Monday it was a movie followed by a LONG dessert date that I already wrote about a few days ago. Tuesday was the dog’s beauty spa day when I do a lot of errands while I wait for him to put a $50 dent in my checking account. One errand took me to Lowes. I had to get screws and a piece of wood to replace a handrail on my deck and I found a newbie worker to cut the rail for me. “I do this kind of thing for my grandma all the time,” the young guy told me. He was so new he didn’t even have a tape measure on him and after he searched in vain for something to measure with, I loaned him mine. I’ve been carrying that six foot tape in my purse so long the business it advertises had a four digit phone number. Tuesday I also screwed down some boards on my deck that had become trip hazards. Wednesday I went to recycling and to a Red Hat Society tea followed by a quick stop at the grocery store. 

And then came Thursday, the day of my first meeting with my new, monthly book club. The book under discussion was The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald. In my opinion it’s one of those ‘palate cleaning’ fluffy books best read after a meatier book that taxed your brain. I made the mistake of reading it the first week that I got it and it wasn’t too fresh on my mind by the time book club rolled around, so I was nervous about jumping into the discussion. I wanted to make a good, first impression and you only get one chance to do that.

There was a character in the book who was the town Church Lady who was having an affair with a bi-sexual guy half her age but I wasn’t going to touch that topic in my first discussion with the club because in my old book group that topic probably would have prompted a few comments on the 'evils' of homosexuality. But just between you and me May-December romances are not my cup of tea when it’s the woman who is just a few years off from being a pedophile. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit. He was in his early 20s and she was in her mid-40s but the affair was still planted firming in the land of yucky-dos as far as I was concerned. Is it sexist to accept the May-December thing if the guy is the older one smooching all over a younger woman, but not the other way around? One of the Readers Guide Questions that comes in the back of the book asks, “Why did they feel the need to hide their affair?” Are you kidding me? Small town, pillar in the church, May-December affair then throw in the bi-sexual element and that's a lot of red meat for any gossip mill. There’s a young guy who is often in the community room when we have our Red Hat Society teas. He’s like a puppy we adopted and we feed him whenever we have snacks. He’s a tall, dark and handsome cutie-pie who flirts with us all for free cake and ice cream but I can’t in a hundred years picture any of us having hot sex with the guy.

Surprise, surprise…when a question came up at book club about which character in the story do you most identify with, five ladies---one after another---said they wish they could have been the woman having an affair with the younger guy. God, we laughed so hard! For once, I was not the most liberal woman in the room and that felt great. One woman over-shared that she hadn’t had sex in 37 years and wasn’t sure she’d know how to do it anymore but others assured her it was like riding a bike and it would come back to her. Even though no one rated the book very high, the discussion was lively, funny, fun and clearly my brand of humor is going to fit right in with this group. Everyone laughed when I said, “If you ever have your grandson drop you off to book club, you’d better keep a close eye on him.”

And now I’m wondering if I should take a second look at the guy that my Red Hat sisters feeds ice cream and cake to. Nah. Not a chance. Nope. Out of the question, no siree! Not for all the tea in China. Not on your life. When pigs fly. Fat chance. You can take it to the bank that I will not become a Mrs. Robinson to Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin in The Graduate. ©

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