The Winter of Disappointment

This week I got my first professional pedicure since last fall. You’d think that would have been a relaxing outing, given the fact they I was sitting in a massage chair while a nice lady played which-little-piggy-went-to-market with my toes, but there were groaning sounds coming from up above and that made me nervous. We’re at a point in our record setting winter where roofs are caving in from the weight of all that snow---nearly 90 inches of snow so far this season. That’s three feet more snow than our yearly average. Nine or ten cave-ins have made the news and any flat roofed building is in danger. Long story short my pink little piggies look perfect and the roof overhead stayed in place long enough for me to escape the impending danger. This senior citizen knows how to live on the edge.

Aside from it being a perfect winter for downhill skiers---if they want to brave the bitter cold---another good thing about having a hard winter is the fact that the ice sculpture contest contestants, this weekend, don’t have to worry about their huge blocks of ice disappearing any time soon. In past years I’ve seen their slightly melted creations as I pushed my husband’s wheelchair around a small tourist town near-by but this year I planned to bundle up in my warmest clothes and I go watch the carvers as they worked---twenty three sculptures created over two days. If you’ve ever seen the Food Network’s Ice Brigade with Randy Finch and his crew you’ll know exactly who is in town working their magic. These guys and gals are awesome!

On paper, the opening day looked perfect for me to get out of the house---no new snow predicted. I had my wool socks, long gaiters, heaviest sweats, snowmobile gloves and a hat laid out. I was looking forward to sipping free cocoa while watching people play miniature golf on a course made entirely out of ice. I planned on sampling the quirky mash potato bar at the olive oil store before wandering over to the chili cook off and the snowman building contest in the park. Then I saw the morning news. Cars crashes and spin offs all over the place. Icy roads between me and the contest. So I’ll be seeing the sculptures and snowmen next week, after the ice festival is over. I’m calling this the Winter of Disappointment. Not to worry. I’m getting used to it. I’m in no danger of hanging myself from the rafters in the attic.

Saturday I had tickets to a country western show put on by the fire department. I haven’t been to one of these twice-a-year firefighters fundraisers since Don passed away even though I continued buying tickets. In the back of my mind I kept thinking I’d connect with someone to invite to go with me, but that hasn’t happened. This year, I decided to go alone, to made it a widow’s work goal. But the temperatures never got high enough for the road salt to work and there is a huge hill in between me and the auditorium that is well known for its bumper car intersection at the bottom, so I opted not to chance it. Color me disappointed. Our fire department guys are the ones who come to the house when you call 911 and say, “X, Y or Z has fallen and can’t get back up.” They’d been here many times when Don was still alive and they never charge, so I will keep buying their tickets whether I go or not. However, if we still have icy roads in July when their next show is scheduled I’m moving to Fiji where I can tie myself to a tree during hurricane season. I’ve had enough of the devil’s dandruff and his polar breath for one season, thank you very much. 

Switching gears, at one of my favorite blogs, As Time Goes By, there is a recent post titled Coming Out as Old. Reading it I learned that to be politically correct I have to quit calling myself a senior citizen or elderly. Instead, I have to use the words ‘elder’ or ‘old’ person. The idea is that ‘elderly’ and ‘senior’ implies a fragile body and declining cognitive abilities. Since I’ve been admonished in my off-line life not to call myself ‘elderly’ I found this discussion of labels very interesting. For some reason that defies explanation I’d rather be elderly than old but I also like the title, ‘elder.’ I guess it's all in the perceptions the labels conjure up in our heads. Many if not most people my age are not frail or have declining abilities---I get that point, I really do---but what about those who are? Do we have to find a new label that covers them? Or do we just get out our bag of adjectives and say, “She’s a fragile old person" or "she's flaky old person”? Given a choice between ‘elderly’ and ‘a fragile' or 'flaky' old person I’d rather be elderly. Ohmygod, I need a pie chart to sort this all out! In the meantime, I am officially now the elder in my tribe of one here on Widowhood Lane. ©

The Widow's Lunch in Guy-Land

“When it rains, it pours” is an idiom meaning a whole lot of things are going wrong in your life all at the same time. I wonder if there is an idiom for a whole lot of good things happening at the same time. That’s the way I feel about the fact that after sitting “on the bench” for most of the winter there are six get-out-of-the-house outings penciled in my planner for this first week in February, a week without a major ice or snow storm in the weather forecast. (We've got a mini storm going on right now.)

Granted an appointment to take the dog to the groomers wasn’t very exciting but that was my Monday outing. Since he had to be dropped off at noon and picked back up at 4:00 I took the time in between to take my closet-purging bags to Goodwill. They’d been sitting in my garage long enough to give me second thoughts and more than once I was digging in those bags, wondering if I made good purging decisions. I did.

Among the things dropped off was a pair of brand new snowmobile boots in their original box with the tags still in place. I found them in a forgotten corner of the coat closet and I tried them on, thinking I could use them when I shovel snow. Guess what, I’ve gotten so old/weak since they were purchased that I couldn’t pick my feet up to walk with those heavy boots on. It felt like they were nailed to the floor---the boots, not my feet. And to think I used to traipse around in the middle of snowy nights, wearing heavy boots like that and holding a flashlight for Don while he repaired broken cutting edges and fluid lines on snowplows. He had so much equipment that something always needed fixing during blizzards. Sometimes when I look back on my life I wonder if all that stuff happened to someone else. Does that ever happened to you? Without a life-partner to ask, “Do you remember the time when….” I seem to have lost some validation.

After Goodwill I decided to go to the Breakfast Only Café where I knew I could strike up a conversation with others sitting at the counter. But I forgot it was Monday, the only day they are closed. So I went to a cafeteria style restaurant near-by. I picked a table near four thirty-something guys where I thought eavesdropping might be interesting. (Don’t judge me. Plenty of people had eavesdropped on Don and me over the years and if they inserted an appropriate comment with a “Sorry, I couldn’t help hearing” they often got invited into the conversation.) Can you believe it, these four guys spent 5-6 minutes talking about hairstyles they used to have, wish they had and hope they never get. One guy went so far as to pull a photo off the internet to show his companions! They sounded like a bunch of little girls. I cannot imagine my macho-man husband ever having a conversation like that. Times are changing.

After they left the restaurant, an old guy sat down at a table adjoining mine and over the half wall separating us he struck up a conversation. That’s when I realized that there were twelve tables with people dining alone and I was the only woman in old geezer-land! If I was in the market for a man, that place would be a prime hunting ground and I’d be eating there every morning, noon and night. I’m not in the market and I hate saying this because it makes me sound like a cougar but if I were in the market, old men have no sex appeal.

Don never lost his sex appeal as he aged but then again I’m not so sure that many/most widows don’t wear extra heavy, corrective rose colored glasses when we think about our spouses. When we no longer get annoyed by their petty guy things---burping on purpose to get a rise out of us or socks left next to the hamper---it’s easier to keep building that ‘dead husband pedestal’ higher and higher. Don wasn’t perfect but in my warped widow’s mind there are few guys, if any, in my peer age group who could compete with him in the Department of Homeland Sex Appeal, and it’s a little scary to have that train of thought traveling through my head. It makes me wonder if someday an old dude will be sit down at a near-by table, a train whistle will blow in my head and suddenly he’ll have sex appeal where before, he didn’t. Will this mighty tree in the forest fall and shout, “Oh, shit!” on the way down and the next thing you know I’d be on my way to Las Vegas for an Elvis-themed wedding with an old geezer who thinks I’ll make a good caregiver should he have a heart attack on our Viagra spiced honeymoon? Or worse yet, I’ll be on my way to Las Vegas with a young con-artist with a sexy smile who mistakenly marked this widow as a good cash cow. Good grief, with all that on the list of possibilities, I need to stay out of the Guy-Land Cafeteria!

The old guy at lunch was nice but the conversation was vanilla pudding. “Nice day isn’t it,” he said in his opening volley.  

“It sure is,” I replied. “It’s been a while since we’ve seen the sun.”

“Do you live around here?” he asked

No, I felt like saying to that ancient line, I just flew in from Dallas to have lunch in this fine establishment. Out loud I replied: “I live on the other side of the river.” Five minutes of chit-chat later, I put my coat on and as I walked off I lied and told the guy, “It was nice talking to you.” I wondered if he was disappointed that I didn’t get myself another cup of coffee to prolong the chance encounter. If the conversation had been chocolate or pistachio pudding I might have. Thank goodness he didn’t ask for my phone number. Years ago when a guy would ask that question I usually gave out the number to the weather station's recorded forecast. I don’t think they’ve had a forecast line in ages. Now, you just google it if you want to know what’s coming. Do you ever wish we could google our futures? If we could, I wonder if I’d really want to know. ©

Who Reads Blogs?

Are personal blogs just a written form of reality TV? That question crossed my mind when someone on The View said he never watches the genre because he is philosophically against it being passed off as entertainment. At first I totally agreed with him until I looked up a list of popular reality TV shows and much to my surprise I found out that on occasion I actually watch five shows that fall into that classification: American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Hoarders, Antiques Roadshow, and Storage Wars. Who knew? When I thought about reality TV shows I was thinking of those programs that make me want to stick my fingers down my throat and vomit: Here Comes Honey BooBoo, The Kardashians, Real Housewives, Duck Dynasty, Jersey Shore, and The Apprentice. These shows are very popular which just goes to show that taste in entertainment is far from one-size-fits all. Why am I philosophically against make-me-vomit television?  I don’t think it’s good for society to lower the bar so much by depicting the daily drama that occurs in these so-called average or affluent families. I don’t want to go back to the days of Father Knows Best but if we’re going to elevate and encourage voyeurism then what we watch should have some redeeming or teachable factors to justify having cameras capture so much bad behavior. Garbage spoon-fed into society, garbage out.

Having said that, I also have to say that reading personal blogs is not much different than televised voyeurism. We not only get a window into the daily lives of the blog writers with all their flaws and foibles but we also get the main attraction; we get a window into the blog writer’s stream of consciousness. A stream of consciousness according to about.com is defined as: “A narrative technique that gives the impression of a mind at work, jumping from one observation, sensation, or reflection to the next….” And aren’t we all interested in knowing how our own stream of consciousness stacks up against the next guy’s? We want to know, for example, how often our neighbors think about their past and future, their families and society at large, even the lint in their belly buttons. We want to know if they worry about the same things we do. We want to know irrelevant stuff like how it feels when someone goes to the ‘days calculator’ online and finds out they are 26,227 days old. By the way, the answer to that last question is that being 26,227 days old makes me feel much older than the run-of-the-mill septuagenarian that I am---like I’ve crossed over into Buddha-land. Say something insightful and wise, old woman.

This long winter has been hard on us blog writers who live in the Snowbelt because many of us have to live inside our heads more than usual. To write, we need outside stimulation and we're not getting any. There are just so many ways I can describe the impassable roads, the birds at my feeders and the tin fold hat I’m thinking about making to keep the crazy, snowbound thoughts from coming in. There are just so many ways a widow can say how lonely she is or how much she misses being relevant in the world. Oh, here we go again! says the Mary Poppins-like voice in my head.  It really is time to say something insightful and wise, old woman.

Okay, I’ll give it a shot. “This, too, shall pass. Spring will come, I’ll get back out into the world and once again the box of Reynolds Wrap will be safe from the would-be hat couturier who lives on Widowhood Lane."

Who reads blogs? According to Social Media Today, blogs get 46 million unique page views per month and 71% of internet users read blogs. They also report that the majority of blog writers are women. There are 6.7 million bloggers on blog sites and another 12 million on social networks. Clearly, a lot of people are interested what others have to say about things that touch their lives in some way, be it a personal musings blog like this one or a blog written by a hobbyist beer maker or the highest earning blog of all, the Huffington Post.

The unique page views on this blog number over 64,000. Yet only 1,033 comments have been made. I’ve often wondered about my statistics. Who are these people who come and read my thoughts but never share their own? Who are you? Won't you give me a clue? Did you land here by mistake, a Google search screw-up? Are you a recovering widow like me? Are you a fellow blogger? And the most important question of all: Do you also have a roll of Reynolds Wrap that hides from you on long, snowy days? ©