Toilet Paper and Other Casualities of the Pademic

I’ve found many things to laugh about during the pandemic and a lot of them have to do with the humorous toilet paper memes people have created for the amusement of those of us who cruise around cyberspace. But I never expected to find humor while shopping for toilet paper at Amazon. One listing had be laughing so hard the dog came from the other room to check on me, probably thought I was having a medical emergency that would interrupt his human treat dispenser and we can't have that happen in this household now, can we. 

The toilet paper was trounced as: “Silky Toilet Paper, Soft Professional Series.” Professional Series? What does that even mean? To the best of my knowledge there are no professional pee-ers and poopers or contests to see who can do it quicker or fill up the bowls fuller. No amateurs to turn pro like in baseball or hockey. Or maybe the professional series is designed for people who have achieved the status of a professional in the world of sports? Do the bathrooms attached to the locker rooms of the New York Yankees or those who play for the NBA require “professional” paper---not one ply, not two ply, but three ply toilet paper? Is it written up in their contracts that their tushies get best?  If so, I hope they keep a plumber on speed-dial because that “professional toilet paper” is sure to clog up the pipes without impunity.

I never did buy what I needed online. They were either sold in such huge lots of brands I’d never heard of or the prices were too high and I had visions of the product having been sitting around in warehouses for the past 30 years, moldy and smelly. At e-Bay the prices were even higher, at gouger heights, which makes me wonder if part of the so-called hoarders are actually profiteers, buying up locally and e-Baying them out for extra cash. $45.00 for a six pack of Charmin? No thanks. I did order a travel bidet with plans to use it for all my “front door” needs thus stretching out my dwindling supplies for my “back door” needs. I won’t run out for a week or two and if I do before I’m able to snag a pack at the grocery store (which is doubtful according to the local message boards), I’ll be grateful that I didn’t stop delivery on the Sunday newspaper. Always have a backup plan and I knew that long before I started reading Navy SEAL books. I've learned a useful acronym from all those books, though: FUBAR. Fucked up Beyond all Recognition. Yup, a pretty useful thing to say about the Covid-19 world we find ourselves living in. 

I dreamed about my mom last night. I haven’t done that in decades. My husband, yes, he’s often in my dreams. My dad occasionally. But today I woke up with a smile on my face after seeing my mom sitting in her rocking chair crocheting. The look on her face was one of peace and contentment, as she usually looked when she was knitting or crocheting, and in my dream I was running around stacking and unstacking boxes like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out that my dream was about a need for the kind of comfort and reassurance that only a loving mother can give. 

During this pandemic my thoughts often go to my parents, especially my dad. Their generation lived through so many hardships and the last pandemic had a profound effect on Dad’s life. My grandmother, his mom, died after nine days of fighting for her life during the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918-1919. She was 33 year old and left behind a husband and three children, the youngest of which was my father, age eight. It's estimated that 20 to 40 million people died of the flu in those two years nationwide and 32 thousand just in the state of Illinois where my family lived at the time. Over the years my dad and uncle had gone down to Illinois more than a few times, trying to find her grave and when I got interested in genealogy I sent for a copy of her death certificate and figured out they were looking in the cemeteries in the wrong town. And the search started again.

In a twisted game of fate it as almost exactly a hundred years after her death that my niece finally solved the mystery of where my grandmother was buried. She found a historian in Grandville, Illinois who said that most people who died during the Great Flu Epidemic in the hospital where my grandmother died were buried in unmarked mass graves in a particular cemetery. My niece was able to go there to see what is now a carefully manicured lawn marking that field of so much sorrow. Now, the dead in NYC are stacked up in refrigerated tractor trailers because the funeral homes are overwhelmed trying to keep up. The more things change, the more they stay the same.  ©

PHOTO at the top is of my grandmother's final resting place.
 

Looking for Unicorns and Rainbows

I decided to write about anything other than The Pandemic or the stay-at-home lock down or other related woes of the world. Jeez, it’s like looking for unicorns and rainbows, I bemoaned more than few times as I sat with my fingers resting on my keyboard. The dog wasn’t doing anything cute or annoying. My blog readers are probably sick of my ‘Tales from the Downsizing Side’ or hearing about the military trash books I’ve been hiding inside and I haven’t been anywhere or watched anything worth writing about. Nothing was making my fingers itch to type. I did see my first housefly of the season, stuck in between my window and its screen, but I wasn’t sure I could turn that event into a 900 to 1,000 word essay. I was, however, getting desperate enough to try.

Every morning for years I've made myself write for at least an hour, whether I produce anything keep-worthy or not. Some mornings I’ll write until my brain hurts, then delete every word I produced. Other times what I produce goes in a file titled, “half written posts.” And twice a week I actually write an essay that ends up going live as a blog post. That's not saying its always good or always interesting. I can, however, say it's always on schedule. But the day I set out to write about anything other than The Pandemic the more it seemed like I was searching for unicorns prancing under rainbows. Finally I thought, Screw it, just writing about unicorns! Don’t we all need to believe the nightmare we’re living through could be wished away as quickly as unicorn stickers can put smiles on little girl faces? Ya, I could do something with that premise, I decided.

If you look online for the definition of ‘unicorn’ you’ll find two listed: 1) a mythical animal typically represented as a horse with a single straight horn projecting from its forehead, and 2) something that is highly desirable but difficult to find or obtain. Little girls seem to have a special affinity for unicorns and not having much experience with children I wondered why. And guess what, I am not the only one. Google found me a MIT graduate student who wrote a paper about why little girls are attracted to unicorns. She says, “Horses and dolphins and unicorns — these are all borderland creatures; gateway animals to other worlds. They help us imagine wonderful other ways of being in the world. They let us be cowgirls and oceanographers and mermaids and princesses…” 

Unicorns are not just an American thing. They can be found in all cultures around the world. They’ve been around and associated with little girls from Medieval times in the form of an iconic myth (?) of hunters who used little girls as bait to lure unicorns to come check them out because…well, everyone in ye olden days knew that a virgin’s purity, youth and beauty attracted unicorns---and probably a lot of biting insects as well, but the storybooks don’t mention mosquitoes in those woods where the virgins waited while the hunters hid. Fast forward a lot of centuries and I hear tell that modern girls will say that unicorns only show themselves to those who believe in them. They are pure spirit like believing in the power of God or the power of Self. 

Narwhal whales with their ten foot, single horn are real which begs the question: Could land-dwelling unicorns at one time have walked the earth? I found the answer and, yes, they did according to an article in Natural Ecology & Evolution. They existed in Eastern Europe and Central Asia but climate change made them go extinct as recently as 39,000 years ago, which means they did co-exist with the human race.

A decade ago researchers were able to study the DNA of a single horned, four-legged fossilized animal but what they found was that those ancient unicorns were nothing like the pastel creatures that today roam across notebooks, backpacks, tee-shirts and little girl’s PJs. No pink or purple pigmentation. No mane to hold on to hold on to while flying over rainbows. And certainly no way to sprout wings when needed. They were downright ugly if the drawing above is an accurate depiction. But seeing that drawing, I can very well imagine they were hunted for a food source. And I’m betting little boys or goats would have lured them into a trap as well as little girls. Girls, however, have always been more expendable through the ages---that’s my spin, being a card carrying member of the Feminist Movement. But you'll have to agree that hunters in primitive tribes have always elevated chest-beating males and milk giving goats above the demure gatherers who cooked the meat and kept the home fires burning. Thus you now understand why I used a question mark after the words 'iconic myth.' The connection between little girls and unicorns is real and iconic but it's not hard to jump to the conclusion that the myth could actually be based on fragments of facts and therefore not a myth at all. (I have too much time on my hands, don't I.)

Rainbows are real and we all know where and when we’re likely to find them. There is something powerful about seeing a rainbow after a storm. They restore our sense of awe and wonder and make us smile in delight. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, however, is not real. Still, the legend of fairies and leprechauns burying their gold at the end of the rainbow remains as an uplifting symbol of how after a storm there is always a reward. In time the storm ravaging the world known as The Pandemic will pass and we’ll pick up the threads of our lives to weave them back together. In time we’ll put on our rose-colored glasses and see mostly the positives these trying times brought out in each of us and in society---and there will be many positives mixed in with the stresses, the losses, the politics and the pain. We just have to believe that day will come and believe it with the tenacity of little girls who believe in unicorns.  ©

Changing Timelines and my Spooky Mind Reading Schnauzer

I always known that having a long timeline for moving that many things could throw a monkey wrench into the mix and disrupt my downsizing schedule and plans to get my house ready to sell. But who would have ever guessed that monkey wrench would take the form of a world-wide pandemic. The reality of that is sinking in. Last week I struggled to keep my self-imposed schedule of preparing and listing collectibles to sell on e-Bay and for the first time I missed my weekly quota, a quota designed to have me wrapping the project up by mid to late summer. I’m trying to get a feel for where the market is going, if the bidders will continue to be there. That’s the official excuse I’m giving myself but in reality I wasted a lot of time metaphorically sucking my thumb and worrying about how I’m going to keep moving my life forward when the world around me is on pause. Even the lot of 100 things I sent off to the local auction house just before all hell broke loose is sitting in the queue, advertised but with the auction postponed. I can kiss my stuff goodbye without compensation if they can't keep their business afloat during the shut-down. Been there, done with another auction house that went defunct years ago. They are/were my back up plan if I still had collectibles left by fall. And the online neighborhood garage sale postings on Facebook has been shut-down. I had planned on selling some furniture that way this spring. I need one of my book-boyfriends to come hold my hand while I re-calibrate my timelines.

In the meantime the painter I’d lined up to paint a ceiling is willing to social distance himself to do the work which would be against the governor’s mandate for non-essential workers, but he can’t get the paint. The lawn care guy can’t work on thinning some planting beds, let alone do the normal spring cleanup services---someone reported him for raking a yard which is crazy since lawn care people don't have to be near anyone. Ditto on having a service washing the siding and windows. Can you imagine the back-log of work these people will have, missing an entire month---now maybe two---of their contracts and services? I didn’t even bother to call the carpet cleaners to do their spring thing. My trash service did a robocall telling us all we can’t put out extra bags (yard waste) until further notice, nothing the workers have to pick up by hand. Oh, and did I mention my washing machine took the pandemic as a queue to go on strike? I spent a whole day singing, “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucile,” a song that has nothing to do with washing machines since I don't name my appliances, but I had to sing something.

Then I got an e-mail from the continuum care campus where I’ve been planning to move. They were assuring us that the stock market volatility will not affect the building project in any way. “They are fully funded and solid.” Jeez, I hadn’t even thought about that! I’ve got $40,000 worth of deposits down on that place (held in escrow) and another $20,000 due in July so I should have been concerned. Nope, I've been sitting here worried about selling pocket watches and moonbeams. The CCC also said the Stay-at-Home orders for everyone but essential workers has halted the construction and will set the project back. Double Jeez! The construction company has applied to the state for an exemption since all their workers, at this point in time, are/were outside in heavy construction mode that doesn’t involve workers being up each other’s butts (my words, not theirs). They also had a lot of heavy stuff that needed moving in before the spring weight limits on the roads went in effect and the shut-down caused them to miss the deadline. The state has temporarily lifted those weight limits to allow truckers to haul heavier-than-normal loads of groceries but the CCC is on hold until they hear back from the state to see if they can be included in that exemption. What a complicated world we live in and that inter-connectivity was brought into full focus due to the pandemic.  

At least we can still go outside. I’ve started walking the dog again since the bad weather is behind us. But it’s going to be challenge this year because of all the new dogs in the neighborhood. Levi has a real bark-fest when he sees other dogs and the anti-bark ultrasonic device I recently bought to curb that bad habit is giving me mixed results. It has a long range and in the house I can be in the kitchen at my computer and he can be two rooms over in the library barking and when I use it he stops barking and comes running to me. Sometimes he’s shaking his head like he doesn’t understand what’s wrong, making me feel guilty that it might be hurting him too much. But outside on our walks it’s like he doesn’t even hear the short blasts that work in the house---and he’s only the length of his retractable leash away. It takes several long blasts before he stops barking. I keep that device in my pocket and just put my hand in there to use it. He’s never even seen it but Levi seems to know it’s in my pocket and the source of his problems. Inside and outside he’ll come nudge the device my pocket, looking up at me with a confused look on his face. How does he know? It's downright spooky!

And does he also know how often I've been lusting for windmill cookies and milk since the pandemic hit our state? They're a 'dad and childhood' comfort food for me just like mandarin orange candy slices are a 'mom and childhood' comfort food. What would we do without our comfort foods? Or am I the only one.... ©