The Doctor and the Realtor

 

My appointments with the doctor and realtor happened two weeks ago but at the time I had other stuff that had to published in a timely manner or be trashed or break my rule about posting no more than twice a week. I didn’t want to trash my stress induced reaction post to the election or my essay about my 1,000^th post, so here I am trying to remember the details about my above mentioned appointments.

I had to see my internist for my bi-annual and the Medical Care Wellness Check where they ask you questions we older people have learned to lie about. No, I don't have any throw rugs that can trip me, doctor dearest. How's my sex life? Only in my head, doc, but I have lots of book boyfriends if that counts. That sex life answer wasn't a lie if I'd actually said it out loud. Instead, I mumbled something about being a long-time widow. It ticks me off that they actually ask it because the medical community never cared back in the days when I was sexually active so why should it matter to them now in our Medicare years? If I had answered that I was playing the hide the bologna game on a regular basis would I have then gotten the safe sex talk? If you've done the Medicare Care test you know they ask some stupid stuff and thank goodness they don't hook us up on lie detector machines while we take it.

I was a little concerned that I was developing lung issues because I’ve been experiencing shortness of breath since I saw him last. Apparently I’m not good at self-diagnosing, even with Dr. Google’s help, because I thought it might be from gaining too many pandemic/comfort food pounds combined with wearing face masks. But my lungs were fine and my internist was more concerned with the fact that I’ve picked up an extra heart beat since I last saw him. He hooked up the EKG machine and that put a technical name of ‘ventricular ectopy and DOE’ to the extra heartbeat. Then he ordered a few blood tests to rule out stuff like anemia. Turned out my RBC (red blood count) came back on the low end of the scale but still one point within the normal range and my doctor says he’s comfortable with waiting until my next bi-annual to have me wear a Holter monitor (echo-cardiogram) for a few days to see what I’m doing when I get short of breath. I don’t need to wear one to know it happens when I jog a few yards with the dog, walk up hills and go shopping at the acres big grocery store---but he made me promise to call if I start getting dizzy or feeling faint with the breathing issue. Stress and lack of sleep can feed into the equation Dr. Google said, so hopefully as the nation heals those factors might resolve themselves. Ya, I know hope and two cents will give me something to wear in a pair of penny loafers. Off topic, but I remember going on a date in high school and my mom having me put dimes in my penny loafers in case I had to phone home. Phone booths and dimes to make a call...those days are long gone.

And, oh goody my doctor wants me to work on losing my pandemic pounds. A month or so before I saw him I’d already started cutting sugar out of my diet but I got side-tracked when the tricker-or-treaters didn’t show up. I used to get around 140 kids on good weather days and 70-80 when it's cold and rainy and since the township didn’t cancel the tradition because of the pandemic I bought enough for 75 kids. Fifteen showed up leaving me with a month of eating two pieces of candy a day. I’ve always hated Halloween for starting me on a sugar binge that would last until New Year’s Day. Not going to happen this year. Fingers crossed I stick to the two a day plan. I'm calling them multivitamins because I'm very careful with medications.

New topic: What did I get myself into? The son-I-wish-I-had wanted me to talk to his realtor friend even though he knew I liked another firm I’d had a walk through with---two lovely women in their 50s who specialize in dealing with senior citizens. Tim and his guy do a lot of business back and forth and he has known him for years, trusts him. So I had an appointment with the guy and I thought it would just be a quick walk through, meet-and-greet appointment like I had with the two women. Didn’t turn out that way. He’s been here twice. The first time with a presentation selling his history and experience and doing the walk through and he left a large, expensive looking leather notebook full of reading material on how to get your house ready to show, blah, blah, blah and the clever little devil wanted to schedule a second appointment "to swing by to pick the notebook back up."

At that second appointment he gave me so much information that my eyes and legs were crossed before he left and I think they killed a tree just to make all the papers he left behind. Homework, he told me of multiple page listings of the past 30 comparable houses that have sold in my neighborhood including all their interior photos. Plus he left every public record to be found on my house including aerial photos and Google street maps shots and some he took which he used to create a sample listing showing a breakdown of what I'd net out of a sale. I hate wasting paper and that stack of listings gave me the heebie jeebies as I sat there trying to decide how I could use the back sides of all those pages.

Dilemma time. I really liked the women but I'd be going on pure instinct since I don’t know anyone who’s used them. And while the guy wasn’t so aggressive that he turned me off, I thought he had just enough aggressiveness to give him an edge on selling my house. Leaning toward him, I thought I'd have a few months to decide between the two realtors but the day after that second appointment I got a greeting card in the mail from one of the lady realtors saying she’d seen the progress done on my future home and thought of me. Oh, crap! I don’t want to lead anyone on so I’ve got to come up with a thanks-for-your-time-but speech to deliver to one of these two companies. ©

One Thousand Posts

Gosh, I would be remiss if I let the statistic of this being my 1,000^th post in this blog go by without a---mention? A celebration? Whatever I might call a thousand posts spread out over eight years. ‘Celebration’ doesn’t sound right because this blog was started because my husband died and I could no longer continue the caregiver blog I had going at the time. If I counted all the posts in all six blogs I’ve had over the past twenty years, my post count would probably we closer to 1,700. My first two blogs got purged from the platforms they were on so I don’t know how many posts they contained but with the four other blogs still in the ether of cyberspace there are 307 posts. One of those four blogs is about family genealogy, another blog---my personal favorite---was written in my dog’s voice. I have two others that were caregiver related---one a speech class diary that I kept while observing my husband work with student speech pathologists, and my Planet Aphasia blog that was the cross-eye child of Humor and Frustration, born from living with a guy who was right-side paralyzed and lost his ability to speak and write.

I’ve always tried to keep my blog posts between 900 to 1,000 words long. Doing the math on how many words I’ve written for public consumption boggles my mind. But would you believe it, there are still secrets and untold stories stuck in my head? Well, not so much ‘secrets’ but stuff too private to share---stuff I haven’t shared with a single soul except with my husband. We met when he was 28 and I was 27 so we came with histories that we didn’t keep from one another. He was storyteller and all his tales came with long-winded windups. Whereas when I had something inside bursting to get out I’d write him long, soul-bearing letters. When I was cleaning out his desk after his stroke I was shocked to find he’d kept those letters and I in turn kept them until after he died. I have a hard time parting with my own written words, but some things a couple shares really are too private for others to read. I love letters, though, and I was the person who spent years going to estate sales and buying letters written by people I never meant. Thankfully, I’m not the only one who likes old letters. I recently was able to sell my estate letter finds on e-Bay, and all my own letters written back and forth to Vietnam found a permanent home in the American War Letters Museum in California---if the building made it through one of the forest fires, last year, that threaten the college campus where they are housed. Not sure I want to know the answer on that question.

No, this is not a celebration post because when I look back on all the blogs I’ve written I mostly see them as life-lines I’ve thrown out trying to connect with others. But once in a while I feel like I've had diarrhea of the mouth, wasted like an old horse that’s been ridden hard and put away wet. Ohmygod, does anyone besides western ranchers and equestrians even understand that metaphor anymore? The only reason I understand it is because my husband’s family kept work horses when he was a kid and it was his job to make sure the horses were brushed dry and warmed up after working them so they didn't get chilled and sick. I’ve put a lot of myself out there in cyberspace, mostly anonymously from my off-line life, which means I blog a post then stand around wet and wondering if anyone will come by to help warm me up by sharing their reactions. In the spirit of Chandler from Friends, “Could I get any more pathetic?” Gosh, I miss that TV show. And I’ve got it into my head that after I move to the continuum care campus next year I’m going to find my own ‘friends’ tribe. A group of mismatched people who are all too old to hide our idiosyncrasies from the world and they'll make me giddy with new blog material to use.

Already I’m wondering if I should start a new blog with a new name or just continue with this one. It's so ME to be thinking far in the future instead of doing/living in the present. Once a dreamer always a dream my mom would say if she knew me now. If she knew me now she’d probably be surprised that I like to write at all, having watched me struggle well into adulthood. When I was a kid they had no idea what dyslexia was. I was the girl that exasperated her mother with my inability to learn to spell and sound out words. Is it any wonder that I consider Kindle's Alex to be my best friend? I love her because unlike my husband and my mom she never gets impatient, never makes me feel dumber than a box of rocks, never gives me irritated sighs and stupid suggestions to "just look it up!" Ya, that’s a feeling that has plagued me since grade-school and it still drives me to keep writing. Alex can, however, frustrate me when I’m trying to spell a word like ‘plagued’ and she comes up with pledged. (If a word doesn't look right, I'll have her define it after spelling it.) It took me three tries to get the right word out of Alex. Thankfully, I can enunciate most words to her satisfaction because when I can’t I’d like to bitch-slap her off my WiFi.   © 

This Too Shall Pass but Can we Get a Confirmation on That?

 

I’m not sure I can do this anymore. And to make matters worse, I don’t even know what “this” is that I want to stop doing. The pandemic? The loneliness it brings with it? The constant focus on moving related activities? The worrying about the direction our country is going in? The pandemic related weight I’ve gained? The guilt of reading too much thus avoiding other things I should be doing? One thing I am sure of is that I’ve entered into another winter of discontent and by “winter” I’m using the word metaphorically and not referring to the season fast approaching my part of the world.

“When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone.”

John Steinbeck

 The Winter of Our Discontent

I’ve always loved John Steinbeck’s title, The Winter of Our Discontent. It rolls off your tongue so smoothly and paints an image of bleakness with so little effort. But I don’t like the feeling of living in a winter of discontent. I’ve been restless lately and when I’m feeling this way I ramble-write, not knowing where I’m going to end up but hoping it leads to clarity. And ramble writing usually leads me to rereading a favorite John Steinbeck quote from In Awe of Words: “A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—‘Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.’”

Steinbeck wasn’t the first to write about the winter of discontent. I’ve never studied Shakespeare but it doesn’t take much research into Steinbeck’s book title to run across a play of Shakespeare’s that starts out: “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York…” spoken by Richard, the future king who was not complaining, as I’ve been doing here, but was rather celebrating the turning point in his family’s fortune. In Steinbeck’s novel, however, the turning point was the opposite---of a family who was once great and went broke thus giving the main character a plot purpose to regain the family riches, power and influence. But the bare bones theme of the book, according to one reviewer, is it's about “the effect of societal pressure.” Geez! There's no maybe about it, that’s the cause of my discontentment right now i.e. there is so much social pressure to do this or don’t do that or to embrace this and reject that. I hate when the world around me seems to view everything in blacks and whites with no grey nuances in between. That's the kind of social pressures that makes my head spin.

“You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.”

John Steinbeck

The Winter of Our Discontent

I’ve always loved living in an area of the world where our seasons are so clearly defined. With our winters comes both gentle and harsh storms followed by blinding white beauty blanketing the earth. Our springs warm the earth bringing forth the fragrant flowers and the return of plump robins. Our green, sultry summers with their long, lazy days are followed by cooler falls that turns the landscape into a blazing, artist's palette. A season that after the colors have detached from the trees gives way to brown, bare-bones visas waiting to start the cycle all over again. As humans we adapt. We fail and start over again. We grow stronger again. I may be in another winter of discontentment, but I’ve been here before and fortunately (or unfortunately) this time I’m not alone. The pandemic and the political climate has made strange bedfellows out of a lot of us. No matter who we voted for yesterday we are all deeply invested in the outcome of the election. God help us all if we can't come together when the dust settles, if our winter of discontent turns into a decade of discontent. Fingers crossed that doesn't happen.  ©