They've Got an App for Everything But....

I am in love with my smart phone! Shopping for free apps and reading their reviews is my new, part time hobby. They have some neat stuff and it’s no wonder so many young people have their faces buried in their phones. If I was in the dating scene the first thing I’d want to do when checking a guy out would be to look at his apps so I could get a window into his personality and quirks. For example, my first apps included the emergency ICE app and the Tornado app from the Red Cross. I’ve always been a person who believes that being prepared for the worst is somehow insurance against the worst happening. Crazy, I know, but it does ward off panic attacks in high stress situations. My grocery store app is another list kind of thing but with the ability to clip virtual coupons and locate which aisle of the store you’re going to find that obscure thing you only buy in leap years.

When people jokingly say, “I’ll bet they have an app for that” it’s really not much of a joke because they probably DO have an app for whatever you can throw in the Google Play Store search engine. Today I was testing that theory and I typed in ‘how to be happy.’ Sure enough they have an array of ‘how to be happy’ apps to download. I didn’t do a ‘happy’ download, but I couldn’t resist the Buddha Meditation Trainer with its Zen bells and Burmese gongs. Level one of ten starts out with a three minute meditation on the phrase, “Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth.” That was downright spooky given the fact that I’m getting over a bad cold that had me feeling yucky and depressed, and given the fact that the whole month of December I’ve been singing a song about my discontented life. And that brings me back to this age-old question: Does the universe find ways to tell us what we need to hear when we need to hear it? Or are those messages out there all the time, like white noise running in the background, and finally we let it penetrate our conscious thoughts when we’re ready to accept its Universal Truth? The meditation reminded me that a bad cold is not cancer---I’ll get over it---and contentment is a worthy, obtainable goal that we all struggle with from time to time.

At the Play Store next I did a search for ‘old people apps’ and I was shocked to find one titled Quickie Locator. You know, “for those times when you’re sitting in an airport with nothing to do” and you want to know if there is anyone near-by with a similar desire for a quickie to break up your boredom. Apparently, you can hook-up using GPS in any given area. You don’t even have to lock eyes across a crowded bar anymore, you can use an app for that and cut to the chase. Who knew! But I think someone tagged that app wrong because I’m guessing most old people would rather find friends and lovers the old fashioned way. But I did find a great magnifier app listed under old people apps and it had me going all over the house magnify stuff. I can even do it in a dark closet which I figure will be pretty helpful in a poorly lit restaurant.

For as cheap as my new phone was---$99.00 on a Black Friday special---I still can’t figure out how they can do so much yet a pair of no frills digital hearing aids that only has to do one thing costs in the thousands. But guess what. At the apps store you can get an enhanced hearing app. They say it’s for bird watchers or students listening to lectures and for people who forgot to wear their hearing aids. Ya, sure. You just plug your headset into your phone and you can listen to conversations coming from across the room. I can see the advantages of that app for people who are hard-of-hearing but, ohmygod, it kind of makes you wonder about some of these plugged-in young people sitting around in coffee shops! Are they really just playing games or could they be high tech voyeurs? It would be kind of fun to test for eavesdroppers wouldn’t it, by saying stuff that would shock a young person into a reaction. “Hey, Mary, see that young guy sitting by the window. I’d like to be his sugar momma” then count the heads that turn to look.

But I did manage to find an area of interest where there seems to be no app for that. I put ‘widow’ into the Google Play Store search engine and all that did was make the system assume I misspelled ‘windows.’ Then I tried ‘widowhood’ and it up came a bunch of apps featuring sexy Scarlett Johansson---actress, singer and model---tagged for this app catergory because she once played the Marvel comic book character, the Black Widow. I don’t know what I expected to find---maybe a pep talk when you need to hear one. Maybe an app like the Tornado app with headings like: ‘what to do before, during and after [a bad day]’, ‘recovery’ and ‘planning ahead.’ As a widow fast approaching the second sadiversary, I know all too well those back-sliding, sad days happen. So where is the app for that? ©

Second Christmas on Widowhood Lane

Have you ever sat next to someone who announces she’s so sick she should have stayed home in bed and you’re thinking, “Thanks a lot for bringing your germs out in public” but you actually say, “Oh, that’s too bad, dear. I hope you’ll feel better soon.” It’s at times like that, though, when I wish I could scoot my chair back with the speed of light and shout, “Get away from me!”

“Occupational hazard,” she says after describing how long she’s had the hacking cough and sore throat. She’s a daycare worker and apparently she, her co-workers and the kids have been trading germs back and forth all winter. I didn’t want to be one of her trading partners but aside from being rude, what choice did I have but to sit there imagining grimy little daycare germs flying through the air with each coughing spell?

By now you’ve probably figured out where this is going. Yes, I got sick the next week---the day before Christmas. It started with the chills and an all-over achy feeling, but I’d been outside chipping ice for two days and I thought maybe I had just gotten too much cold air down my lungs. Then my throat got sore and my voice took on a course, gravelly sound like heavy smokers get. The coughing spasms started next. If I was a kid I’d think I have whooping cough. Sometimes the spasms don’t want to stop and I think I’m going to crack a rib coughing so hard. But on the good side, I don’t have a fever and I still have enough color that I won’t get mistaken for a cast member from the Walking Dead. The house is also well stocked with tea, honey, soup and throat lozenges. The lozenges, however, are six months past their expiration date but I’m assuming that won’t kill me.

Christmas morning I got a call from my sister-in-law inviting me over for a prime rib dinner that afternoon. Had I felt like going it would have been nice to have some where to go but I had to decline. I didn’t want to be the person who says, “I should have stayed home in bed” while everyone else is pushing their chairs back trying to put distance in between themselves and my germs. So I settled in my La-Z-Boy with a bowl of mint chocolate ice cream and watched It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart and that was my Christmas.

I love that old black and white movie. But it did get me to thinking about managing our expectations. George---the hero Mr. Stewart played---had a life-long, unrequited dream of traveling the world and doing big things. But over the years he had to learn how to balance his regret and acceptance of never fulfilling his dreams. Still, he never appreciated that he actually did have a pretty wonderful life…until he was given the opportunity to see what the world would have been like if he’d never been born---how one person missing in the landscape could throw off the yin/yang balance. He saw how his saving one life led to saving many others. He saw how without his kind-hearted and moral business sense to counter-balance Mr. Potter’s Scrooge-like business practices the town would have grown into a cold, depressing and immoral place. He saw that his life was rich beyond measure in friendship and family, that he actually had done some pretty amazing things in his life.

I don’t know if it’s true for everyone in my age bracket or of just widows or just a few of us ‘well-seasoned people’ but I spend a lot of time trying to balance my regrets and acceptance of unfulfilled dreams and time trying to manage my expectations for the rest of my life. I don‘t want to set my sights too high or too low. For me, I know that widowhood brought on this discontent. When I was just living my life with Don I didn’t think about my long-ago unrequited dreams. I didn’t think about my own mortality. I just lived in the moment as much as I could because that worked for me while I was living in a world full of his disabilities where anything and everything could change in a heartbeat. We made the best of life, had happy times and lots of laughs. Now, I feel like I’m wasting time, kind of like George felt at the beginning of the movie when one thing after another got in the way of his making his Great Escape.  Sooner or later I have to quit worrying about the future and learn to live in the moment again. Like George, I have to learn to appreciate the rich life I've had and can still have. It may not have been the life I planned but it's been a good one.  ©

 “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” 

 John Lennon

One Lucky Widow

 

In my area of Michigan, they are calling this the worse ice storm in ten years. People as close as a mile away are without power. Some of my relatives counties south of here are without power. Can you image spending Christmas in an emergency shelter? If they don’t get the power restored soon, that could easily happen to a lot of people. We have 1,000 out-of-state power workers from as far away as Kansas and the District of Columbia helping us out but high winds and more snow, the weather people are saying, could take out even more power for more people on Wednesday. I’m pretty lucky considering it could be so much worse than being encapsulated in ice the way I’ve been in recent days. But I must admit the isolation that goes along with having everyone trapped inside their houses makes me feel like I’m living in an episode of Lost in Alaska---except for the fact that I have Face Book to confirm that, yes, there will be no White Knight coming to my rescue. All the White Knights riding dog sleds are iced in, too. And the entire kingdom is still without the coveted driveway salt.

The photo above is of my driveway. It took me two days but I was able to get an ice-free path down to my mailbox. Then I ran out of salt and started using oil soak-up---that’s the black stuff you see on top of the ice. Like Kitty-Litter, it gives enough traction so you can walk safer on top of the ice and I also have ice fishing cleats on the bottom of my boots. Still, it makes me nervous, given the condition of my old bones. But I resisted the temptation to shoot myself up with extra doses of Forteo for my osteoporosis before suiting up like a little kid going to a snowball fight. I paced myself. I chipped ice a half hour, went inside and knitted a half hour then I repeated those two activities over and over again from noon to dark.

The retail stores in the area are still out of salt but I got a great surprise when I opened my garage door this morning, thinking I’d do some more chipping away on my driveway ice. Overnight my driveway plower showed up and had salted! I had called him three days ago but he never returned my call so I didn’t expect him to opt me into his salting service this late in the season. It was the best Christmas present I could have gotten. I shut the garage door trusting that the salt would do its work of drilling holes down through the ice and I was feeling much better knowing if I had to leave, I could get back up my driveway when I returned.

When Don and I used to plow snow we had a salting service along with plowing and, boy, did I hate that job even though all I had to do is drive and Don was the one who had to load the 50 pound bags of salt into the spreader. We salted at a large multiplex movie theater and a shopping mall and I could never drive slow enough to suit Don. Anything over five miles an hour had him yelling, “Slow down!”  One time he fell off the tailgate of the truck and I didn’t know it until I’d made an entire pass from one end of the mall and back again where he was waiting for me in the cold. It was so icy that he couldn’t have walked if he had some place to go. I think that happened more than once but I’ll never tell.

Needless to say, I won’t be driving out to my niece’s house in the country for the family Christmas Eve party. She has a generator to keep power in the house, if needed, but my days of winter driving in bad weather conditions are over. I’m sad but okay with missing the party. I’m no longer in pity party mode because I had to miss six of the eight holiday parties/events I had lined up. Winter is winter and you have to expect the unexpected. That’s the breaks. Don’t cry over milk that is still in the carton. Yadda, yadda, yadda. There will be other social events when the weather is better and above all, I’m sitting in a nice warm house with a pretty view out my living room window. I could be fighting over sleeping space on a steam vent in a downtown alley. How on earth do street people survive this kind of weather? I am indeed one lucky widow. ©

My living room view at the back of the house.