Taxes, Shoes and Marigold Movies

I’ve been going to the same CPA to get my income taxes done for decades. I trust him and so I was glad when he got married late in life and had a bunch of kids who are now approaching their college years, keeping him from retiring. With any luck he’ll be in the work force until after I die. The drive through town to get to his office takes from twenty minutes to an hour depending on traffic tie-ups, construction and accidents. It was a twenty minute trip this week and for that I found out I’m getting a large refund. As soon as it comes I’m making another trip through town to the Apple store where I’m buying myself an Apple Air IPad. I’ve been fighting the urge to get one for a long time. I mean how tech connected does a woman my age need to be? I have a great, desk top computer with a fabulously big screen and ergonomic keyboard, a laptop with a light-up keyboard, Wi-Fi, a Kindle, an IPod, three cable TVs with remotes so cantankerous I swear they’re possessed by demons and I’ve got a smart phone which I might as well call a texting machine because that’s about all I do with it. 

The last time the furnace man came to the house to clean it, he tried to talk me into getting a programmable thermostat and I said, “No way! I’m already in tech overload.” If I screw up a TV remote it’s just an oh-well inconvenience, if I screw up a thermostat it’s a hand-wringing service call because it would happen in the dead of winter. When the time changed recently I had to reset digital clocks in devices until the cows came home and there are still two I can’t do---the one on my electric tooth brush and in my CD player. I refuse to spend a half day trying to figure them out because the set up buttons are so tiny a stalk-eyed fly would have trouble seeing them.These Asian flies, by the way, have incredible eyesight and their eyes are at the ends of long antennas. And from the department of Useless Trivial is the fact that the male with the longest antennas always win when two of them go-face-to-face to gain the rights to mate with a girl stalk-eyed fly. I guess males throughout the kingdom of living things are all obsessed with measuring the size of their external equipment. Wow, how did my stream of conscience take me from my CPA to stalk-eyed flies?

After the tax appointment I had another appointment at the shoe store. Yes, you read that right. This shoe store is a specialty place where you go if you need great support for problem feet. I’d never been there before but all the foot doctors in town highly recommend the place. When I got there I had to fill out a history of my feet issues and they took measurements of things that had never been measured before plus I got a lesson on foot anatomy with the help of a moving model of foot bones. That was interesting. It showed how shoe pressure in the wrong place can make your foot hurt and in the right fit can relieve pain. A half hour later I walked out of the store with a new pair of walking shoes, a pair of sandals---sandals with so much support I literally ran around the store!---and on order is a pair of gun-metal grey Mary Jane’s that are made in Israel. I’ve never paid so much for shoes in my life---$168.00 for the Mary Jane’s---but I was way over due for dress shoes I can wear to weddings and funerals that don’t come with three days of pain after wearing them. This is huge because now I can wear skirts and dresses again which I’ve shied away from buying for decades.

Also this week: With my Movie and Lunch Club (which is sponsored through the senior hall) I saw The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I knew the committee would pick that one because of the large assemble of elderly actors and actresses in the cast. It was an okay movie to me, but not anything I’d recommend. It didn’t seem like a stand-alone film to me and of those in our group who had seen the first Marigold movie, they said the first one was better. Even so, I was the odd man out; most of the fifteen ladies loved it. I agree with the movie reviewer from IBNLive who wrote, the film is, "warm and fuzzy…but also over-plotted and occasionally contrived.” And don’t get me started on the romance between Richard Gere’s charming character and a sour-ass woman. Gag me with a spoon then stand back so I don’t vomit on your shoes. But no movie is a waste of my time if I come away with a few great lines to savor, and I did. 1) About being terminally: “There’s no such thing as an ending, just a place where you leave the story;” and 2) about being afraid of taking the offer of love before you: “Sometimes it seems the difference between what we want and what we fear is the width of an eyelash.” ©

Stalk-Eyed Fly

Time for Fun and a Reality Check

 

St. Patrick’s Day came and went with the usual stories on the local news---green beer at the bars, green cakes in the bakeries, the churches that were servicing up corn beef and cabbage dinners at their fund-raisers. Yadda, yadda yadda. My husband got practically giddy on St. Patrick’s Day. He loved his Irish heritage and it’s funny that I didn’t even know that I’m one quarter Irish until this past winter when I did my genealogy. All those years when he’d haul out his green t-shirt with the “proud to be Irish” logo on it, I could have worn a matching one. Well, at least I could have had green underwear or something to pay homage to those Irish genes that reside alongside my Italian (1/2) and English (1/4) roots. 

The senior hall had their St. Patrick’s Day luncheon this week and you know me, I had to go. It’s such cheap entertainment. Six dollars for dinner, a floor show and people watching 109 souls all wearing green plastic beads and sporting green tongues from eating the contents of the candy cups that lined the tables. If you had the luck of the Irish at your back---which I didn’t on Tuesday---you could even win of one of the fifteen loaves of Irish soda bread they handed out for door prizes.

The floor show was comprised of a fiddle player and a singer/guitar player who did all Irish, Celtic and Gaelic music. If you can picture a big guy with a silly grin and salt and pepper hair that reached to the middle of his back, the top layer of which was tied back into a low ponytail, that was the singer. He also had a long mustache, twinkling dark eyes, a peg leg and he wore a traditional, eight yard tartan kilt and horsehair Gaelic sporran. When the senior hall director introduced the guy in the kilt she said she wanted to talk to his wife because he needed some lessons on how to bend over while wearing a dress. He did it while setting up his equipment and he exposed his whole backside. What fun we had! Mr. Kilt Wearer would stop often in the middle of a song to explain the ancient lyrics or define what certain Gaelic words meant. The two of them got everyone clapping or singing a few times and more than once they’d stop mid-song and back it up because they liked a particular verse (or screwed it up) and “wanted to sing it again.” Crazy, silly stuff like that kept us all laughing. I was lucky enough to find a seat surrounded by six ladies who I know well enough to carry on easy conversations with and that was the frosting on my afternoon cake.

I did find one disagreeable woman at my luncheon table. She’s known for knitting her way through every event she attends at the senior hall which, Tuesday, sparked a conversation about knitting and crocheting projects several of us had worked on over the winter. I made the comment that I’ve tried many times over my life to learn how to crochet and I just can’t do it and I blamed it on being left-handed. She’s says, “That’s a royal crock of bull! I’m left-handed and I learned how to do it.” I responded, “I even took a class last year and it didn’t stick any longer than it did when I was a teenager trying to learn from my mother.” “Bull!” she says again, “you’re not trying hard enough.” I didn’t want to get into a fight with a total stranger so I didn’t get snippy back at Ms. Disagreeable and I’m glad I didn’t. As the afternoon progressed I realized that she didn’t have a good thing to say about anything, including the very entertaining singer and his side-kick fiddle player. I hope I never grow up to be like her. Does she ever listen to herself, ever see herself in the mirror? Of course, not. She’s too busy knitting to see herself through the eyes of those around her.

Change of Topic---well, sort of: My niece came back north from spending the winter in Florida and we had a long conversation on the phone in which I told her I’d be very proud to call her and his sister my daughters. They’ve both turned into such great women, raised good kids and are such a pleasure to be around. She said, “Then we’ll have to come up with a new term like niece-daughters.” It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as sister-wife but I love the idea. I have the young friend I call the-son-I-wish-had so I’m going to start introducing my nieces this way: “This is my niece, the daughter I wish I had.” After talking with my oldest niece I texted my other niece and informed her of her new title and she texted back, “Very cool!” I love my family and I just wanted to give them as much space in this post as I gave to Ms. Disagreeable. But I still wish someone or something would give Ms. Disagreeable a reality check that would penetrate her narrow mind with this message: Cheerful, loving people trump the disagreeable naysayers of the world and they always will. Nana nana nana. ©

We're Born and Then we Die---What's the in Between all About?

A good friend of my niece’s just passed away this week while on a trip to Hawaii. He was only 65. I knew him slightly back when he was a college student working part-time at a large wholesale/retail flower shop and greenhouse where, at the time, I was working full time. But over the years I’d read and heard a lot about him as his career path took him from being a fourth grade teacher to a district reading coordinator to the principal of the elementary school where he and my niece both recently retired from. He was also active in the Michigan Elementary Principals Association but the kids at his school, perhaps, will best remember him as Zero the Hero, a red tights and swim goggles wearing guy who was passionate about getting each and every child in his school fired up about reading. It’s hard to lose a good friend. I could be wrong but I think this is the first time my niece is experiencing that unwelcome life experience. He was the best man at her wedding, a golf buddy to her husband, a fellow member of their long-standing poker club and far more than just her principal.

Other than my husband, I can’t even say that I’ve experiencing losing a close friend and especially to something as unexpected as a lethal heart attack. Before Don died, I had occasionally wondered who would be the first in my circle of friends to die and I even recall thinking after he passed that I didn’t need to wonder anymore. It was Don. He was my first friend to die. We are acclimated to losing older members of our families and can console ourselves that the person who died lived a long life filled with many blessings or joys. Widows in my age bracket can even console ourselves by saying the same thing about our spouses. With a person like Zero the Hero I know many will be consoled by his life-long history of giving his all to his passion projects. At his retirement party Zero the Hero said of his school, "I feel like I've taken more than I've given with this job. You just can't have a down day here. There's just too much positive energy all the time." But from what I hear tell, he wasn’t giving himself enough credit for having created and maintained that positive energy for so many years.

When someone we respect dies and the dust settles, even someone we mostly knew through someone else or through the media we can’t help looking at our own lives and taking stock of what we’re contributing to the world. Have we fulfilled our legacy, made our tiny piece of the world a better place? Have we accomplished enough things on our Bucket Lists? Have we had enough fun, given enough, loved enough? And I keep coming back to the sentiments expressed by Burt Bacharach’s song: “What's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live? What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?” Theologians have been working on that for centuries and think they have all the answers, and perhaps they do. We grow up learning about good versus evil, free will, the concept of God, the soul and the afterlife. And we like to think we are a part of something bigger than just waking up every morning to a new day, a new start. What is that something bigger than ourselves? A minister once told me: “The secret is there is no secret. Life is about love. You can interchange the word ‘love’ for ‘God’ and ‘God for ‘love’ and that’s all there is to it. We are here to love one another.” If that's true, then people like Zero the Hero left this world full-filling his mission. He was loved deeply and he loved deeply. 

I can’t image what it’s like growing up not knowing love. As a widow and a person who lost both my parents I still struggle with feeling like there is no one left on earth who loves me. Intellectually, I know that isn’t true but in my heart I miss hearing the words. I have one niece-in-law who never misses saying it at the end of a visit or phone call but that’s all. I have friends who have a pact with their spouses to say “I love you” at the end of every phone call. Something about wanting that to be the last words the other hears if one should die while they’re apart. It seems strange, sometimes, to hear one side of a phone call where heated or tense words are being exchanged but they still end their call with, “I love you.” But then again, maybe that’s exactly the right time to say it. I’ve read a few widow blogs where the writers were racked with guilt because they’d been fighting just before their spouses passed away and they wish they'd gotten the chance to say, "I love you." I got to say that to Don a few minutes before he died and to hear him say back, “love” which was the very best his aphasic brain could do and that was enough. I hope Zero the Hero’s family also got to hear the three most important words in the English language. Note to anyone still reading this, please say them today to someone you love. ©