The Potpourri Post

Used as a noun, potpourri is usually thought of as a mixture of dried flower pedals and spices kept in a jar or mesh bag for their fragrance. But a potpourri can also be a collection of miscellaneous objects or subjects, even a musical medley. To the best of my knowledge no one has a computer that can dispense or detect smells so the potpourri in my title is obviously not the pedals and spices type. So what’s a potpourri post? I’m glad you asked. It’s a post with no central topic, just a collection of unrelated things to dump into cyberspace because that’s the way my brain is rolling today---nothing focused, nothing over-developed to the point of ad nauseam. 

I’ll start by finishing a train of thought I mentioned in my last post regarding the new “digitally enhanced bank” in my neighborhood that is replacing a full service branch. I still can’t get past the fact that a BANK will no longer deal with cash. The powers that be really do want us all to quit using the green folding stuff. There’s even a few places in town that refuse cash as payment to eat there. I can play tit-for-tat with the best of them so I refuse to go to those restaurants. However, I will admit that I’m in the minority. Between my Lunch and Movie Club, the Mad Hatters and the Gathering Girls, I go out with a lot of women for lunches and I’m guessing two-thirds of them use a credit card. I’ve turned into a fuddy-duddy haven’t I, who refuses to hop on the train of progress.

Next item in my potpourri: I learned how to do something new and exciting this week that has made a huge difference in my life. I changed the settings on my mouse pointer so that it’s a bigger, slower arrow and it’s a solid black over white pages that changes to a contrasting color if it passes over anything dark. Google can teach you how to do anything. I also learned not to pick up what looks like a chocolate sprinkle from a Nestle’s Lil’ Drums Drumstick and put it in your mouth. When I did that this week it turned out to be a ball of ink that must have come off the end of a ballpoint pen. It instantly turned my entire mouth and fingers black. Thankfully, it came off my tongue with toothpaste and a lot of scrubbing. That should teach me not to eat while working at my desk where crumbs are too inviting. The next day I had a bi-annual appointment with my internist and it would have been hard to explain why I ate an ink ball.

For spices in my potpourri I’ve been watching the parade of nightly town halls on CNN featuring the Democratic presidential candidates running for president. I’m fearful of the process of paring that long list down to the viable people who can actually win AND do a good job of bringing dignity and brain-power back to the White House. So far I’m putting my money on---in no particular order---Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro and Beto O’Rourke. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden make me nervous because they’ve been in public life so long they’ll be spending all their time on the campaign trail defending past decisions in a political climate where those decisions are judged by today’s standards and not the standards of the past. Like Warren, for example, before DNA testing was the thing to do, who didn’t just accept the oral family history that was passed down by our parents and grandparents? No one, that's who.

Every potpourri needs a recipe---well, I would assume so. I’ve never made potpourri except for this ‘Potpourri Post’ which more accurately should have been named ‘Six Topics, One Post’ but I’ve never been good at naming any of my creative endeavors except for maybe “Toe Joe.” Who Toe Joe? He’s a clay sculpture I made back in college that’s had a place of honor in my house ever since. He inspects his toe while cursing his creator for making him so fat. 

I write these posts twice a week faithfully to exercise my dyslexic brain although it wasn’t always true when I first stated blogging back near the turn of the century. Back then I fancied myself as having some useful advice and humor to share with caregivers, and then after Don died I was sharing antidotes to make myself and other widows feel less alone in our plight to feel whole again. Now, I would say that isn’t entirely possible for many of us, but a shirttail relative disagrees. After a long and reportedly happy marriage she’s jumping back into the marriage sack and it only took her two years of bemoaning the lonely state of her life to find another guy. Oh, and he happens to live right next door and she's giving her house to her retired kids. Something must be wrong with me because living with Toe Joe and Levi the Mighty Schnauzer is all the testosterone I’m interested in blending with my hormones. ©

NOTE: Yup, that's Toe Joe in the photo above.

Changing Rules at the DMV

I usually renew my driver’s license by mail which I did this year as well but you can’t renew a handicap parking permit by mail for some obscure reason known only to those who work for the Department of Motor Vehicles who have screws loose in their heads. People who need handicap parking hangtags aren’t known for their physical endurance and ability to be packed inside a sardine can with a hundred plus people or for waiting in line for a ticket to enter their precious room full of hard plastic chairs, then sit for another hour or two for them to get called up to the counter. I don’t use my handicap parking tag often but when I need it, I need it so I have to play by their rules.

Last week I made my first attempt to go to the DMV. I got a couple of blocks from home when I realized I’d left my cell phone at home on the charger. What should I do? The side of my brain that wants to live dangerous had a debate with the sensible side. She said: I’ve lived better than half my life without a cell phone attached to my body. What’s one more day? I didn’t listen to what the sensible side mumbled back about random flat tires and traffic accidents. I grabbed “danger” by the throat and kept my car headed toward the DMV. 

When I got there, I looked for the red sign on the wall that tells what number they called last but I couldn’t find it. I found out why when I was herded by a bank of computers where we were supposed to register. Great. I’m computer literate. I can do this, I thought. Wrong. It wanted to know your cell phone number so they can send you a text when it’s time for you to get called up to the desk to do your business. That explained the missing red sign on the wall. No cell phone, no way to advance forward. There are so many things wrong with that but it’s enough to say that I had to tuck my tail between my legs and pick my way out of the building. I felt like an antique person with a flip phone...not that there's anything wrong with that.

My second attempt to go to the DMV was on Monday morning. I figured I’d start early in the week, giving me plenty of days to get it right. I had my cell phone handy, I’d even written its number on a slip of paper because, truly, how many people have their own number memorized? I can repeat every landline number I’ve had in my entire life---which isn’t that hard to do considering there’s only been two---but all I remember about my cell number is it contains the numbers of a popular interstate highway. But this time I headed out of town to drive to a DMV twelve minutes northwest, in the middle of apple orchard country where those who work at the DMV likely all speak Spanish as well as English. I checked the computer to make sure the branch hadn’t been closed and I lucked out. 

Speaking of closing up branches, my bank is switching over to one of those “digitally enhanced branches.” Which means they will no longer cash checks or allow you to withdraw or deposit cash. So what the hell are they going to do because they aren’t closing the place? There is still a full service bank in the town where I drove to get my handicap parking permit renewed. But I’m not going to drive unplowed country roads in the winter to get there nor in the fall when migrant workers explode the population of this speck of a town in the middle of nowhere. Growing up, no one would let their wives or daughters go there in the fall for fear they’d be raped at knife point. It’s utterly ridiculous to harbor a race-based fear for so many years but isn’t that what drives all stereotypes that are the root cause of systemic racism? One woman back in the early ‘50s had that experience and a whole group of innocent people were besmirched as a result. Afterward, white high school boys would go up there on a Saturday night looking for trouble and if they found it, guess which group got a slap on the hand while the others went to the county lock up. Jeez, did I get off topic.

Anyway, when I walked into the Rural Town DMV I took a paper ticket from a machine like you do at the meat counter at the grocery store and waited for my number to show up on the red sign. There were only 35 people ahead of me. I was in and out in a flash and while I was there I learned all about how the guy across from me left his short fuse at the restaurant he’d just left, and I learned if you ask an 18 month old girl to tell you what her grandpa’s tractor sounds like she’ll blow bubbles and make adorable sound-effects while putting the "tractor" through gears I’m pretty sure it doesn’t even have. She had our whole row laughing. Conversations like that wouldn’t happened at my local DMV where everyone is staring at their cell phones. At the counter I also learned that the state is talking about changing the rules and letting us renew handicapped parking permits online. Hooray! ©

Leaving Time...or is it Time to Leave?

Have you read Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult? I probably shouldn’t be discussing the book in public on the chance that someone reading this has it sitting in their to-read stack. But I can’t help it. I just finished it last night and book club is a week away and I want to sort out my reactions to it. I read a few reviews this morning to see how they handled the plot twist in the last forth of the book and none of them gave away the fact that---spoiler alert!---the characters you think are alive are actually ghosts and the character/s you think are dead are not. For most of the book you think you’re reading an interesting mystery of sorts about a 13 year old girl who wants to find out why her mother ran off ten years ago and she gets a down-and-out private detective and a has-been TV psychic to help her.

The story line of the book takes place mostly at an elephant sanctuary and the mother was a researcher studying the grieving habits of elephants. I love elephants. I mean I REALLY love them! I have an elephant bell sitting four feet away from me as I type. I follow the Elephant Listening Project on Facebook. I donate to elephant causes so I was racing through this book like it was on fire. All the main characters were extremely interesting…until the big reveal and then I felt let down, disappointed. Cheated. I wanted a happy ending, not one that opens up a bigger can of worms to sort out. Jodi Picoult is a good writer and her research about the elephants was spot on and, sure, the mystery got solved by the end of the book. BUT I don’t believe in ghosts. At least 95% of me doesn’t believe in ghosts. Jodi via way of the psychic character had some interesting things to say about our after-lives for lack of a better way to describe the supposed spirits milling around our space after leaving our time.

After closing the book last night I said out loud, “Okay, Don, if you’re a ghost you’d better come by and haunt me tonight.” And he did! It wasn’t a pleasant dream that made me wake up smiling and trying to hold on to that haziness as long as possible. Nope. I woke up in a panic. I’d been running from an elephant chasing me and Don was on a motorcycle behind the elephant driving him to me. I remember my dreams often enough that I have the dream dictionary bookmarked on my computer and this is what I found: “Dreaming of an elephant coming towards you at an unstoppable speed means that you are going to face a situation that you cannot control. You have to let things be and wish that it will all work out in the end.” I’m guessing the “situation I can’t control” is the fact that I’m going to die one day and I’m really not in the mood to go any time soon. And I don’t even want to guess why I dreamed that Don was herding the elephant in my direction. 

Change of topic: The next morning I loaded up the back of my Chevy Trax with things left over from my recent redecorating project. I had so much stuff the back bumper was dragging on the ground. A slight exaggeration, but it was a big load that included eight sets of sheets for twin beds. I had sets in red, black, and gray---prints, solids, flannel and jersey. I didn’t even know I had so many sets stuck on the top shelf of my closet. I also took a whole trash bag full of towels sets in the same colors and two boxes full of stuff I knew if I didn’t get them out of the house right away, I’d be tempted to keep them in the garage until they grew roots. I set aside all the framed photographs I had in my bedroom with plans to hang them on the pegboard wall in the garage where my husband’s collection of gas station memorabilia was displayed. Why not? These are my people. I’ll see them more often in the garage than I will if I un-frame them and put the photos in albums.

After dropping off my loot at Goodwill I headed north five miles to the tourist town where my husband grew up and my Mad Hatters Society sisters meet the first Wednesday of every month. But I was a half hour early so I back-tracked a couple of blocks to make an early visit at the cemetery---I usually don't go until May. I had dug the sod out around Don’s tombstone last fall and I was surprised to see the ‘ditch’ filled up with pine cones and pine needles still attached to small branches. Holy crap, that pine sap is sticky! I’d forgotten about that. It was a common childhood curse at the cottage where we kids played cowboys and Indians in the woods behind the lake. Back then, mom used gasoline to get pine pitch off our skin and out of our hair. I wasn’t about to try to get some gas out of my Chevy Trax so I tried the only liquid I had in the car besides water---Windex. To my shock, it took the pine sap off my fingers.

When I left the cemetery I told my husband---just in case he does happen to be a ghost and was hanging around---that I’m not speaking to him until he apologizes for trying to get me trampled by an elephant which, by the way, is how someone in the Leaving Time book died. But for a while, you're really not sure which character it was who got her head crushed under the elephant's foot. ©