Enchantment Under The Sea So I was talking to my daughter Claire a couple of Mondays ago and I asked her how was her weekend. She said she'd had a really good Saturday night. She and Miguel went to prom. Adult prom. What is adult prom? Just what it sounds like: a high school-style formal dance with all the prom trimmings, from the rented limo - or rather in this case, a bus - right down to the spiked punch, only minus the late-adolescent angst that is the integral ingredient of every high school prom. Claire and Miguel's adult prom was organized by their friend Josh, a young furniture maker from the Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago with a flair, nay a true gift for throwing what Claire refers to as epic parties. According to Claire, Josh's Halloween and Fourth of July parties are known among their friends as works of celebratory art, where the food, decorations, music, and every detail of hospitality make for a great time for all. Anyway, last year it occurred to Josh that it would be fun to go to prom all over again, and so he came up with the idea of putting together an adult prom. He hosted his first prom last year and it was such a hit that he organized another one this year, the one that Claire and Miguel attended. Once Josh found the perfect venue, a barn in Lockport, a suburb outside Chicago, generously lent by his good friends Joe and Andrea, preparations included pulling together a prom committee from among his friends, arranging for a bus to transport the prom-goers from the Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhoods to the prom and back again, and selling prom tickets. Then there was the job of decorating the barn to the theme which the committee had decided on: "Enchantment Under The Sea." Among the decorations were: Jelly fish, And under-wateresque lighting About 30 adults came to prom People came in couples, or stag with friends. There was streamed music for the dancing: Prom-style snacks included pizza, chips, and: Cute little oyster cookies. And, of course, spiked punch. Claire said it was a great time, just like prom but without the requisite stress that goes with being in high school. The girls arrived in their prom dresses (for which recycled bridesmaids dresses fit the bill) and corsages and the guys in suits or tuxes pinned with boutineers. As many of the attendees arrived stag, at the beginning there were girls dancing with each other out on the dance floor while the guys hung around the edge of the room. (Some things don't change, right? ) But by the end of the evening everyone was dancing with everyone. (Perhaps the punch helped?) And what would a prom be without a prom queen and her king? Alana and Zach As the photos attest, a good time was had by all.
But anyway, what about this concept of adult prom? I think I have a few thoughts on the subject, which I'll share tomorrow.
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So, according to an op-ed article by Mark Bittman in Wednesday's New York Times ("What Causes Weight Gain"), the real cause of all the weight we're all gaining these days is all the hyperprocessed food we eat. It's the copious amounts of salt, fat, and sugar that processed food is chock full of that sends the calorie-per mouthful ratio through the ceiling and packs on the poundage with every inauspicious bite we take. And sugar, in whichever of the many possible forms it could take, is the caloric kingpin of the evil trio.
Anyway, Bittman's solution to the obesity problem in this country and everywhere else is simple and the epitome of common sense: cut out processed food and sugar in all its forms and eat only real food with fruits and vegetables dominating our diet. I agree with Mr. Bittman and I think he is 100% right, as are all the rest of the thousands of nutritional voices who've been crying out some variation of the same message in the processed-food wilderness for the past 10, 20, 30, or however many years. And the message is always the same, isn't it? Eat healthy. Eat fruits and vegetables. Don't eat refined carbohydrates and sugar. Don't eat processed food. And anymore, do you know how I feel like responding whenever I hear that message? DUH. I mean, come on, for cryin' out loud, do we really need at this point to be told that we should finish our meal with an apple instead of a chocolate brownie? Eat a plate of grilled chicken with a side of raw veggies instead of a big Mac and fries? Munch on carrot sticks instead of Combos? We know it already! How could we not? But they just keep on lecturing us and lecturing us on what we already know about how we should be eating without ever addressing the big over- weight elephant in the room: Human appetite. Appetite is something that we all have, right? And ultimately we're driven to eat according to its dictates. It dicates to us to eat what it wants, and what it wants ain't healthy. I mean, take me, for example. All I ever want to drink is caffeine-free diet cola. It makes everything I eat taste good. But since all the nutritional data states that water is the healthy thing to drink, I've given up diet cola for water. Now I drink water with my meals. And my food doesn't taste as good. Eating without a diet cola not as satisfying. Some essential flavor is missing. But I'm forcing myself to drink water anyway with the goal of suppressing the will of my appetite in deference to what's good for me. And, by the way, it's not just us humans who naturally prefer the bad stuff over the good stuff. When my daughter Theresa was in college she did an experiment with rats. She set a bowl of healthy rat food in the cage where the rats could easily get to it. She also put Cheetos (which are as junky for rats as they are for us) in the cage, but to get to the Cheetos the rats had to figure out how to work a complicated(for rats) little device. Those rats knocked themselves out getting the Cheetos while they let the healthy stuff go. So here's the questions I'd like answered in the next article somebody writes on how we all need to eat healthy : 1. If appetite is an evolutionary apparatus to ensure that we take in the fuel necessary for our survival, how come it leads us to the wrong fuel? 2. Why doesn't the real food we're supposed to eat taste as good to us as the bogus food we're not supposed to eat? 3. Is somebody working on a pill that will make food that's good for us taste as good as food that's bad for us? 3. Why did God invent sugar, anyway? 4. Is this all somehow related to pain? Everybody have a great weekend! I haven't had a sip of diet soda since the night of May 7, when I made my promise to quit drinking the stuff.
So how does it feel going cold turkey on a 30-year habit? Well...Back in 1958 there was a made-for TV movie called "The Days of Wine and Roses"*, the story of a young alcoholic couple whose lives are being ruined by their drinking. As I recall, there's a scene from this movie in which the husband, who is struggling to stay sober, begs his wife to stop drinking. But for his wife it's more than that she can't stop drinking; it's that she doesn't want to because when she's not drinking the world seems like a dreary place, not the world she wants to live in. Now, I'm not at all saying that's how I feel without my caffeine-free diet coke; I'm just saying that I understand what the wife character was saying. I mean, I used to sip diet soda from one can to the next all day long, and for me those sips were like little treats, something to look forward to a few dozen times a day. Part of my routine. I was a chain-sipper. But now that I've quit I feel a little at loose ends. For the first week or so I'd go to the refrigerator and open the door looking for something to sip. On the shelf where my diet sodas used to sat now sat cans of club soda. But club soda isn't really a sippin' drink like my diet soda was. It has fizz, but not that flavorful little cola kick. Next I tried sipping grapefruit Sparkling Ice, a sugar-free carbonated mineral water/fruit juice drink infused with vitamins and anti-oxidants. But with that stuff, too, I was just going through the sipping motions without getting any real satisfaction. So I emptied the soda shelf, closed the refrigerator door stopped sipping altogether. Which is probably a good thing, since I think I needed to break the sipping habit as much as the soda habit. Unless I can get used to sipping water. Which leads me to another issue which may be the root of my whole drinking problem: I don't like water. I don't like the taste of it. Or rather, the lack of taste of it. People have offered me special brands of bottled water which they swear is so good that I'm sure to like it. I have yet to try a bottled water that tastes good to me. If I have to drink water, I'd much prefer sink water. And even that I don't especially like. But I'm drinking it. Or trying to. Drinking it with meals, Drinking it on the road. Drinking it with Combos. It still doesn't taste good. But maybe it will eventually. In the meantime I can't say that at this point I'm specifically craving diet soda. I can now look an ice-cold diet soda right in the eye and resist. Which I guess is a victory of sorts. And yet I always feel like I'm craving something, always hungry or thirsty for something, I just can't put my finger on what it is. Well, whatever it is, maybe if I drink enough water I'll drown it. 8) *This was an episode of Playhouse 90, a TV series of made-for-TV movies that aired once a week. "Days of Wine and Roses" was one of its most famous episodes, and in 1962 it was re-made into a dumbish movie with the same name and a schmaltzy theme song. The Playhouse 90 show starred Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie and was awesome. The movie starred Jack Lemon and Lee Remick and was lame. The problem is, the Playhouse 90 Cliff Robertson-Piper Laurie version is about impossible to come by. You can easily find a copy of the Jack Lemon-Lee Remick movie, bu it's not worth watching. So if you're interested in "Days of Wine and Roses" don't bother unless you can find a copy of the original 1958 TV version. When it comes to just about any subject or thing, I tend to either be obsessed by it or indifferent to it, preoccupied with it or totally uninterested in it; a thing keeps me awake at night or puts me to sleep on the spot, I'm either all over it or I don't get it at all .
I have trouble finding my footing on the middle ground. It's the same when it comes to my relationship with food. I could lick the vanilla icing off a whole birthday cake but you can have the chocolate; I can polish off a bag of gummy fish or caramels but M&M's leave me cold; I can dive into a tub of cottage cheese and not come up for air until I've cleaned out the whole tub, but the Greek yogurt, unless somebody else eats it, sits in my fridge until it's outdated. And I don't drink alcohol but for the last 30 years I had been drinking 'way too much diet cola. 'Way too much. Granted, I mostly drank the caffeine-free stuff, but I drank it all day long. Not even a can at a time, but a sip at a time. Every morning, some time between breakfast and lunch (or sometimes even before breakfast) I'd open the fridge and grab the previous night's unfinished can or else I'd crack open a new can for my first sip of the day. Then I'd return the can to the spot on the refrigerator door shelf reserved specifically for my soda cans, where it would sit for a brief spell until I needed another sip, which would be fairly soon. Then I'd open the fridge again, grab the can, take another sip, return the can, close the fridge. This protocol, the opening, sipping and closing, would continue all morning until lunch time, by which time I'd usually have polished off at least one can. Then I'd drink another can with lunch. Maybe a can and a half. I'd sip away the afternoon until it was time to leave to teach my piano lessons in my students' homes. I knew the location of every CVS along my travel route, welcome oases where I could pop in for a bottle of caffeine-free diet Coke and a bag of Combos, which I systematically sipped at and munched on all evening long between lessons. I've consumed manys the Coke-and-Combos dinners on the road. Then when I got home in the evening I'd pick up where I left off with the opening, sipping, and closing. I usually polished of three or more cans a day at home, not counting what I drank on the road or in restaurants, where I generally guzzled down two more refills of my original diet soda. My basement was always stocked with cases of caffeine-free diet cola, I didn't care what brand, the cheapest store brand would do for me. I just needed my fix. Sometimes before starting my grocery shopping I'd stop by the cooler next to the check-out counter to buy a bottle of diet soda to sip while I pushed my cart up and down the aisles. If I was invited to a friend's house for the evening I'd graciously bring along a six-pack of caffeine-free diet Pepsi which nobody but me was ever interested in. My son Tommy and my nephew Randy kept cans of caffeine-free diet Coke in their fridge for me in case I stopped over. My three daughters who live out of town always prepared for my visits by stock-piling my drink of choice. My mother-in-law who lives out of town disapproved of soda altogether so when we went for visits I brought along cans that I kept hidden in a cooler in the car so that I could keep sneaking out on some pretext or another for my sips. If I was someplace where caffeine-free diet cola wasn't available I'd settle for caffeinated. If I couldn't get either I couldn't stand it. But it was rare that I couldn't get either. Even when I spent 6 weeks hiking through the mountains of Spain last year I discovered that the 15' X 20' grocery store in the smallest village carried cold cans or bottles of "Coca-lite". So even hiking in Spain, though I couldn't sip all day long, I could always put away a can or two. Thus it went for 30 years. Did I ever consider quitting ? No. What for? What harm was it doing? I felt fine. But the truth was, I knew I couldn't quit. I was addicted. To diet soda, of all things. Or maybe I was just addicted to sipping all day long. So why, one night 5 weeks ago while sitting in a booth in a Panera across from my son Tommy did I announce to him that I was giving up diet soda? In truth, I guess, to see if I could; or to find out if my life was really so controlled by this fizzy brown, chemical-laden, artificially sweetened stuff that I couldn't live happily without it. And also because, based on some recent studies I'd read or heard, I was starting to believe that all this non-stop drinking of all that fizzy, brown, chemical-laden, artificially sweetened stuff really wasn't good for me. And I'm getting a little, you know, old, so...maybe I'd better start taking better care business? Anyway, I made a promise to myself, with Tommy as my witness, to go cold turkey on the diet soda. Tommy offered to be my sponsor, to text me regularly to cheer me on and check on how I was holding out. I could also call or text him if I felt too sorely tempted. That was Wednesday, May 7. Have I been caramel-color-free ever since? Tomorrow I'll share how it's been going down. Frankly it hasn't been all that easy. "Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways," Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. ..."Why in the world did He ever create pain?"
"Pain?" Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife pounced upon the word victoriously. "Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers." ... "Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us?" -Joseph Heller, Catch 22 As I mentioned in yesterday's blog, I've pondered Yossarian's question myself, or rather variations on the theme of his question. Really, is there anyone among us who hasn't wondered why we have to have pain? I have. I've even imagined up some painless pain alternatives. For example, what if everyone was born with an internal body-trouble alarm system that only they could hear, but could also be heard with a special stethoscope? Or what if our skin changed color over the spot where the problem was? Or what if, when our body was in trouble, instead of feeling pain we just felt a sort of vibration in the afflicted area? And you could tell how bad the situation was by the strength of the vibration. And of course by now there'd have been invented a piece of medical equipment to measure the vibration so nobody could ever accuse you of faking it or of it being all in your head. I realize that none of the above ideas is without flaw, but at least, unlike pain, none of them would hurt. Which is also why probably none of them would work. Because human beings are notoriously bad at heeding painless warnings. I mean, just think of all the warnings we have all around us: we see, read, and hear warnings everywhere, all the time, warnings about actions and behaviors that put not only our own health and safety at risk but the health and safety of the planet that sustains us. And how many of us ignore, dismiss, or bulldoze right over all these serious, ubiquitous, pain-free warnings? That's why I figure none of my painless warning systems would work on an individual basis; they wouldn't get our attention. I'm not sure even a door bell ring from God would get our attention. But on a cosmic basis, maybe God is already ringing our planet's door bell. Maybe we shouldn't ignore it. Tommy's pain meds from his hip surgery. So pain, as I understand it, is actually a messenger sent by the brain with an important communique' warning that something is wrong with some part of the body . But rather than delivering the message with skilled discretion, pain tends to announce its presence too loudly then rams the message home, sometimes even sloppily spilling the goods (or the bads - pain's message is seldom a good one) to neighboring nerve cells for whom the bad news was not intended. No diplomatic courier, pain. Nor, after running its errand for the brain, does this messenger make a quick tactful departure back to from whence it came, but rather keeps hanging around, banging out its something-is-wrong message over and over until you want to yell, "Okay, okay, I got it, just leave already!" You'll offer it an aspirin or a Tylenol or even a glass of wine or a shot of whiskey to just go away. And sometimes it will. But sometimes it won't, in which case you've got to deal not only with the problem the pain is warning you about but the pain itself, because the pain has become as bad a problem as the problem it's warning you about. Sometimes worse. Which begs the question, as asked by the character Yossarian in "Catch 22": "Why couldn't (God) have used a doorbell instead to notify us?" In truth, I've wondered about that myself. Tomorrow I'll share some thoughts I came up with on the subject. But in the meantime here on the home front Tommy has been trying to deal with the bad messenger with the help of four different pain killers (none of which are doing any actual killing; just some tolerable neutralizing), a lot of ice and exercising and, maybe the best medicine of all: An evening of board games with great friends. I guess I assumed that Tommy's 6-week recovery from his hip surgery would involve mostly resting and keeping his hip immobile so that it could heal. In other words, I was imagining 6 weeks of Netflix heaven. Au contraire. Apparently to recover from this kind of surgery you have to hit the ground exercising. Before he left the hospital Tommy was instructed that every day, starting from the day he arrived home from the hospital, he needs to: 1. Do six different exercises 10 times each, 3 times a day. 2. Stick his leg into a continuous passive motion machine that keeps bending and unbending his knee. His knee needs to be in this bending machine 4 to 6 hours a day. 3. Ice his hip 20 minutes out of every hour. 4. Practice walking around the house on his crutches whenever he's not engaged in any of the above. 5. Ditch the Netflix. The logistics of how all this activity is supposed to fit together is a bit problematic, especially trying to fit in all that bending and icing. And it was even so much more problematic that first day home when Tommy, who his whole life has been the avatar of cooperation, strove to follow his exercise instructions before he had his pain meds squared away. I took this picture and posted it on Facebook to let everyone know about Tommy's surgery. But I took it before his pain meds had kicked in, which was a mistake, as his sisters found the picture so distressing that one by one they called, upset to see him appearing to be in so much pain. I promised to post another one as soon as he was feeling better and the next day I did post the one below, which made everyone feel better. In any case, though he was following the doctor's instructions I wondered if Tommy might have overdone the physical therapy a bit that first day because that night while he was sitting on the bed we'd set up in the family room, which is his designated recovery room for the next few weeks, he noticed that his surgical wound was leaking. It had leaked through his water-proof bandage, the compression ace bandage wrapped around his leg, his shorts, the bed sheet, mattress cover, right through to the mattress where it left a blood stain about 6" by 12". I called the doctor again and talked to a resident who said not to worry, just take off the bandage then wipe around the wound with a dry sterile gauze then cover the wound with another sterile gauze and some tape and all should be well. And after that all was. Except for the mattress, which was brand new. But even the mattress story has a happy ending, and if any one happens to be interested in finding out how to totally get a semi-fresh blood stain out of a mattress then read on. Otherwise you might want to stop right here. ;) Anyway, so I went on the internet to see if there was any advice on how to salvage my mattress and, wonder of wonders - truly, is there any answer that can't be found on the internet? - there was! I found the instructions on Wikihow.com: First I blotted the stain with a wet (cold water!) paper towel then I blotted it with a dry paper towel. Then I repeated the process and kept repeating it until the stain was gone and the mattress felt dry to the touch. I spent about half an hour wet-then-dry-blotting the stain, and, tedious and time-consuming as the process was, dang, it worked! Look: This is the mattress after I finished blotting it. Can you even see where the blood stain was? (It was close to the front edge and just a little right of center). Anyway, here's the site just in case anybody ever needs it:
http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-Blood-Stains-from-a-Mattress#Blotting_Before_Stain_Removal_sub Happy weekend to all! 8) I once had the opportunity to hear Michelle Obama speak at Capital University in Columbus.
She spoke, among other things, about being a parent, and the one thing I still remember her saying is that for us parents when one of our children is in some way not well it's as if we're no longer part of the world around us because all we can do is focus on is our child. And it's only when our child is well again that we can rejoin the rest of the world. I think that must be the corollary to the axiom that you're only as happy as your saddest child. Anyway, all of the above is true, as we parents know. And just in case I hadn't already learned how true it is, I had another opportunity to learn this past Monday when my son Tommy had arthroscopic hip surgery to repair a torn labrum and fix a misshaped hip bone. As I understand it, the tear in Tommy's labrum, which is a ring of cartilage lining the hip socket, was caused by his "saddle hip", which means that the ball of his hip bone wasn't fitting correctly into the socket and the constant poking of the bad-fitting hip bone against the labrum caused it to tear, leaving him in nearly constant pain. The operation consisted of the surgeon shaving off a bit of the hip-ball part so that now it fits better into the socket and won't go poking into his labrum or anything else it shouldn't be poking into. After he fixed the hip the surgeon repaired the tear in the labrum. The surgeon said that the operation went very well, and the nurses said that the post-op recovery went very well, and so Tommy was released from the hospital the same day. But as soon as we arrived home Tommy wasn't doing very well. The pain meds he'd received in the hospital had already worn off and it took an hour to get his pain prescriptions filled at Krogers. Then I found the pill instructions confusing: take pill "A" every 4 hours and pill "B" every 6 hours and pill "C" twice a day and pill "D" once a day but not at the same time as pill"C"....so, did that mean take pill "D" between the 2 doses of pill "C" or did it mean take "C" twice one day and alternate with "D" once the next day? I called the Kroger's pharmacist for enlightenment but she didn't think Tommy should be taking pill "D" at all if he was already taking pill "C". So I gave Tommy pills "A", "B" and "D", which gave him about as much relief as three tic-tacs. Three hours after I'd given him the pills he was still in so much pain that, though I tried to comfort him, I was feeling frantic inside, transported to that place where the rest of the world was eclipsed by the world of my son's pain and my fear. I called his surgeon who assured me that the pain was normal, that first day was always the worst, and that he'd be better by tomorrow; but in the meantime I could triple his dosage of pill "A" and absolutely do have him take both pills "C" and "D". So we tripled pill "A", threw in pill "C" and, miraculously, the pain finally started to retreat, to the great relief of us both. That first night home was still a fairly rough one - for Tommy and by extension for me; but that first, worst, night is now, thankfully, in the past; the next two days and nights have been better. Tommy's recovery period is 6 weeks so I guess it will be that long before I fully return to the world. But I'm two days closer than I was . Tomorrow: Hard-Core PT ASAP I've never been hungry or in want of anything, I have a family, a home, a car I can drive anywhere I feel like going, I have a piano, a laptop, a cat, good healthcare, and probably a hundred times more stuff and reasons than I really need to make a human being happy on this planet, and all of the above isn't even the tip of the iceberg of blessings I should be counting every minute. But none of that was any consolation last Thursday when I acquired an awful haircut. I mean, it was just awful! I walked into the same no-appointment-necessary chain hair chain salon that I always go to and this is how I looked when I walked out: I'm not kidding you. This is the only way it would lay. And look at the side: shaved straight across with a shadowy little side-burn. Who the heck cuts a woman's hair straight across with a sideburn?! By the time the stylist had finished I knew I'd been hit with a bad haircut, but I didn't realize how bad until I got into my car, glanced into the rear view mirror and saw the triangular side burn below each ear. I came down with an immediate and severe case of the Bad Haircut Blues. I needed to go to the grocery store but was too embarrassed about my hair so I didn't go. I had to pep-talk myself into leaving my house to teach the one more piano student I had that day. The next morning I woke up hoping my hair would look better but it didn't. Those sideburns were still there. I returned to the hair salon, to what end I couldn't really say except that I was upset and wanted somebody to know it. When I pointed out to the stylist the shaved side burns she'd inflicted on me she looked wounded. "But you asked me to cut your hair that way, remember?" "I did ?" I asked. "Yeah. When I asked you whether you wanted me to leave your sides at the natural angle they grow at or cut them across in a straight line above your ear you said 'straight line', remember?" In fact that was not how I recalled the conversation going down. I did recall her asking me at some point the cryptic question "Do you want the sides straight or curved?" To which I replied, "Um, I don't know...straight?", thinking straight as in straight down and curved as in somehow curved out. Then I went back to the newspaper I had my nose buried while she finished cutting my hair. Anyway, the young stylist seemed truly sorry that I didn't like what I'd asked for and offered to shave off the little hairs growing to a point below each ear, but I declined and returned home in a heavy funk. What is it about the appearance of our hair that can weigh so heavy upon us? I tried talking myself out of my bad hair funk, telling my self it didn't look that bad, that the shaved sections would grow back, reminding myself of what a cushy existence I have and that with all the suffering in the world I should be ashamed of myself, not to mention that at 62 I was 'way too old to be funking over my hair. And though everything I was telling myself was true I still couldn't stop funking. Until, like the snapping on of a light bulb to disperse the darkness in my soul (oooo, forgive that fruity metaphor!) , I remembered Jerry's. Any of you who read my Camino blog about Tom's and my 490-mile trek across the mountains of Spain last year ( "Tighten Your Boots", is that blog's name, or it can be found at pattiliszkay.weebly.com in case anybody's interested) might remember my post on Jerry's, the barber shop I went to for a short, short guy-cut before my trip: And the guy-cut I got there: Anyway, what this light in my brain made me see was that it was time to return to Jerry's for another guy-cut. I knew nothing that nothing but time could bring back the shaved-off parts of my hair, but I hoped another really short guy-cut might at least camoflage the situation a little bit. Now, the last time I went to Jerry's I learned that Jerry was actually a pretty blonde lady named Jenny, the barber/stylist who gave me my original guy-cut. But this time Jenny was busy with another customer and the only available barber was a big, friendly muscular guy in a cut-off tee-shirt named Kurt whose arms were in covered in tattoos. Kurt said he felt too nervous to cut my hair because he was only a barber, not a barber/stylist like Jenny and he'd never cut a woman's hair before except his grandma's, and hers only one time. I told him not to be nervous, to just pretend that I was a guy and do his stuff. When I showed him my sideburns he said, "Ewww, you can't cut a woman's hair like that. Women's hair grows differently on the side than men's". Ewww, indeed. For somebody who'd only cut his grandma's hair once, Kurt definitely had a clue about women's hair. I told him that no matter what how he cut my hair it couldn't end up any worse than it was. I told him that if he just could just camoflage the shaved sides a little I'd be very grateful. He did and I was. So grateful was I, in fact, that I left a $10 tip on the $13 haircut. For which Kurt was grateful.
So the story ended up with much gratitude, which is a good way for any story to end, right? One of Romaine's Aunt Mary quotes reminded me of the story from whence it originated, one of my aunt Mary stories. About 16 years ago I was visiting my parents and Aunt Mary in Seaford. At that time my father was an invalid, mostly moving only from his bed to his chair in the living room, and even to do that he needed my mother's help. At that time my father never wanted anyone but my mother caring for him or doing for him, and so she did, day and night. But she also still had my Aunt Mary to care for, and sometimes there was a bit of a rivalry between my father and my Aunt for my mother's attention. Every night my mother and my Aunt Mary used sit and say prayers together in a little sitting corner near the fireplace at the end of the dining room. They'd sit on either side of the lamp, one of them in the chair where Tom is sitting and one in the other chair. They'd say a few rosaries and then they would recite a few more prayers. It was usually a peaceful time for my mother at the end of each hectic, tiring day.
But one night during my visit in the middle of Mom and Aunt Mary's prayers my father started calling in the insistent way that he sometimes would when he was particulary anxious: "Ro-maine! Ro-maine! RO-MAINE!" So my mother stopped the prayers and hurried off to him, leaving my Aunt Mary sitting by herself holding onto her rosary. Mary waited patiently for as long as she could, but when she couldn't wait any longer she started calling to my mother in her anxious, insistent way, her rosary still clutched in her hand: "Ro-may-nee! Ro-may-nee! RO-MAY-NEE!" There was nothing I could do to calm her down, she wanted my mother. "What's wrong, Mary?!" my mother called, hurrying back from my father. At the very end of her rope, Mary cried, "If you'd stop f***ing around and sh*tting around we could finish our prayers!" I believe that for Aunt Mary nothing was sacred. And at the same time everything was. |
"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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April 2024
I am a traveler just visiting this planet and reporting various and sundry observations,
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