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Today I received an email from an out-of-town friend whom I'd visited last weekend.
 (Sigh) Yes, I replied, that's my watch. I had noticed that this watch seemed to be missing, but I didn't look very hard for it or, in truth, give it more than a fleeting thought. I figured it was to be just another the many watches I've left behind along life's path. Watches, earrings, sunglasses, gloves, library books, all eventually go the way of all things; however any of the above objects that fall into my possession will for sure go that way a whole lot quicker. Alas, The Biggest Loser is me. But of all loseable objects, I have a special propensity for losing watches. I suppose this is because, unlike many of my fellow 21st Century humans whose phones now serve as their timepieces, I have a special propensity for wearing a watch. But I also have a special propensity for removing my watch often and setting it down on the nearest available surface. I think this trajectory of wear a watch, remove a watch, lose a watch comes, in my case, from being a piano teacher. For me a watch is a work necessity,
 ...each lesson running for half an hour, more or less - well, never less, though often more, and if I didn't have a watch I'd never know when to stop the lesson. But just as my students are required before their lesson begins to remove their watches, fit-bits, twisties, Livestrong bands, rubber bands, yarn bracelets, hemp bracelets, friendship bracelets, or any of the other myriad possibilities of things that youngsters can show up for a piano lesson having wrapped, snapped, or tied around their wrists, the principle being that playing the piano is difficult enough without having something possibly weighing on, constricting, obstructing, or otherwise bothering your wrist,  ...I, too, remove my watch at the beginning of each lesson and set it on the piano. In fact, removing my watch before playing the piano is so automatic for me that I do it reflexively, without thinking. Sadly, putting my watch back on afterwards is not so reflexive; subsequently I'm always leaving watches on pianos, as I did at my friend's house last weekend. It so happens that my friend's husband plays several stringed instruments, and so I joked that he should pull out his fiddle and we could have a hoe-down in the living room. I then hopped over to their piano and played a few bars of boom-chucka, boom-chucka to accompany myself while I sang the melody of "Boil Them Cabbages Down." I was totally unconscious of having taken off my watch, and yet my friend had the pic, so it did, indeed, happen. Anyway, I emailed my friend back that she didn't need to worry about the watch I'd left behind, that I'm always leaving watches on pianos and losing them, that I keep a stash of cheap Walmart watches at home,
 ...and a couple more in my purse. I told my friend she could keep my watch if she wanted or toss it into her purse for an emergency watch in case she lost hers. But then my friend probably doesn't lose watches like I do. (Sigh) Nobody loses watches like I do. *The turquoise-banded watch is not a Walmart watch, my sister Romaine made it for me.  I'm trying really hard not to lose it.
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 ...in which Marshall, a tough, brilliant young lawyer for the newly-formed NAACP in the 1940's fought to defend a black chauffeur who was accused of raping the wealthy white woman who employed him.  And though this gripping, stranger-than-fiction true story of the victory of truth and justice over racial discrimination, bigotry and fear should have left one feeling uplifted, in truth I left the theater feeling rather glum. I felt glum because the movie showed events that took place at a point in history when the American Civil Rights Movement was just over the horizon; and because the great moments of that movement,  ...the courage,   ...the heroism,  ...the suffering,   ...the hope,  ...the solidarity,   ...and the battles won for equal rights under the law,   ...are now behind us. And now, seventy years after Thurgood Marshall fought for the rights of the oppressed and the victimized, the fight has changed and the meaning of civil rights has flipped. In 2017 the civil rights movement in America is white supremacist racist groups who've united under a hip-sounding name and cool-looking symbol, 
 ...Milo Yiannopoulos 
 ...fighting for their right to publicly spew hatred and minority oppression on college campuses and any other public forum they can get their mouths on - and actually being taken seriously instead of being banished by the dictates of public morality and outrage to back under the rocks from beneath which they've slithered out into the open since the ascendancy of:
...and his band of hyper-entitled bigots.
 In 2017 demonstrators rallied in Charlottesville.  Now right-wing Christian groups cry out that they're suffering religious discrimination when people they don't approve of are allowed the same privileges and respect as they have, because giving people they don't approve of the right to do things they don't approve of is against their religion. Now people need only invoke the name of God or Jesus to spin their intolerance and bigotry into righteousness and paint themselves as the offended or oppressed. And it's amazing how little people in this country actually care about the welfare of America's war veterans, except to use them as a verbal tool to bludgeon those who are making a plea for civil rights.  What tribal fools we mortals be.
Please, somebody tell me something good. |
"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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January 2025
I am a traveler just visiting this planet and reporting various and sundry observations,
hopefully of interest to my fellow travelers. Categories |
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