Honest Scrap – Trust Me

Amurin over at Stop & Wander tagged me with an Honest Scrap award. I am honored. Of course, maybe I fooled her. Maybe I am really a deranged young man living in a cabin in the north woods, accumulating fertilizer and poetry, and bumping into Bigfoot every once in a while. Ah well. Here goes.

When you get the Honest Scrap award for your honest crap, you are meant to grace your readers with 10 honest things about yourself, and then pass on the award to other blog friends who write honestly and truly about themselves and events in their life.

At this point the blank white screen is imprinting itself on my brain, but I’ll try.

1. In my family honesty was the Holy Grail. Lies were not permitted and the word “liar” hurled at anyone or even spoken quietly evoked a stern look or smack. There was nothing worse you could say of a person.
2. It is unbelievably freeing to no longer be a sex symbol.  Just a hint to the C.I.A.: In my invisible woman phase I could be unfailingly helpful to you. Just sayin.
3. I’m not a one-friend person, always ran in groups (not cliques, we weren’t that important) in school.
4. When a child, I hoarded all my nickels and pennies and counted them over and over, loving the sound of them flowing back and forth from one hand to the other. I still try to keep most in my hands.
5. In school avoided reading and science. As an adult read constantly and am fascinated by science. What happened to “as the twig is bent, so grows the tree?”
6. My grands are the most amazing four people on the planet, followed closely by their parents plus two, my daughter and her husband.
7. I can live without a lot of things, but not cats. (Well maybe this one blocking the computer screen.)
8. I love, love, love guns. So shoot me.
9. My motto is: Old is not a four-letter word. Senior is what I was in high school.
10. But I refuse to wear “granny panties.” If bikinis were good enough for my pregnant body, they are good enough now.

Now watch out! I’m getting ready to tag someone, and it’s: Corina @Wasted Days and Wasted Nights, C\hele, OmbudsBen, & anyone else who would like to join in.

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The Triaged Life

You know what they say happens when you are over the hill? You pick up speed, of course. Darned if it isn’t true and I think I may know why, at least in my case. Older people tend to cast off things that are no longer useful (my mother almost stripped her house) and eliminate activities and associations that no longer give them pleasure. Perhaps the feeling is that life’s fuse is burning shorter and we don’t have a minute to squander on non-rewarding things. I’ll leave that to psychologists. I just held a microscope over my own changes and found them interesting. Here are some of the things I now do.

• Choose microwave over crock pot (all that planning, you know)
• No longer compare purchases strolling store to store, but on Internet
• Encourage e-mails instead of time wasting phone calls (anti-social, I know)
• During commercials, play show recorded earlier on TV and get two in very little more time
• Skim newspaper articles instead of reading every little thing. I’ve seen most on Internet anyway.
• Crave news instantly from Twitter, treating “refresh” like a one-armed bandit in the casino when things are really breaking.
• Revel in flash fiction and haiku (reading and creating)
• Love challenge of squeezing my thoughts into 140 characters on Twitter, making every word count.

For what do I squirrel away all this time, you might be thinking. Family, friends, good books (or slutty books, if I like), working on my house and first garden, exercising, keeping an eye on government, doing photography, matching wits with my cats, any darn thing I enjoy – and nothing I don’t.

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Rich Ancestors

Ellen Goodman’s article (Self-serve and Slave) in the Orlando Sentinel this morning had my head nodding all the way through. She drew the line at a dinner invitation to a restaurant where they hand you a platter of raw foods and a hot pot. She decided if she wanted to cook her own food she would eat at home. Ellen, we are sisters under the skin.

 

Perhaps I carry it too far. It annoys me to choose what goes on my hamburger. It’s a hamburger! Put everything on it like they do in Texas. I understand the concept of personalized sandwiches, but still don’t like to have to decide on each ingredient in a sub sandwich. I have to make those decisions in my kitchen every night.

 

But forgetting about food, Goodman recalls all the jobs we have to do for free now that stores once paid workers to do. We’ve been distracted by jobs sent overseas and don’t see how many jobs have stayed right here—but shifted to us – the ultimate free labor.  Ramming that first nozzle into our gas tank was the “gateway drug to self-help.”  Before we knew it, we were conducting our bank business with an automated phone or the Internet, storing our own medical records, copying and delivering reports, picking up scripts because our doctor stopped calling them in, analyzing our own prescription drug plan needs, weighing and slapping a price tag on produce, even checking out our own goods at Home Depot if we were so sappy, etc. etc.

 

Now I am picturing our parents or grandparents, poor as church mice by our standards, some living through the Depression, yet in many ways they were treated like royalty. Grocers kept a running tab for them, bankers knew and looked out for their finances, mechanics knew their car as well as their own, milk was delivered while they slept, clothes  brought to the fitting  room, doctors came to their home, long-time insurance agents advised on every aspect, and on and on. Sure they had to make many of their clothes, grow and can much of their food, share a family car, but the niggling little “unpaid jobs” that add up to a whopping weight on our shoulders were not present. They used that energy to help neighbors—and got help the same way.

 

You hear so many older people say they never knew they were poor. Maybe it’s because they weren’t. Maybe they were our rich ancestors.

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