SOCK IT TO ME

 

Improvise! Adapt! Overcome!

One of the joys of aging is finding creative new ways to do things that you’ve done all your life with no excess trauma, such as putting on your socks. If you’re interested in stability, however, attempting this feat in a swivel rocker might not be the most productive course of action.

My son The Showoff can stand on one foot and, without wavering, pull a sock on without spinning like a weathervane in the direct path of Hurricane Helene or hopping like Peter Rabbit on Easter. Due to unique health issues, I can’t even walk to the bathroom without experiencing both events. I generally end up standing in the hallway litter box. It turns out that sand is only desirable between your toes at a place where the tide goes in and out. 

In a world where you can press a button to wipe out typing mistakes, the folks in charge of the universe still see fit to locate your right foot farther away than your left. Some people view this as God’s sense of humor, which I find is not even closely aligned with my own. My left sock goes on like hot fudge on a sundae, but my right foot bobs and weaves like Mike Tyson in his prime. I figure the distance to my left foot is measured in large print and the distance to my right foot is dog years.

I tried propping my foot in my the living room swivel rocker (also known as the Tilt-a-Whirl) for support. This method of sock manipulation was unsuccessful if you count encasing your foot in a sleeping cat and your sock residing on the dog’s nose like a gold toe condom as undesirable. As the chair spun left, the cat decorated my shin with claw marks in a clever barber pole design, then cited me for assault. Our attorneys are in talks. 

So, in the manner of Wile. E. Coyote, who never gave up on the Roadrunner, I took the adventure up a level. I used two swivel chairs with the idea that foot and shoe would undoubtedly meet up sooner or late like rotating gears. It works with clocks, right? What could go wrong?

I forgot that clocks have gone digital.

Perching at my desk in an office chair and using the swivel rocker as a runway, I discovered why Mr. Coyote always ended up on a fast track to a crash landing. Both chairs displayed the sort of flair for fast turns you normally find on the Indianapolis Speedway. The resulting wardrobe malfunction led to the friendly folks at Urgent Care encouraging me to apply myself to other methods.

So if you see me out and about, don’t look at my ankles. I’m just following doctor’s orders.

 

Esme in firing position.

Watch and Waste

 

It’s 7:00 on a Thursday night. Rain patters against the windows in the kitchen. Over the years I've collected animals like I'm Noah. The Captain of my ark and I are huddled in a small, square hallway surrounded by empty coffee cups and wrappers from the McDonald’s dollar menu. We have binoculars, a pair of large disposable tweezers, and a baggie containing a small plastic vial. If I listen closely, I’m pretty sure I can hear the theme from Dragnet playing in the background.

We’re doing surveillance and have probably watched one too many cop shows. Imagine a mashup of Starsky and Hutch and the Golden Girls. Add a muscle car and imagine Starsky with a bad back, counting the days until retirement and we could have our own show.

Suddenly, imaginary suspense music envelopes the scene. The subject of our stakeout strolls into the hallway, pauses at a bait bowl of snack mix, and crosses the hall to rub flirtatiously against the Captain's leg. She curls up in his lap and purrs like a bandsaw.

Dropping the baggie on the floor between us, I aim a look at my partner that I usually reserve for husbands who buy chocolate doughnuts when you’re on Day 5 of a 7-day diet.

“I told you it wouldn’t work.”

“She smells fear.”

“She smells beef jerky on your breath.” 

Esme is a beautiful ball of gray fur who loves Bill like he’s made of bacon. She looks at me like Willy the Weasel in the chicken coop in cartoons you’ve never seen if you were born after ATMs were invented.

She’s 15-pounds of cat treats and dandelion puffball fur destined for a vet appointment tomorrow morning. She’s approximately the size of the death boulder in the first Indiana Jones movie and it’s likely that she’s looking down the throat of the kitty version of the Atkins Diet once she lands with a thud on the vet’s scale. Our job is to stake out the litter box and get a sample of the sort of thing vets like to ask for on Friday mornings to make Thursday nights an adventure.

All in all, I’d rather shave my legs with sandpaper. Our household includes four feline inhabitants, and if I have to invade the shady side of the house I want to come up with the right prize the first time. It’s like doing a drug deal with a parade full of motorized Shriners.

Also, the impending vet visit is tricky because the puffball in question has a record. She was pawprinted and landed on the Health Department’s No Fly List  during her last visit due to an assassination attempt on the technician who violated the rules of kitty etiquette with a pair of latex gloves and a cold thermometer. We avoided the vet for two years with a clever plan that involved the feline version of Witness Protection.

I wave the tweezers meaningfully. “She likes you. Tell her to go to the litterbox.”

“I don’t tell her what to do. That’s why she likes me.” 

“She likes you because you would hand feed her Beluga caviar if she wanted it.”

“You gotta know your audience.”

“I told you to do it my way. I have experience in collections. I once got a urine sample from a Dachshund with the lid from a chicken salad container.”

“Where is the container now?”

“Let’s just say I make my own chicken salad these days.”

The subject began to purr.

“Okay, what do you suggest?”

“Maybe we should feed her tuna casserole.”

Our wedding vows included the phrase, “Love, honor, and never make tuna casserole.” His previous spouse made tuna casserole for special occasions, such as any day that would be improved by a food fight. If Bill is ever poisoned, the paramedics need only to whisper the phrase “tuna casserole” to cleanse his system. I haven't made tuna casserole in 27 years but we're in a desperate situation.

I lean close to her ear and whisper the forbidden phrase. She shoots me a look that lets me know to check my shoes next time I put them on.

“Let’s change her appointment.”

“Why?”

I have a feeling that by tomorrow morning, we’ll have a fresh sample. But make sure we have a baggie in my shoe size.”

 

 

 

 

Santa Snoop

 

Not sharing. Only one reason I made the naughty list.

Since I’m not one to hover at the top of Santa’s Nice List, I’m never sure what to ask for at gift-getting time, so I end up in January with a wishful thinking list instead of December with a want list. A castle in the Alps seems like it would stretch Santa’s Comfort and Joy a little too far, and socks and underwear are a little too personal coming from a fat man who dresses in fur and hangs out with the kind of elves that make cars instead of cookies. But since pushing my luck is my favorite activity, I feel like I need to ask for something. Just in time for my birthday. Which comes up in February just in case you're putting together a shopping list. It turns out lists are handy in all sorts of situations.

This year I know just the thing. Snoop Dogg’s peanut butter chocolate chip cookies! It will take the pressure off the elves who are more suited for Worst Cooks in America than the Holiday Baking Championship and give me incentive to resume my aerobic workouts in the New Year. (Hint. That’s a lie.)

For those of you who haven’t racked up enough street cred or haven’t been near a television in the past year, Snoop Dogg is the coolest (I’m not cool enough to know today’s synonym for cool), hottest topic since Taylor Swift rode to fortune and fortune on the remnants of her broken heart. Snoop is cooler than an Artic ice floe and chiller than the last popsicle in the back of the freezer.

He’s been a gangsta, a rapper, a Superbowl halftime sensation, an Olympics commentator, and a vocal coach on a TV singing competition that I usually forget to watch until the last episode. He’s been much more, and most of these at the same time, and even if I wore ice chips in my underwear I would not be as cool as Snoop.

And now he has a cookbook. Granted, he has a friendship with Martha Stewart that has lasted longer than Brussels sprouts at the kids table, but I would expect Gaga and Brad to invite me for a prime-time singalong of A Star is Born favorites before I would look for a cookbook from jolly ole Snoop. But what to my wondering eyes did show up on my digitally delightful news feed when pretending to shop for my husband, but a recipe for Snoop Dogg's Rolls Royce Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Now I don’t like to crumble my own crackers, but I have to admit I’ve sampled a few of the best cookies around in my six-decade snack streak. There’s a recipe in our church cookbook that would jingle your bells any day of the week. But I’ve never even had a Ram tough cookie, never mind a Rolls Royce one. I’ve had a lemon, both in cookies and cars, and there’s only one of them I’d care to have again.

So, I killed two birds with one chocolate chip, which sounds like a cross between Martha Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock. I ordered Snoop’s cookbook for Bill on Christmas Eve and told him he could make cookies for my birthday. He won’t have to worry about fit or fashion when he starts searching the sites for my gift.

Because chocolate chips never go out of style.

 

TREE TRIALS

 

One of  our cast of characters.
You've probably seen her picture at PetSmart under a sign that says WARNING.

It’s half past tree-decorating time. I have a collection of beautiful and delicate heirloom ornaments handcrafted to celebrate joy and reflect the beauty of the Christmas season.

In a box in the basement. 

Why?

Because nothing says Here Comes Santa Claus like shards of memories and broken glass scattered across the living room Oriental to impale the toes of random passers-by on their way to the kitchen for a snack. And with centuries of experience, the reindeer are finicky about landing on a roof that’s decorated in a festive pawprint motif. Santa is understandably anxious about a house that decorates with broken balls.

 A week ago, we decked the halls, shook out the tree skirt, and festooned the boughs and branches of the well-worn, but guaranteed to remain life-like, evergreen with symbols of good will toward men. The evergreen that has a permanent, cat-shaped hole in the middle.

The next morning the tree exploded. I thought the star had gone supernova.  

A black ball of fangs and fur flew past in a cloud of glitter and tinsel, and a tabby with a surprised and somewhat bewildered expression catapulted from the center of the Christmas tree, ricocheted off the La-Z-Boy, and careened into the hall, where it scattered laundry baskets like bowling pins. The vacuum cleaner succumbed to a change in air pressure and current and performed a magnificent backflip, neatly taking out a stack of newly washed towels on an end table. A black and white furball with years of experience grabbed a gold ball with a luminous snowflake pattern and headed downfield like an Olympian about to score a gold medal goal.

The tree was shredded like a delicate interoffice memorandum and teetered like a ballerina with sore feet before it crash-landed on the hardwood floor.The Pit Bull, who is leery of the cats' shenanigans and who learned emergency maneuvers during the last hurricane, hid under the coffee table with his favorite knucklebone for rations.

But within minutes the tree was up and re-decorated in its Christmas finery.

Its Christmas plastic finery.

In a move of inspiration and lightning-fast reaction to a scene of destruction in our living room years ago, Bill rushed out and snapped up all the dazzling, heirloom plastic ornaments that WalMart had to offer.

Of course, our tree looks like the toddler aisle at Toys R Us on Black Friday.

If our Christmas tree were a Muppet, it would be Miss Piggy.

If it were a celebrity (don't tell Miss Piggy), it would dress like Jennifer Lopez on Oscar night.

Where other homes have trees that reflect good taste and tradition, our tree is a reflection of our life choices. We don’t have family photos on our walls so much as mug shots.

Because sometimes Peace on Earth looks more like Earth in Pieces. It just takes a little love to keep it all together.

 And maybe some duct tape.

 Hold your loved ones together with whatever it takes.

 Merry Christmas!

 

 

 

Brushing Up

 

NOT optimal toothbrush organization.

We just passed the day of the year that is responsible for the biggest increase in bathroom activity of the year. Don’t be gross. I’m talking about Thanksgiving and toothbrushing.

Today while I was scrolling through Facebook catching up on the latest Black Friday deals and conspiracy theories, I came across an advertisement for a manual toothbrush. I realize we live in a world where patience is stretched too thin to wait for batteries to charge, but I had to stop and think. Isn’t a manual toothbrush a. . .

 Toothbrush?

 A regular, old-fashioned, hand-cranked toothbrush?

Even with the teeth I lost over the years due to my record consumption of peanut brittle, I’ve brushed a lot of teeth in my time. I’m old enough to remember the pain and suffering I felt when they boosted the price of candy bars from a dime to fifteen cents. But even then, my manual transmission toothbrush worked just fine, dealing with everything from Pay Days to Peanut M&Ms with cheerful efficiency.

That same dime bought me a nutty buddy when the Ice Cream Man, who was not a creep trying to lure small children into a lifetime of cheap snow cones, drove through the neighborhood in his specially outfitted freezer truck, selling Push Ups, Ice Cream Sandwiches, and chocolate covered vanilla popsicles. I’m old enough to forget the name of those, but they were delicious and cold on a hot, summer day even when your fingers stuck together from melting ice cream running down the stick.

Which reminds me that I’m old enough to remember when a Push Up was not an item of lingerie.

You can see I brushed a lot of teeth - not counting the times I brushed extra  because there was a tiny piece of chip from the Mexican restaurant down the street stuck in between my front teeth and I couldn’t find the dental floss because somebody had taken it to their room because their yoyo string broke or out back to tie up the tomato plants, so I’d try to wedge the bristles in between my teeth because it felt like all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were jammed in there.

I even had an electric toothbrush when I was a kid. I used it to brush my coat’s fake fur collar that resembled a rain-soaked weasel, Barbie’s hair that resembled my coat collar, and the cat, but I didn’t use it to brush my teeth.  

A couple of gray hairs ago, my son got a new toothbrush to take on his trip to Japan. It had a USB port. I don’t know what they do for teeth in Japan, but I know they are very particular about personal hygiene and technology, so I guess Son the Second fit in just fine. I don’t know exactly what you do with a USB toothbrush. Does it find your molars on Google Earth? Track the path of your last stick of Juicy Fruit? Count how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?  All I know is that electronic toothbrush logged more miles in one trip than I have since I’ve been old enough to say “First Class, please.” Just kidding, I don’t even go to the mailbox First Class. 

When I saw the fancy advertisement for the new manual toothbrush, I beat a path to my computer and ordered one from the site that knows more about me than the doctor who carved into my stuffing to produce Giblet One and Giblet two three decades ago.

The toothbrush arrived faster than it takes to load Cool Whip onto pumpkin pie. It looked just like my last toothbrush. Except it didn’t fit in the hole in my ceramic toothbrush holder so I had to lay it across the part where the soap goes. When I tried to turn the water on, I accidentally knocked it with my elbow and it catapulted into the trashcan.

So the new toothbrush didn’t conform to standards, required a restructuring of equipment, and needed an upgrade to be functional. I assembled a Problem-Solving team to assess the feasibility of redesigning the toothbrush area of my bathroom to support the integrity of the new vision. Bill said forget it, he’ll buy me a toothbrush that fits.

So much for technology.

 

THE LEGACY

Mama - Happy with something in a shoebox; no telling what.

As far as legacies go, my tastes lie with something simple, like a check. Or stock. Or heirloom china. Unfortunately Mama wasn’t the heirloom china type. What I got when she departed for the peaceful place where mothers don’t have to cook, clean, or say, “If I told you once, I told you a million times,” was not the inheritance I assumed was my birthright. What she left me was the very thing I was the least qualified to handle. Wisdom.

Giving me a lapful of life lessons is like tossing me a copy of the Atkins diet and a size six sheath dress and telling me the party starts at seven. You may as well shove the plans for building a biplane into my arms and tell me to be in Paris by midnight. When it comes to legacies, it’s best to just go ahead and hand me a gold bar.

Now that I’m in the stage of life where good advice usually involves a recipe loaded with fiber, I realize that what Mama left me was a handbook for life. Thanks to the seeds my mom planted in the rocky garden of my mind over the years, I’ve sailed through many of the stormy seas of life without having to evacuate to life boats. Turns out Mom knew best all along. Here are Mama’s Rules to Live By—along with some of my own observations for those who, like me, have trouble following directions.

1. There is something to love in every person. However, there are some people who hide that something really well. Actually, Mama just said that first part. I learned the second part from my sister.

2. If you rip a page out of your brother’s comic book, he can rip a page out of yours. This is a mother of four’s version of The Golden Rule. I learned to treat friends, family, and their possessions with respect. And I’ll never know what happened to Archie and Jughead that day at Riverdale High.

3. Give a child two cookies; one for each hand. This is a smart idea because it keeps the child busy for twice as long, diverts him from "helping" with your biscuit dough and prevents you from having to walk every morning for a week to work off two cookies that you would have eaten to relieve stress if your child had two hands free to plunge into the dog's food.

4. Don’t honk your horn at anybody. At first I assumed this was Mama’s version of traveling etiquette, but now I realize that she understood road rage long before anyone held up traffic trying to read road signs through the wrong part of skinny designer bifocals.

5. Always have a skill you can fall back on. By this, I know now that she meant a skill that will continue to be of service to the Community of Man. Unfortunately the skill I chose was typing, which caused typewriters to immediately become extinct.

6. If you’re not tall enough to see out the car window, sit on a pillow. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. Even the Marines agree with her.

7. If something particularly unpleasant is happening to you, there’s probably a lesson involved. Wade through a puddle or two on the linoleum and you’ll remember to let the new puppy out. You’ll also remember to buy a mop.

8. Don’t sell things you can give away. That might not make sense in an e-Bay world, but knowing that someone who needs it will have a warm coat for the winter goes a long way toward offsetting the thrill of bagging $1.50 for your old hula lamp in an online auction.

9. Play to win. Unless that gets in the way of playing for fun. When playing Scrabble with an elderly woman who can’t see past her elbow, give her a break if she thinks she drew five blanks. Come to think of it, that’s how Mom always won at Scrabble, so there’s probably an extra lesson tucked in there.

10. Always take time to watch the birds at the birdfeeder. Time spent with nature is a peace of mind investment. And last winter, a tiny chickadee who muscled his way through a crowd of rowdy cardinals to have lunch gave me some great ideas for handling the next family reunion. And the big project due at work.

11. Don’t worry, it’ll get worse. This was my mom’s slogan. When I was three and ran to her with a skinned knee, she said it. She was right. I broke my arm. When I was thirty-three and getting divorced, she said it again. And soon my kids became teenagers. But by then, I had it figured out. If things can get worse, the problems that seem overpowering right now aren’t the end of the world. Things can also get better. So if teaching two teenaged boys to drive and adding them to my insurance is the worst life has to offer, I can handle it.

But I sure wouldn’t turn down a check.

 

 

My favorite time of day.

 

Watch Out

 

I have a love-hate relationship.

With my watch.

It has a lot of settings that I never use. There’s one that says “Run.” I never push the button for that one. But there’s one setting that says “Sleep” and shows a little moon. That’s my favorite setting. I take that one to heart. I push the button for that one when I’m in my recliner and the ball game is on. That way I always win.

I have a friend who has a watch that calls for help when she falls down. Emergency Responders already think I have them on speed dial. There’s talk about moving their office across the street from my house. 

I’d rather have a food truck.

I think my watch spies on me at night. In the morning it always knows how many times I got up to go to the bathroom the night before. Don’t tell my watch, but I was getting cookies all those times. Well, almost all of those times. Once I got pizza.

My watch is the sort of watch that thinks it knows everything about you; when you should be asleep but are awake because you can’t remember the name of that man you need to call to clean the carpets  at the office, when you should exercise but the Greek festival comes only once a year and doesn’t walking to the pastry table count for your steps total, and when you’re doing wind sprints to practice for the Olympics.

Wait. What?

I’ve never done a wind sprint. Not even in gym class. My last gym class was in 1973.

My watch disagreed. It said I ran for eighteen minutes.

I haven’t run a total of eighteen minutes in 65 years.

It said I burned a whole bunch of calories. This is the part where I love my watch.

But one day it said I burned up a lot less calories doing the same thing I always do.

As you know, being a loyal reader of my exciting lifestyle blog, I exercise sitting down. Three or four times a week I sit down very fast which keeps my doctors happy. My watch usually says I sat down very fast long enough to subtract the steak biscuit I eat to give me the energy to sit down fast for an hour.

This time it said I was a slacker. Which is usually true, but wasn’t this time.

This is the part where I hate my watch. It is mean-spirited to lie about biscuit calories.

Then I noticed. It’s battery was low. It needed a recharge.

I did, too.

So I plugged my watch in and went off in search of a cookie.

Now we both feel better.