Baby Birds and Father's Day

I thought I’d lost this picture, the only picture that I have of the father who raised me. I found it while looking for something else which is usually the way it happens with clutter. (It does seem that I’m becoming obsessed with this subject, doesn’t it?) So why do I have only the one picture of my adopted father amidst the paper clutter in my life? Maybe because of too many moves too early in my life and an apartment fire in Houston that stole everything but our lives, my childhood bible, a few pictures, and a folder of poems I’d written.

Regardless of all hype that a successful blog must have a theme, mine being the first of the baby boomer era, blogs are still online journals. Journaling, by nature, is a journey into one’s self and I think I just might have discovered the reason for my clutter obsession. Maybe I use clutter to hide the void for all that I’ve lost over the years?

This picture of my father, Harry, and I, was taken when I was six, our first summer together. I hope that I was scowling because the sun was in my eyes but I can’t be sure. The transition for both me and my new parents must have been a rough one. My father, a CPA, was 54 when I entered into his life. My husband, Eddie, had already become a proud grandfather by that age. I never knew my father was older than most parents of my friends. In fact, I didn’t learn his age until he died and I thought the newspaper had made a mistake when they wrote he was 64.

It didn’t take long for me to learn to love this new father though. His stern features in this picture, perhaps it was the sun in our eyes after all, masked his gentleness and giant heart. He spent many a frustrating hour trying to teach me math, the term dyslexia unknown to both of us at the time. He never raised his voice even though I’d stomp out of the room yelling, “It’s not fair! I knew the right answer!” And I usually did. Know the right answer somehow. I just couldn’t prove to him how I got to it.

He taught me the love for dogs and all living creatures—except for cats. (I still ended up being a cat lover as well.) He hated cats because they killed birds and he loved birds. I still remember him coming home one day, his broad hands cupped gently over a baby robin he’d found in the alley. He showed me how to nurse the baby bird with an eye dropper. He then showed me how to let the bird we had raised and loved so much go once it learned to fly. The robin returned the next spring, and the spring after that. We always knew it was him when my father whistled and the robin answered with a short song, then flew in low, glazed my father’s shoulder, then flew back into the trees. A few years later he found a baby sparrow and brought it home. I found a baby rabbit whose mother had been killed. He always made sure that once they were strong and able to survive on their own, that we release them back to their world. His time was cut short but he still managed to do the same for me. Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

In The Year 2525

I have never been a science fiction fan but I have always loved the 1969 hit song, In The Year 2525 by Zager and Evans. I occasionally hear it on the oldies but goodies stations and I always find myself tapping my feet, swaying my hips and singing along off-key with gusto. Not the best visual of a woman my age, I know and a dangerous one if I’m driving, which I usually am when listening to the radio.

I thought of this song again yesterday evening as I stood drooling in front of Barnes & Noble’s newest color Nook. I’d dashed over there to pick up the June issue of Whole Living, Body + soul in balance, a magazine that I love. I once gave a friend of mine a subscription to this magazine but never wanted to subscribe to it myself for one reason. It gave me an excuse to go to Barnes & Nobles at least once a month, my place of refuge and anti-depression therapy.

When the Barnes and Noble Nook representative showed me all the clichéd bells and whistles I started to hyperventilate. I had managed to resist the e-book reader so far thanks to my passion and dedication to books. Not only do I love to read, I truly love books: the feel, the scent, the beauty of them. I also am addicted to magazines, a trait I inherited from my mother. As the sales clerk continued titillating me with all the Nook features, I rationalized that I needed it to reduce clutter in my life. Fewer magazines stacked on chairs and floor and maybe a few less books on the shelves. "I might buy a color Nook next month as a birthday present to myself," I told her.

When the sales clerk told me that they were reducing the discount rate for my membership card and that last year they had sold more Nooks than books, I swear I started hearing the lyrics to In the Year 2525. More Nooks than books? Does that mean that the day will come when there will be a Barnes & Noble in the cloud only with no physical store to stroll through and books to scan through? Will that become the fate of our libraries as well? With the 64% budget cuts made recently by Texas legislation for libraries, this could be sooner than we think.

In the year 4545, ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes. You won’t find a thing to chew, nobody’s gonna look at you.

I am a hermit by nature. And that is one of my biggest fears about retirement. That I will end up sitting in front of a television or computer screen rest of my life, never having to leave my house. Never have human contact.

In the year 5555, your arms are hanging limp at your sides. Your legs got nothing do. Some machine is doing that for you.

In 1969 we thought we’d never live to see these lyrics come to life. It was not in our future. But we’re ahead of schedule and it scares me.

In the year 6565, you’ll pick your son, pick your daughter too from the bottom of a long glass tube.

Now it’s been 10,000 years….. No. Maybe it's only yesterday.

Blog Days

My Sunday “B” day has been temporarily moved to Monday because I had an expired license renewal sticker on my car. Actually I’ve had the new sticker for over a month but never bothered to put it on the car windshield. It was one of those “I’ll do it tomorrow” types of things. After all, the current one on the car didn't expire until the end of April.

So when I agreed to drive the car pool to Midlothian, TX for a Sunday afternoon rowdy game of Mexican Train with a wild bunch of librarians, I planned my morning quite carefully: Get up early, read the Sunday paper, have breakfast, walk the dogs, fill the gas tank, and get the car its semi-annual bath and grooming for the upcoming 40 mile drive. This would still leave me plenty of time to shower and dress and write my blog. So I thought.

With the car now spit-shiny, the expired license sticker loomed menacingly on the windshield, almost like it was just waiting to flag down the first patrol car it saw so it could embarrass me in front of my friends. No problem though. It’d only take me a minute or two to retrieve the new sticker from the glove box where I’d shoved it until it was time to apply it. I hadn’t counted on two things: one, the clutter in my glove box and two, the renewal sticker not being there.

New problem. When I had the laminated flooring put in a couple of weeks ago, I had to remove all my papers from the computer room. I hadn’t moved anything back yet (another one of those “I’ll do it tomorrow” things). This meant that I now needed to search through boxes and sacks crammed with very important papers to try and find my license renewal. Papers and cuss words flying about, I was determined to find that damn sticker as if my life depended upon it. And in a sense, it did.

We baby boomers pride ourselves on our keen minds. We can accept the sags, the wrinkles, and the aches, but we cling to the façade that our minds are as sharp as ever. I knew I had put the renewal sticker in the glove box, damn it! I remembered thinking that if I did ever pulled over by the police, I could pull it out of the glove box and say, “See, I have it right here.” I had to have put it there! Where else would it be? Then I remembered. Duh, I’d put it in my purse to put into the car’s glove box. So I hadn’t lost my mind; I just hadn’t complete the process.

Lessons learned? I still need to work on that clutter, I need to stop the “I’ll do it tomorrow” mentality and I need to relax more. My first blog happened to be posted on a Sunday morning so I made a rule that it always had to be done on Sunday morning or I might never do it again. Wednesday evenings also became a “B” evening as I now write a library blog and you got it, my first posting was on a Wednesday evening. Ah, the ruts we crawl into because of fear. Hurray for the ruts we can crawl out of if we allow ourselves to do so.

Sunday Morning Ritual

After spending Friday evening and all day Saturday with 28 other women at the 3rd Annual Ladies Only 42 tournament, I am beat. Who’d think that having a blast can be so exhausting? I thoroughly enjoyed the games, meeting women I’d never met before and reconnecting with those I had. However, (a fancy “but”) as much fun as it was, the nonstop conversations and laughter echoing through the acoustical-lacking club room were over stimulating and I looked forward to my Sunday morning quiet time ritual. Coffee and the Sunday morning paper.

This ritual, handed down to me by my parents, is probably a universal ritual for most of us baby boomers. In my house, my parents still got up at the same time they did on a work day, started the coffee maker, and retrieved the Sunday morning paper from the front porch steps. I’d come downstairs to find the house quiet, the only sounds being the rustling of paper and the soft chime from a silver spoon meeting the side of a china cup. Conversation was held to a minimum with the occasional, “Hum…. What’s the world coming to….more coffee?”

Breakfast would follow, and then church, Sunday dinner, and naps or Sunday drives. The Blue Laws were still in effect back then meaning no stores were open, no malls to roam in, no errands to run. I miss the Blue Laws. It made life so much simpler and peaceful. Saturdays were days for housework and shopping. Sundays then were truly a day of rest, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Much needed downtime for the busy workweek ahead.

I’ve managed to keep part of the ritual: coffee and the Sunday morning paper. This is my quiet time. I refuse to turn on the TV, the radio, the CD player, or the computer until after I’ve finished reading my paper, my only distraction being a noisy woodpecker outside my window or one of the dogs pawing my leg to be picked up and held. I don’t often follow reading the Sunday paper with church and that bothers me. I say I don’t have the time which is a poor excuse and only partly true. But that is another blog for another time. Still, the demands for my Sunday time are legit, especially this Sunday that starts daylight savings time and steals an hour from us. There is housework to do, laundry, grocery shopping, yard work, dog walking, etc. And oh yes, a nap.

Doing It All

I’m pooped this blog-writing morning and my back and wrists ache from the part-time job that I hired myself to do yesterday. Yesterday being Saturday and one of my only two days off from my regular full time job. I was paid $4.00 an hour for two strenuous hours of manual labor that included cussing, sweating, panting, huffing, and wondering what in the world had I been thinking. I am sitting on the results. A new desk chair that actually supports my back while not spewing screws whenever I leaned to the side like my old chair did making me feel like I was on a tilt-a-whirl ride most of the time.

I’ve been wanting a new chair for quite some time but hated to spend the money on something that would make me more comfortable. I also knew that when I went to make this purchase I would face another dilemma; how to get it home. I had looked at several stores and it appeared that all the task chairs came unassembled and contained in large boxes. I don’t have a hydraulic lift at home or even a dolly. I also assumed that I didn’t have the physical strength to even assemble the chair once I got it out of the box.

Never assume. I found a chair on sale yesterday that offer support for my sway back. The store clerk would even assemble it for me for $8.00. Woo hoo! Get out the charge card. One small problem. The salesman assured me that if assembled, the chair would not fit in my car. However, the boxed one would fit in my trunk. He even offered to take out to my car (with his dolly) and put in my trunk for me. He did not offer to follow me home and get it out of my car though. So much for going that extra mile customer service. lol

Now I could have called my friends who’d already offered their services and SUV, or my son, or my helpful neighbor but I have a stubborn streak. I wanted to do it myself. This has been an-ongoing problem with me. I still remember the time that my mother hired moving men to move some furniture from our home to our lake cottage. I was fourteen and I was determined that I was going to do my part. It was a struggle, but I got the twin mattress down the stairs. I didn’t have to work nearly as hard to get the box springs down. Not after it escaped my grip and bounced down the stairs and crashed through the window on the landing.

I could entertain you with many more Betty Oops stories but my point is that as baby boomer, I grew up in the era where I learned that “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget you’re a man.” We baby boomer gals not only were encouraged to do all with cute ads and songs, life circumstances like divorces, bad economies, and deaths forced us to do it all. Along the way, we worked hard to obtain equal rights and to make our own decisions. Yet, with all that we have accomplished, it seems that some of these rights are being threatened to be taken away by Texas legislation and the Federal legislation. I’ve never presumed to know what is right or wrong for someone else or have all the answers, but I do know it feels like we are taking giant steps backwards and that scares me.

Sugarfree Blogging

Why I am blogging? And what do I expect to get from it? To be honest (and one cannot blog without being totally honest – my first blog lesson learned) I think I was bored and wanted to try something different. I also wanted to hopefully reignite my passion for writing. And, this is a subconscious reason I believe, I wanted to blog to stay young. Of course I realize that blogging, twittering, Facebooking and goggling when I should be googling isn’t really going to keep me from aging, but just maybe it will keep me connected to youth somehow. Ya know there’s that old cliché that says being old is a state of mind. Ain’t quite true says my mirror and my brittle bones but I’m willing to give it a try.

As I do every Sunday morning, I read Jane Glenn Haas’s column, Our Time, which is all about us baby boomers. Her subject this Sunday is, “Baby boomers are doomed to grow old in public.” Not one of my favorites of hers. Personally, I’d change the title to “Baby boomers are growing old, dang it, and so are you!” I’m starting to resent the media and scientific focus on us aging baby boomers. We are the lucky ones; not some bizarre sub-culture. I can say this because my mother never lived to see 50; my father never lived to see 65; my husband never lived to see 57.

Yes, I am one of the leaders of the baby boomers aging sect. I don’t have many role models so I have to find my own path. It’s scary and lonely at times. And I prefer to stay in denial. Until I look in that mirror or my hip refuses to move in a certain direction. So what I am going to do about it? Well, for one, I want to stop complaining about it. I want to stop listening to and reading the doomsday boomer media. And I want to start listening to what my body and Dr. Oz says to do. He claims to know how to reverse the aging process and at this point, I am desperate.

So…. Dare I write it for the whole world (okay, the handful of my blog readers) that starting at noon today (breakfast was the sweet rolls I’d baked yesterday and didn’t want to throw out unappreciated) I’m going to divorce myself from refined sugars and baked goods. I use the word “divorce” because of the thirty day waiting period in which I can change my mind. Lol

No, I will not be giving up chocolate. Dr. Oz says it’s good for you. I’m also going to eat more veggies, lean protein, and drink more wine and beer, the beer being especially good for brittle bones. I’m hoping enough wine and beer will numb me to the sugar-withdrawals and make the world more tolerable. Or me more tolerable to the world. Lol. Stay tuned as I share my progress and slips. P.S. Helpful hints appreciated.

Point of View on Self-Publishing

As I have done lately, my own life being quite comfortably boring, I looked to the Sunday newspaper for this week’s blog inspiration. I opted to disregard the Sunday column that totes another banner for us Boomers who are turning 65 this year by the droves. Old hat news which only serves to make me feel really old. While 65 is a milestone that I’ll be delighted to reach, it’s not the pinnacle, or so I hope, of my life and what I still hope to achieve: becoming a published novelist.

But what I still hope to achieve is rapidly becoming passé and that saddens me as well as depresses me. I am referring to the article in today’s newspaper about e-books and well-known and respected novelists preferring to self-publish. This isn’t new news. I’ve read about it before (and chose to forget that I did) and I’ve had discussions with a friend or two who knew this was coming. I chose to disagree with them. Today the multi-columned article about authors abandoning publishing houses and self-publishing instead wormed its way into my reality which is now being challenged.

I’m of the age where self-publishing, vanity presses as we boomers know it, was the avenue a writer took when all other roads were too bumpy or too hard to navigate, i.e., those whose work didn’t cut the mustard so to speak. Call it what is was and still is for some of us—writer snobbery. I’m not ashamed of it. I received way too many rejections from publishers and editors because my work wasn’t what they wanted or wasn’t good enough for them. I’m proud of those rejections because of the euphoric high I got when I’d finally received those acceptances for that short story or a creative nonfiction piece. The rejections made me want to write better, made me determined to keep trying, and in turn, made me succeed. In other words, whenever I got an acceptance, I’d earned it. My writing had been better than good. You don’t get that validation when you self-publish.

For those novelists who’ve already proved their work’s worth, if they are writing purely for money and their egos are so secure that they don’t need to fear their work isn’t as good as it could be, maybe self-publishing is the right path for them to go. I also realize that there are those successful writers who choose the self-publishing route to make their books more affordable to their readers. That’s a good thing. But I’m not in that writers league, so if I ever get that novel or memoir published, I want to know it was because someone else besides me and my friends recognized that it was worthy of the publishing investment and that I earned that advancement check.

P.S. The Cardinal is back at my window this morning doing his best to get my attention. I learned from my dear niece that seeing a Cardinal in winter is a blessing. Since he only shows up for certain blogs, maybe this is a sign that I should finish this last novel that I’ve been working on.

Comfort Zone

I spent my weekend outside of my comfort zone although I didn’t wander far. Only to Denton on Saturday with my son and Carrollton on Sunday with two dear girlfriends. Now’s that sad that such few miles take me out of my zone. Except it really isn’t. I like my comfort zone. We baby boomers have worked hard to get to our comfort zone. Like generations before us, we struggled and fought years for equal rights in the work place, equal say over our bodies, and equal rights for the minorities. We feel that we’ve earned the right to snuggle into our comfort zone at this time of our lives.

My comfort zone is the place where I nurture myself, unwind from the stresses of work and the world and I only step out of it with special people in my life, my son and close friends. When I’m really blessed, a new friend like Alexis will drop into my comfort zone for a short visit.

Other times we have to clean out our comfort zone. I had to do that this week—a chore I needed to do several years ago but kept putting off like cleaning out the clothes in my closet that no longer fit. I resigned from my writing group that has been a major part of my life for over fifteen years. This should have been more painful than it was and that makes me sad. But it taught me that our comfort zone isn’t stagnant; it breathes in and out and can’t nourish us unless we keep it fresh and renewed.