lull before the storm
gather your wits about you
flight is an option
JSmith 12/28/2016
So just be real…
03 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
I read a story today, shared by a friend whose granddaughter dictated it to her daddy, and was struck by how on the mark this small girl is. You’ll see what I mean:
“We flew on an airplane to Albuquerque to see Ian and Jordan and Ashton and Uncle Doug and Aunt Jill. Will got diarrhea.
Then we flew to Chicago to see Aunt Beth and Grandma and Uncle Billy and Josiah and his sister and the dad of the baby and those two with a jacket and glasses. Then we flew home. Grandma threw up.”
Her story illustrates important tenets of writing:
- Tell it like it is. If people want us to write kindly about them, they must learn to be behave well.
- Engage your readers by telling them things they would not otherwise learn.
- Illustrate with plenty of pink.
So simple, really, and once again a little child leads us.
By golly haiku…
22 Jun 2016 Leave a comment
pooled our ignorance
and got it done
old not daft
JSmith 6/22/2016
For Patreekia The Birthday Girl
08 Jun 2016 1 Comment
never content with
the long littleness of life
the ladies who lunch
JSmith 6/8/2016
Emergecy, emergecy!!
24 Feb 2016 4 Comments
Not a typo, a quote from my baby nephew back in the day. It’s a thing, friends.
Pre-retirement, Kim crawled home from his soul-killing job as a service writer one day, burst into the house, and yelled “Read me something from the Bible, quick, before I go back and kill somebody.” Yes, darling, I feel ya’.
Today is that day again in Smithville, so I’m asking y’all to throw me a bone, a carp, ANYthing. We talked about books the other day … now I’m asking for your go-to when you just can’t even. Do you rage, cry, throw things, hide out in a book, drink, talk … what works?? I mean WORKS. NO PLATITUDES or I will rage, cry, and throw things at you after drinking and before hiding in a book.
I’m usually pretty good at the Zen, the calm, the considered, the adulting, but sometimes I’m not, so sue me. When you wake up pissed, everything hurts, idiots are still getting away with murder in all its iterations, the music in your head is relentless, the construction asshole who’s been tearing up the parking lot with the big honkin’ telehandler against all admonitions is still at it big as life and twice as natural, and people need your help but you have nothing left in reserve, WHAT DO YOU DO? Please. Dangle a rope if you have one.
But first:
- I understand nothing lasts forever — I’m about as old as God this morning and I’ve been there.
- Things are never as bad as they seem. (See #1)
- You’re blessed, fed, clothed, housed, and people love you, dammit.
- Look at all the people who have shitty lives but aren’t complaining.
- Okay, whatevs. Did you never, ever, at any time wish you could turn in your human card?
Just give me whatcha got, I’m not fit for man nor beast until the storm blows over … and the Flying Monkeys are clamoring to be unleashed.
To the bone …
10 Feb 2016 2 Comments
This morning I’m feeling inordinately proud of my skeleton. I’ve had doubts about it in the past, but this time, when slip came to slide, my little boney bits marched right into formation and got busy. They were treated to a photo shoot yesterday and the films are gorgeous — all the shattered pieces are in place and getting chummy with each other — what Dr. Pro calls *sticky.* Sans cast or surgery those little guys shouldered (eh?) the job and did what had to be done. Part of my personal staff:
It’s been a sobering month at our house; therefore, good news is primo, and when is it not? So on a sunny day in February it’s fun to know I’ve still got it, even if it’s on the inside where you can’t see it. You know why old people are grouchy? Because they hate getting old, end of story. We try to grace it all up and pretend to be philosophical … mature, ha! … all the while feeling slightly bereft that not very many people can hear or see the eighteen, thirty, forty-five-ish, never-gonna-grow-up real soul that is us. We’re having such a good time! How could the ride be so far down the tracks already?
That’s why we can’t have nice things and the reason we say shit like “Get off my lawn,” and “You’re one smartass comment away from being bitch-slapped so hard Google won’t be able to find you.” We mean well.
I just realized today is Whinesday, which explains everything, sorry not sorry. Enjoy the sunshine — it’s always out there somewhere.
Thank you, Ben Franklin.
23 Dec 2015 Leave a comment
Marriage between humans is heavy-duty stuff. We jump into it thinking we might know things, only to learn early on that we were ignorant beyond belief — and then the OTJ training either makes or breaks us.
This isn’t my maiden voyage — I was married for thirty-four years the first time, at least half of them happy. Steepest learning curve was WHAT NOT TO DO and it did almost break us. So second time feels a lot like this:
It’s about the really important things.
Which is why I tried to take Benjamin Franklin’s advice from day one: “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterward.”
And why it took me eleven years to catch on that Kimmers is OCD, not just “picky about certain things.” I thought it was his upbringing and his white-glove education in the Navy showing up. Or as our friend Seth says, he was potty-trained at gunpoint.
Seems instead to be the real thing and he got the memo the same day I did, not that I helped him out with hints and/or pantomime. Fortunately, his version of the disorder presents not as repetitive behaviors like hand-washing and obsessive counting, but as vigilance against dust and … um … disorder. We live in a loft with 14ft. ceilings, exposed ductwork, concrete, steel, glass, wood and tile. It’s cozy, but there’s always something needing attention. Enter Mr. Clean, who works his magic on at least one area every day, never letting it get ahead of him. It’s excellent that we downsized to half the space we used to have.
He also, as you may know, handles all the grocery shopping, cooking and clean-up, and keeps his kitchen in shiny order. So when he grabs a glass I just set down and rinses it in the sink even though I’d planned to refill it; or stashes something in a place I’d never think to look for it; or gets a little frantic about having a dirty windshield — it’s a no-brainer that I CAN’T LET IT MATTER, although I confess we were reaching Exasperation Level before the light came on.
My husband’s attention to detail and willingness to speak up has saved me countless times, and he’s helped other people who’ll never know that, because he did it by planning ahead, anticipating, juggling, understanding in advance where things were going. If you’ve been on the receiving end of his thorough help and wanted to smack him before it was over, you can be sure it was because of how much he cares about you, loves you even. It matters to him what our immediate environment feels like, and I matter to him most of all (he’s told me) and there’s a lot I need a surrogate for, so this “disorder” thing turns out to be fabulous for me.
If you’re curious about what it is *I* do here, that would be the laundry, bills and banking, a little writing, social media, and Maddie … also, I color pretty pictures in my free time, which is defined according to mood. And I do what I can to help Kim preserve a semblance of order along with a large helping of peace and quiet. Works for me, too — so sometimes it’s fine to be selfish.
I agree with the divine Babs …
“Why does a woman work ten years to change a man’s habits and then complain that he’s not the man she married?”
-Barbra Streisand
Still savoring stories …
13 Jul 2015 3 Comments
Remember this photo from the other day? My Great-aunt Nora, my grandmother, and my Great-aunt Ruth in the middle dressed in white. Christmas 1917.
Now we have this — taken same day, same location, when Ruth’s daughter Myrl was around two years old and my Uncle Ed maybe seven or eight and already missing his right eye. Until my dad came along several years later, they would be the only children of their family generation. There were eleven years between the two brothers, so they didn’t become friends until they were adults.
Ruth’s life took twists and turns from early on, and at no time did she adopt the quiet lifestyle of her two sisters. She instead embraced the 1920s, transitioning quickly from the chaste white dress to flapper gear more suited to The Party, wherever it happened to be. 
A happy Ruth …
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My grandma, who lived past 95, told me endless stories about life in the late 1800s and on, but I don’t remember her going into detail about why Myrl was raised by her Aunt Nora instead of her mother. There are bits and pieces we could combine in formulating answers, but as in all things there are nuances to be taken into account. Fortunately I have an inside track and a fact or two at my disposal. 1) As far as I could discern, not having really known them until they were what I thought of as old, my grandma and Great-aunt Nora, having been raised in challenging circumstances brought about primarily by their alcoholic father, were straight-laced to the max. 2) I heard mention of drinking when Grandma did talk about Aunt Ruth’s life, which would probably have required the equivalent of endless come-to-Jesus talks, but their objections to her lifestyle tell us nothing about Ruth’s feelings or her capacity for maternalism. My guess is that Grandma and Aunt Nora offered to keep Myrl at every opportunity and gradually made that a permanent arrangement, Nora thus getting the child she never had despite two marriages (more stories, kids), and Ruth getting what she, maybe, wanted in the first place, which was simply the freedom to be. That’s the trouble with photographs … they can tell us only so much. Ruth was the baby, spoiled and indulged by her older sisters, and she came along just as social mores were evolving ahead of the more devil-may-care attitudes of the Roaring 20s. The comparative drudgery and boredom of her growing-up years no doubt quickly lost out and fell away in the face of NEW, FUN, HAPPY, EXCITING! By the time I was conscious that I had a Great-aunt Ruth, she was older, ill, married to the last of a series of hard-drinking men, although Uncle Erv did treat her like she was made of glass. Her laugh, which she never lost, sounded like that same glass breaking, and I instinctively loved her. Life ended up costing her dearly … but that’s a story for another day.
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Mesa, Arizona, in the late 1990s. Me holding Merle’s dog Su-Ming, my dad, and feisty Merle, who at some point shed the old Myrl and moved on under her own terms. She was a party girl like her mama, but smarter about it, turning the discovery that her husband was a serial cheater into a flush retirement. By this time Uncle Ed had passed away, so Daddy and Merle were the only remaining direct connections to my grandparents and their era. Merle loved to laugh, she loved people, she loved family, she loved her little dog … and everything was “Oh, kid!” followed by delighted laughter. My favorite story was about the times a neighbor would pick her up from Aunt Nora’s house and then go get her mother. As Aunt Ruth was walking to the car, dark-haired little Myrl would giggle and shout at her “You tan’t fit, Roofie, you got too big a BUTT!!”
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There are a million ways to make life work and it’s a bonus to come from hardy people who knew about some of those ways. I’m in their debt but that isn’t how they saw it — they were simply surviving, in the end doing as well as anybody at that and hanging onto a healthy sense of humor through it all. They’d be genuinely happy to know they left a mark.
Tuesdays were for what?
11 Mar 2015 4 Comments
The Grand Purge of 2015 is currently underway here at Chez Smith so everything that was on my desk … sticky notes, calendar pages, scribbled-on envelopes, wrinkled business cards, Twix wrappers … is in a heap on the bed and I can’t remember what Tuesdays are supposed to look like here on the blog because my notes are in there somewhere. And who has the energy to scroll back … ? Getting rid of that big stupid pile in the middle of the bedspread was my Tuesday goal. Instead, oh look, it’s WEDNESDAY already! Time to shift the detritus from love seat to bed again and see what happens.
Seems to me Tuesdays have been about thankfulness lately, which rhymes with beauty, which gets us back to Monday’s good intentions. Are you OCD at all? What are the things that hook you in and you can’t get enough of twenty-four hours a day because they engage your brain and ignite your passions? And then a morning dawns, the next week or years down the road, when you wake up and can’t find two fricks to give about any of it. And it feels kind of sad but mostly it feels like the most liberating thing that’s happened in too long.
Facebook and I reached an impasse like that the other day, one of many but this time totally out of left field. We’ve agreed to stay friends, but we’re negotiating a little break from each other for health reasons — it’s an increasingly unhealthy place for me to hang out because my reserves are so pathetically low. I can cite chapter and verse, but for now it seems sufficient to say that I’m out of energy for the general ugliness, and sharing my truth just annoys the crap out of people if it isn’t also theirs. I woke up last Thursday with the settled knowledge that it’s not my job, man, and I have to tell you I feel SO much better now that I no longer care.
So I’m trying to make Facebook about relationship again without selling out. We’ll see how long and how evenly my psyche handles the dichotomy — it’s guaranteed to be fascinating. We should talk more about this tomorrow because I clearly haven’t solved the whole puzzle yet and I have a feeling there’s helpful advice out there that could open some windows. I know it all comes back to beauty and beautiful places — living in them, creating them, facilitating them. God, it’s probably something as cliché as “Be the beauty you wish to see in the world.” Nooooooooooo, that sounds so pathetically passive and ineffective. But bottom line, probably yes. Because the really beautiful people do get trampled in life, but while stuff’s hitting them they’re shedding pollen and sloughing off seed pods that take root like science and make places for change to happen.
It’s obvious that the earth is losing its sparkle and could benefit from a beauty infusion, so I’m going to let myself think about all this for a while because it’s what we here in the office like to refer to as overwhelming. Meanwhile, from the Playing for Time desk, a wonderful Wednesday to you all. Make your corner of it beautiful if you can.
Does this mess with your head like it does mine?
I mean if you could know.
Feels like a HumpDay …
25 Feb 2015 4 Comments
4:00pm. Good news and bad news so far today. Rewind to …
10:45am. Kim returns from his annual cardiology exam/report full of great news — the sonogram shows no sign of muscle damage, his blood pressure read 116/63 in the office, and he is, in clinical terms, healthy as a horse. Everybody hugs and does the happy dance and the house feels warm, and safer than it did at 9:45 before his doctor said to him “You should be around for a very long time.”
11:45am. My surgeon’s assistant calls to remind me about tomorrow morning’s appointment, which I think is for finishing the graft and freeing my eyelid again but is simply a check-up, at which time Dr. Khan will determine how much longer the graft has to “bake.” I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry.
11:46am. A meltdown may or may not take place, after which Kim takes me to Hog Wild BBQ for a loaded baked potato bigger than my head. Carb therapy.
2:00pm to present. Lying prone in a darkened room does wonders for temporary insanity, and by darkened room I mean Facebook and WordPress. By *lying prone* I mean I’ve intentionally flat-lined for a while, and by *temporary insanity* I mean batshit crazy.
4:15pm. It’s all good news, of course. A delay in ditching an irritant does not a tragedy make, the graft looks like it’s healing perfectly, and my well-worn face has not been further marred — the scar is going to fade beautifully and who really cares!
Staying cozy tonight with Kim and Madison and feeling grateful. Another HumpDay conquered.
HumpDay Drivel
07 Jan 2015 2 Comments
Yesterday was a little crazy-making and today is a deep-freeze. Applying coffee, a hot shower, and M&Ms, and trusting that the immediate world will right itself before day’s end. Snuggle up, kids, might as well make the best of another HumpDay!
So an attorney and a senior citizen are sitting next to each other on a long flight. The lawyer’s thinking that older people are so out of touch he could easily get one over on this guy.
He asks the retiree if he’d like to play a fun game. The guy’s tired and just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and tries to catch a few zzz’s.
The lawyer persists, however, saying that the game is too much fun to miss out on. “I ask you a question, and if you don’t know the answer, you pay me only $5.00. Then you ask me one, and if I don’t know the answer, I’ll pay you $500.00,” he says.
This catches the man’s attention so to keep the annoying passenger quiet he agrees to play the game with him.
The attorney asks the first question. “What’s the distance from the Earth to the Moon?”
The senior doesn’t say a word, just reaches into his pocket, pulls out a five-dollar bill, and hands it to the lawyer.
Now it’s the older guy’s turn. He asks the lawyer, “What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down with four?”
The lawyer googles everything he can think of but can’t find the answer. He sends e-mails to all his smart friends, to no avail.
After an hour of searching, he finally gives up. He wakes his fellow traveler and hands him $500.00.
The senior pockets the $500.00 and goes right back to sleep.
The lawyer is going nuts now, not knowing the answer. He wakes the guy up again and asks, “Well, so what DOES go up a hill with three legs and come down with four??”
The weary older guy reaches into his pocket, hands the lawyer $5.00, and goes back to sleep.
(Shared by my friend and fellow old person, Rudy Loewen)
Ranting about thankfulness on HumpDay …
31 Dec 2014 4 Comments
Didn’t feel like losing it over anything on Monday, so you got a break. Love it while you can because that’s over in 4 … 3 … 2 …
So Monday was okay, as I recall. Tuesday afternoon we’re tootling along Hwy 10 when the tootle goes away.
Kim sits, hands on wheel, just long enough to assess how and why and mutter “F*ckin’ embarrassing” before he starts walking. Li’l Truck inhaled the last of the fumes about a quarter of a mile short of an exit, beyond which there is rumored (according to the sign) to be a service station, but just before Kim gets to the exit ramp somebody in a big black truck pulls over, picks him up, and drives away.
Which, after the shortest, most obscure Monday Rant you are likely ever to hear from me, brings us to Thankfulness Tuesday. Because yes, there was a service station just beyond the exit ramp. WAS. Extinct and crusty. Enter Ric, driving back to KC after the cold burial of a much-loved friend. Spots my husband strolling along the highway, hunkered against the chill, a heavy coat, stocking cap pulled over most of his face, imposing enough man that you’d notice, and of course pulls right over. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Ric. Ric isn’t a big guy, but he sticks in your mind that way. He repairs heavy equipment and does pipeline work, and I’m pretty sure he isn’t afraid of much, but his kind heart is a lot bigger than all that. He insists on driving back down the 4-lane to get the Madster and me, carts us all back the other way to where the service station really IS, then west one more time where he uses his new truck to shield Kim from Highway Harm while he pours gas in the tank. And yeah, then follows us back to the same service station so he knows for sure we made it, and tells Kim to give that piece of green to somebody who’s looking for it.
But wait, there’s more. Kim’s a good mechanic, knows a lot about a lot. For instance, he’s known since he bought the truck that it needs a new sending unit for the gas gauge, and probably a new fuel pump while you have the tank dropped, but since he doesn’t have a place to do his own work anymore and hasn’t loved the estimates he’s gotten, he’s just gradually developed a little system. The system failed yesterday. But only so we could start getting acquainted with Ric, and so he could offer to replace the unit for parts at his cost, plus labor. Helps him, lets my husband win. Think it’s gonna happen.
Also it’s HumpDay AND New Year’s Eve. Do with that what you will, kids.
If I’m lyin’ I’m flyin’ …
03 Dec 2014 6 Comments
My grandma, who had to tolerate me a lot since I lived within rock-throwing distance and never knew when to go home, used to tell me that I was as happy as if I had good sense. That is, when she wasn’t accusing me of lacking the sense God gave a goose. Clearly she noticed a certain deficit in the reasoning department. Time and experience have predictably sharpened my perceptions, but if I have to base my mood on whatever life’s currently dishing out, I’m done. Hey, I KNOW things suck, generally speaking. I’m perfectly aware we’re all headed to hell in a disintegrating hand basket at warp speed. You know the drill: our atmosphere is imploding, our ground water’s drying up, our oceans are gunked up with plastic and sewage and a sick radioactive glow, the whole planet’s at war in one way or another, and disease and pestilence stalk the land. But I can’t shake the feeling that life is good, gosh darn it, all indications to the contrary. What can I say, things just have a way of working out, and it’s always too early to give up. To quote the great Lucimar Santos de Lima (it’s okay, even Wikipedia can’t find him), “It doesn’t hurt to be optimistic, you can always cry later.”
Playing for Time 
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