A dark and stormy night, to coin a phrase… November 20, 2021
Oh dear. It’s dark at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and I’m tired. I fix a supper of spaghetti, my comfort food, and settle down to deal with my email. I am a subscriber to the free version of Grammarly, which sometimes helps when DragonDictate shows beyond a doubt that it has not a clue about what I’m saying and intend to appear on the paper.
But, wouldn’t you know, Grammarly tonight has its own issues. Grammarly cheerfully notifies me that it has an eight-step guide to how to write a “Pro Blog Post,” and before I can thoughtfully consider whether I want that tonight or not, my complicit printer begins grinding out pages.
I read, “A blog is a great way to establish yourself as an authority on your area of expertise.” My area of expertise tonight is: tired! I am 80, it has been a long, frustrating, busy week, and I am tired! I am an expert on the subject of tired! Even spaghetti doesn’t help. I am still tired!
And my feet hurt. Enough to plunk down right now $58 for the pop-up advertised socks, whose pressure points promise to cure my feet, “no injections, no surgeries, no magical lightbulbs,” just socks. We shall see, won’t we.
But since my $58.00 six pairs of socks will probably join the rest of the world’s goods currently on a cargo ship somewhere in the harbor at Long Beach, I continue, still tired.
A good friend of mine, not a great many years younger than I, is currently working full-time to put together a marketable project for elders. It will include a book, workshops and retreats, and videos. He is a marvelously creative person, usually quietly sensitive and kind. But he has it in his head that elders need to be shown that there is a wonderful world out there, beyond the bingo games and golf that he imagines our focus to be now.
We are good friends, and I wonder how he thinks I spend my time. It has been 10 years since I was close to a bingo game, and that was at the VFW when I practiced with my bagpipe band every Wednesday night next door. The best thing about a bingo game in my mind is that one could put one’s feet up while playing (bingo not bagpipes) in case Miracle Socks don’t work.
Last year, my best friend and buddy climbed on the ice flow and headed out to sea. I’m thinking of him tonight because every year during the holidays, he led a carload of us elders for several hours of viewing Christmas yard decorations. Not the ones that are professionally designed. No, he knew where the best family-put-together yard extravaganzas were in the whole area. Ernest pride shown on every lawn and rooftop with inflatable Snoopys on cotton-covered dog houses, nativity scenes inhabited with Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the rednosed reindeer peering into the manger. Whole symphonies of flashing lights going on and off in ribboned sequences. And all of us, shouting our oohs and ahs at the top of our lungs.
I can’t tell you how much I miss him.