"I may be old, but I know stuff."

 On Friday, Jan sent me a strange text: "HAPPY LINDA HARRIS DAY!!!"

I didn't get it.  Later she explained, "This is the anniversary of the date you reclaimed your rightful name!"

Oh.  Oh yeah.  I remember doing that about 20 years ago, but I couldn't have recalled the date if you put me under hypnosis.  I told her that.

She replied, "I may be old, but I know stuff!"

I am hereby adopting that line for future use.  It's such an apt phrase to pull out when a younger person assumes you don't know shit about anything pre-1994 when the world as they knew it was just getting started. 

When my spinal cord stimulator stopped working, I told the pain management PA, "The vibrator isn't working to ease my pain anymore."

"I hope you don't call it that around your kids," she said--she, being about the age of one of my kids.  She didn't even try to conceal the smile that expressed her amusement that a person of my age knew what a vibrator meant in common parlance.  

I informed her that "spinal cord stimulator" was a mouthful; "Vibrator" was just my shorthand for the device implanted in my spine, that was, even as we spoke, vibrating my feet so noticeably that I wondered if other people even saw my feet shaking.

Younger people do that all the time!  "Do you do email?" they might ask--instead of "Wha's your email address?" 

Do I DO email?  I was doing email, Honey, before you were born.

Sometimes we really don't know things for a minute.  We've hopped on the bandwagon of the digital world, for example, but may temporarily not recall that "digital" used to refer to the fingers on our hand.

I mentioned a minor issue to my dermatologist.  "Occasionally, I feel a tingle in my fingers that feels like a tiny bee sting. " 

"Oh that.  It's a digital mucous cyst," she said.  "Nothing to worry about." 

In other words, a tiny harmless cyst in the finger joints.  Ohhhhhhh!  

Here I was thinking that even my fingers were in need of a password change!

As I left the dermatologist's office, one of the receptionists asked "Can I pet that dog?" and all the others laughed.

"Yeah," I said--"But this girl is really a dawg, not a bear,"

I heard them saying to each other, "I'm surprised she knew that one!" 

Yeah, I'm super cool for such an elderly person.  I know about memes and things go viral!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/P8JgEAmToC8

Making and Reading

Making things--that was the seed pod in my childhood.  (That and church and piano and library books)

My mama made so many things: 

Every garment she and I ever wore.

Wardrobes of tiny dresses for my Christmas morning dolls. 

Stuffed animals made from scraps from our clothes.

Complex stained glass hangings, churches, lamps, kaleidoscopes, insets for doors and windows.

Cross-stitch and crewel embroidery.

Quilts

Flower beds

"Surprises"--little fold-over pies with left-over pie crust dough, filled with cinnamon, butter, sugar, and pecans.

Shorter term, she painted china dishes with her friend, Bea, and built a display rack for them on the walls of our carport-turned-den.  

She used to say she could fix anything if she could just go sew for a while.  Her sewing machine was a lifelong place for thinking things out, making decisions, and healing.  I spent countless hours conversing with her as she guided fabric under the presser foot. 

I was never as good a seamstress as she, but I'm certain that my lifelong love of papers and fabrics comes from the hours we spent in McConnell's poring over pattern books then walking the aisles and handling the fabrics and deciding what fabrics went with which dress patterns.         

Calico, gingham, corduroy, velveteen--ah, how lovely even the words!

When my daddy gave me the McCalls Make-It Book, it became my favorite book.  The pages showed me how to carve animals out of soap, how to weave pot holders, how to make Chinese lanterns out of construction paper--things like that.

Making books is satisfying in a similar way sewing was for Carlene.  (She just gave me her Bernina sewing machine)   I love the precision required to measure, cut, and fold papers.  I love that final happy moment of stitching when the cover snugly holds the pages together.  And I love poking in thrift shops for braids and buttons for final touches.

This has been a tough week with my feet.  My PT released me after 8 sessions ("It's not working for you") and sent me to a spine doc, suggesting that there could be something going on in my spine.  So this week I have three medical appointments.  I'm also looking into other options, one of which is low-dose radiation, another is nerve ablation. But in the meanwhile, it's virtually impossible to stand at my beautiful cluttered-with-paper dining table long enough to finish a book. 

So, as we used to say about things that got in the way of what we really wanted to do and opened up time for something else: "The Universe must want me to read more." 

So that's what I'm doing:

I'll write about that tomorrow.  

Sports

I can't believe I'm watching March Madness!  (I didn't even know what it was until this week). Due to early-onset athletic deficiency (last to be picked on every team, for example), I have never had an ounce of interest in sports.  If someone so much as mentioned a game of ping pong or pool in somebody's  garage, I was the one to go wash the dishes, just to get as far away as possible. 

Marcus, along with a friend of his, is doing the commentary for VCU radio.  So we turn on the games on CBS without sound, while we listen to VCU on our phones.  I am amazed at the scope of his knowledge about sports, all sports, and his ability to recall stats on the spot whatever game he's announcing.

It makes me think about how we all choose our unique paths--based in large part on what is loved and enjoyed in our first homes.  Whether music, sports, animals, cooking, or reading, it's likely that those seeds are planted in early childhood.  

I remember being at their house when Rutgers was playing, back when Marcus was just a toddler, how they all put on Rutgers jerseys and took sandwiches and snacks to the basement for game night.  In those days I might have glanced at the game from time to time, but mostly I was fascinated to see a whole so INTO the game.  Even Day--who used to be pretty sports-averse like her mama, but last year coached girls' football at her high school! 

Buffalo Bills--the whole family, including Leary aunts and uncles and cousins, watch every single Bills game, without fail, all wearing jerseys and texting back and forth throughout the game.  

I didn't get it, until now--when the Pritchett/Harris/Leary's texts go on from start to finish. 

I might be starting to be a little bit of a sports fan!

Monday Afternoon at the Rodeo

This is rodeo season in San Antonio, and Elena is racing in anything open to teenagers.  Not only that, she's working with a trainer after school most days to up her game. 

She did great runs in the weekend barrel races--three this weekend and another tonight. 

On Thursday she found a newborn orphaned goat and has added goat-feeding-every-four hours to her busy days.  I can't believe how agile and sturdy Annie is so soon after birth, relating well to the dogs and horses and kids in rodeo world. She was a big hit with all the kids in the bleachers yesterday. 

Big old furry Conway, half blind, is turning out to be a natural surrogate mama,  treating Little Orphan Annie like his own little kid. .

From Rumi

 Man, man, man,

what kind of lightning are you, setting farms on fire? 
What kind of cloud are you, raining down stones?

What kind of hunter?
Caught in your own trap—
a thief stealing from your own house.

You’re sixty years old, you’re seventy years old, 
and you’re still uncooked?
Still won’t let Love’s flames near, 
won’t let them burn you up?

Enthralled by stuff and status, 
the crown, the turban, the king’s beard—
thorns pricking your hands,

but where is your flower?

Gazing in the mirror, 
you tilt your hat like a crescent moon—
but where is your light?

The Year of the Puppy

Every night, during the months-before-vaccine of Covid, I looked for puppies online.  I had a certain one in mind, something black and white, a breed that ended with poo.  When what we are looking for doesn't show up, or is way too expensive, we sometimes don't see what does show up. 

I will be forever grateful to my friend, Janet Oglethorpe, for scanning SNIPSA's site with fresh and wise eyes and sending me a picture of a dog who was, she said, already "my dog."  

But she's not a puppy!  "Don't get a puppy," she wisely advised me.  "Get a grown-ass dog."

As for color and breed and lineage, Janet knew before I did that none of that mattered.  

She found Luci online on the infamously memorable January 6th.  She grabbed her as a foster dog until she could introduce us.  

On January 7th, when she called to say she'd found MY dog, I hesitated.  January 6th had gutted me.  And I didn't yet have a fence.  

Nevertheless, she persisted.

On January 8th, she said, "I have to take her back today unless you want her.  Can I just stop by and introduce you two?"

In came this adorable little copper and white dog with a tail one observer has since called "resplendent."  Having just had surgery so as not to produce any more puppies that could wind up in shelters like she had, she was not particularly active.  She sat beside Janet and on her lap.

And then I picked her up!  She curled up in my lap, a tiny circle of fur, looking for all the world like a newborn fawn.  Then she put her head on my shoulder--that did it!

She was my ten-pound shadow, following me from room to room, curling up beside the bathtub when I bathed, standing between my legs as I made dinner.  Small as she was, she jumped all the way from floor into my bed and slept beside me.  The rest is happy history!

If you are inclined to get a puppy--or know anyone who is--you must buy Alexandra Horowitz' book, The Year of the Puppy." 

Ironically, just when I was writing that sentence, a family from the end of my street, along with a visiting grandmother named Lucie, knocked to show me their new little one-pound puppy, Remi--who loves following his new brother Moochoo, around the house.  

There is probably nothing cuter in the animal kingdom than a puppy!  

Luci was probably 10 months old when I got her, past chewing on furniture and whining all night and peeing on the floor.  On the first day she did chew up my favorite leather pocket book and a phone case, but I told her that was not allowed, and she never did it again.  Based on her laid-back and sweet personality, after reading this book, I'd say that her dog mama was very attentive and gentle with her.  And that whoever her first human people were taught her good manners.  

If you're a little on the older side, with no kids in the house to play with, and you want to take your dog with you everywhere, I'd suggest this formula: ten pounds, ten months.

"It's ten o'clock. Do you know where your children are?"

Do you remember when the local newscasts ended with that question?  It was long before I had children myself, back in 1967 when I was a newly-married person living in San Antonio, but I often recalled it years later when my children started driving and being people out in the world without needing me so much.

Now three of my four grandchildren are older than I was when I moved to Texas trying to figure out how to be an adult in Texas, how to finish my degree, how to be married, and how to keep up without a TV or in-house telephone.  (There was a phone booth two blocks away and a friend sometimes invited me over to watch her TV). 

Now that I'm a grandmother, and still a mama, I come home from a trip wondering where they are, how they are, and what they're doing.  

So this morning, I got a call from Day along with pictures of her recent retreat to Virginia Beach for a crafts weekend with Deanna's family and friends.  Also pictures of Marcus and Lucia who are visiting for the weekend. 

At the Virginia Beach retreat, Day made a deck of face cards:  (I told her she's the most playful creative I know!) 

Everybody's okay--that's what I really want to know.  Marcus has lost a lot of weight from his recent mono and just found out he needs a tonsillectomy, but he's lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree.  Jackson doesn't get a spring break this year now that he's working.  Tom and Day are going to Denmark this spring--after they come here for Easter weekend. 

So they all love Lucia!  

Here is the morning conversation between Day and Tom:

"Okay, Tom, we can't get too attached to her.  She's from Spain, who knows where this is going to lead?"

Tom: "It's too late.  I can't help imagining them holding our future grandchildren!"

She's a basketball star and an art major, her parents were both Olympians.  She speaks three languages fluently.  She adores Marcus.  And vice versa.  What else do I need to know? 

Even I--who've never met her--am starting to get "attached" and hoping to get to meet her in the spring. 

The funeral of Jesse Jackson

I wonder where the expression came from: "She never darkens the door....," a phrase that I associate with non-church-going people like me?

Except for the occasional wedding or funeral, I never "darken" the doors of organized religions.  But today I'm making up for a bunch of Sundays, watching the five-hour funeral service of Reverend Jesse Jackson. I'm on Hour Two, but I intend to watch it all the way to the getting-saved part if that's how it's going to end--which is typically the wrap-up of a good Baptist church event of any kind. 

Thousands of people attended the service in Chicago today--from choir members and soloists to preachers and speakers of all stripes and colors, to a handful of Democratic Presidents and dignitaries, Jackson's wife,  children and grandchildren on the front row.

As I was napping this afternoon, You Tube on, I woke up to the dynamic speech of Al Sharpton.  I'd never heard him deliver a sermon, I know him mainly as a host and guest on programs aired on MSNow.

But he rocked the congregation today, Martin Luther King style.  He got impassioned shout-outs and AMENs and applause from the people.  After hearing that, I decided to watch the entire service.  (The last one I watched similar to this one was the funeral of Mahalia Jackson.)

A cardinal, a rabbi and a Baptist preacher delivered poetic powerful prayers.  I copied a few lines from the prayer of the Baptist preacher, Otis Moss: 

Jessie Jackson was "a son of the South, a practitioner of good trouble, and an acolyte of holy mischief."

(Baptist preachers love threesomes, phrases with three parts!) 

"We come to honor a spiritual artist who painted upon the canvas of democracy with a rainbow coalition of colors that had been marginalized by antebellum myths that dismissed human dignity....

We honor the rhetorical genius of a man whose oral dexterity reshaped notions of what is possible.

The simple phrase 'I Am Somebody' when deployed by Rev. Jackson empowered a generation suffering from the lingering residue of confederate bacteria resting upon the unrealized constitutional promises in a space called America..." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZQ2CD6UEZE

Back in San Antonio

Jeremiah is a grandpa of a man, a proud shuttle driver who is attentive to his riders while mentoring a future driver  in the front passenger seat. Throughout the ride, he tells us a few interesting things about the areas we're driving through, like "They are building three bridges at once right here--not very smart in my opinion" and "Atlanta doesn't allow these 18-wheelers to go into the city, they have to use the Perimeter, so you won't see many big trucks from here on."

Before leaving Athens, while checking to make sure we were all buckled in, he asked for my phone.  He held it up to tell us what he probably tells all his passengers: "See this thing here?  How many of you drive?" (We all said yes)  "Driving and these phones never go together--I've been driving all my life and I don't even want to tell you how many people I've seen hurt or killed cause of texting and driving." 

I was unsteady yesterday, teary the way I always am on transition days.  My feet were hurting so much I felt nauseous. I was wondering how I'd get out of the shuttle and how I'd manage my way-too-big suitcase in the airport.  But this quintessentially grandfatherly black man helped me into the shuttle with a firm grip.  A young man in the back row smiled warmly at me and helped me move my back pack and pocket book out of the way when the late last rider finally showed up.  

Jeremiah teased the last rider, "Since you're late, you get to buy us all lunch."

Midway, he said, "I"m just thinking of what I'm going to order for lunch when Steve treats us all at the airport.  Fried chicken maybe."

When we stopped at the North Terminal, he reached for my hand with that same tight grip.  "Don't worry, Sweetheart, I got you."  

I got you!  When I'm feeling teary anyway, that's enough to almost make me  cry. 

In a world in a hurry, when we no longer meet each other or deliver each other to the gates like we used to in the old days, his slow easy kindness hearkened back to a past we'll likely never see again.  

He reiterated it as I squeezed his hand going from the seat to the pavement, careful not to fall: "I got you covered--like a big ole blanket."

Arriving in and leaving Georgia were bookended by the kindness of strangers.  

The student driver--even he who'd said almost nothing up to that point--said, "I hope to be the driver when you come back to Georgia." 

My San Antonio Uber driver was a kind young man in the US for only two years, "an elementary teacher from Cuba where students respect their teachers so much and have good etiquette and manners." He was here with no family, no friends, hoping to master English and study to be a nurse.

I've met so many nurses and caretakers this week from other countries, parents who are working long hours to provide their children with better lives than they might have had "back home."  What strikes me--but my Uber driver and I don't have enough time or mutual language fluency to go there--is how I always feel a need to apologize to new immigrants for the state of the country they've landed in.  

I want to tell them about better times not so long ago.  I hope he meets good people and makes a safe life for himself until this Trumpian nightmare of ICE and war, recklessness and cruelty, is over, when people of conscience and reason prevail and we can feel proud of our beautiful country again.

Weekend Retreat in Watkinsville, Georgia

On this Sunday night in Watkinsville, Georgia, I am sitting on the porch of an old wooden house called Fanny's House, my home of the week five miles from Carlene's apartment at Presbyterian Village.  Behind the house is what was Fanny's only bathroom, a red outhouse that's settling into the ground.  

The owners (my landlords for the week) live next door in a beautiful house--and Brian is the mayor of Watkinsville.  

After Fanny's death, this house was used mostly for storage, but Brian and his wife have turned it into a short-term rental that's just wonderful!  Now that I've found my home-away-from-home, this is where I'll be staying from now on.  

Fanny, known by all the townspeople, was always rocking on her porch when she wasn't working as help for the family who lived where Brian and his family's house now stands.  

The house was wallpapered in cardboard and newspaper and there were only three pictures on her wall: pictures of Martin Luther King, Jack Kennedy, and Jesus.  

It's a beautifully landscaped house now with all kinds of  Georgia  flowers growing in the yard.  If this house were for sale and I were in the market, I would buy it and move in permanently.  Every detail--from headboard to chandelier (made of old Coke and Dr. Pepper bottles) to the coffee table is made from wood salvaged when the "big house" was demolished.   

It has a large bathroom with a modern shower and an antique bathtub--and bathtubs are hard to find in Air BnB houses. What is now the kitchen was Fanny's bedroom and the current bedroom was her kitchen.

I haven't cooked anything because Carlene and I are spending our days playing..  Yesterday we went to Madison, one of our favorite little Georgia towns and had pizza at Amici's.  

Madison sidewalks are bumpy bricks, and can be a tad difficult to navigate with Carlene's rollator, but we managed quite well.  We went into a few shops, no problem, but the curb across from Amici's was a bit tricky.  We would have made it without help--sure we would!--but our technique might have looked a little iffy to a young couple who approached us and asked if we needed help.

Turns out, they are in the senior living business and a friends with the CEO at Presbyterian Village. 

This is my favorite part of meeting people with her: She loves to insert into the conversation that she's a hundred!  And I knowingly smile thinking, "Here we go again."

"No-o-o-o!" they all say.  "No way!  You look like you might be 80 tops!"--or something to that effect.  

Of course, Carlene knows the CEO and probably everybody else working at Presbyterian Village--not aligning perhaps with the couple's expectations of a centenarian. "You're sharp as a tack!" Crystal said to her.

To which Carlene retorted: "Not the kind you could sit on!

Here she is with Jackie, one of the staff members in the dining room, who told me, "We just love your mama!" 

Of course they do.  She knows the name of every one of them--as well as the residents on her floor and the many she's befriended who live in independent living houses.  She knows about their families and life experiences.  She asks them questions and remembers what they tell her.

This is kind of rare if you think about it.  How often do you meet people who love to tell you about themselves but never ask a single question about you?  Being genuinely interested in other people is one of Carlene's top super powers!

As we were leaving for a ride-around this afternoon, we stopped to chat with the women at the front desk as Carlene always does.  One of them, a security guard, was putting the finishing touches on a strawberry lap quilt she's making for her 22-year-old daughter.

"Are you saving it for her birthday?" Carlene asked.

"Oh no, I'm giving it to her tomorrow.  I can't wait.  I want her every time she sees it and touches it to feel how much I love her."

I get it.  I have a mama like that!