Day 4/24: Things I Won't Be Buying Today

There are well-meaning folks who decisively declare that the best two days of boat ownership are 'the day it's bought and the day it's sold', but their sardonic stance has never dulled my desire for this particular beauty. 

It's the item I won't be buying today: the 1937 twenty-five foot Chris Craft Triple Cockpit Runabout.

Some want a party barge. 

Some want a fishing boat. 

Some want a luxury yacht. 

But me, I want a mahogany girl with copper fuel lines and flame red leather seats. I want double flags and chrome gauges and a rumbling engine that sounds like the purring ambassador of a bygone era. I've wanted the sound and smell of a boat like this since having been introduced to one at the age of fifteen by some affluent friends; friends that included me, much to my middle-classed delight, in their highfalutin', moneyed adventures.

Fortunate to have grown up when and where I did, I know what poor looks like. I know what middle class looks like. And man, do I know what rich looks like. Being around the well-to-do as much as I was as a young teenager made an indelible impression on me. You know how baby ducks imprint on whatever is around them at birth? Well, I am pretty sure I unwittingly imprinted upon things like Mercedes Benzes and antique Chris Crafts when I was hitting my hormonal stride. My taste preferences for cars and boats have always been above my budget and, yes, I know precisely from where those preferences come.

Today's case in point: I had friend whose family was chummy with a New York State Senator, and damn if he didn't have the nicest restored prewar beauty, which he entered yearly into summer shows. My friend and I scored an invitation to a show that summer and were directed to sit in the senator's boat and answer whatever questions we could (while also discouraging any boat defacers) as he walked about, hobnobbing, perusing, and socializing with other big money boat owners. 

In my madras shorts and docks with no socks, my legs were mid-July tan and my collar was half-popped in that lazy "Yes, I just wandered in from prep school" way. I gelled my hair into a ballet dancer's bun and, with my pearl earrings and Tom Cruise Wayfarers, looked like any other teenager lucky enough to be from a family with an antique wooden masterpiece stored in their boathouse on the lake. Except I wasn't. I was just along for the ride in this upper class world, acting as though I belonged there, blase' in my appearance while discussing things like the best options for charitable giving and Peter Gabriel's Biko album.

Walking around that afternoon, I encountered my most favorite, to this day, wooden motorboat. Running my hands back and forth over the thickness of the varnish, I hovered, I suppose, too long, stunned at the luxuriousness of it all; so sleek and powerful, with its marbleized banjo-style steering wheel, and flawless bench seats heating up in the midday sun. Stupefied, and frozen in place, I felt the vibrations of all the years that this boat had been owned and prized, its history rolling up my legs from the floorboards. I saw myself in the water with the hull splitting the reedy grass of the shallows, and I knew in my bones I belonged on it. But, as I grew uneasy in the owners' collective gaze, I also knew I'd probably never have one. Families with money will act like something is no big deal even though they are showing you something that is a very big deal.  

Me: gesturing about the 1937 Chris Craft, "I love your boat."

Rich Guy: "This boat? Oh (chortle) Gooby ordered this from Algonac in 1937 when he graduated from Brown and had it delivered all the way to Rhode Island. You know, all soooorts of water in Rhode Island! The perrrrrrfect spot for a tool around the bay! Econometrics, right, Lovey?"

Rich Guy's Wife: "Old Gooby! Yes, Econometrics from Broowwwn. Gooby was the best, darling, simply the best."

Family members aboard the boat: (clinking Waterford flutes) "Three cheers for Gooby!"

As I stepped away, I remember committing to memory, specifically, 1937. Specifically, the triple cockpit. Specifically, those red leather seats. Maybe I could have one someday.

Well, here we are, well past 'someday' and I'm not buying one, though I do love thinking about it. The desire got lodged in my developing brain where it sits, occasionally kindled back to life when I spot one of these classics either in person or online. I suppose there's no harm in letting that desire remain there.

If you were lucky enough to have a Gooby who bought, and maybe even left you one of these, I raise my glass.

Cheers to Gooby. Simply the best.

 

 

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Day 3/24: Things I Won't Be Buying Today

Today I won't be buying a Trapper Keeper, even though they are sold, in an updated form and fashion at Walmart and Amazon. 

I also won't be paying eighty five dollars for an original one, dug out of someone's basement junk pile and posted on ebay.

But, I do love a good school supply and this one was the best.

I bought my Trapper Keeper with my babysitting money and it lasted me through all of middle school and high school. Each September my friends and I would go to Schatz Stationery store in our local mall, buy new multicolored Mead files and reams of loose leaf paper, wipe our Trappers down with a little soap and water and the things were like brand new.

Did you have a Trapper Keeper? I sure hope so. Was yours plain, like mine, which was cobalt blue and white, or did you have one of the more decorative ones with rainbows and unicorns or glossy animal photographs?

One of my favorite sounds back then was the satisfying rip of the closure. When the entire class tore them open at once it was like a beautiful Velcro symphony. 

Do you remember that fat white plastic paper clip, sort of fashioned like a clipboard? It was super helpful for holding homework papers...and secret notes from friends. 

The original commercial, from 1980 and still circulating on YouTube, is cute, with a simple 60 second conversation between classmates. The more I re-watch it, the more I feel my original desire to have one.

 

 

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Day 2/24: Things I Won't Be Buying Today

Today, I will not be buying a Mercedes-Benz Classic Car, in particular, this perfect 300SD from the year 1980. 

I became infatuated with Mercedes Benz at the age of twelve when a friend of mine, whose father was a bank president and whose mother was an interior decorator, had a Mercedes wagon; specifically in which to drive their female golden retriever around because the dog was so hairy and stinky. 

Although I am admittedly hairy (but hardly ever stinky), I too, feel like it's probably time I exercise my right to own a car I have coveted for almost 4 decades. 

'Cause that's a whole lotta coveting.

In addition to this being my absolute most favorite Mercedes paint color, Manganese Brown, a rich and spicy root beer hue, it also sports the wood trim I associate with reading rooms and Chris Craft boats and horse barns and old money. It's looks like a rolling library of honey colored leather. 

Might you have any Grey Poupon?  

 

The fact that it has a cassette deck is no problem, musically, as I still have my cassette collection, minus a few that have snapped due to a combination of brittleness and overplay throughout the years...sort of like my body.

But because a bag of groceries cost us 48 dollars today (navel oranges, tangelos, dog treats, apples, bread, a frozen pizza and two bottles of juice) I will be eschewing this Long Island-based Mercedes. 

Okay, let's be honest, I wasn't going to buy it even if those groceries were free. I will, however, keep it in mind if we ever rescue a golden retriever because God knows that hairy stinky thing is definitely going to look great in this.

 

 

 

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Day 1/24: Things I Won't Be Buying Today

I will not be buying a chicken nugget shaped hair clip today.

Having long hair, I like barrettes, elastics, pony holders, head bands and other assorted hair funkery but why anyone would wear a piece of fast food in his or her hair is beyond me. 

The description says it "looks real but is not edible"... yeah, no kidding.

I bet I'd be the most popular sunbather on the beach with this thing on my head. The seagulls would have a flipping field day. 

And then I'd have a hair ornament shaped like fear and loathing...and bird shit. 

 

#mushroomtumbler

Oatmeal Colored Fog

 

Walking up our stairs I am suddenly trudging up a greige carpeted mountain path. On the hiker's scale, it's got a rating of  'Strenuous'.

 

My vision blurs and I am a six year old grasping for the flimsy, frayed nylon exit rope after stepping off the Tilt-a-Whirl. All pigtails and white canvas Keds and between the fingers cotton candy stickiness, I'm stiff from gripping down so hard on a hot steel safety bar. 

 

My palms feel clammy. 

 

I swear I smell fairground metal. 

 

I close my eyes, breathe, and try not to lean too far left or right. My heart beat is a skippity-dippity-do bayoneting its way through the side of my neck. In what now looks like oatmeal colored fog, I dramatically and fitfully seek out the sturdy wooden railing on my first to second floor staircase and force myself to kneel. Remembering what my meditation app says, I picture low tide waves, cerulean and cushy, softly washing over my knees and feet. I conjure my yellow and brown tube of suntan lotion with the smug looking monkey on it. I hear a boom box, grit in all its joints from having fallen over in the sand, stuttering the bass line from 'Come Together'. 

Finally, after a moment of panic, I've got feet down below my knees. 

One thing I can tell you is [I've] got to be free... 

 

of this fucking anxiousness.

 

Later, I'm preparing dinner, stubbornly squinting because I was too lazy to look for one of my ninety nine pairs of reading glasses. I'm pointing and dragging my index finger, ashen and ancient-looking from being washed in million degree anti-bacterial water 82 times a day for the last 731 days, down a cookbook page of rudimentary ingredients like noodles and butter. I question why I even require a recipe for a meal as simple as this when my iPod travels to one of the old George Harrison songs I used to crank in college. I hear the first five notes and begin weeping without an ounce of control. 

 

I'm a Dark Horse. Running on a dark race course. 

 

It's just one of those days.

Because, like you, if I have to read about one more person whose last breath looked a lot like the last breaths of a bug-eyed guppy discarded on the beach by the 4 year old who'd not been taught better, dumping her water pail full of stolen sea creatures out on the sand before grabbing her moldy towel and dragging it, tripping over and over on the way back to her family's summer retreat; or one more small businesses owner first watching her last two employees nail sheets of cheap splintery plywood to the windows of what was to be her American Dream, and then going home to cry silently behind the door of the freezer so the kids don't hear her pitchy gulps as she pulls the last pound of overly fatty ground beef out of the freezer to cook with a box of Hamburger Helper found in the back of the cabinet from 2019 when it seemed more like a cheeky nod-to-nostalgia impulse buy than an actual end-of-our-working-life-as-we-know-it meal; or one more exhaustively walloped health care provider following the familiar footpath from the ER to his favorite hospital parking spot for the last time, scrubs sweaty with the acrid funk of fright and forced out of his job over a choice about what he puts in his body despite saving thousands of lives over the course of his 20 plus year career, I'm going to crack. 

 

I am a handful of peppermint Mentos, quickly and sinisterly forced one by one, into a tepid can of Diet Coke on Granny's doily-covered end table.

It's the bad news. It's the hatred. It's the shaming. It's the hopelessness. 

 

It's the lack of accountability. It's the politics. It's the fear factor.

But, I wipe my nose, find a pair of horn-rimmed readers, and slip into my thirty year old clogs, not so much brown but more the color of that dead pelican I found. Just an enormous bill, bleached white bones and clustery tufts washed ashore. I feel my aching feet loosen up in the worn leather, thawing from having numbed atop the icy kitchen tile, and I look out the frosty window pane to admire the fresh snow and know this too shall pass.

 

It just has to.

Everyone my age has a long list of sufferings and nearly all of it has shifted, either temporarily or  permanently. And if it hasn't, we have figured out a way to live with and among the misfortune. We might make it through the day with a healthy jog on the treadmill or we might make it through the night with a hearty swig (or five) of Jack Daniels. We might have steel resolve forged by confidence and the knowledge that we can stand strong against whatever we encounter or we might have an invisible exoskeleton created by thousands of alternating layers of panic and recovery, like thick bubbly varnish on a beautiful antique.

Either way, we make it through.

 

Today, I scratched out a list of things that I have endured and, very significantly, which have passed. I used a bubble gum pink marker which I realized the irony of after item 35. The list is long, or maybe it just feels so fucking long because of where we are in the world. But as I look at it and try to just regard the events as "times gone by", I reinforce that I've motored through and figured out every last hurt, tragedy, trauma, and disappointment. I've proven that the abandonment, the recklessness, the harm done, and the abrasions are no match for me. 

 

I am triumphant. 

I am a blue ribbon and a first place trophy.  

I am more undefeated than the 2007 Patriots.

For just a brief moment I am more Jolene than Dolly.

 

Most importantly, I'm still here. 

 

I flip through the list again. It can be viewed, as can most things in the human condition, multiple ways. It can be looked at as a life that has been less than saccharine sweet, or it can be viewed, as I am choosing to see it right now, as a life that has prepared me for disaster and recovery, calamity and recuperation, strife and calm, cataclysm and rebirth.

 

Normally, I wold totally choose the Oatmeal Fog as a paint color, but today, if I were selecting something new for the hallway where I stumbled for a moment overcome by panic, I would choose one of these, as sentimentally cloying as they are, just to make sure I am focused on the possibility of a happy tomorrow. 

 

 

Keep going, friends. 

We are journeying through this together and one day we will emerge, like baby voles blinking at a corona of concentric circles surrounding the white summer sun, stunned by the notion that this new day is for nothing more than our collective enjoyment.

 

Keep going. 

 

Keep. 

 

Going. 

#mushroomtumbler

Take a Good Look

This is Jax. He's momentarily still as a statue here but don't let that fool you. He moves about like a giant wind up toy rotated two clicks past where the tiny white winder really should stop.

In every other moment besides the nanosecond of pause required for this shot, he repeatedly bumped and circled his tank-like body up against and around his owner's legs with a plucky kinetic energy. 

He's huge with a strength and size rather daunting to the average person; but at "just about" one year old, this male Great Dane is a big pink-hued albino baby. 

All of his weaving and darting coupled with the glare of the sun and my less than skillful ability to take photos on my ancient phone, made this picture nearly impossible but was able to snap and capture what I needed for this piece. (Thank you, God.)

And what I needed was a decent picture because I really need you to take a good look at him. 

A close and careful look. 

And when you do, you'll see that Jax was born without eyes. 

He was also born without the ability to hear a single sound.

Because hubs and I walk a lot, I've crossed the paths of hundreds of dogs but I can't say I've ever seen one quite like Jax. He is unusually special, like something you might see on 'The Dodo', an internet site for animal lovers.

I believe, as I do all the time, that Jax was placed before me for a purpose. Stumbling upon him and learning about his adoption as the most vulnerable newborn pup I'd ever personally heard of, once again gave me reason to renew my faith in humanity. Our random encounter offered me the blessing of a special chance to see all of the beauty within what initially might have presented as a hopeless situation. 

The beauties I saw were acceptance and safety and love. 

His owner is a kind soul, oozing sweetness like pumpkin stuffed French toast. Leading Jax gently but firmly on a soft, thick leash, she encouraged us to put our hands on him and without hesitating, hugged me tightly when I tearfully told her that he touched my heart. 

They are living their best lives together, galivanting on daily beach walks and interacting with strangers who, unless they pay close attention to where his peepers should be, might not even notice that there is something seriously flawed about that puppy face. 

Today, there were horses on the beach and, damn, didn't Jax know it? Sniffing the air and skittering about, he could sense them. There was a sharp farmy scent and a low thrumming vibration in the sand that I could feel in the soles of my feet as they approached us. Jax grew more animated, perhaps agitated, as they clomped closer. His owner soothed him, leaning into his body and petting his jittery back in long, slow strokes. 

Like so many of you, I also been struggling; but my unexpected and enchanting moments with Jax and his owner gave me a real lift. 

Someone with a big heart truly wanted this dog, despite being born with so many problems and needs, and she willingly provides him with unlimited love, safety, and acceptance. He lives a good and decent life, even when something big and powerful and unknown is approaching in the distance. 

Truthfully, we all have problems and needs...and serious flaws which most strangers fail to see unless they take a really good look. Maybe we can offer ourselves and each other more love, safety, and acceptance.

I wish you a good and decent life no matter what is approaching you. May we all feel loved, safe, and accepted. 

#mushroomtumbler

Sidewalks, Silence and Siding - the Stories

Complete strangers always tell me their stories.

I suppose you could say I have one of those faces or I remind someone of an old friend they once knew and felt comfortable with but honestly, I think it's because I just look people in the eye, smile, and stand around and listen. I try not to rush off in a hurry. I let people know that I'm holding space for them even though we've just met.

Last week I was approached by the woman who methodically and repeatedly, day after day, sweeps the common concrete and blacktop in front of her apartment complex; a large community that houses hundreds of people. She can't wait to tell me, after vigorously petting the min pin, that her mother had ten chihuahuas when she was a kid, all with names straight from the bible. She proceeds to recall the little buggers, squeezing her broom handle, wooden and worn, under one armpit for what is probably the first time in the last few hours. She counts off on her calloused, dusty fingertips...Abraham to Zebediah. 

I'm routinely blessed to interact with a cherubic mute man who breakfasts at Stewarts. If he wore a baseball uniform, he'd be a dead ringer for a differently-abled Don Zimmer. Although he's older, he has the smooth kewpie face of a perpetually astonished blue-eyed child that you've just surprised with a sheet cake and balloons on a morning he forgot was his birthday. Our Zim doppelganger wears effeminate sneakers, in a style your Memaw might call 'house shoes', but he balances their grandmotherly charm with an unexpected fistful of chunky silver skull rings and as he stands before me in his periwinkle soft soled slip-ons, I ask him questions to which he utters, urps and ughs while conducting an invisible orchestra; mammoth stainless steel biker jewelry shoved down every arthritic digit; a gleam in his glacier-colored globes which tells me he is an amazing orator despite not possessing a single recognizable word. 

But today, I got to chat with a new guy, a guy who is single-handedly re-siding his home, a building rather stately but in need of a facelift. 

We've probably walked by this house forty times in the last three months and bit by bit, the old beauty is being veneered a pleasant brownish gray, very much like the feathers of mourning doves.  

I get weirdly excited when a city house undergoes significant repair. I can't help but heap praise upon the flippers who are busy pouring sweat and love into a dilapidated home. Hubs sometimes leaves me be and circles the block with the min pin when I start yakking with the tile guy or hollering up to the roofing crew balanced precariously on slate like the chim chimeree stack sweepers of my youth. So, I was pleased when my love stood with me this morning and looked for whomever'd been busting his or her hump on the two story colonial. 

Like most days, there is an old van in the driveway. There is a paint splattered boombox playing classic Bryan Adams. I strain my neck to see who's responsible for the handiwork but there's never been anyone there to converse with...until today, that is. Today, Mr. Siding Man is there. 

Mr. Siding Man is probably somewhere around my age, though, admittedly, I am a very poor judge of that nowadays. My eyesight isn't as good as it used to be and though my sunglasses are prescription, they're old. Hubs points things out to me all the time and I peer skyward, rather Magoo-ish as I step off of curbs squinting and saying "Where? What am I looking at?"

But I can see that Mr. Siding Man has a short shock of perfectly silver hair and a build suggesting hard work and home cooked meals. 

We compliment him on a job well done thus far. He apologizes for the amount of time it is taking him. He is but a one man show and he likes things done right the first time. This would have been sufficient explanation for us, but as I cheerfully flatter his colorful choice of vinyl, he blurts out that he has recently had a variety of below the belt cancers, three rounds of chemotherapy, a prostate left back in the operating room and a bladder surgically crafted from his small intestines. He also mentions that siding work with a colostomy bag is about as uncomfortable as anything you can imagine. 

We stand, mouths agape, at the determination this man possesses. I start feeling that familiar heat coursing up the sheath of my spine whenever I am in the presence of someone who has more fortitude and backbone than I perhaps ever will. I want to shake his hand and tell him I am proud to know him, but I really don't know him and shaking hands has become such an overstep in this horribly awkward time; so, instead, I offer simple exclamatory statements suggesting awe and blessings that sound rote but what else can you say when presented with such information? He goes on to tell us that he has two new grandchildren and he is beyond thrilled to be in their lives. Hubs declares that grandkids are definitely something to be thankful for. Mr. Siding Man says this will probably be his last job so that he can spend more time with them. 

His last job. 

It is then that we realize he doesn't live at this house. He is working on this house. Someone hired this guy to start and complete what for some might be a one-man Sisyphean task but he's doing it...while jamming to Bob Seger's "Against the Wind" as his colon empties into a bag strapped to his abdomen. 

Think of that next time you have to mow the lawn or scour scrambled eggs off the stovetop, or watch Bubble Guppies for the hundredth time this week, or pick your in-laws up at the airport. Think of the dog-loving lady forever sweeping a driveway that can't possibly stay clean or the poetry of a wordless, slipper wearing bard, or the cancer conqueror on a ladder wearing his insides on his belt and dreaming of pushing two brand new littles in a double-seated stroller. 

And then, after you've done what you didn't want to do, breathe deep, go outside, throw the doors to your beating heart wide open, look your hometown in the eye, and marvel at the sweetness of how everyone starts telling you their stories. 

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