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Lucy and Ethel,…what can I say?
Not that I’m paranoid, but I live in a world where skirts are devious creatures, trees are aggressive, and chairs conspire to trap me. Embarrassing moments abound!

We’ll start with skirts…and come back to skirts.
If they’re long and flowing (some of my ill-advised favorites), skirts will, at the very least, trip you on stairs. But there’s more…. At my husband’s high school reunion, I wore a lovely 2-piece outfit with a wide flowing skirt. So elegant! As I stood to the side of the dance floor, a kind and gentle fellow I had never met tapped me on the shoulder to alert me that the bottom of the back of my skirt was tucked into my waistband and I might want to pull it out. (I had come just come from, guess where, the restroom!) Years later, I again felt oh-so-elegant in a long flowing skirt when I attended at workshop at the university. I left the workshop, chatted with the instructor, made a comfort stop, walked to my car, drove to a coffee shop where I would be meeting a friend — all the usual. Somehow I kept feeling rather drafty. As I toted my belongings into the cafe, that feeling became even more pronounced. I went to smooth my skirt to sit and realized with horror that it was not there…behind my legs…where it was supposed to be!!! Yikes!!! Slithered as surreptitiously as possible to the ladies’ room where I (again) had to untuck the skirt bottom from the waistband. (Sigh…) I have no idea how long it had been that way. As I said skirts are devious creatures. Short skirts can be embarrassing in soooo many ways (apply imagination). My skirt issues began when I was quite young. At the age of five, I had the most lovely white organdy dress with a wide hoop skirt. I could not understand, at that tender age, why my mother would not allow me to create a wonderful arc with that hoop by sitting on the back of it while riding home from church on the bus. Predating that, another church story actually, was the Bible School 3-year old class’s performance in which we were all singing “The B I B L E, oh that’s the book for me”. Clad in my cute little red plaid pleated skirt with jumper straps over a charming white blouse, I became very nervous and began rolling the skirt up to the waistband as we sang (front row, of course), with my poor mother trying to signal me from the third row to put it down. (The worst case skirt scenario will be described later on in this blog…)

Moving on to trees. Be very careful because trees can attack. Case in point — Christmas Eve a year ago. While my husband was running a last-minute errand, I was fiddling with the decorations on our real live dead tree which was perched, in its water-container base, on the library table by our front window. One decoration too many on the front side, and the tree, twinkling in glee, lurched at me! What to do??!! I could not let it topple, so I grabbed the trunk and held on…for 45 minutes until my husband got home. My arm was not long enough or strong enough to push the tree upright. My phone was, of course, in the other room. I yelled as loud as I could, thinking the neighbors would hear. And they did! They thought my TV volume was turned up very loud and that I was watching a program wherein a woman was yelling for help. For a long long time. Regarding aggressive trees, we have also had two of our 50-plus-foot oaks fall on our house during a storm, and twenty years later had a neighbors’s 50-footer fall in our yard due to saturated ground. (Don’t want to say much about this, as just yesterday, a huge tree fell over — the saturation phenomena again — a couple of blocks away. So shhhhhhh…..I don’t want the trees to know I’m talking about them….)

Chairs are next. During a speech tournament awhile back, when I was judging, I was called upon to judge a semi-final round of Duo Interpretation, an event where two students portray one or more characters each in a 10-minute cutting from a play or novel. Because it was semi-final round featuring six of the twelve top Duo teams, it was held in a huge study hall room so that the competitors who had been eliminated could sit in as spectators. Because Duo is great entertainment, by the time the other judge and I arrived at the room, all except two seats had been taken, and students were even standing around the walls and sitting on the floor. So we had the choice of the two quite small combination desk-and-chair units that were left. I am not a small person, but I had to sit. And, being a role model for the students, I had to somehow manage this gracefully. So I inhaled deeply and wedged myself into the larger of the two options. Not large enough! Pain! And, to complicate matters further, I was the “starred” judge, which meant that I was the one designated to introduce the competitors and call them up to speak…which, given the crowded conditions of the room, would require standing for each speaker. Not a chance!! So the other judge, my friend Sam, bless his heart, realized my predicament and volunteered to do the honors. Had to wait for the crowd to disperse afterward for me to be able to pry myself out of the desk and resume breathing! Whew!

So, continuing the chair-trap theme, I take you back to attack skirts. Let me just say that you should not allow chair traps and attack skirts to conspire with one another. It does not come out well. While at work one day, in my long flowing skirt (why did I like these so much???), I was busily moving from task to task wheeling around in my office chair as I pulled charts and paperwork from the various file cabinets around the room. I had to stand up at one point, only to realize that the hem of the rather sheer skirt material had become wrapped around the caster of the desk chair. Uh oh!! So I tried to unwind it…but it seemed to wind further around the caster. The door to the hallway was wide open, so I was hesitant to try to pull off the skirt lest someone should happen along and look in. Yikes!! What to do??!! So I tried rolling. And tugging. And no one came along, so….I figured I’d try to slip the skirt off over my hips so I could crawl under the chair to free it. No dice! The drawstring waistband had a knot in it. Oh, no. (Did it occur to me to try calling someone to come and help? Of course not! On my own, I was!) Well, then, to get at the bottom of the skirt and the caster, my next clever step was to stand up and lay the chair on its side. So…there I was, sitting on the floor by my overturned chair, stuck to it!! And along came our psychologist, Ralph. He glanced in the doorway and did a double-take. Red-faced I explained my dilemma, and the noble man came to my rescue. He finessed the hem from the caster, freed me, and was sworn to secrecy.

Watch out for trees, chairs, and skirts! They are evil!

Back in the days when I was in tenth grade and the dinosaurs roamed free, our English class was assigned to read the novel Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, an author who, by employing literary tools such as elliptical phrases, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and a wide array of punctuation marks, was able to somehow, amazingly, develop the art of creating a rather involved pattern of sentence structure which could, ostensibly, stretch a sentence out in such a manner that it could, if he chose, ramble on almost indefinitely — for paragraphs and even pages, actually — which, as I was a young and impressionable student of the English language, presented a particularly appealing challenge to me in that, having been exposed to the wealth of verbiage contained in this novel, beckoned for me to put forth effort in creating similar sentence structure in order to attempt to equal, if not exceed, the intricate and prolonged passages presented by Thackeray in his work and, therefore, to construct (mostly in my journal, at that time) an almost infinite compilation of words and phrases that could meander from paragraph to paragraph and page to page, much like a babbling brook winds from rock to rock and bridge to bridge in its journey downstream, gurgling and splashing in carefree glee as it travels on its merry way, reflecting the frivolity of the writer (in this case myself) and carrying the reader along on this adventure, this consummate challenge to chatter on in one hopelessly connected (yet, perhaps not-so-connected) endeavor to manufacture an incredibly long and contrived sentence in tribute to the prolific author of Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray; therefore, insomuch as having written the above, it is this author’s (in this instance, my) sincere hope that the gentle reader (yourself) will come to understand, in some profound — or, perhaps, merely perfunctory — way, why it is that I babble.

A gazillion years ago, yours truly had an old LP record album entitled “Inside Shelley Berman”. Berman was a comedian many of whose bits involved his sitting on a stool having imaginary phone conversations. But sometimes he just chatted with the audience. One of my favorites involved plurals such as one blouse, two blice; one kleenex, several kleenexes (pronounced kleen-ess-eez); one goof, a group of geef; three jackii.
Just had to share.

Being the protective mom that she was, my mother tried to shield me from the world’s base realities. (Often it worked; sometimes it backfired into embarrassment — mine!)
First of all, she had a penchant for euphemisms (which I would eventually figure out in some sort of “duh…” moment). For example, “witch with a capital B” and “big shot dot-the-O”.   Those I figured out pretty quickly. “Adubblezee” took me a bit longer (like years; I was a pretty naive kid). Referring to one’s bottom, the word seemed to be just a synonym…until eventually the realization hit: A double Z. Hmmmm….
One that came back to haunt me when I started school was another posterior euphemism — “butty butt butt”. (Where these came from, I don’t know; one of my aunts used the same term. I just went with it.)  So in school, when the teacher wanted us get in line with a “buddy”, I was really perplexed! And pretty red in the face when it was explained to me. (My mom also coined the word “doogee”, but I will not define it for you at this time.)

Insane — If “sane” means of sound mind, shouldn’t “insane” mean in (as in inside of) sound mind? And then shouldn’t to be not of sound mind be “outsane”?

My mom was a nurse — because her stepmother believed that women should be teachers or nurses, and my aunt was already a teacher.
My mom had some stories about her experiences working in the hospital. One involved an older male patient who kept getting out of bed. Nurses, back in the day, were taught to give directives with a gentle “we”, rather than an accusatory “you”. When she took the gentleman’s arm and said, “Let’s get back in bed,” the man snapped, “I did not come here to be insulted by you or anybody else!”
Another favorite from the nursing realm involved a story from her nurses’ training. The nursing students were preparing to go to a formal dance. One of mom’s friends, who was rather sparsely endowed, was wearing a strapless formal that had a newfangled contraption inside the bra section of the dress that inflated with a little air valve to, say, give the girl’s figure a more enhanced appearance. When her date arrived and attempted to pin her corsage to her dress — boom!! Humor for some, humiliation for someone else.

Kidnap — kid (baby goat) nap (sleeping).  Hmmmm….. How do we get from a snoozing ruminant to an abduction???  Oh, wait!!  The etiology gives us kid (child) nap (snatch away – probably a variant of nab), so….there you go!!

A new year rapidly approaches, each new year coming faster than the last. (As we get older, each minute/hour/day/year takes up a smaller percentage of our overall experience, so – wow! can they zoom right by.)
How will we see the coming year? Ever hopeful that it will bring wonderful possibilities? A precious commodity to be nurtured, treasured, treated kindly? Much as we might like otherwise, we cannot control others and have limited control over circumstances. But we have ourselves to bring into the future, complete with the ability to dream, hope, create!!
Several of my favorite quotes come to my mind (paraphrasing here and not always sure of whom to credit…but trying to convey the timely essence)….
**”We can complain because rose bushes have thorns or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses”. [Abraham Lincoln] (The lens through which we view opportunities makes all the difference.)
**”Until the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change, there will be no change.” [attributed to a number of sources] (So simple, but so true.)
**”According to recognized aero technical tests, the bumblebee cannot fly because of the shape and weight of his body in relation to the total wing area. The bumblebee doesn’t know this, so he goes ahead and flies anyway.” [Igor Sikorsky] (This one exceeds even the concept of resilience. Love it!!}
Quite a few years ago, storms came through our area, uprooted two humongous oak trees and dropped them on our house (while I sat, terrified in the basement, under the ironing board, under an i-beam, with a squirrel monkey – Edith Anne – on my shoulder). When my husband was able to get in the door and find us in the basement, I was laughing. “There’s an atrium in our bedroom,” he announced, then asked, “Why are you laughing?”  I responded, “It could have been a really nice house.” (We lived in a very old house which was in need of repairs, updates, renovation, etc. It was the only house we had…but we were still alive to have a house! Important, in my book!) As it turned out, we were out of the house for about 6 months — during which time I managed to snap a tendon in my ankle. Luckily we were in a one-story rental at the time because navigating steps to the second-floor bathroom would have been a chore!
Our great grandson, due to an infection his mother developed, was born at 26 weeks’ gestation (during the window allowed by law for aborting a baby, incidentally). His will to surmount the odds and live has made him my superhero. He managed to let the nurses know when he was having breathing problems (the worst of which was when his breathing tube clogged with snot and cut off his air supply). His first 18 months were spent in the hospital with a series of surgeries and therapies. He is now five years and has a sight vocabulary bigger than that of most children in his class. He still has some work to do with motor skills and communication, but he loves books, music, and videos. And he forges on….because it never has occurred to him that he might not.
|So….as we approach the new year, what will we bring to it? Will we appreciate the roof over our head even if it needs patched? Will we appreciate the air that we breathe even if it is not always fragrant? Will we use what we have rather than rue what we lack?
Hindsight is 20/20, they say. But foresight has endless possibilities….

As we celebrate our holidays, let us remember why we set aside these special occasions. What is the essence of the day which is important to us? Are they just a day off? (Not a bad thing, of course, as most of us spend quite a bit of energy and need to replenish.) Or holly jolly days? (Also not a bad thing. We need some fun in our lives.) Or are they holy days? (We need the significance of something beyond ourselves.)
Whatever the occasion, celebrate thoughtfully! Embrace the meaning behind the day. Take the opportunity to share that meaning with others — be it loved ones or strangers.
Wishing you all the the best!