Busier Than I Thought

No holiday parties to attend except for the organizations to which we donate and those parties have come and gone without us.   They are nice people, but getting out in the cold snowy weather late at night is not much fun for us oldies but goodies.

We did drive up one afternoon to attend daughters "Cheer" "challenge." These are held in large, noisy arenas with expensive junk food and lots of crap paraphernalia to buy.  Our entry as seniors cost us $20 each.  

If you are not familiar with this venue, it is something that makes takes millions of dollars from parents.  The cheer group parents pay a couple of thousand dollars a year for a coach, several weekly 2 to 4-hour training sessions, a professional choreographer, and of course very fancy costumes, which the young ladies (and a few young men) outgrow within the year!

According to one consumer report, 67% of the participants suffer injuries.  It is probably one of the most dangerous sports around.  The girls also get costumes that are flirty and youthful looking with bows in the hair, they wear lots of makeup as if they were showgirls...or something else, some wear artificial wigs so they can look even more "Stepford."

I am not a total downer here, because my granddaughter eats like a horse and without this intensive exercise, she would have a weight problem.  She also has a core body that is strong and solid and she is HEALTHY.  She also loves this and has few other things she loves as much!  She has learned a lot about teamwork and pushing through when things seem tough.

The award ceremony after a long day is lengthy and noisy.  All those hormones on a padded mat.  Glad I was up in the stands.  This pretty much took up the whole day.  Wish I would have thought of this as an investment a while back!

Why I HATE This Time of Year

Taken early this morning as the sun was coming up.

All those sweetness and light ads making you assume that Christmas is about buying stuff to make people happy are evil. Not everyone is able to buy food this time of year, much less an automobile, French perfume or an exercise bike! I hate the commercialism more than anything. Yes, there are lovely decorative lights covering homes (adding to global warming), there are rich and delicious foods (contributing to obesity and diabetes), and there are numerous parties where you have to find another fancy dress and hire that expensive babysitter to make small talk with people you barely know. (I do not get invited to any of these anymore, needless to say).  OK, I will give you the music.  That is the good stuff.  (Unless it starts getting played before Thanksgiving.)  Yes, I am Debbie Downer today!

I am almost in tears right now as I type this because that young man who knocked on my door asking for chores a few weeks ago so that he could bring home some food is back this morning. We gave his number to the food pantry folks and maybe they called. Maybe his mother was too proud and hung up on them. Maybe she accepted the charity and her family can eat again. I do not know, but on this snowy day with schools closed, this young man is back asking to shovel my driveway. It will be totally melted by this afternoon as most of the snow has disappeared where the sun hits the driveway. He asked for maybe $20. I, of course, said I would love to have him shovel it.  I am thinking of having him shovel my back deck so I can pay him more.  I do not know how far he walked to get to my house.  I also realize he does not want charity and I am being careful. 

An hour later he knocks on my door and as I pay him and hand him a bag of persimmon bread and homemade cookies, he tells me he has graduated from high school and is taking classes when he can at the local community college.  That is good news although he seems to lack the sharpness and sophistication that will be needed when he moves forward into adulthood.  I ask for his number and tell him my husband may call if he needs a young helper.  He is really pleased with the baked goods and gives me a surprising hug.

I wish I could believe in a God, but this just makes my heart so heavy that such poverty is common.  It is not some Christmas novel, it is real life and I hate that children have to deal with this!  I just drove my very privileged and lovely grandchildren back home with their dirty clothes separated so that the "maids" can do the laundry.  Along the trip they had their faces glued to their various technology toys.  They are good kids, but I have serious concerns about whether they will understand the world.  Even more, I wish I was rich enough to start a foundation in this county that can help families like this young man's.  Yes, we all give to various foundations, but it is not enough.

Looking forward to getting past this time of year.

Stupid Headlines

"Cardi B Shares First Photo of Daughter Kulture Hours After Announcing Offset Split" 

It took me a minute or two, or honestly, I gave up trying to figure out the headline above in under a minute.  I just glanced at the article to make sure it was not something important I needed to know.  I have no clue who these people are, I do not care who these people are and I wonder when we are going to quit trying to be so unique in this world when we hand out names!

I also hate that my life gets cluttered with emails and FB posts about such nonsense.

Yes, I am really old!

Part II of Stories We Tell

OK, now for Part II. If you have not gone ahead and listened to Malcolm Gladwell's Season 3 podcasts 3 and 4 on Revisionist History, go back to the prior post, click the link and I will wait...I will just look at the trees....If you are too busy, then it is your loss. I mean really. You would enjoy it.

OK. Here are three versions of the same event.  (I actually tried to search my blog to see if I had written about this story before but could find nothing, so maybe I am not repeating myself after all!)

I worked as an au pair for a family in Hawaii while I was in graduate school. They gave me food and a place to live and that saved me tremendously so that I could get my degree.

Version 1.
One afternoon my employer came to me to let me know they were having company for dinner and instead of eating with the kids (which I did when they had company), she asked if I would join them for dinner to make it a "foursome." She explained the young man they had invited was a biologist at the University. He had become a friend on a cruise that her husband had taken. They explained he was a bit nerdy on science and maybe somewhat intense, but I might find him interesting and they just wanted a fourth to balance the table. I reluctantly agreed as I was in the middle of mid-terms.  I figured that I would not join them for pre-dinner drinks and work on my term paper and show up before dinner later.

Version 2.  
The man who came to dinner (my future husband) tells the story a bit differently.  He says that they invited him to dinner because they wanted him to meet a young woman that they thought he would like.  They explained that she was charming and interesting.  He had been complaining to them that he could never seem to meet a "nice girl."

(As an aside, I was dating a number, small number, of guys while attending graduate school. I am guessing they were not impressed with my selection of dates.)

Anyway, that night I arrived later than my future husband felt was polite form and we did not hit it off.  I completely forgot that he did not seem to be nerdy because he seemed to be so offended that I was not super eager to meet him.  I remember thinking he seemed so full of himself!  The evening did not go well.  Hubby says that I was really offish to him the whole night!

Needless to say, we did not begin dating right after.  We did run into each on campus a few times and slowly got to know each other, and because hubby is a determined person, we actually did start dating a month or so later.

This year we stopped by on our Hawaii trip to meet up with the couple that brought us together over 46 years ago.  They are now in their late 80's early 90's.  We told them our versions of the story and they do not remember the story as going either way.  They said they just remember inviting us to dinner as a break for both of us working so hard in school.

Clearly, the truth of the story is somewhere in the depths of each person's version both at the time and in the following years as it gets re-told.  

Telling Stories I(He) Don't Remember

A bookshelf of stories from a friend's house.

I am sure that many of us have sat around the holiday table and told a story from our childhood or youth only to be interrupted by a sibling or aunt or cousin or old school chum telling us a substantial variation of how things really happened. Are we lying, are they lying, do we just see things differently, or are our memories plastic and undependable?

I guess the more we like to tell a good story of an event from our life we tend to embellish or maybe just exaggerate a little because we have told the story so many times before and we want it to have a better edge?  If we do that enough, then the story may change substantially in our own mind.  But what if the story is not that old?  What about omissions to the story?

We had been invited to lunch recently.  This was by a couple I had never met and they lived about 40 minutes from our house.  When I asked Hubby why and what was going on his response was that "I  had met the man at the community pool the last time I went up to swim(!).  He found we had so much in common that we were invited to lunch."

We get to the house, which has a lovely spreading view of a river, and when the door is open a lovely, very thin, lady with dark Spanish eyes and bold dangly earrings welcomes us in.  The home is warm and inviting and there are nice smells coming from the range.  We introduce ourselves and I meet the husband who is of average looks, average build, and above average intelligence.  We learn over a glass of Spanish rose that she is from Columbia and this is a second marriage for both of them.  (They met via computer.)  We, of course, do not get into what tragedies brought about the dissolution of both marriages.  He is retired Navy and she has worked on nutrition programs for USAID in her past.

Another couple arrives in leather jackets and pants via a very expensive looking motorcycle that can carry home the groceries if needed.  The man is a retired Navy pilot and the wife is currently working in intelligence data for defense, both in their late 50's or early 60's.  

I finally ask as we sit down to eat why the retired Navy pilot had been so brave as to invite to lunch someone he just met at a community pool?  His wife is laughing because she agrees with me.  This is when I get the other version of the story.

He begins with:

"Well, at first I was not too sure about J.  As I was leaning against the wall of the pool he walked up to me and asked if I had an extra swimsuit because he had forgotten to pack his.  I didn't.  Then after my swim, I saw him working out in the gym and we headed to the showers together and got talking.  We found we had a lot in common."

I think I can safely say that most of us found this story a bit jaw-dropping.  I am not as surprised as you are that my husband asked if the man had an extra suit.  My husband is an only child and the most honest and trusting person even at his old age.  (My daughter was shocked when I told her the story.)  The fact that my husband left out this important point shows somewhat how we skew stories.

Now for another story.  I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell's podcast (which can be heard here) that explains how stories by honest and intelligent people can be so strange or contradicting. Listen to Episode 3 and Episode 4 from season 3 for the background on this storytelling thing.  Malcolm Gladwell has a compelling voice and really good episodes....go ahead and listen...40 minutes long and 37 minutes long...I will wait.

Then my next post will be the story my husband and I tell about how we met and a revisionist ( more boring) version.