Blog #404                                December 5, 2024

 

I got a call this week from some marketing company that wanted to pay me $70 to participate in a 2-hour focus group on radio preferences.  I agreed, but when they found out my age, they said no thanks.  They don’t care what radio stations old people listen to.  Nobody cares about old people in general?  They clog up the highways and waste our country’s medical resources.  They pester their children about the simplest technological task.  Who needs these silly old people anyway?  Unless you’re a four-year-old or six or eight or ten, and you want a cool bedtime story about dinosaurs and princesses and old men who fall down and make you giggle and who never stop loving you no matter what. 

 

Recently, I was privy to a story of the passing of a woman in her late nineties.  You know, I almost said “an elderly woman”, but as I encroach upon the world of the elderly myself, I prefer to use other terminology.  The thought-provoking part of the story was the fact that the children of this lovely woman, all in their sixties, began to quibble and argue about the woman’s knickknacks, figurines, chotchkes, paintings – all the accumulated flotsam of a long and well-lived life.  And the thought this story provoked in me was, “What’s going to happen to all my stuff when I’m gone.”

 

Yes, one day I shall be gone.  Even Betty White died eventually.  And what’s going to happen to my “stuff”.  Who is going to want all the accumulated letters, blogs, poems and stories I have written?  And who’s going to take Shakespeare?

 

Message from Shakespeare: The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together (All’s Well That Ends Well). Wait!  What the fur are you talking about?  You can’t go anywhere and leave me with someone else.  You’re not even coughing!    And who would want a limping, crippled cat anyway?  We’re a team!  I couldn’t get used to anyone else’s lap.  And who would chase the ball down the hall with me or let me sleep under the covers?  You can’t leave me.  I will even give you all of my extra lives.  Purr.

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you had a warm, loving and peaceful Thanksgiving and are feeling well.  People often ask me why I started writing this blog, and I always give them the easy answer, relating how I have been writing letters to my daughters for 30 years and I just transitioned into the blog.  But that’s not the real reason.  The real reason I started writing to you is that whenever I’m with my wife and our friends, I cannot get a word in edgewise.  The women talk over you, through you, behind you and around you.  They interrupt you.  They all talk continuously and all at once.  They all must have at one time been parole officers because they never let anyone finish a sentence.  I have as much chance of being heard as a piccolo player in a marching band.  And that is why I write to you every week, just so I can have someone to talk to.

 

So now that you’re here and I’m here, let’s talk.  I did something stupid last Saturday.  I had promised some friends that I would take them to the airport.  That wasn’t the mistake.  I’m happy to do them favors and they treat me the same.  But a snowstorm arrived.  It was a wet, slushy, sloppy, sluggish snow, but I had promised.  The visibility was umbrous, the roads were difficult and tense and ugly, but we made it.  And what did I get out of it – a thank you from my good friends and a limerick for you:

 

It really was stupid to go

But we went in the wet, sloppy snow

We slogged through the slush

And the muck and the mush

“Cause that is what good friends are fo’.

 

See, it was all worth it.  I got a limerick and a Weekly Word.  It’s umbrous, which means shady, dark, in a shadow.

 

I’ve never loved winter.  Winter used to mean it’s cold outside so let’s get our behinds out of here and go someplace warm.  But life has changed so much that now outside simply means the space between my heated car and the front door of the grocery store.  And travelling?  We used to drive to Florida and North Carolina, but we don’t do that so much anymore.  But I still have many friends who winter in Florida.  I love how they’ve made the name of a season into a verb:  I winter in Florida.  I summer in Vermont.  As long as they don’t fall in the bathroom.

 

The advent of cold weather signals that two big holidays are coming up, Christmas and Hanukkah.  Of the 8,312 alternative spellings of Hanukkah, I have chosen to use this version because it’s the one my children and grandchildren use.  When I was a kid (images of dinosaurs and telephone cords dance through my gray-haired head) we spelled it with a Ch at the beginning, but languages and spellings adapt to common usage.  We no longer can understand the 14^th Century language of The Canterbury Tales -- Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote -- and I’m certain that 500 years from now, people (if there are still people) will think our literature as foreign as Chaucer is to us.

 

But I will never abandon the language I learned from my teachers and my mother.  I will always use the proper forms of lie and lay and always use none as a singular and always spell kidnapped with two Ps.  As phones have gotten smaller, so have words and now kidnaped with one P has become acceptable.  Well, for every P that young generation uses, we seniors need to P twice.  But fear not.  I, your bastion of all that is fuddy and duddy, shall remain steadfastly loyal to the ancient language I learned so many years ago. 

 

It’s time to go.  I’ve probably gotten a little too wordy.  Am I getting too wordy?  I don’t think I’m getting too wordy.  Do you?  Really?  I’ll stop.  Soon.  Wait, just one more thing.  Stay well and count your blessings.  There, I’m done.  See you next week.

 

Michael                                             Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com