My Klimt-inspired Bow Tie o’ the Day is a perfect cherry-on-top selection for my green-and-white, old-timey swimming suit. I found a green-and-white striped Face Mask o’ the Day which almost matches. I’m good with almost matches on rare occasions.
It’s pool time folks. I’m wearing my cowboy boots here in the photo just cuz I like to wear my cowboy boots. They make an especially bold statement, but I won’t be swimming in them. I swam in my cowboy boots at the Reservoir near Delta once when I was a kid, and I got stuck in the sand at the bottom. No matter how hard I tugged and pulled, I could not budge my boots from the muck. I got stucker and stucker. I stood out in the water, calling for help for what felt to me like hours, but it was probably more like 10 minutes. There was no way in heck I was gonna just pull my feet out of my stuck boots and swim to shore. No way in heck was I going to leave my cowboy boots out there to drown without me. I waved my arms, again and again, and yelled for assistance. Even then, people knew I was eccentric, so they just thought I was waving hello and putting on a show for those on shore.
Finally, some drunk hippie I didn’t even know suddenly realized I was in a predicament. He swam out to save me, and he patiently dove beneath the water to release me and my boots. He carried my boots to shore for me.
I learned two lessons that day: 1. Don’t swim in your cowboy boots, no matter how much you love wearing them. 2. Sometimes the drunk stranger will be the first one to save you from yourself.
Along with my Face Mask o’ the Day, I just had to don a Two-fer o’ Ties o’ the Day. That’s the best way I can illustrate my admiration for law enforcement AND for those who seek to bring attention to injustices near and far by public protest. First, let me say that the two “sides” are not mutually exclusive. Most cops want the justice system to work more justly. Most protesters don’t want innocent people and their property—cops or otherwise—to be harmed just because they exist.
I have been to my share of rallies, protests, marches, and vigils. When I lived in the Washington D. C. area, I felt like I was at the Capitol or the Lincoln Memorial in support of some cause or other every weekend. It was exciting and enlightening. I learned so much. Over time, I refined my political and social thinking. In fact, I refined my critical thinking skills by light years, by being in the middle of the business of the U.S. of A.
But honestly, I got tired. Long before the political divides we live in now, I got tired of them. Oh, I still have all the fight in me to make the planet a better place for more than just me, but I haven’t been to a rally/protest in a long time. And I prob won’t show myself at another one. Why? The simple answer is this: There are always a few people—on every side—who lack civility. In other words, there are always a few wing-nuts who ruin a good get-together for everybody.
Last Saturday’s protest in SLC was a perfect example of what I’m talking about. A bunch a folks get together to protest the death of a criminal suspect, George Floyd, at the hands of cops in Minneapolis. The SLC cops are at the SLC protest to protect the protestors from other civilians who might do them harm for exercising their right to assemble and to speak. The gathering is going along peaceably. And then a couple of fruit loops decide it’s too quiet. They drag a few others into their mayhem and tip a cop car. Oh, this is fun! Let’s start it on fire! And so on. Meanwhile, most of the protestors aren’t interested in this crap. They leave or at least distance themselves. But of course, the only thing that makes good viewing is the tipping and burning of cars, so the tv cameras don’t follow what most people are doing—which is behaving like civilized citizens.
We’ve all seen the group mentality create dipsticks out of otherwise reasonable people. We’ve seen it happen in profound situations as well as in situations that are near unimportant. I remember being around this kind of wing-nut fervor once was when I was in high school. It was football season, and we Delta Rabbits were set to play our arch-rival, the Millard Eagles, at the end of the week. A bunch of us packed ourselves into a car and drove the 30 miles to Millard High the night before the game. We toilet-papered and egged shrubs, sidewalks, and windows at the school. This was par for the course during rivalry week annually. Some Eagles were most likely doing the same thing over at DHS at that very moment. A little temporary mess to get the rivalry to a fever pitch is fun. And then one person in our group, without any of the rest of us having any idea what was coming, pulled out a hammer and a can of spray paint and completely destroyed one of the school’s eagle mascot statues. It crossed the line. Our friend was so proud of the destruction he’d created, but he seemed suddenly foreign to all of us. This was beyond the point of what we were up to.
We shook our heads and walked back to the car—with all the wind sucked out of our prank sails. A small, but significant-to-others, object got destroyed. Worse, even though it seemed a relatively tiny bad deed, we never again felt the same ease and trust with our kidhood friend. On top of it all, we knew our friend would not have done what he did if we hadn’t been doing what we were doing. We knew we were implicated in his behavior. This could not be repaired. I could tell you how his life turned out, but I don’t want to. It wasn’t a very happy or very long story.
Some days, all it takes to make me grin is to gussy up in a gorgeous Tie o’ the Day and a plaid Face Mask o’ the Day. I’m headed out to Dick’s Market—grocery list in hand. This particular tie is like a good omen to me. It always puts me in a why-worry? kind of mood.
Another wood Bow Tie o’ the Day clashes bigly with both my shirt and what I will call my Face Mask o’ the Day. Face Mask comes from Beau Ties Ltd. of Vermont, my bow tie company. I call it “my” bow tie company because I order my non-wood bow ties almost exclusively from them. They are a small business, with skillful seamstresses. If you want them to, they can even take your favorite necktie and turn it into a flawless bow tie.
In mid-March, with Beau Tie Ltd.’s employees making bow ties in their homes, they also began to create homemade fashionable face masks. And now the company has begun to make matching bow tie/face mask sets—none of which I plan on purchasing, cuz that would be too much matchiness for me to wear.
Anyhoo… Get ready to enjoy a bonus helping of Face Masks o’ the Day on the tblog posts for the near future. No matter which side of The Great Face Mask Debate o’ 2020 you find yourself on, I think you’ll like the stylish masks.
Bow Tie o’ the Day and I have been taking a look at the world recently, and we haven’t liked the us/them division we’ve been seeing. We don’t believe in using rose-colored glasses, so we are going to rest our world-weary eyes by looking at things through our silly-colored glasses for a few hours. These glasses come in handier than you might think.
For decades, Mom and her best friend, Peggy, made a daily Pepsi run. Peggy would drive one day, Mom would drive the next. They’d pull up to the drive-up window at any one of a number of Delta’s finest establishments. It was the Cardwell gas station for the last few years of their Pepsi-running. There was always a brief tiff over whose turn it was to pay. Drink in hand, they would cruise the roads of Millard County. Even the Stake President once acknowledged their presence in a Relief Society meeting by referring to them as the ladies who drink and drive. His wife made him apologize to them later, but they thought it was funny. And all the church ladies of the Delta West Stake understood and thought it was funny too.
There came a time when Mom could no longer drive, so I drove them when it was her turn. When Mom got rid of her car, I began to drive them in Peggy’s car when it was Mom’s turn. Eventually, I became the official chauffeur of their daily forays to and fro across the county, always in Peggy’s car. If you ever experienced the comedy routine that was Mom’s and Peggy’s friendship, I don’t have to explain how exhausting and enlightening and uplifting it could be to be around them. If you never had the chance to see them be friends live and in-person, all I can say is that you missed something wonderful. Now Mom lives in a care center and Peggy is gone.
It was because of Mom and Peggy that one day I truly regretted not having bigly bucks in my bank account to waste on one humongous good laugh. It’s the only time in my life I have been ticked off that I wasn’t awash in wealth. We had just picked up our daily drinks and we were driving out of Delta on Lone Tree Road, when I got this vision. I wanted to buy a motorcycle, with two side-cars attached for Mom and Peggy. I wanted to jump on the bike and drive Mom and Peggy—and their drinks—up over the overpass, and up and down Main Street, then all across every paved and dirt road in the county. And the old broads would have gone along with it—once, just to make everyone who saw them laugh.
Well, of course, I told Mom and Peggy my plan-which-wouldn’t-happen. We all got a kick out of envisioning it. I said, “You know you would do it.” The minute I said that, they both replied in unison as if they’d practiced the line for years, “Yes, but not on hair day.”
I couldn’t find a side-car for my bicycle, but I did manage to find a bike trailer for Skitter to accompany me on my bike outings. I’m letting the skittish mutt get used to her trailer for a few days before we head out on an actual trek. Here, she wears her Tie o’ the Day, looking forward to our meandering daily journeys. We wish Mom and Peggy could come with us.
TIE O’ THE DAY challenges y’all to guess what major university employs this little Bow Tie o’ the Day’s parents. I’ve promised myself to wear red whenever I’m around Gracie, and to whisper “Go to the University of Utah” in her ear every flippin’ time I get a chance—just to bring a proper Utah balance to our fledgling munchkin.
I was able to go to my physical therapy appointment at the U of U this morning, cuz yesterday I got the news I passed my COVID-19 test. I had to prove I was virus-free before the staff at Pain Management Center would even open the door to me and wood Bow Tie o’ the Day. It was my first PT visit for the current torso distress I find myself in. (It feels like my ribs are squeezing my innards to death.) I am not convinced PT will do a dang bit of good for what aches me now, but I will do as I am told. I felt the same hopelessness about going to PT for my gnarly rotator cuff last year, but PT almost completely eliminated my shoulder issues. And so, I will give PT for my gut a whole-hearted go.
By the time I was done with today’s PT appointment, I had been through a thing called “trigger point dry needling” therapy, which I had never heard of before. It is sorta like acupuncture, but with electricity being pumped through the needles and into whatever muscles they are sticking out of. Electrified needles protruded down both sides of my spine and across my belly for most of my appointment. I kid you not.
While I was experiencing dry needling, it came to me. Here’s how you can determine whether or not you’ve hit your pain limit: You know you’ve hit your pain limit if you’re happily willing to endure new and different pain for the merest smidgen of a chance to get rid of the old familiar pain. Or something like that.
I’m on official quarantine until I get the results of my COVID-19 test in the next day or two. After I drove to Farmington to take the test this morning, I came home to an empty house for the first time since mid-March—because today was Suzanne’s first day back to work at the office. I decided to throw caution to the wind, and be the baddest bad I can think to be. I’m free!!! No more supervision!!! I’ve been a civilized, quiet camper in the house with Suzanne doing her job at home all these weeks. I have reined in my whims so I wouldn’t interrupt her scrupulous brainwork or any of her Zoom/Teams/FaceTime/etc. meetings. Today, I was finally free to turn up my music to decibel levels I could hear without my hearing aids.
That kept me interested for about 25 minutes. I tried really hard to come up with a gazillion wacky, house-based plans I could play out while unchaperoned and in quarantine—you know, things I haven’t been able to do with Suzanne here to keep an eye on me all day. But I couldn’t think of anything I want to do that I can’t do with her here to keep me in check. Maybe I’m just boring today. I did, however, break out the “good” Post-it Notes and go wild.
FYI If you are an office product aficionado like I am, you know exactly what I mean about the “good” Post-it Notes. They are the ones you rarely use because they are so cool you never want to run out of them. They are like the “good” staples (colored) or the “good” paper clips (coated and colored). I could go on about the “good” tape, pens, file folders, paper, and etc. But I won’t. Not right now anyway. Suzanne will be home from work in 10 minutes, and I have to come up with a believable reason for why I had time to play with Post-it Notes but couldn’t get the dishes done.
