Category: Stories

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A Trip To Home Depot

My shattered-look wood Bow Tie o’ the Day and I had a hardware store list. Suzanne had her own hardware store list. We always have all kinds of lists going, and whenever our lists get long enough that it’s worth the trip to go out into the pandemicky stores, we go. And so it was, for our hardware store lists. We headed down the road to our local Home Depot.

I needed screws for my new license plates. After 13 years of holding the old plates on my car, two of the screws’ heads popped clean off the screwy part when I tried to loosen them. Two others were rusted and stripped by the time I was able to wrest them out of their holes to replace my plates. Suzanne even had to come to my rescue with one of her drills. Now that’s a frightening sight. If Suzanne is wielding a drill, stand back and don’t talk. Just let her work. She successfully got the decapitated screws out of their holes, sure enough. After the old plates were off, I went directly to the garage closet, where we had every size o’ screw ever manufactured—except the one size I needed to properly secure my plates. That’s how screws got on my hardware store list.

While at the Home Depot, I noticed Suzanne had “bulbs” on her list. You have to understand that I am the Light Bulb Stocker. I make sure we always have plenty. They are on a shelf in the garage closet, right by the mountain of toilet paper and paper towels I keep well-stocked. As I asked Suzanne what bulbs she needed me to get, I myself yelled “OOPSIE!” inside my own brain. I had skipped breakfast and lunch, and my thinking was two beats behind. Suzanne needed bulbs for planting in the garden. Yeah, that kind of bulb. Duh!

Another item I needed was a pack of razor blades. Plain old razor blades. I’m scraping off my out-dated bumper stickers, so I can plaster my vehicles with new ones. For whatever reason, single-edge razor blades have never been a product I keep stockpiled. But as I walked my masked self down the aisles of Home Depot in search of the razor blade section, I realized I could be buying razor blades for the last time in my life. It occurred to me that I am “at that age” when I can start saying that about certain products, and never have to put them on a list again. It was a liberating and exciting moment for me when I saw the 100-pack of razor blades staring right at me. I cannot picture a scenario in which—even if I live forty more years—I could possibly need more than 100 single-edge razor blades. For $7, my utility razor blade needs are met for life and beyond. I crossed that item off my list for good, with a bigly fat grin on my face. What a weight off my overburdened shoulders that is. 🤡

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A Nauseated Feeling After The Recent Presidential Debate Debacle

Unfinished, unadorned, speechless, wood Bow Tie o’ the Day is here to say absolutely nothing about that two-ring circus that was misnamed a “presidential debate” Tuesday night. Bow Tie isn’t looking to begin a political discussion. It is especially not taking sides. It is simply mute in the face of the debate’s incivility, bluster, and mendacity. It is glad it’s a bow tie and doesn’t have the right or responsibility to vote in the 2020 elections.

As far as my own “speechless” response to the debatable debate, I offer a poem by the incomparable poet, Mary Oliver, which she first published over a decade ago. In every election season since I first read it, I find myself mumbling its lines in my head as I see the various spectacles and hijinks perpetrated by many—but certainly not all—of the candidates for various offices of public service, who say they will represent us, but almost never actually do.

End of literate, peaceful rant.

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A Whole New Car

As I’ve mentioned on TIE O’ THE DAY before, Suzanne has been nagging me for a couple of years to get a new vehicle. It’s nice of her to want me to have a new mode of transportation, and I sometimes muse on the idea of driving around in a ding-less, scratch-less, rust-less auto. But my jalopy truck—my Isuzu Hombre— is only 22 years old, and it still has a few sections of metal that haven’t yet rusted. Who cares if the keys no longer open its door locks? Who cares if the driver’s window refuses to roll down/up sometimes? Who cares if I have to sit on a pillow while driving it because the metal seat frame pokes up through a bigly hole in the seat upholstery? My car—Vonnegut Grace Pontiac Vibe —is only 13 years old, and still gets the same 34 MPG she’s gotten since day 1. Who cares if it rides like it’s always driving on a gravel road—despite regular balancing and alignment? I just don’t yet see the need to abandon my old horseless carriages yet.

I decided to compromise with Suzanne on this issue: I got new license plates for Vonnegut Grace Vibe, and they showed up this week. I tossed around a few different ideas before ordering my vanity plates. According to the DMV website, somebody in UT already has BOW TIE, so that was out. I settled on BOWETRY, a combination word in honor of my two passions: bow ties + poetry. It is pronounced to rhyme with the word “poetry.” And the license plate really does make my car look like a brand spankin’ new classic car. A little.

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Mom Doesn’t Look A Day Over 89

Mom had a stupendous time on her 90th birthday, even in the midst of a pandemic. She dressed up in her Sunday best. She had her earrings clipped on. Her phone was all charged up and ready for birthday callers. All five of her kids sat outside the MCR hall window, taking turns talking to her by phone on the outside side of the glass. We siblings set up socially distanced lawn chairs, and chatted and laughed with each other while Mom watched us intently through the window. I know it is always a gift for Mom to watch us enjoy ourselves sibling-ing together, being happy to be her kids. By the time we got around to taking a picture of us “with” Mom, two of my siblings were nowhere to be found. I am joined here in one photo by BT/Mercedes and Ron—and Mom, who’s proudly displaying her birthday cake. Bow Tie o’ the Day is covered in joyous emojis, and I am pleased to say my Batman socks—with their tiny capes—were a hit with Mom (and everyone else). She said she liked them before I’d even had a chance to purposely show them off to her. She’s ancient, but she notices all the important details in life.

Bigly thanks to my Sister Who Wishes To Remain Nameless for arranging for birthday decorations and posters to be set up inside MCR, and for having a celebratory cake made for Mom and “smuggled” in. My SWWTRN also decorated right outside Mom’s window, so the first thing Mom saw when she looked outside that morning was a display of balloons and words telling her she had, indeed, made it to 90. Kathi and Robbie’s family made posters they then plastered onto MCR’s windows for Mom and the rest of the residents to enjoy.

Mom has been receiving a steady stream of flowers, cookies, gifts, window visits, and phone calls over the past few weeks. And, of course, she has been receiving cards galore! I asked Mom if she knows how many birthday cards she’s received over the past couple of weeks, and she lifted up a handful of unopened cards she had gotten in the mail that very day. There were at least a dozen unopened envelopes in her hand. She says she has not counted all the cards and letters yet, but that she knows “there are a lot.” I can say from taking a glance through the window into her room that piles of cards dot every flat surface. I know how my mother is, and I know darn well she will read and re-read her birthday cards from now until she’s 91, and beyond. They will provide her much joy and nostalgia, especially in the absence of in-person visits. Thanks, y’all!

To all of you who sent birthday greetings to Mom in any form, I and my siblings—and Mom—are grateful for your love for her. She feels rightly adored and spoiled. You helped to make Mom’s Pandemic 90th Birthday a many-people-involved, grand occasion for her.

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Goodbye, Pandemic Hairs Thursday’s: Before And After The Cut

I was so busy posting about Mom last week that I skipped right over Pandemic Hairs Thursday. Mom’s much more interesting than my hairs could ever be anyway, so I’m sure nobody missed seeing my ‘do last week. Hey, my pandemic hairs were fun for the most part, but I couldn’t take them anymore. My hairs felt like they weighed a ton on one side of my head. Trying to hold up my head straight was causing me severe neck pain. Beyond that, I decided it would be respectful of me to show up looking well-kempt for Mom, outside MCR’s windows Saturday when I can wave at her on her 90th Birthday.

I finally got in touch with Miss Tiffany o’ Great Clips and she was able to fit me into her schedule this morning. My hairs haven’t seen her since February, before Suzanne and I went on vacation to Nashville. I have to admit I ended up feeling bigly bad to have enlisted Miss Tiffany to cut my hairs today, however. She was glad to see me and my birdies wood Bow Tie o’ the Day, but she was hobbled by a broken foot. Apparently, she broke it in a dancing accident in Wyoming. She had attended a wedding reception there last weekend, where she was dancing around while wearing extra-high heels. Miss Tiffany’s family kept admonishing her to take off the extra-high heels while dancing, or she was bound to fall. She finally got sufficiently irritated at her family harping on her about her extra-high heels that she shed them and put on some flats. She hit the dance floor again in “safer” shoes, at which time she promptly slipped on the dance floor in her flats, ripping up the tendons in her foot. She said her foot dangled from her leg all the way home from Wyoming. I asked her if it dangled like a participle. She wasn’t sure.

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Mush On The Porch

Yup, that’s all this is: Mom eating her oatmeal mush on my front porch one morning. (FYI Mom puts Half & Half on her mush.) Mom was not being shy for the camera here. She was laughing so hard at something I said that she was on the verge of spitting her mush, and I wanted to capture it on film if it happened. Oh, how I wish I could remember what I said that caused her such a laughing fit, cuz I would certainly write it down here for y’all to read—at the risk of causing you to spit your own mush.

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The Anderson Girls

Here’s a picture of Mom and her sisters, and their mom, Martha Anderson. [Grandma is front and center. From left to right: Shirley, Arlene, Rosalie, Barbara, Mom.] This photo was taken at the Hotel Utah in the early 70’s, where these lasses would occasionally get together for a mother-daughters sleepover for a night or two—away from the hubbies and wild kids, and away from having to cook and clean. I can only imagine the cackle-fest which ensued when they took over the hotel.

You can see from the photo that by that time, Grandma had already lost her right eye. At first, she wore a glass eye in public. She wasn’t vain. She simply did not want to scare children. However, the prosthesis bothered her bigly, so she finally quit wearing it completely. (But not before she dropped it in my car once while I was driving her to the Provo temple, and it rolled around on the floor mats as I drove, cuz we were running late and Grandma wouldn’t let me stop the car until we got to the temple. Oooo, that’s a story I need to write about for y’all. ) Grandma preferred to cover the right lens of her glasses so no one could see her eyeless eye. It wept constantly.

The second photo shows a perfect example of Mom’s cleverness. This is a pic of the cake Mom commissioned Marcia Meacham to create for Grandma’s 90th Birthday party at the old Delta care center. The cake captures Grandma’s quiltiness. And I so like the tiny ears of corn dotting some of the “quilt” squares. But the best cake detail is the covered right lens on Grandma’s glasses. Grandma—and the rest of the partygoers—got a true kick out of it.

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Merry Birthday To My Bigliest Sister!

When I lived in the Washington, D.C.-area, I wanted Dad to come see the sights. Knowing my parents as I do, I knew they didn’t like to both be away from their bee ranch at the same time, so Dad needed a travel pal to fly across the country with him. My sister, BT, to the rescue! She’s adventurous. Mercedes, as I usually refer to her, has never seen a tombstone, monument, or museum she didn’t have to check out. Add Dad to the equation and she was all in for the trip. Here are pix I snapped of them at the Lincoln Memorial and at Harpers’ Ferry, W VA. (Yes, it is on this trip when people who saw Dad walking in D. C. honked their horns and/or asked for his “Sean Connery” autograph.)

Today, TIE O’ THE DAY wishes the merriest of birthdays to BT, my first-born sibling! BT is yet another “porch worthy” icon in my life. This morning I wrote about imagining Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Mom lighting up my old Delta porch with scintillating conversation, and I want y’all to know that the “porch worthy” BT, my Mercedes, would be sitting right there—laughing with us all, way too loudly for the neighborhood to handle without checking on us to make sure we old ladies were not in any danger of a medical emergency.

BT and I are the oldest and youngest of the family, 15 years apart in age—near-matching bookends to our siblings. We look alike, especially in our school pictures. We share a love of not just reading books, but of studying them. It’s like neither one of us ever left school. I don’t know what we’re studying for, but I can guarantee that if you give either of us a pop quiz on just about anything relating to history, social sciences, and the humanities, we would probably both pass—especially if we did the quiz together. We are both interested in almost any topic.

BT and I are on similar wavelengths in terms of public policy and the importance of including the word “responsibilities” whenever we talk about the word “rights.” We share a whole-hearted belief in Mosiah 2:17, about the importance of serving our fellow beings. And we do not tolerate bullying, in any forum. To us, meanness has no place in any context where human beings gather to learn, work, or worship. We stand against the whole of that sort of unnecessary contention, even when it sometimes feels as if we two are standing alone.

We have similar minor pet peeves. We most certainly get agitated when people who should know better don’t spell and use words correctly and appropriately. In fact, we are both slightly—but proudly—snotty about clear language usage. BT and I would both be embarrassed to be caught somewhere with our grammar down around our ankles, so to speak.

I could go on. I could give you a million ways we mirror each other, and I could give you a million ways we don’t. Suffice it to say that I find my Mercedes to be interestingly different from me. I hope I am the same to her. I would hate to be BORINGLY different from her.

Love and peace to you on your birthday, my Sister Who Lets Me Name Her in my tblog.

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Impersonating Mom

‘Tis I, doing one of my many impersonations of Mom. I call this particular impression “Mom And Her Fresh CHRONICLE.” Mom and her weekly MILLARD COUNTY CHRONICLE PROGRESS, a.k.a. THE CHRONICLE, are inseparable when she gets her mitts on a new issue.

Mom has never personally subscribed to Delta’s weekly paper, because she is too impatient. She has to read it hot off the press—whole hours before it could possibly show up in her mailbox. Getting a copy in her mail on Wednesday is unacceptable to her. She gets her copy the minute they hit the local stores on Tuesday afternoons. When Mom moved in with my brother in St. George after she broke her hip, my Sister Who Wishes To Remain Nameless bought Mom a CHRONICLE subscription to be sent to her there. Mom was forced to read her beloved hometown newspaper out of the mailbox on Wednesday’s or Thursday’s, depending on when it showed up in my brother’s mail. I am convinced Mom decided to move to MCR in Delta, just so she could somehow get her CHRONICLE on Tuesday afternoons again. Since Mom moved into MCR almost two years ago, my Sister Who Wishes To Remain Nameless and her husband have faithfully delivered Mom her CHRONICLE every Tuesday, the minute a copy is available for purchase.

Jump back to 2017, before I sold my Delta place (a.k.a. Momo and Popo’s house), and before Mom broke her hip. Here’s what Mom’s Tuesday schedule looked like:

8:30 AM. Mom saunters over to my living room, where she sits in a puffy chair and asks, “Should we see if Pegetha wants to go for a drink today?” I don’t know why she ever asked. Of course, Peggy (Mom’s best friend) wanted to get a drink. Of course, Mom and Peggy wanted to be driven all over the county to see what’s what and who’s who. And of course, Mom would call Peggy to see for sure that she wanted to go with us.

9AM. Mom and I get in her car and I drive us to Peggy’s house. I hit the horn.

9:01 AM. Peggy gets in the passenger side of the car.

9:02 AM. I order 2 Pepsi’s and a Diet Coke from the Cardwell’s drive-up window.

9:02:45 AM. A bickering ensues about whose turn it is to pay for the drinks. We also chat with the gals working at Cardwell’s, cuz we haven’t seen them since…..yesterday at 9:02:45 AM. The car behind us at the drive-up wishes we’d pull away, but the driver waves at us cheerfully anyway. The driver knows who we are because we are sitting in either the Helenmobile or the Pegethamobile. Mom and Peggy each have their own vanity plates, and they are famous and beloved women of Delta. Because of their fame, we can get away with a lot of things others can’t. I’m just the chauffeur.

9:07 AM. I drive the two Old Girls across the valley, while we drink and once again solve the problems of the world—while catching up on whatever it is we need to catch up on since yesterday.

11:00 AM. We drop off Peggy at her place, where Mom reminds her it’s CHRONICLE day, and Peggy says to Mom, “Ours won’t be here until the mail tomorrow.” Same sentences, every Tuesday.

11:01 AM. I park us in front of Mom’s house, as close as I can get her to her front door, where she asks if I’ll drive uptown to buy her a CHRONICLE as soon as it’s out—as if I don’t already know it’s my job.

From 11:02-whenever THE CHRONICLE is available. Mom searches for a pair of reading glasses with both lenses. This is a task which usually takes Mom a bigly chunk of time.

CHRONICLE o’ clock PM. I drive to fetch a copy of THE CHRONICLE from Jubilee because it’s the closest place to get it.

30 seconds later. I’m back to hand off the paper to Helen Sr., knowing she will be happily hunkered down and glued to it for the rest of the day. Finally, I can get a nap in.

8:00 PM. Mom comes over to my house to go to sleep early on my couch, because it’s been another busy CHRONICLE day for Mom.

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Mom and Momo

I think this is Thanksgiving dinner for our family at the Palomar in the early 2000’s. My Grandma Wright was the unofficial guest of honor. Mom was head cook.

Not everyone can live next door to their mother-in-law without bigly problems. We lived next door to my dad’s parents, and the only issue I can recall is that Mom felt a bit embarrassed if dad’s mom—who we called Momo—came to our door and the living room looked like a family was living in it. But that was on Mom. I don’t think Momo ever gave Mom a snooty judgement about her lived-in living room. In fact, Mom has told many a story of going out to get the clothes off our clothesline out back, and finding socks that had been hung to dry with holes in them had miraculously been darned. Momo strikes again. Mom took no offense. She considered it as the help it was, and not as a condemnation of her ability to take care of her own family.

Recipes got traded between Mom and Momo. They watched each other’s homes and cars, and collected each other’s mail, if one or the other was out of town. They didn’t belong to the same clubs, but they liked hearing about each others activities. They did Relief Society stuff together. They were in the same ward, of course. They really couldn’t get rid of each other, nor did they seem to want to.

As my grandparents got older and more bound to the inside of their house, I saw them less. At dinner, every evening without fail, Mom or Dad would ask, “Has anyone checked on the folks today?”—meaning Momo and Popo. If somebody hadn’t done it yet, Mom would come up with a message or a goodie to send over with me to their place, so I could verify Momo and Popo were alive and kicking. It was an important lesson: Love your neighbor. Yet again, kindness rules.

Boundaries are good. Good fences make good neighbors. But looking out for your Momo and Popo is always proper. Have you loved your neighbor today?