Category: Stories

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Think Before You Panic

If you’re anything like me, over the years you have developed your own pantheon of go-to experts you can summon up in your own mind when you find yourself in a predicament, with a pocketful of questions. They are generally folks whose character you admire and try to emulate. Of course, there’s Jesus, and the What Would Jesus Do? (WWJD) question to help guide you. A lot of people use that one.

One of my staples is WWJJD—as in What Would Judge Judy Do? Judy is bigly on fairness. She’s also loud and funny. She knows what to do and say in every situation. If you’re as lucky in the mother department as I am, you also consider What Would Mom Do? (WWMD). My mom is what I consider to be Judge Judy Lite. She can size up a situation in two seconds and then tell a hilarious and relevant true story that gives you a clue about your best options for solving a problem.

It’s always good to follow-up any need for assistance with WWDD—as in What Would Dad Do? It was Dad’s spirit I called upon a couple of day’s ago. I was cooking, and I nearly decapitated the tip of my left index finger while opening a package of Omaha Steaks. Oh, how the blood did spurt! Suzanne almost called 911, and she told me I needed a stitch or three. I did not disagree with her about the stitches, but there’s a pandemic going on out there, which made me leary about heading off to a hospital for a measly stitch.

I reflected on Dad and his occasional wounds from mishaps he incurred in the course of his beekeeping and bricklaying. He was not a klutzy guy at all, but accidents happen. During my kidhood, I witnessed him care for a number of work-wounds to his appendages. I did not witness him go to the doctor for his wounds. He sucked it up, cleaned it up, wrapped it up, and healed himself. WWDD? If Dad had maimed his finger as badly as I vexed mine, he would have simply stayed home and fallen asleep reading his newspaper. I knew sculpting myself a bandage and bending a splint—before falling asleep while reading the paper—would be exactly what he would counsel me to do.

Bandage Tie o’ the Day has aided my finger-healing greatly. I’m always happy to have an excuse to wear this novelty neckwear specimen. A terrific feature of bandage Tie is its padding in its middle section, just like with a real Band-Aid. If you ever see me wearing this live-and-in-person, please feel free to touch Tie for yourself. I believe in sharing the groovy stuff o’ life, no matter how ridiculous.

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Called Up The Doctor, And The Doctor Said

Here I sit, with Bow Tie o’ the Day, in my own loft. I am in my pain doc’s “waiting room” on my laptop, waiting for my doc to show up to my online appointment. Of all the pandemic-related life adjustments that I have personally had to make, the virtual doc appointments have been a pleasant surprise. It has been a pleasure to not have to spend time driving to and from doctor appointments. It takes longer to drive to doc appointments than it takes to have the appointment itself. It worked especially well for my crazy head therapy appointment, which is normally a one-hour drive each way, for a 30-minute appointment. For my last crazy head therapy appointment, which was online, I spent 5 minutes in the virtual waiting room, then chatted with my doc for 30 minutes, and that was that. Saved time, saved gas, saved possible road rage.

Of course, there are some doc appointments that just don’t work online. For example, I had an appointment scheduled with a plastic surgeon in April—to look into getting a breast reduction. It took me forever to get an appointment with this particular doctor. I waited months. And then a week before my scheduled April appointment, I got a call from the plastic surgeon’s office, saying they weren’t doing in-office visits. They wanted to do a Zoom appointment, or reschedule for a few months down the road. How do I put this? I felt like a televisit wouldn’t capture all the relevant information. Plus, going topless online, even for a medical exam, even for a valid medical reason, just ain’t my thing. Yes, I’ve visited a nude beach or two in my day, but this feels to me like a whole different can o’ worms.

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The Pandemic Ate My Homework

Have you ever wanted to eat an entire bottle of maraschino cherries, but you knew it was just plain wrong? Exotic bird feather Bow Tie o’ the Day and I did some thinking, and we decided we might just be able to make this pandemic-thing work to our advantage. I mean—what better excuse to eat whatever you want than a pandemic? We bought a spectrum of somewhat unnecessary food items we don’t ordinarily buy: maraschino cherries (both red and green), cocktail onions, gourmet pickles, and peeled white asparagus spears.

I ate the entire bottle of red maraschino cherries while watching LIVE PD one Friday night, then I started on the bottle of green ones just to see what the difference is. (The only difference between the red and green maraschino cherries is—you guessed it—the color.) No worries! It’s ok, cuz there’s a pandemic out there! The next night, during Saturday’s LIVE PD, I ate most of the cocktail onions. I followed that up on the Sabbath with eating white asparagus and pickles. I was spoiling myself with food-ish food, which is what everyone deserves to do in the midst of a pandemic. In a pandemic, everything makes sense to put on your shopping list, including every different flavor of Oreo you can try. What’s a pandemic for? Best. Excuse. To. Eat. Weirdly. Ever.

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The One About The Senior Key

It’s amazing what a gal can find when she throws on a wood Bow Tie o’ the Day to clean out a drawer of miscellany. Yup, this is my Senior Key necklace, and I present it here during Pandemic High School Graduation season. The “key” is now 40 years ancient, although it’s still in presentable shape. I didn’t consciously try to save it all this time. It just hasn’t gotten itself lost during my many moves. Here’s a brief history of where it has lived with me, in order: Delta, Ogden (3 different compartments), SLC (5 different apartments), Arlington, VA, Takoma Park, MD (1 apartment, 1 house), Delta again, Ogden again, Centerville. I know people who have moved plenty more miles than I have, but my moves still add up to a significant number of miles—across which this necklace has traveled in one piece. It has had only one owner. It has never been in a lost-and-found box.

If you’re anything like me, you have lots more stuff than you have room for, or need of. It would save time and space to not have to look after the props of our lives, yet we find it hard to let stuff go. Why do we keep things? They’re just things. They have no spirit in them. Are we afraid we’ll forget what’s happened in our lives if we get rid of them?

The memories in our brains are where the time lives. When we tell our stories, our experiences are alive again for ourselves and for whoever we’re sharing them with. We aren’t going to forget snippets of our lives if we don’t keep the props picked up along the way. But still, it so difficult to let material things go. And when we decide what stays and what goes, we each use a logic of our own—which would make no sense to someone who hasn’t lived your life, although it makes perfect sense to you. C’mon. You know you own some items whose significance you can’t begin to explain to people who don’t know you really, really, really well.

Some folks keep everything. They’re the ones who relate better to objects than to people. And sometimes we take better care of our trinkets than we do of the people we love. It shouldn’t be that way.

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Once Again, By Request

[Yesterday, after I posted about our pandemic Mother’s Day dinner, I was asked to re-post this gem from last year’s Mother’s Day din-din. If you recall, last year at this time, I was having weekday TMS treatments to my noggin, hoping to get my bipolar brain into its right mind.]

What I did yesterday does not resemble how I am, in the least. When I started writing TIE O’ THE DAY a couple of years ago, I said I would always be as honest as possible about my circus life—good and bad. And I’m here to tell you I embarrassed even my neckwear yesterday. Only Suzanne and I know first-hand I was a jerk, but still… I was wrong.

So….. yesterday afternoon Suzanne and I had a minuscule non-Mother’s-Day-related tiff about when to binge-watch IN PLAIN SIGHT and when to do serious napping before going to dinner. Yes, the set-to was that stoopid! But you know how it goes: One of you says a kinda not nice thing; and then the other person says a kinda not nice thing; and pretty soon you’re both swept up in a huge tornado of immaturity. (Do not pretend you haven’t done it too.) I blame the TMS, cuz I don’t want to blame myself.

Before I knew it, I was in my car alone, driving to SLC to the restaurant where I had earlier in the week made Mother’s Day dinner reservations for us.I sat and ate dinner on the patio at CURRENT all by myself, crying in my halibut. (The halibut was excellent, BTW.) The whole time I was there I kept looking at the Find Friends app on my phone to see if Suzanne’s phone had left the house to come eat with me. Nope. She and her phone stayed home. I understood. Heck, even I didn’t want to be around me.

Thus, today I chose my world map Bow Tie o’ the Day as a way to express my current title of Official Ass Of The World. And I felt my offense yesterday was so childish and egregious that I also deserve to be awarded 1/2 of a trophy—to memorialize my Official Ass Of The World title.

This fine trophy is actually my 1980 Miss Liberty 1st Attendant trophy, whose top statue has long since broken off. I don’t know why this little treasure hasn’t been lost in my life’s moves. I have lost important documents and photos in almost every housing move I’ve made, but this broken trophy always finds its way to wherever I live, making itself at home. Perhaps it has stayed with me since 1980 just to fulfill its ultimate destiny as my Official Ass Of The World trophy, which I’m sure will stick around until the minute I die. I might as well get it re-engraved with my current title.

Stoopidist. Lovebird. Tiff. Ever!

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On The COVID-19 Town

Going out to dinner for Mother’s Day during the pandemic looked like this for me and Suzanne this year. I pre-ordered PAGO’s Mother’s Day Dinner feast last week, then Saturday we drove in to SLC to pick it up at the curb—where the masked woman in the background brought our fixin’s to the car. Suzanne drove us directly home to finish the final food prep, and then we ate until our bellies were full of braised chicken, salmon corn cakes, asparagus, potatoes au gratin, and carrot cake muffins. Magnetic wood Bow Tie o’ the Day presided.

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The Bow Tie Food Group

For this post, I planned to take a selfie while showing off a few pieces of Haribo Gummi Peaches. I recently discovered each piece looks like a double bow tie of sorts—with one yellow bow tie and one orange bow tie, crisscrossing. However, by the time I had dolled up in my neckwear and found the right place to selfie, I had eaten all the Bow Tie o’ the Day gummi candies. I drew what the candies look like rather than get masked-and-gloved-up for an outing to the store to buy another package. (Not that I wouldn’t go to any length for a good ol’ TIE O’ THE DAY post.) My drawings vaguely resemble the peach gummies, it’s true. But it’s also true that my drawings resemble the sign for radiation waste. I’m sure that says more than I could ever hope to about my drawing abilities. ☢️

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A Bone To Pick

It was a slight mistake to wear my painted-wood, bone-shaped Bow Tie o’ the Day to DICK’S MARKET on my masked-and-gloved grocery run this afternoon. You see, often when I wear a shiny piece of neckwear somewhere—especially if it’s a bow tie—some people turn into chimpanzees, and they feel compelled to reach out and touch said shiny neckwear. Even though it’s kinda weird when a stranger occasionally feels free to touch my bow tie, it’s not normally a potential health hazard. However, in our lovely Deseret, in our lovely COVID-19 spring, I’m both askeered and miffed that one shopper in the grocery store allowed themselves to be so overcome with bow tie love that he completely forgot we’re in the middle of a pandemic—and this other shopper automatically touched Bow Tie. Honestly, you’d think only I would fall into such mindless infatuation with a bow tie. I think it is in my best interest to wear a dull bow tie on my next grocery run—if I have a dull bow tie. I kinda doubt I own a dull anything.

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G-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!

It’s 9AM and I’m already about to blow a cork—and I’m not talking about champagne! I’m a grown-up, literate woman so I’ll go for an appropriate tie metaphor and settle on wearing a Bow Tie o’ the Day made out of cork.

What got me all ticked off? I got the annual bill for my tie-o-the-day.com site security. For some reason, my account was billed 3 times for the same site security license. But that’s not the part that got me angry. I knew an innocent mistake had been made somewhere in the Land o’ Billing, so I calmly called the company to get things straightened out.

Of course, I reached the voice of a phone menu. After I had tried everything on the phone menu to no avail, I decided I needed to communicate with a sentient being. The phone menu voice told me it could understand full sentences, so I asked the voice to connect me to a living human being. It did not understand my request. I then asked for “a representative,” then for “a customer service representative,” then for “an operator.” The menu voice still did not understand my simple request. Finally, I asked to speak with “a person.” “Person” was the password. I was ultimately connected to a lackluster, but helpful, gentleman to whom I was quite polite, despite how frustrated and ticked off I was by the time I finally spoke to him. The error was supposedly fixed. We will soon see for sure, when autopay does its scheduled thing.

So far, I have managed to put on a civil facade to write a post which is honest about what happened, but reigned in substantially in tone. If I were to write this with the words and attitude that correspond to my real feelings about my phone-y morning thus far, this post would look something more like the following:

blah, blah, blah, cork Bow Tie o’ the Day, blah, blah, blah, #@&*”:?!@!#&^&(>”@$#(+(+”@#$%$%&%@”#%$%@!)&*@>:”:}#$%##$*&*@?%!~#@&^(*%^7!!!!!!!!!!!!!#&^@(*)%#

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And A Thing About Mom’s Phone Number

Dad’s actual cell phone—with its paint and scuffs—joins me and bees Bow Tie o’ the Day for this post.

Early in the 2000’s, Mom was fine with the kitchen wall home phone and an answering machine. Dad got a cell phone early on because he dragged his bees from here to California and all over creation, and he hunted coyotes who-knew-where before dawn daily. Bee yards and coyote dens rarely have phones or phone booths, so Dad packed his clunky cell phone in his Dodge truck in case of emergency—along with the other lifesaving travel essentials: water, toilet paper, and matches. He rarely made or received a call. Mom finally frequently called his cell from the home phone to check on him towards the end of his days here on the planet.

When Dad went to The Big Coyote Hunt in the Sky, in 2007, Mom naturally inherited his cell phone. With it, she also inherited his cell phone number, and she began the process of gradually becoming one with the cell phone, as we have all done with our own. The landline home phone number which had belonged to Mom and Dad for close to 70 years was only shut down a couple of years ago, but Mom had quit using it long before that actually happened.

He’s been gone close to 13 years now, but I’ve never taken Dad’s name off my cell phone’s contacts list. Nor have I added Mom’s name to my contacts. I call Mom by dialing for Dad. There is something eternally reassuring about calling Dad’s phone number and having Mom answer. Really, it’s just like it always was with our kitchen wall phone. Its number was perpetually listed under Dad’s name in the annual Delta phone book. But it was always Mom who answered the ring.