Category: Stories

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The Helen And Ron Wright Family Wall Phone

Bikini Bow Tie o’ the Day couldn’t get Mom to answer her cell phone. I even tried using the old wall phone from our old kitchen in my old kidhood house. Mom didn’t answer that phone either. For a few days last week, nobody could get in touch with Mom. As most of you know, Mom is on pandemic lockdown at Millard Care and Rehab, where she has resided for the last 18 months. No visitors are allowed, so the only way we can keep track of her and remind her we love her right now is by calling her cell phone.

At first, I thought Mom was maybe boycotting me for some reason, by not answering my calls. But over the course of a couple of days, I received many texts and calls alerting me to the fact that Mom wasn’t answering her phone for anyone. Aha! If Mom was boycotting, I wasn’t the only one being boycotted.

I’m the point-man for Mom’s phone issues because her line is on my account, and everybody in the family knows it. So if Mom’s unreachable for some reason, I get screamed at. Mom has occasionally had real phone troubles, but nothing major since she quit answering it with wet hands while washing dishes or cooking. She went through 3 phones in the 3 years before she went to live at MCR, where she is not allowed to do dishes or cook. Since taking up residence there, her phone problems have had to do with her accidentally turning down the volume, or otherwise touching a wrong key.

Normally, I would text my/my sister’s hubby, Gary, to drive the mile to the care center to see Mom and solve her phone issue, but that’s not currently a possibility, thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown. After calling Mom’s phone for the zillionth time, I figured she had most likely accidentally turned it off. I texted MCR and requested they check out Mom’s cell phone to make sure it was turned on. Someone at MCR solved the problem by simply turning Mom’s phone back on. Sure enough, Mom had somehow used one of her many superpowers to turn it off, but she apparently has lost the superpower that turns it back on. When you are approaching 90, you naturally lose a superpower here and there. And that’s ok. MCR can help you fix it.

BTW Mom is doing dandily. She did ask me to send her some spiced jelly beans though. I’ve been saving them to give her when I see her again, but I think I better mail them ASAP.

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Necessary Pandemic Changes

Today, Suzanne went off to her decades-old Champagne Garden Club. They take turns gardening in each other’s yards once a month. But notice that in their official name, the word “champagne” comes before the word “garden.” If ya know what I mean.

COVID-19 can’t completely disrupt Champagne Garden Club, but precautions must be taken for the safety of all persons and plants involved. Along with social distancing in the garden, the ladies have to wear face masks, and they must drink a disinfectant version of champagne which was created by Miss Heidi, whose beauteousness peeks out from behind her mask in this photo. No, I do not know whether the gardening gals remove their masks to quaff their champagne cocktail, or whether they just drench the mask and suck on it. I’ll ask Suzanne when she gets home.

So what did I do all day, while Suzanne has green thumbed it at Miss Heidi’s? Spades, wood Bow Tie o’ the Day and I hung around the house with a couple of pillows of sealed air. Yeah, it was as fun as it sounds.

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Sleep Is The Most Important Meal Of The Day

The Tie Room 2020 Census continues. Here again is my one and only blow-up Tie o’ the Day. It was given to me by my bro-in-law, Nuk, my oldest sister’s hubby. If you’re whitewater rafting and you and your tie fall out of your raft, Tie will stay afloat so somebody can find it and your body that it’s attached to. Tie can also act as a pillow for you when you’re bored at the office or in church, and you just need to close your eyes for a minute. Tie stands alone in its Census description category.

I must admit that The Tie Room Census has been a rather welcome and important distraction from the continuing, sometimes boring, drama of COVID-19. The Census gives me a good reason to do some bigly needed re-vamping of The Tie Room. My collection needs both a more streamlined organization, and a more jumpy-outy-but-presentable way of being exhibited to visitors. I have so massive a neckwear collection that sometimes I can’t find the precise piece of neckwear I’m searching for. Also, there are folks who visit us who would like to gawk at the amazing adventure that is The Tie Room. Maybe I’ll sell tickets. You’ll be invited, of course.

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This Is The Way We Go To The Vet During The Pandemic

It’s time for one of Skitter’s booster shots and her Centerville city license expires on May 5th, so she needs a new one. She also needs what they call an “older dog” physical. Plus, I decided that since we live in the bigly city, she really ought to be chipped.

I called Dr. Doolittle’s office yesterday to make Skitter’s appointment for this morning. When I made the appointment, I was told to not enter the building when I arrived, but to stay in the car, then give ’em a call to say “My mutt and I are here,” and then someone would come out to fetch the patient.Bow Tie o’ the Day and I drove The Skit to her appointment, and a masked vet tech came out before I could even call to announce our arrival. She told me one animal was ahead of Skitter, then she grabbed a dog patient from the car across the parking lot from us. So Skitter and I sat for a few minutes in the waiting room which is also known as my car. About ten minutes later, the vet tech came for Skitter the Skittish.

Before she picked up Skitter from the passenger seat, the masked vet tech and I discussed the exact purposes of our being there. I’m glad we did that because it seems their ID chip shelves were as bare as toilet paper shelves were at COSTCO two weeks ago. The vet clinic’s scheduled chip shipment hadn’t arrived. The vet tech said she would take Skitter in to take care of the other stuff today, then I could make a future appointment to get Skitter’s chip. I said “Oh no, we will not!” We’ll schedule one appointment for some time in the next few days.

I refuse to make Skitter go through the fear and anxiety of even one more vet visit than she absolutely has to. Skitter will see the vet for these needs once, when they can all be taken care of at one time. She can barely handle a vet appointment without shaking her bones into dislocation.

In her photo here, notice The Skit’s praying paws and the forlorn look in her eyes as she waited with me in the car/waiting room for her turn. She and I are glad she escaped the vet visit for at least another day. As we pulled out of the vet’s parking lot, I swear I could hear Skitter actually say, “WHEW! That was a close one.”

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Bling Is A Glittery-Good Thing

Remember when you were a kid and you got a cool new clothing item you’d been bugging your parents to buy you—like a swimming suit or moon boots or a holster for your cap gun? Remember when you finally got it, how hard you then worked trying to convince your parents you just positively had to sleep in whatever new thing it was? You pleaded. You begged. You played out all of your best kid-brain parent manipulations right up until bedtime, when your parents finally got so worn down and sick of your tricks that they gave you their ok to wear whatever you wanted to sleep in, if you would just get in bed and go the heck to sleep. “But don’t put any caps in your cap gun,” they said. Which, of course, you loaded up with a full roll immediately—even as you were swearing to your parents you would never be so stoopid as to sleep with caps in your cap gun. And remember when you just had to shoot a cap off every so often under the sheets so you could see the spark and smell the smoke? And then one spark got on your new swimming suit and melted a hole in it, while burning you at the same time. And remember how you tried to get out of bed to save yourself from what you thought was an impending house fire, but your bigly moon boots got tangled in your sheets mostly because you were wearing a pair of your dad’s old spurs on them? And then remember how you frantically rolled out of bed and onto the hard floor, because when you were a kid, carpet hadn’t been invented yet? And remember when your dad woke up because of the commotion you were making, and when he walked into your bedroom to check on you he didn’t say a word? He saw you weren’t injured and nothing was on fire, and he put all his effort into trying not to laugh at you in your predicament. He simply turned to go back to bed, holding the back of his garments shut as he chuckled in the kitchen. And remember how you deduced your dad had shared your little fiasco with your mother almost immediately, because five minutes after you were re-situated in your bed, you could hear both your mom and dad laughing. Remember when that happened? Or maybe it only happened to me. Probably more than once.

Anyhoo… I admit right here and now that I have used and abused amazon prime far too much since our lovely pandemic has kept us homebounder-than-usual. But guess what got delivered to me yesterday? My new pair of Hello Kitty sunglasses, which I soooo had to sleep in. Check out the bling on Hello Kitty’s Bow Tie o’ the Night. Best. $4. With. Free. Shipping. Spent. Ever.

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I Sneak, Therefore I Am

Leather Bow Ties o’ the Day have been counted in The Tie Room Census, and here they are—all 2 leather critters. I got the blue one in Monterey, CA when we vacationed there two years ago. I found the brown one on Etsy.

Since Suzanne has been working from home, I have had to adjust some of my daily routines just a tad. Fortunately, the biggest adjustment I have had to make has been in the area of my usual eating habits, which is kinda more like grazing.

About the time Rowan ventured out on his own to be a fine adult, Suzanne did a switch in her diet which requires she eat nothing tasty. (Yes, that’s really what her diet requires.) Well, what was the point of me cooking anymore? I was free from cooking! That freedom unleashed my inner grazer, which has allowed me to live off a handful of cereal, a half-dozen times a day—with a Junior Mint here, and a potato chip there, and a bowl of ice cream everywhere. And usually a steak for dinner. And so on. Oh, happy snackin’ me!

However, eating in such a manner throughout the day while Suzanne’s home seems just plain rude of me. I mean, she is ALWAYS right here in the same realm. Our house is bigly, but not bigly enough that we can avoid each other all day. How do I get my munch on? Let’s just say that if I could tally how many times I have spent time in the garage over the 7 years we have lived here, it wouldn’t amount to the number of times I’ve “had to” visit our garage in a single day, each day, for the past 6 weeks. That’s how many times I’ve been sneaking in there to “eat” from my carefully placed stash o’ not-so-nutritional food—just so Suzanne won’t see me. I don’t want to get her jealous of my too-much-salt-and-sugar foods, causing her to be swayed from her healthier diet. That would crush me.

It’s been really quite simple to keep Suzanne out of the garage for the last 6 weeks. I keep all the COVID-19 stuff in there: Used rubber gloves; re-usable shopping bag; masks which need washing; shoes I wore in the grocery store; etc. I disinfect the groceries in there. I out-and-out forbade her from going into the garage, for her own good. For once, she has done (not done, in this case) what I told her.

I don’t like being sneaky and secretive about anything. And I don’t delude myself about my current skulking around: I know Suzanne knows exactly what I’m up to. But she also knows I am, in my own way, trying to be kind. In fact, eating yummy stuff in front of Suzanne is probably more my issue than hers. She says it doesn’t bother her if I eat goodies when she’s around. I beg to differ. To me, it’s rude to eat pie when Suzanne’s eating a piece of Keto toast. Maybe, in the end, I really go through all of this surreptitious, spy-like behavior for myself—to prove to myself I can be nice on occasion. If that’s true, I’m actually being selfish by being kind. But my selfishness also says I care about Suzanne’s feelings. So am I selfish, or selfless? Both, or neither? Or am I simply writing a post which has somehow meandered from leather bow ties and The Tie Room Census, through my pandemic garage, across sugary and salty non-nutritional foods, over a theory of politeness, to this very last question mark?

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I Hate This Photo

Poor mini Bow Tie o’ the Day has to pose with my Sophomore yearbook photo, which just happens to highlight two of my worst features: bad hair and bad teeth. This is the most curl my hair ever held. My hair just wants to be straight. (Insert your own jokes here.) I’ve since handled my hair mostly by going with short cuts, in which the cut itself is the star.

The true culprit I hate in the picture is the sorry state of my teeth. I come from a long line of genetically bad teeth, so there was really not much I could do to keep my teeth white and shiny for the world to see. They were also prone to chipping. I chipped a tooth on a Rice Krispies square once. Oh, and by the way, my teeth hurt like you wouldn’t believe—all of them, all at once, down into the roots.

Like any teenager, I was self-conscious about every part of my body. Thanks to my teeth, I regularly got to hear not-so-nice comments about my hideous choppers. I didn’t really belong to a particular group in high school. I flitted and floated from one crew to another. I got along with just about everybody, which meant the cutting comments I heard about my teeth were coming from people I considered to be my friends.

Never smiling was not an option for me. Have you met me? I’m a smiler. Since those few who hassled me had their own imperfections, I could’ve thrown stinging comments back at them with the added jab of using vocabulary the dastardly hasslers would have to find a dictionary to look up. But I knew them and their families, and it wasn’t my style to handle things that way. I just kept on doing my own cheery thing. Besides, they were my friends. They were rude and stoopid friends, but still… I knew—or at least hoped—they’d grow out of it. Some did. Some didn’t. If you were ever a teenager, I’m sure you know what I mean, because every teenager gets teased about something. The sting goes deep, but it can make you a better person if you let it.

I knew I’d grow out of my teeth because soon my mouth would be mature enough for me to get caps, which I did just a few months after this pic was taken. Caps would be only a temporary and cosmetic solution, though, because they wouldn’t solve the tooth pain. Nope, I knew I was inevitably headed down the happy trail to dentures at a very early age, after my mouth matured for good.

While most teenagers can’t wait to be old enough to move out of their parents’ house, or go away to college, or get a real job, or go on a mission, I was twiddling my thumbs and killing time waiting for my mouth to be old enough to get all my teeth yanked out to make room for a set of white-toothed, painless dentures. I got my wish when I was in college and almost 19.

BTW Even though it’s been nearly 40 years since I heard the last of those hurtful comments, you’ve probably noticed I don’t show my teeth when I take selfies. Without even thinking about it, I still carry the stoopid past comments about my stoopid teeth despite having perfectly formed dentures. Closed-mouth smiles are just a habit of mine from way back.

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Not Ours, Dang It!

TIE O’ THE DAY is honored to introduce Bow Tie o’ the Day-wearin’ Daisy Corona Debenham. Daisy is Lollie Lyman Debenham’s newest member of the family. Brinkley’s passing was a hard pill to swallow for Lollie and her family, but Daisy looks to me like she’s up to the job of restoring dog joy throughout the Debenham home and family. Daisy is a lucky pup to have them as her people.

For those of you tblog readers who don’t know Lollie, let me assure you she’s a gem. The word “scamp” comes to mind, so she’s a fellow scamp to me. She is also a fellow Delta Rabbit. We were in elementary school when I learned Lollie was named after her mother, like I was named after mine. Lollie was the only other girl I knew who was named thus. But we were never called by our mothers’ names. I was always mystified by that. I was never called Helen, and she was never called Laura. Trust me—Helen Sr. and Laura Sr. were incredibly strong, gifted women. I wear Mom’s name with pride and reverence, and I think Laura Joy does the same.

Another kidhood thing I remember about Lollie has to do with a birthday gift she gave me. A herd of kids came to my birthday party at my house. I’m guessing I had turned 6 or 7. There were a million kids, and I got a million presents. I’m sure all the gifts were fun and appropriate and probably girly. However, I can remember only the present I got from Lollie. It was a plastic turtle. And it wasn’t even wrapped. Oh, how I loved that turtle. I played with it in the canal and out at the reservoir. I tied a rope around its neck and “walked” it up and down the sidewalk on my block. Once, when a bunch of us wanted to play football and I couldn’t find our football, the turtle stood in. To heck with pigskin—we used plastic turtleskin to play our football game. I have no doubt it substituted for many types of balls, since we had a neighbor who made it her job to pilfer any unaccompanied ball she saw anywhere on our block. I’m certain I named my turtle, but I don’t recall its name. It was a darn groovy birthday gift. Thanks, Laura Joy.

Anyhoo… I told Lollie TIE O’ THE DAY would make Daisy a bigly star. So let it be written, so let it be done.

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Signs In My Realm

I’m not out-and-about often these days, but when I am, I check out the pandemic signage. I wasn’t able to get a picture of my fave COVID-19-related sign cuz I was driving to an appointment. The sign was at TWISTED SUGAR in Centerville about three weeks ago, and it said they were giving away a free roll of toilet paper if you bought a dozen cookies. I decided to buy a dozen and get my roll of free toilet paper immediately after my appointment, just to say I did it. And I was going to snap a photo of TWISTED SUGAR’s sign, of course. By the time I got back to the cookie store about an hour later, the sign was already down. Apparently, they had sold out of cookies and tp. I was more upset about not getting the picture of the sign than not getting cookies and a free roll of toilet paper. I always have plenty of both of those things at home. But I was disappointed I couldn’t post a picture of the sign for y’all to see.

Anyhoo… Here are a couple of signs which painted wood Bow Tie o’ the Day and I came across near home as we committed errands today. We thought you’d appreciate them. Sorry, there’s no toilet paper involved in either one. Maybe next time.

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I Finally Found My ’81 Yearbook

Here’s another rare photo of me not wearing a tie of some sort. In my opinion, I do not resemble myself at all. A day without my wearing a Tie o’ the Day is like a day without wearing my soul. Fortunately, I don’t have neckwear-less days anymore. I also don’t go by my middle name anymore.

Anyhoo… This is my last yearbook photo of the Delta High School chapter o’ my life. I was a Junior (Class o’ 82) who would be graduating with that year’s Seniors (Class o’ 81). Does that mean I was a Jenior or a Sunior?