Category: Stories

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Not Speechless

Although mustache Bow Tie o’ the Day isn’t visible– and although this photo is only slightly different from one I already posted in my swimming suit post– this  picture is one of my all-time faves of me. And I don’t like many pics of me at all. But I think this expresses me and my outlook, scrunched into one pic. I think it’s a pretty accurate representation of my attitude as I move through the world. It shows my relationship to the world. Here are some captions I’ve come up with that fit what I see of me in the picture. These are things I can imagine myself saying in this photo. They are words which sorta give you a tiny peek at my philosophies and my life-posture.

  • I love my life this much!
  • Would ya look at this?!
  • Does this swimming suit make my butt look big?
  • Suzanne, this is the exact spot where we’re building a beach house when you retire!
  • Everybody come see this!
  • What do you mean, you forgot the marshmallows for the s’mores?
  • I ain’t goin’ back to work!
  • (When things are tough) Yeah, I’ve got this!
  • (When things are relentlessly tough) Bring it on!
  • (When things are toughest) Is that all you’ve got?
  • Who drank my last Diet Coke?
  • Is all of this picturesque earth just for little ol’ me?
  • (Singing, from the hymn) “The wind and the waves shall obey my will…”
  • I can see forever from here!
  • I can’t believe people would rather start wars than sit on their beach towels together on an ocean beach, around a bonfire, watching sunsets.
  • Wow! I get to have all of this scene’s elegance AND a cool swimming suit!
  • This is photoshopped, right?
  • Hey, wind, water, sky, sun, clouds, sand, swimming suit! Come here and let me give you this big bear hug.

If you’ve got a caption you think captures my spirit in this photo, feel free to share it. I’m curious to know what kinds of things others think I could be saying in this picture.

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You Don’t Know, Until You Go

Our trip to Dauphin Island was planned and paid for months before we knew I’d need my surgery. Once I found out it was imperative they butcher part of my Hanky Panky, I had to decide whether to have my little pancreas operation right away, or to wait until our schedule was open again in November. But it was best to let them cut me open as soon as it could be arranged.

If I got cut open ASAP in late-June, that would give me nine weeks of recovery time before our trip. We– including the surgeon– figured the two months between surgery and vacay would give me enough convalescent time to be in shape to go on a low-energy vacation, so we decided not to cancel or reschedule our trip.

For the nine weeks that I was stuck in the house using all my energy to recuperate, being ready for our Alabama trip was my light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel goal. It was a milestone I worked to achieve. I knew I had to take extra good care of myself if I was going to be ready to head out across the country. Suzanne and I took gingerly good care of me during those weeks.

As the trip date approached, I was excited but apprehensive. I felt like I was well enough to fly away, but I worried vacation would be too hard on my old, healing body. I was concerned that I might play too hard. But while in ‘Bama, I worked at being careful, and I managed to have the most mellow vacay adventure of my life. I had a ball. A lazy, enjoyable ball.

Even so, Suzanne and I soon realized the trip had happened a little too early in the course of my recovery. In this photo, Tie o’ the Day’s colorful ocean buoys are attempting to buoy up my spirits. I had to spend most of this day sprawled out resting on the couch, as I am doing in this shot. I wasn’t even up for beaching.

Couch potato rest, or no couch potato rest, we still had to eat– so Suzanne went out into the town alone to slay a beast for us to consume. She went to the Lighthouse Bakery and slayed us a couple of trophy cinnamon rolls. She promptly dragged their carcasses back to the condo. She’s got a sharp eye, and that’s what makes her a spot-on hunter. I’m glad it was Cinnamon Roll Season on Dauphin Island.

The pastry was health-giving, and I was later able to waller off the couch and go to the beach that evening– where we watched the sun set over the ocean. And of course I wore my new, sexy swimming suit.

It will be revealed in the next post.

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Bow Ties Will Be Bow Ties

Sometimes I get so wrapped up in what I’m doing that I forget my bow ties have minds of their own– even on Dauphin Island. They are not living, breathing beings, but they are alive in their own way. At least, mine are alive somehow. In fact, they are downright scamptastic!

Suzanne and I were hanging around on the beach, doing our own thing. I looked away from my back-up Bow Ties o’ the Day for only the tiniest of moments, and when I looked back, they were gone. When I finally found them, I was both livid and relieved at the same time. It seems they had gotten it into their bow heads to stake out a section of beach for themselves. As you can see in these photos, they were doing typical beach things: sunbathing and getting buried in the sand.

I couldn’t be angry with them, but I did give them a rousing come-to-Jesus talk, during which I gave them the parent line about how they need to tell me where they’re going and when they’ll be back, or they’ll be grounded until they’re in a retirement home. Running off unannounced is not acceptable behavior, even for bow ties. My bow ties don’t have cell phones, so I have no way to contact them when they scurry off. I can’t afford that many phone lines.

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Making A Spectacle Of Myself And My Bow Tie

When I go to a restaurant for the first time, I order the Caesar salad. In my experience, if the Caesar salad is yummy, it’s almost guaranteed that the rest of the menu will delight the taste buds. If the Caesar salad doesn’t triumph, I probably won’t be going to chow at that restaurant again.

Likewise, when I visit new places, I make a point of carefully checking out the sunsets there. Generally, if the sunsets are breathtaking, I have a stupendous vacation. Sunsets are omens. And the sunsets on Dauphin Island were good omens.

Bow Tie o’ the Day’s glasses helped me see sunsets and other sights on the island with equally super clarity. I especially liked looking at the ocean and the beach. Although Suzanne and I love the sport of people-watching, we enjoyed just watching the bare beach and empty ocean– since after Labor Day, almost all of the tourists and vacationers are outta there. Half the houses on Dauphin Island are summer homes, and when we set foot on the island, they were already closed up and deserted until next summer. The long and short of it is that really only the residents of the island were anywhere to be seen. And they were few and far between. We didn’t have just part of the beaches to ourselves. We had 99 percent of the beaches to ourselves. No complaints from us.

But one evening, we found ourselves eating at PIRATES, a beach-front restaurant with its own swimming pool. When we finished our meals, we walked twenty feet to the beach, where we sat on our butts to watch the setting sun. And then That One Guy– you know the guy– thought the whole island should hear his music. There’s always That One Guy. (His annoying behavior is not limited to music, although it was about music on this occasion.) Why is it That One Guy never plays any good music? I wanna say to That One Guy, “If you insist on taking over the general public’s sense of hearing, please, please, please…. take requests. And we request that you play ANYTHING that’s not the crappy-sounding crap you’re blasting right now!”

But nobody wants to get into it with That One Guy. He doesn’t understand you when you politely ask him to consider others around him, and maybe turn it down a notch or two. He can’t speak to you without using words with a lot of m’s and f’s– and in that order. To top it all off, That One Guy has always had more than way too much to drink, and we all know where that takes the situation. My advice is to leave That One Guy to his own obnoxious deeds. Trust me. He’ll get his due. He’ll eventually irritate That Huge Guy.

Anyhoo… Through the din of That One Guy’s blaring tunes, Suzanne said, “I’m done with this beach.” We got up and took our eardrums to another one. Luckily, That One Guy and his speaker (probably his only friend) never showed up anywhere in our vicinity for the rest of our vacation.

 

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Sometimes It’s Worth Pushing Through The Pain

As we all know by now, bow ties do not necessarily need to be created with fabric/cloth only. I’ve got bow ties made of wood, leather, vinyl, plastic, feathers, metal, etc. I even have one made from a recycled bicycle inner tube. At one of the Dauphin Island beaches, I arranged Bow Tie o’ the Day out of some of Suzanne’s seashells. I had to hurry to snap this shot, in order to beat the encroaching waves.

Suzanne found some bigly shells, and I immediately started to worry about how we were going to get them back to Utah with breaking them. Suzanne does not tolerate broken shells.

Add Suzanne to a beach where she can trawl for seashells and she becomes a stubborn, non-hearing child. I enjoy walking along beaches, for sure, but… When I’m walking on the sand with Suzanne, I know to just grit my teeth and follow where the seashells lead her. There’s no thwarting her when she’s on the Mission o’ Seashells.

So… one foot after we stepped off the fishing pier and onto the beach, Suzanne’s Seashell Glaze took over her eyes. It’s on. Here’s a shell, there’s a shell. On, she walked and picked up shells. On, I staggered for what felt like miles through the deep sand o’ the beach– setting back my recovery from surgery about a month. I was hurting, dizzy, thirsty for a cold Diet Coke, exhausted– you name it, I was feeling it. Suzanne was oblivious.

And then I looked ahead of me and saw Suzanne paying rapt attention to the grandeur of the ocean, feeling the warmth of every grain of sand between her toes, and touching the raised, undulating textures of shells. She was in heaven. And then, Suzanne looked back and smiled her happiness right at me– letting me know that my being with her on a shell-y beach is a big part of her heaven.

How could I not be happy? How could I not trudge ahead in tremendous joy, despite whatever ills my body felt? How could I not be sure to add that day to my long list o’ Best. Day. Ever.? 💝

This is a BTW, with a TMI alert:   From the Best. Day. Ever. at the beach, I am now back in real life, heading out to today’s scheduled doctor appointment– for a pap smear. Worst. Day. Ever. 😱

Up and down, plus and minus. Such is life. 🙃

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The First Supper

Bow Tie o’ the Day sat with us for our first meal on Dauphin Island, at an appropriately named restaurant called ISLANDERS.

After a half-day of flying from Utah to the bottom of Alabama, it was high time to sit by the bigly restaurant window and gaze out at the ocean while eating seafood, right? Not quite, for Suzanne. No! Suzanne, the landlubber, wanted fettuccine alfredo, so she ordered fettuccine alfredo while I sat in my chair wondering who in the world I came on a beach vacation with. “Hello! Can you hear me now, Suzanne? We’re sitting down to dinner, looking out at the Gulf of Mexico– and you’re not ordering seafood? WTFlip?”

We did decide to split a couple of seafood appetizers before our meals showed up at the table. I ate most of the calamari, and Suzanne ate most of the chips and crab-and-spinach dip.

Oh, and what seafood did I order myself for dinner, after having such a big ol’ cow about Suzanne ordering the non-seafood dish– fettuccine?

Er, um, well, uh, so, er… I ordered up the roasted pork loin, covered in a tomato and raisin chutney. I know, I know– pork loin is not generally considered seafood. But it sounded like something I’d like to try, because of the interesting-sounding chutney combination of flavors I had never tasted together. I wasn’t disappointed one bit. The chutney and pork pairing was tasty. Also, the dinner came with cole slaw, which is a common seafood side dish. And I got thinking: pigs drink liquids, including water. That makes them sorta seafood-y. You can’t say that about fettuccine noodles.

And so I’m a hypocrite. I truly felt kinda guilty– like I was doing something wrong by not matching my meal to the environment I inhabited at that moment. And then I thought: “What is this “matching” thing of which you think, Helen? Blasphemy on yourself!” But I ate seafood at meals for the rest of our vacation. For most meals. Sometimes. Occasionally.

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We Meant To Post, But We Couldn’t

My plan was to keep churning out TIE O’ THE DAY posts during our vacation. (We know you miss us when we’re dormant.) However, the dastardly Tropical Storm Gordon– which we barely missed– had knocked out internet access on Dauphin Island, so the posts took a timeout. The neckwear did not, and I will certainly let you see what we and our family o’ ties were up to.

We begin with this photo of Suzanne and me at the baggage carousel in the Mobile Regional Airport, on the first day of our trip. Suzanne was tasked with carrying ALL our bags, since I’m still not lifting or toting anything like the luggage we packed. Each piece was so heavy that somebody must have packed cinder blocks. Besides the two suitcases she’s wrangling in this photo, Suzanne is carrying my computer bag and my Bag o’ Bow Ties, while wearing her own backpack/purse. She’s trying to figure out a strategy for getting all the bags to the rental car. I was kind and offered to carry the small Bag o’ Bow Ties and the rental car paperwork. It was the least I could do. The absolute least.

I, on the other hand, was busy wearing my shirt cape and posing. Note wood Bow Tie o’ the Day’s wings, which I had carefully chosen to wear on the plane in order to give a little extra assistance to the pilots. The flights to Atlanta, then to Mobile were a success, so wearing Bow Tie worked. Obviously.

And let me add this: You know how as you’re leaving the airplane each crew member stands at the door repeating “buh-bye” or “have a good day” to each passenger? I got to hear “Cool bow tie!” from a crew member. It broke up the insincere, monotonous exit chatter. That alone is worth wearing a bow tie around your neck in the clammy humidity of Alabama. 🛩

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My Uber Is Closed For A Week

Bow Tie o’ the Day and I returned our family hitchhiker to Stockton this afternoon. We Uber-ed our passenger a total of 228 miles. There was a ton of slap-happy conversation when we were together. And there was terrific sing-a-long music for me when I was alone in the car.

One of the things about being retired that I never considered: Other people think that because you are retired you have absolutely nothing to do to fill your time, so they think you’re available at any given moment. They expect you to be ready for any task they might need you to do, including chauffeuring them to do their errands and to visit far-away relatives.

I don’t mind helping out one bit– except when I do. Seriously, I enjoy doing favors for people I care about. But after driving to the exciting town of Stockton twice today, my butt is tired. I think I deserve to take a holiday– and not just the kind in this photo, where you fill up your gas tank and grab a bad breakfast burrito.

Suzanne and I got the Gulf Coast go-ahead for the condo, the power, the airports, the roads, etc., so we’re outta here way too early in the AM. Off we go, to Atlanta to Mobile to Dauphin Island, AL.

Thank heavens I have not been drafted to drive anyone to or from Stockton tomorrow or I’d have to cancel our vacay.

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To Sunday Brunch, Or Not To Sunday Brunch

The photo of Bow Ties o’ the Day is a throwback from Sunday, when we took a drive to WY for brunch. As I’ve mentioned previously, Suzanne’s brother, James, is the owner and chef of Gateway Grille– which is located at The Purple Sage golf course in Evanston. James puts out a magnificent Sunday spread. And yes, I stole all the remaining pastries when we left.

As you can see, Suzanne wasn’t all that interested in being in a photo as we hung around on the deck at the clubhouse. Thus, I only managed to capture the side of her head. Ain’t that a pretty ear?

James managed to make time to get out of the kitchen and sit down with us for a few minutes. During our conversation something came up about “smart” v. “wise.” He said, “A smart person knows a tomato is a fruit. A wise person knows not to put it in a fruit salad.” Sounds right to me.

James lived with me and Suzanne in our first apartment, in SLC in 1985. The apartment was on the top floor of an old house, and was U-shaped. James slept on the floor in an almost-hallway, and we had to step over him to get to the bathroom– which had red walls around the bathtub.

We also had a neighbor named Sadie Cowboy, who had a little girl, but had no teeth. Well, maybe a tooth or two. And a U of U football player whose name I don’t remember lived on the first floor. He took no guff from anyone, and was sort of like our guard dog. Ain’t nobody dared mess with us.

Dad helped me move my large stuff into that apartment when we first moved in. (He helped me move into more than one top-floor apartment in SLC. Sorry, Dad.) He knew I’d be sharing the apartment with a couple of friends, but I guess he assumed it was a couple of gals. When he saw James’ huge shoes sitting on the floor in the apartment, Dad said, “I don’t know if I’m comfortable with you living with a man.” I didn’t have the heart to say to him at that moment, “Between James and Suzanne, James is not the one you should be worrying about, Dad.” We laughed about the incident years later, after his “dunno” got “smart” on the matter, and then his “smart” eventually got “wise.”

Dad absolutely loved Suzanne. They “clicked.” He loved her because she’s Suzanne. And he loved her because I do. And he loved her because she loves me. Simple as that.

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Unless We’re Not

Tie o’ the Day and I are closely checkin’ the weather for the days of our upcoming vacation. We are scheduled to leave for Dauphin Island, AL– a few miles off the coast of Alabama– on Thursday morning. It seems that a little tropical storm named Gordon is trying to become a hurricane in that coastal region right now.

Are we still going to our little beach? Heck, yes. Remember, we’ve survived Delta wind for decades– real wind. And who doesn’t want to experience a tropical storm and/or hurricane getaway? Not everybody gets a chance to vacation in a hurricane. Besides, Gordon’s supposed to be only a Category 1 hurricane. And it might not even turn into one at all. It might miss our little island completely. Also, whatever it ends up being is supposed to happen before Thursday. But– you know the weather.

When we planned our getaway months ago, we checked into when hurricane season is generally over. It was supposed to over by now. Oh, well. The manager of the condo we’ve rented touched bases with us yesterday and said that we shouldn’t worry about changing our plans. And she lives there, so she should know. Sounds like when these teeny-powerful storms happen, they are more of an annoyance than actually dangerous.

We will likely get rain in the storm’s aftermath. We’ve packed an umbrella. Even though we may not get as much beach time as we anticipated, that’s ok. There are other things to do and places to see that tourists don’t necessarily think to do/see if they spend all their time at the beach. Suzanne and I enjoy wherever we are together.

For me and Suzanne, no hurricane is gonna detour our vacay parade. We’re not changing our plans, even though we have trip insurance and easily could. I’ve been chained to the house, recovering for most of the last 2 months, and I need to go somewhere. I need some bigly fun. Bigly, but relaxing. Even experiencing a hurricane sounds better to me than sitting around the house one minute longer. I guess I can wait two days– since I have to. We’re going!

I can already imagine the bow tie/tie posts that are gonna come out of this adventure o’ weather. And I even have a dashing new swimming suit that will amuse you. 🌊 ✈️