Talk Radio and Tranquility Or The Lack Thereof

The phone rang and I could hardly hear the caller. "Wow! You've got a lot of noise going on." she said.
I had the phone pressed to my ear while the door to the garage was open so that I could I toss a pop can into the recycling. Bernie was in the garage, welding, while the radio blasted out three stations simultaneously. The din was incredible.

"What?" I shouted into the receiver. "I can't hear you. Hang on just a sec."
I retired to the living room where it was suddenly blissfully peaceful. The cat was asleep on my chair so I opted to sit on the sofa and continue the phone visit with my friend.

NOISE! I heartily dislike noise. I like a quiet environment. I like the calming tone of my own voice as I talk to myself. Nothing soothes me more than the soft cooing of a Mourning Dove or hearing the whirrrr of its wings when it takes off, startled by my peering eyes. I appreciate the velvet-like atmosphere of solitude.

"Well, it sounds like you've got alot going on at your house." she went on. When my husband is around there is always a lot going on because he thrives on the cacophony of Talk Radio. He derides and verbally jousts right along with the guest callers. He puts words into the mouths of the Moderators. He shouts threats or go-getums with full-throated glee. To my misfortune, many of the stations that he likes are AM stations- which means, by my definition, "Amalgamated Mayhem" because they never come through the airwaves in single file. They come through in one huge hydra with each station gyrating for attention.

The first thing that he does in the morning is turn on the radio to one of his conglomerated stations. When he leaves for work, the first thing I do is turn off the radio. If he comes home for lunch, he walks in the door, turns on the radio and smiles a greeting. He leaves for work and I turn off the radio. He comes home from work and grabs the remote to turn on the radio, then he kisses me hello. It's a never ending battle with me against the airwaves. It would have been wise for the Minister on our wedding day to have added to the promises: For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness or in health, in quietness or in chaos.... The last statement may have given pause for some serious decision-making.

When the children were at home, I expected noise, and I didn't mind the noise. It was the noise of children clomping, stomping, banging doors and screaming at each other. It was the noise of us, in turn, threatening the children. It was healthy noise. It was noise that we could do something about.

There is nothing that can be done about Talk Radio. You can't change their topics. You can't tell the caller that what he's saying is idiotic. You can't convince the Moderator that he doesn't have all the world's solutions within his singular brain. It is the noise of imprisonment to me.

Would I have run out of the church on that beautiful wedding day if the Minister had asked me if I would make a commitment to this man that included daily doses of Talk Radio? I was so starry eyed, that I would not have hesitated one moment but would still have heartily said, "I Do!" It just takes a great deal of patience to bear up under the commitment sometimes.

I Corinthians 13 has the perfect description of genuine love. In my times of quietness and tranquility I spend a lot of time praying through this passage and I can only trust that the Lord will work in me the acceptance and trust that goes along with the faith that He is working His virtuous love in me. When it gets to be too much, I can always retire to the living room, take my place on the sofa and listen to the cooing of the Mourning Dove.

Graphic inspired by tut from Auds Dezinz Here and Here

It's All About Balance

Balance. A two syllable word. A word that is equalized with one syllable on each side of the separating dot in the middle. It is so very - balanced. It is so very practical. The word doesn't dance around, or wriggle with excitement. It stands strong and firm, solid and reliable.

Yet - and this is important - Balance has come to live with me as a very unreasonable and quixotic personality. I have found her to be demanding instead of one who comes to stand by my side as a helpful and enabling quality. I would love to safety pin her picture to my chest and go about my day knowing that Balance is held securely in place. Instead, I feel as if the cords of intrigue have coiled around my legs and are tripping me up each step along the way.

Take, for example, my desk. My dream vacation would be to have a condo next door to an office supply store where I would be given an unlimited gift card. I love office supplies and I adore organizing things. All the paper clips and bulldogs clips are separated by genre, size and color in their drawer. I know precisely when the supply of copy paper or page protectors is beginning to wane. And I am an expert on practically every type of writing instrument there is. The problem is this: I cannot, I absolutely cannot maintain an orderly surface on my desktop.

I love to organize but I find maintenance to be Balance's bailiwick. And she just does not share her tips. The end result? No balance. Mrs. Balance stands upright at the door, raises her eyebrow at me and cluck-clucks like a 3rd grade substitute teacher. It is most unnerving!

When I try to resolve the situation and tidy up the surface, I find I can only shuffle stacks to move them around a bit. I may dust a little as I find surface area that was once hidden. But before I know it, the piles have moved back into their positions and I'm typing over a slope of information that I can't file or I'll forget where I put it. I can only say that it is a good thing that my piano teacher taught me to keep my fingers nicely curved and uplifted. It helps while typing over debris.

I could list several other areas of struggle as I try to convince Balance to join with me instead of fighting against me. However, I won't bore you with my wrestling match with Mrs. B. Suffice it to say that I am going to rustle up a batch of cookies, and see if I can sweeten her up with some bribery. Maybe we can become friends yet. At least I know that I'll feel better after a couple of chocolate chip delights.

Housework

Click on picture for enlarged view.

I come from a distinguished line of women who are "random housekeepers". In an effort to maintain lineage purity and family integrity, I am following in the footsteps of my feminine predecessors while passing along helpful hints to my children. Peg Bracken, in her opening paragraph in chapter one of I Hate To Housekeep Book defines "random housekeepers": "There are three kinds of housekeepers. There is the spotless housekeeper, who won't stop, and there is the spotful housekeeper, who won't start. Then there is the occasional or random housekeeper, whose book this is."

At the present moment, my husband and I are smitten with Reese Sticks. I discovered them first but he had to horn in on the treat which requires me to now carefully guard my stash or they'll be inhaled so fast that the created vacuum will leave me breathless. Therefore, we are allowed one Reese Stick per person per night. They are hard to find, which makes them even more delicious.

This week we are devoted to Reese Sticks. Several weeks ago we couldn't get enough of watching "LOST" on DVD and sat through an all night marathon. This spring I was in to knitting so completely that I made 8 pair of socks for Christmas presents in about 3 months, which was astounding for me because I hardly finish anything let alone PAIRS of socks. Next week, most likely, we will find something else that catches our eye. Like crows, we'll flock around it, pick it up and carry it back to our nest. We are not consistent individuals. We are random, we function quite well that way and we are merrily passing along the DNA. But I find that I actually resent it. I would rather be uniform, consistent, and comfortably pragmatic. I don't want to be dogmatically pragmatic mind you, but yikes! That comment shows that my randomness is leaking out again.

My mother had this book and I found it on my bookshelf today when I was chastising myself, yet again, that I really need to clean house. Since I need a strong charge of desire to clean when I'm not motivated by the terror that company is arriving in 2 hours, I sashayed over to a bookshelf to see if I could find a resource on "getting organized." I've collected a number of helpful volumes through the years. On the bottom shelf, I found little Peg! I blew the dust off her, admired the quirky illustrations by Hilary Knight (who always cracks me up) and began to look through the yellowed pages. I couldn't believe that I'd had that book all these years and I'd never read it! I scanned the first page and knew this book was for me! It is about me! It appeals to my Germanic sense of being sensible and practical, yet it is witty and full of fun - like we Germanic people are....

Chapter 10 of her book "How to Remember and How to Remember to Remember" is a hoot. It is especially relevant to me right now because I forget what it was I left the bathroom to go to the kitchen to get. It wasn't a Reese Stick because I would have remembered that. Oh yes, it was the Awesome cleaner. Now, where did I put that cleaner the last time I finished using it?? I think her flagpole remembering list on page 116 may really help me. You must read that chapter yourself because I could get into big trouble from the copyright cops if I cut and paste too much information from the book into this blog. My blog readership is such that Crest Books would know by this afternoon.

What is the point of all this, you may ask. Well, the point is this. Peg Bracken just gave me credibility to accept that I am random and that I have talent in that direction. I am going to attempt to not obsess about the fact that I'm not spotless but I'm clean enough and life is too short to obsess about being perfect.

I'll talk to you later. It's time for a Reese Stick before my husband comes home.

An August Saturday

It has been a refreshing day - one in which I have procrastinated - most successfully - at most everything that I should have been doing. But I can't help it. The sun is shining. The locusts are singing. The trees are whispering. And we bought a new bench!

Let me tell you about the bench. It all started this spring when we went to Rick's Garden Center. I was hankering for a replacement bench for our rotting, but once lovely, beauty which sits on the front porch. It was no longer safe and I missed sitting on it waiting for whatever needed to be waited for. We found a nice one at Rick's, and it was on sale, but we weren't ready to buy a bench quite yet. We had to anguish about it for awhile longer. Today we went bench shopping again and returned to Rick's.

There was our bench - only now it was on CLEARANCE! Hoot hoot hoot! I had earned some Rick's Bonus Bucks by emptying out the bank account on so many spring flowers and I was hoping to use it on something we would not normally buy. We don't normally buy benches, so this seemed like a legitimate use for the Bonus Bucks. With the $24 off for the Bonus Bucks plus the low clearance price, the cost for our bench came down to $88.00 (plus an inordinate amount for Ceasar's tax, of course.) We preened and clucked all the way home. Who says that "he who hesitates is lost."

End of story. I like happy endings, don't you?

Vintage

I walk talking to a friend several days ago while we hiked through Starved Rock State Park. Donna is involved in teaching young people drama and inspiring in them the gift of gazing at things through the lens of imagination. As we ambled along in that green lushness, sweating and fatigued, enjoying every moment but also aware that our hips hurt us, she began to tell me about a workshop she had done recently. The students decided that they needed information from "way back" and elected her as their encyclopedia!

She said something to the effect that it was rather discombobulating to be known as the vintage source of information. I agreed. I suppose it doesn't do one whit of good to dwell on the fact that I'm getting older but I just can't seem to avoid it. In one of those wildly inane Perry Mason T.V. adventures, he made one comment that stuck with me through the years. One of the characters was talking to him and said, "I'm not as young as I used to be." Perry Mason wisely and mildly responded, "None of us are."

For some reason Perry's 4 little words really set me free. You see, I've been in angst for some time about the fact that my chin has reproduced itself without my permission and my trim figure is a pleasant but very distant memory. I want to appear in each year of life just like I did at 18! I'm looking for a place to join up with Ponce de Leon's team as they look for the Fountain of Youth. RATS! He's dead! So that won't work.

I did find a Photoshop tutorial with some great directions on giving a photograph a facelift. Now, that would be a lot easier than working out in the gym 3 times a week. In fact, it is now a family joke, but for our Christmas letter one year I wanted to include a photo of our beautiful children and grandchildren. Unfortunately, I was also in the picture. I couldn't remove myself without it being obvious, so I decided to shave off an unknown quantity of pixels from each side of myself.

When a seamstress is making or altering a pair of pants, it is imperative to make them smaller by removing amounts from both sides of each leg or else it will throw off the grainline. Therefore, when I was using my eraser tool, I was quite conscious of working on both sides. I didn't want to throw off my grainline on top of everything else! It worked. I suddenly looked quite pleasant and agreeably svelte. My family and I all think it's a great joke that I can make myself look like something that I'm not and be quite shameless about it. It's all about art, right?

There are certain merits to growing older. I've gathered one or two ideas together here for you. It never hurts to run them through the mind every couple of days as a form of emotional antibiotic.

One of the delightful and unexpected pleasures is finding that in that vast reservoir of experiences, a certain level of perspective has floated to view like water lily flotsom. There is comfort in knowing that, merciful heavens, you didn't totally destroy your children! And, there were several times that you actually made right decisions! These can be such heady revelations and you may find the need to back over to a chair and sit down or you'll collapse from shock. Actually, I think that this revelation is one of the most fun parts of growing older. When you're young you are still wrestling with the giants. When you're older, you see that there were a number of times when you actually kicked them in the groin and they backed away.

I take great encouragement from the Bible's perspective on aging and wisdom. Unfortunately, not too many people want to hear the lurid details of my learning journey, but they don't always mind getting the fallout from the lessons I've learned. Especially if I can phrase those lessons in few words, without bossiness or judgment, and can be there to support them if things turn sour.

The bottom line: is it bad being considered vintage? I don't think it is if your spirit is still beautiful. That is the true Fountain of Youth.

(Graphic based on tutorial by Kimbearly Membership Group.)