On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and
the US population plunged into mourning and a nationwide depression.
How could this happen? How could we recover? I was fifteen and a
sophomore in high school.
Life goes on. Our local teen radio station, KIMN, introduced new
songs and asked listeners to vote on whether they were winners or
losers. Late in December, they played I Wanna Hold Your Hand by The
Beatles for the first time. The music was fabulous although I had to
laugh at the thought of holding hands with a bug. All over Denver,
teenagers screamed, “Yes!” This was exactly the kind of joyful
noise we needed in a time of darkness. A week or so later, on my
sixteenth birthday, January 8, 1964, The Beatles landed on KIMN’s top
fifty for the first time.
From that day on, I was all Beatles all the time. I went to their
concert (my first) at Red Rocks. I saw the movie, A Hard Day’s Night.
I bought their albums, from Meet the Beatles to Let It Be. My niece
has all my vinyl albums now, but I still have plenty of memorabilia.
Visit my apartment and you’ll see Abbey Road and Yellow Submarine
tote bags, a Beatles ball cap, a yellow submarine lunch box, several
Beatles biographies on my bookshelf. My Christmas tree has at least
two Beatles ornaments and my laptop sports a yellow submarine
sticker. That green Celestial Seasonings tin holds my collection of
Beatles bubble gum cards. Somewhere in my basement storage unit is a
box full of Beatles magazines, including the iconic Rolling Stone
with a naked John on the cover.
I’m almost finished reading a sweet book about another fan, titled,
She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.
That could be the theme of my life yesterday and always.
Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.
That’s the way I usually feel when dealing with corporate customer service departments, and I had plenty of reasons to think of Murphy’s Law last week.
It started with the new sofa I ordered online and the news that FedEx would deliver it on Thursday. I stayed home all day and all evening and it never came. The furniture store where I bought it (Furniture Mania) emailed to tell me the driver said I had moved, so he needed a new address. Of course, I haven’t moved, but just in case he hadn’t read the original delivery instructions, I resent the security code to get into my building.
Friday I stayed home all day again. To entertain myself, I decided to use my time to call Wells Fargo to close an under-performing investment account. It took five calls after I finally got their automated call system to let me talk to a real person because the system couldn’t recognize my account number either by voice or touchpad. She said she was the wrong person to talk to, but she could transfer me to the right person. Guess what? The right person not only wasn’t available, she apparently no longer worked for Wells Fargo. Smart woman. The replacement number got me to voicemail for the third time. I called the 1-800 number again and got to speak with a real live human relatively quickly. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the right person and transferred me to a man who turned out, FINALLY, to be the one who could do what I needed. It only took an hour, so I should count my blessings, right?
Once again, however, the sofa didn’t come. This time the driver said, “the business was closed.” This is my home, not a business. When I went to the FedEx website, I learned that drivers will attempt to deliver something three times and then it is up to the customer (me) to pick it up. On my back, I suppose.
I complained to FedEx. Furniture Mania complained to FedEx and gave me a 10% discount for my trouble.
Monday, much to my astonishment, the sofa was delivered.
This started out to be a rant about the poor quality of what passes for customer service these days. And that remains true for the likes of Wells Fargo and FedEx. A pox on their corporate souls.
Instead, I want to thank the people at Furniture Mania for their help. Go buy something from them.
Sometimes, to my everlasting surprise and gratitude, things go right.
Remember that old novelty song “They’re coming to take me away, haha. They’re coming to take me away!” I’m singing that this morning, although it isn’t me they’re coming to take away, it’s my couch. My hideous, bulky, not-very-comfortable couch that I’ve hated ever since I bought it twenty years ago.
Once I swore I’d never again have anything in my house that I couldn’t move by myself. That will never happen largely because I have three pieces of space-age designer furniture that I’ve had since 1969 and that I adore. Even though with molded plastic fronts, they look lightweight, in fact, they weigh a ton. Literally.
I have contemplated putting wheels on everything. Sliders help.
Back to the couch. You might wonder why I bought it if I hated it. Well, I detest shopping. I made a trip to American Furniture Warehouse thinking it was so big they would have to have something for me. This was as close as they came. It was the right size and the right price. The color, always the most important feature for me, was a dusty lavender, not the clear bright purple I would have preferred, but again, as close as they came.
Once I moved into my bright modern condo, the couch seemed to become even uglier, so I’ve been looking around (online, because I still hate to shop) for a new one for the past seven years. You’d be surprised how few purple couches are on the market.
Well, maybe you wouldn’t.
I finally found the one I wanted, sleek, modern, and bright, and put it in my Amazon cart where it stayed for several months. Then a couple of weeks ago, it went on sale and I had to order it. Before it came, I needed to find a way to get rid of the old one. The service I called offered fast service and reasonable prices.
They’re coming this morning to haul it away and the new one will arrive sometime in the next week. This all makes me very happy. Best of all, the new one is light enough for me to move by myself when I decide to rearrange things.
I might be old, but I’m lively.
These days it seems like everybody has a podcast. I find myself more and more choosing listening to a podcast over watching television. Chalk that up to my wanting always to learn something instead of just zoning out. I’m sure there are zone-out podcasts, too, if that’s what you prefer.
Here are my favorites:
The Creative Penn—Joanna Penn is “a thriller author and creative entrepreneur” with one of the most popular podcasts on writing and publishing. She begins each episode with updates on news from the world of publishing and her own writing and publishing activities. Each week features an interview with an author or publisher who brings valuable information to her audience of writers.
The James Altucher Show—James is a fascinating person who has made and lost fortunes and became more or less famous by writing about his experiences. He interviews peak performers across a wide range of industries who are typically as curious about him as he is about them.
NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour—Host Linda Holmes gathers two or three people each week to discuss books, movies, music, television, other popular culture. My favorite part of the podcast is also their favorite: each guest chooses what is making them happy this week. This is my main resource for learning about new entertainment releases.
NPR’s Fresh Air—Terry Gross has hosted this show since its inception in 1985, asking probing questions of prominent figures in various fields, among them entertainment and the arts, culture, journalism, and global current affairs. Always interesting and one of the most popular shows on NPR and one of the most listened to podcasts.
The Rachel Maddow Show—when I cut the cable cord five years ago, I mourned the loss of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, so I was thrilled to find that the audio of the nightly show is rebroadcast as a podcast about an hour after the TV show ends. Insightful, informative, and scrupulously factual, she gives context to the Washington insanity. I never feel like I understand what’s going on until I hear it from Rachel.
I didn’t sleep well last night, thanks to my *&^%$#@! cat. I went to bed about 10 and had to get up around midnight because that’s what old people do. After that, it was all over, according to Radley. He jumped on the bed and proceeded to mess with my hair because that’s what he does.
I threw him gently off the bed.
He jumped back up, lay on the pillow and reached for my hair.
I threw him off the bed.
This continued roughly 700 times until 4:20 this morning. I don’t know why.
I may have dozed off for 10-15 minutes a few times.
He had food and water. He has a perfectly fine bed of his own, for crying out loud, not that he ever uses it at night.
At 4:20 he finally let me sleep for about an hour.
At 5:23 he stuck his claws in my hair again and I gave up.
I got up, accompanied by his usual morning bawling. I yelled at him, not that it ever works. “What part of Shut Up don’t you understand?”
When I sat down to write this, he finally settled down. I don’t know why.
I’ll go back to bed shortly and he will probably let me sleep. I don’t know why.
While I’m grateful that I no longer work and can spend the morning in bed if I need to, it isn’t what I had planned for today.
Our sermon on Sunday was about the importance of getting enough rest. We are a busy people and most of us don’t get our needed eight hours of sleep, but Pastor Ashley reminded us that even God rested and built that into the Ten Commandments.
I’m thinking God didn’t have a cat.
On the Auntie continuum, I fall somewhere between Aunt Bee and Auntie Mame, less matronly than one and less flamboyant than the other.
When my nieces were little and spent time with me, I told them “just don’t act like children.”
I’m sure this makes me a bad person, but children are not my favorite people. I think they’re cute and I like watching them, but interacting with them baffles me.
Now I’m a great aunt (well, I was always a great aunt) to Griffin, 10, and Harper, 7. They live in Phoenix and I see them once a year when they come here to visit their grandparents. This year they flew alone for the first time, and in that and many other ways they are growing up way too fast. They were more subdued than in previous years. Harper has lost her first tooth, showed us her new gymnastics moves and then settled in an armchair to watch So You Think You Can Dance. Griff was a little cold from our uncommon rainstorm, so he came home and changed into his pajamas before cuddling under a blanket to watch TV.
I was thinking that next year, he’ll be taller than I am, and then I realized that this may be the last time I see them. Next spring their grandparents will retire and move to Tucson, so that’s where they will visit from now on. I’ll have to go to Arizona to see them, and that would require me to reconsider my no traveling policy, which could happen, but I’m not making any promises.
Thank goodness for Facebook. The ability to check in regularly with distant friends and family has always been the best thing about it.
I will watch from a distance to see how they navigate their perilous teens. How will their interests grow and change? What will they study in college? I’m feeling a little premature melancholy about all this. Maybe my own version of empty nest syndrome.
Yesterday a friend asked if I wanted some of the Basket of Gold currently taking over her front yard with their sumptuous yellow flowers. I had to tell her no.
My only outdoor space is a balcony on the north side of the building that gets no direct sunlight.
In my old life, I’d have welcomed them and invited them to take over my own hillside or parking strip.
This time of year, I’d be cutting the last of the lilacs, purple, white, and lavender and propping the vase up so the cats couldn’t eat the flowers, tip over the vase, and drink the water. Those were the days.
I was gradually digging up all the grass and replacing it with flowers. People who asked about my garden always wanted to know what kind of vegetables I grew. I didn’t. I grew flowers.
I’d go out in the early morning to cut a bouquet for that day—roses maybe, and bachelor’s buttons with a sprig or two of bleeding heart.
Ultimately, the garden is what convinced me to move to a condo. As much as I loved the flowers, I didn’t love the buying, planting, watering, fertilizing, mulching, and weeding it took to get to the blooming. When my dad got sick the garden got away from me and I never had the energy to bring it back. My neighbors deserved better.
So I moved to a garden-free zone. Every year, I consider renting a plot in the community garden until I remember the unrelenting heat and weeds of July and August. No, these days I’m an observer only.
What brought all this to mind is reading Creative Quest by Questlove. He uses gardening as a metaphor for creativity in general. “To end up with beautiful flowers and healthy plants, you have to be in regular contact with them. You have to prune. You have to tend.”
I may need to make a trip to Paulino’s or O’Toole’s or Echter’s. Just to look.
I have a low tolerance for authority and bureaucracy. That’s why it took me three colleges, six majors and twelve years to complete my bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Colorado at Denver. I returned to school, earning a master’s in adult learning from Colorado State University. A ... Continue reading →
The Constant Learner 