Random Thoughts

The other day we did something we enjoy doing – danced at the Ormond Beach Senior Center.  The ballroom dance is every Wednesday afternoon from 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm.  It is all very, very structured.  You arrive, pay $5, and find seats along the side of the dance floor.  The live band, The Blue Notes, plays the same songs (as far as we can tell) every week.  They play the classics –“Stardust”, “Fly Me to the Moon”, and for the ever present “line dance” they play “New York, New York” (which, in case you have never line danced (i.e. – done the Electric Slide to it) goes on for an infernally long time.  After each dance you clap a bit and then dutifully return to your seat.  The band starts the next song, and you go back out and fox trot or waltz or what have you.  Cutting a rug at a dance in 2011 Then, exactly halfway through the afternoon, THERE ARE SNACKS.   You line up as if you were in elementary school again and fill your litt...

Dear Ed, I have been thinking about you lately.  Maybe it is because of the death of another classmate – the first that I knew about in our cohort.  His death has sparked many new Facebook friend requests from people I grew up with some 40 years ago.  And social media has allowed me to see what is happening in their lives, which I like. And it made me wonder what is happening in YOUR LIFE.  I have searched online for you and can’t find anything. But you know what?  I really think I started pondering your fate last year when I bought a new winter coat.  It’s a Land’s End coat (bought at Sears, how old fashioned of me).  They had a few colors but I was really drawn to the Kelly green one.   When I put it on and pulled up the hood, I looked in the mirror and thought to myself, “I look like Ed!  Just like him waiting for the bus in 9 th grade!”.   My green coat   I am not sure you knew it then, but with you ...

I live a USED life.  And that is just the way I like it. Just what is a USED LIFE?  Well, it’s a life that doesn’t place NEW as a super high priority.  It’s a life that values experience, functionality, memory, and use above newness. I realized it today when something BRAND NEW popped into my life unexpectedly.  See, we needed a refrigerator.  We bought ours right after we bought our house (which, by the way, was a used house, it is now over 100 years old).  Our old side by side fridge conked out two months ago and ever since then we have been using a small fridge in our basement apartment, meaning we have to go up and down a flight of stairs every time we want annnything cold (including cream for coffee!).  While that is good exercise, it is not all that convenient.  So we decided we would buy a new fridge. That required looking at several different places, each several times.  Sears, Home Depot, Lowes, Bray and Scarf, H.H. Gr...

What if great art – brilliant art – were right in front of you?   Would you care?   Would you NOTICE?   Would you stop your busy, rushing about life for at least a moment or two to take it in and appreciate it? That was the premise behind the Washington Post experiment in 2007 – would morning Metro commuters in Washington DC take the time to listen and appreciate the music of one of the world’s best musicians, Joshua Bell?  The piece Gene Weingarten wrote in the Post on the experiment enthralled me at the time and also won a Pulitzer Prize.  (Article here:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/pearls-before-breakfast-can-one-of-the-nations-great-musicians-cut-through-the-fog-of-a-dc-rush-hour-lets-find-out/2014/09/23/8a6d46da-4331-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html As you can see if you read Weingarten’s piece, the experiment that day at L’Enfant Metro yielded dismal results:  Bell played his violin for 43 minutes. 1,097 people h...

Let me say first - I do not write this piece to “brag” or to point out a good deed – good deeds do not need to be broadcast to the world.   I write this to remind you to LOOK AROUND and notice people. I got home from a weeklong trip late last night.  And I was cranky (“cranky” is probably putting it mildly…).  I didn't get my preferred 8 hours of sleep before the alarm went off and I had to jump in the shower and get ready for re-entry to real life, a morning job.  Luckily my husband rearranged his scheduled a bit so he could drop me off at the metro, and the day began. The job was only one hour.  I had several errands on my to do list, so when I was done I decided to  metro around town to see what I could accomplish. But in the back of my mind, I was still cranky.  It was HOT.  I was carrying a HEAVY BAG that kept getting heavier as I purchased more items and had to CARRY THEM because I didn’t have my car.  My shoes were comfo...

Last night it happened again – the stars aligned and everything was perfect.   Things that “should not” have happened, HAPPENED.   And once again, when I thought through it all step by step and giggled about the perfectness of it all, I wondered WHY and HOW do such things fall into my lap?    I discussed it with David, who came up with what feels like the right answer:   I am AVAILABLE. If you make yourself available to things around you, you get to experience them.  I don’t mean “available” as in calendar/schedule wise.  I mean available as in head-space, heart-space, and mind-space wise.  I now realize that I am a super “available” person.  I am open to what is going on around me and willing to take it in, let it happen, and experience it. That availableness is not always rosy.  I was open, willing, and available to take care of 3 parents as they died.  Being really “available” means taking in the sadness, pain, and he...

I don’t believe in “bucket lists”.  This may surprise people.  From the outside, to some people it may seem as if I live my life running around checking item after item off my “bucket list”.  ·          Fly in a helicopter – check ·          Go to a presidential inauguration – check ·          Float in the Dead Sea  - check ·          Yada ·          Yada ·          Yada But I do not do those things to COMPLETE them.  I don’t do them to check them off, to finish them before I die. I do them because I am ALIVE.  I do them because they are opportunities, events, ideas that present themselves, and I grab them.  I relish them.  I take time to enjoy them. Don’t get me wrong – I love lis...

Maybe it has been the talk of #YesAllWomen recently.  Maybe the stories of the Indian girls who were raped and then hung from mango trees to die last week.  But I have been thinking about WOMEN.  And about myself as a woman.  And about FEMINISM.  I am proud to be a feminist.  If asked, I could not quickly give you a definition of the word.  Yet, I AM the word. So now that I am thinking about it, I looked up the definition.  Dictionary.com says “feminist” means: a dvocating   social,   political,   legal,   and   economic   rights   for   women   equal   to   those   of   men. I can get down with that.  And when put that simply and succinctly, who could disagree with it?  By disagreeing, are you advocating that social, political, legal, and economic rights of women, of ME, should NOT be equal to those of men?  Because they are not, you know.  So I gues...

Twice lately I have been reminded of how lucky I am to simply have been born where I was.  Understand this right off the bat - I am not particularly patriotic, not at all really.  I have no “Go USA” bumper stickers.  I do not fly an American flag.  I am not saying I am ANTI America – I am just not a gung-ho “America is the only good country” and “The USA is the very best and no one can ever beat us” kinda gal…  I have traveled to several other countries and am open minded enough to realize that the one I currently live in is not the only one that has a lot to offer its citizens. But TWICE lately new friends I met from China have given me pause – and caused me to not be able to speak for a moment.  They reminded me what good fortune I have simply because I am an American. The first was at an opening night party for a theatre festival.  His name was Wangkai and he spoke almost no English, but was totally enthralled by my husband David...

I was in my bathing suit yesterday, doing my annual Spring/Summer cleaning of our wrap-around porch.  Being in my bathing suit while in DC brings ONE THING to mind – SLIP ‘N’ SLIDE!!!  I got a Slip ‘n’ Slide a few years ago for my birthday, and even though I have only used it a couple of times I really like it.  Both times we set it up, some neighbor kids came over to slide with us. Well, yesterday when I thought of the Slip ‘n’ Slide, I wondered, “Will the little neighbor girl think she is too old this year to play on it?”.  And that got me starting to think about the concept of AGE APPROPRIATENESS.  I realized that I never went though the stage of feeling “too old” for anything.  Here I am just a few weeks shy of age 48 and I can’t think of a darn thing that I am “too old” to play with or do.  Not only that, I don’t need to have a kid by my side to grant me access to anything, either!          Bouncy house? ...