Did You Miss Me?

Wow, it has been FOREVER since I wrote on this blog.

I just read through a few posts, and was once again pleasantly surprised in hindsight at how lucid, and, dammit, just plain lovable I am!

Here's a funny update:

I opened the freezer door a couple days ago, thinking to maybe clear some space for new, exciting frozen treats to come, and pulled a grocery bag from the very back.

"Hmmmmm, wonder what's in this?" I said to myself.

There was a tag on the bag. It said: "Athena."

I immediately thought, "Guinea pig food?" Because, as you know, dear reader, since you have diligently digested all my previous posts, Athena was one of our guinea pigs.

Then, a split second later I realized the frozen lump in the bag WAS Athena.

That poor, dead guinea pig has been in our freezer for over a year, waiting for burial.

Makes you wonder what else is in there, doesn't it?

By the way -- and this has nothing to do with what's in my freezer, despite the juxtaposition -- you're all invited to my house for music and potluck Feb. 5.

A free denouement

Every time I get in the shower, this idea for the denouement in a novel comes to me. I'll probably never write a novel, so it's yours if you want it!

The story is about a married couple whose families, like everybody's families, have their own ways of doing things. This man & wife (for indeed it is a man-woman arrangement) are always getting on each other's cases -- in a loving if at times exasperated manner -- about the way they do things.

For instance, she thinks it's stupid to rinse the backs of dishes, because nobody eats off the backs! So who cares if there's soap on them? Plus it wastes water.

He calls her on it, and she says, "It is the way of my people."

For another instance, he insists on keeping two bars of soap in the shower, one strictly for face and upper-body use, the other strictly for lower-body use. She pokes fun at him, but he just says, "It is the way of my people."

So, they go through life, kids, ups, downs, arounds. They get old. She's the first to go. Her daughter is at her hospital bedside.

The old lady takes her daughter's hand and gazes lovingly at her through bleary brown eyes. "I have a message for Daddy."

Daughter wipes away tears, says, "Yes, Mom, what is it?"

Mom is fading. She moves her lips, but nothing comes out.

"What, Mom?" asks the daughter. "That you love him? That you never regretted marrying a bad dancer? That he's been the best husband you could ever have imagined?"

Mom smiles faintly, closes her eyes, and manages to whisper, with her last breath, "I always used the upper-body soap for my lower body, too."

A Strange Occurrence

At the Olive Garden tonight, Rex and I were dining and conversing when a woman at the next table flagged down a waiter and pointed toward another nearby table, where a birthday celebration had been in progress.

We naturally followed the pointing finger, and were surprised and somewhat horrified to see one of the celebrants, a woman, lying on the floor. More precisely, we saw her pants-clad legs and boot heels, because people were kneeling beside her northern areas, presumably administering comfort and perhaps resuscitation techniques in addition to obstructing our view.

God knows how she got there; Rex and I had been completely oblivious! You'd think if she'd fainted and fallen out of her chair we might have heard something! Maybe she just slumped down unobtrusively, and then someone moved her just as unobtrusively to the floor.

A manager arrived. The curious crowded into the room, craning their necks for a better view.

My kid and her two friends had been holding a birthday dinner of their own in another room of the restaurant. They met up with Rex and me as we headed for the exit.

"I wish we'd been in that room," my sensitive child exclaimed. "Nothing exciting happened in our room."

Creative Ants

As life chugs along, I'm more and more inclined to look at the human race as nothing more than very creative ants.

Life is strange. Religion is bizarre. The more I see of us, the less I understand us. We accuse each other of trying to make the world over in our own images, but really, isn't the human race as a whole trying to do that? We are right, our creations (cars, buildings, cities, farms) are right, everything else has to give in to us.

I personally think we're much too big for our britches and frankly, it would be a good thing if someone just stepped on us!

Athena

I was at the computer today when Rex came in the room, bent down to the guinea pigs' cage, and said, "One of these guinea pigs appears to be dead."

Indeed, one of them was dead. It was Athena, the golden guinea pig with a cowlick on her forehead. The one that had been known to bite people on occasion.

Maybe it was because I've only sporadically been taking my little blue "happy pills" lately, but I have to admit, I lost it on my drive into work. What bothers me about little Athena's death is that she spent just about her whole life in a cage. And, truth be told, not a very frequently cleaned cage.

I once had a co-worker who told me he didn't keep animals because he didn't believe in it. (Shortly after that, he sold everything he owned and set out to bike across America. He died not a month later crossing a four-lane highway in Ohio.) Anyway, I didn't understand his philosophy at the time, mainly because I'd never really pondered the ethics of animal-keeping.

Recently, though, being the keeper of so many animals, it has occurred to me that each of these beings has just one life, and if I'm in charge of it, I need to "do right" by them. It's a rich source of guilt, and I guess Athena's death struck a mother lode.

The remaining guinea pig, Jewel, will probably benefit from her pal's passing. I'm envisioning an outdoor pen with lots of toys and other guinea pigs, kind of a Maine version of a prairie dog town.

Either that, or I'll just try taking those pills on a more regular basis, and screw the guilt.

Charging for Butter

When you eat a bagel, do you eat it plain – no butter, no cream cheese, no nothing?

Wouldn't that be like eating a potato plain? Who does that?

So I was flabbergasted when given the total – $1.79 – for my bagel with butter at Dunkin' Donuts the other day.

"Shut UP!" I exclaimed.

Nowhere on the sign above the counter does it say, "bagel with butter," $1.79. It says, "bagel, $1.19," and "bagel with cream cheese, $2.19."

In my decades of life, I always thought the butter was just automatically included with the bagel. Butter goes with bagels like dressing goes with salad, like ketchup goes with french fries. It's inseparable. Nobody eats a bagel plain!

As soon as I arrived at my desk at work after this shocking experience at Dunkin' Donuts, I shot off an email to Dunkin' Donuts headquarters.

The next day, I got a call from the One City Center franchise owner, "Tiffany." She said that all Dunkin' Donutses charge extra for butter, and that if I hadn't paid extra all my life, then I had been chronically undercharged.

What the charge pays for is the plastic knife and the butter, she said. And the toaster energy, if the bagel is toasted.

I still couldn't believe that Dunkin' Donuts had been charging me for butter all my life and I never noticed it. I thought "Tiff" was wrong.

So on my way to work, I stopped at a different Dunkin' Donuts.

At the drive-up, I got the standard "How can I help you?"

I asked for a plain bagel, which at this Dunkin' Donuts was priced at $1.09, and got the standard, "Would you like that toasted?"

"Is it going to cost me?" I asked.

"No," the voice said.

"What if I want butter? Is that going to cost me?" I asked.

After a pause, the voice said, "Yes, that would be $1.92."

Wow! 83 cents for butter!

I drove off, bagel-less, and headed to the next Dunkin' Donuts, where the butter similarly beefed up the bagel price.

Well, I guess Tiffany wasn't just yanking my chain. But I wasn't done yet.

For comparison's sake, I made a special trip to the Tim Horton's near the Maine Mall. Here the base price for a bagel was 99 cents. To my delight, there was no extra charge for knife, butter or toasting.

Their coffee isn't as good, but it's worth the money saved on butter.

Dunkin' Donuts should be ashamed of itself.

Memorial Day

I woke up half an hour before the parade was to start here in little Limerick, too late to walk a horse up the hill.

So Rex, Kayti and I enjoyed the festivities from the sidelines.

What really made this Memorial Day memorable was the scene across the street from where we stood. As the preacher intoned the benediction, a woman hustled a boy (presumably her son) to the side of the road, facing us, and he threw up, not just once, but time after time after time. It was bright orange, too.

It was so gross. I almost gagged. Just when we'd think he couldn't possibly have anything more coming out, more came out.

Well.

We spent the rest of the day trying to expunge the image from our minds' eyes.

Have a nice day!