These Are the Days, My Friend

It all started out innocently enough.  There was to be a tea and bake sale in the afternoon so I got up early and spent my morning baking goodies.  While I'm not old old yet, neither am I young young. By the time my counters were laden with buns and cookies and tarts my feet were sore and my coffee didn't seem to be cutting it in the power juice department.  Never the less, I had baking to deliver, staying home was not an option.  Thank goodness.

I rummaged through my closet for something besides blue jeans to wear and headed off to town.  My day wasn't over yet.

Teas and bake sales are pretty standard affairs.  Of course there are tables of baking for sale, and raffle tickets as an extra fund raiser, plus another table offering pretty things perfect for Christmas gifts.  The rest of the space is filled with tables inviting people to sit and visit for a while.  Once my baking had been delivered and my tickets had been bought I checked out if they needed me in the kitchen.  I hadn't been asked to help out but I had come prepared to do so if they needed me.  All was calm.  I wandered back into the tea room.

There has been many a day in my life when things don't go well ... flat tires ... 'flu bugs ... burnt suppers ... broken dishes ... forgotten promises.  You know how those days go.  And I almost always stop and wonder, "What did my horoscope say about this day?"  Would I have been fore-warned about my bad luck?  Could I have avoided these troubles?  I'm not really the kind of person who keeps track of horoscopes, and I am the kind of person who tends to think we are better off not knowing what the future holds, but there's always that curiosity there.  "Could I have seen this bad luck coming?"

There is also the flip side of that coin.  There are also the times when a person could completely miss out on a wonderful experience because her feet were sore and she stayed home.  I wonder what my horoscope said about the day of the tea?  Would it have said "Get out there, girl!  This will be a wonderful day for you!"

I was all by myself so I looked for a table where all the chairs weren't already taken and asked if I could sit with those already there.  The table I chose welcomed me. 

We were hardly strangers - we were either schoolmates, or friends, or friends of siblings, or connected by marriage, or neighbours, or friends of neighbours ... or, as in many small town situations ... an intermingled web of all of these types of relationships.  Making conversation was easy.

We talked of many things ... recipes and planning Christmas dinners, which of the dainties on the plates were our favourites, how nice the weather was, health concerns within our families.  Pretty mundane stuff.

But somehow it escalated to hair dos - the good, the bad, and the ugly - and stories began to pour forth.  We all had a tale to tell, each one funnier than the one before.  There was much laughter.  We progressed to the subject of aging and we all offered examples of memory failure problems and how we tried to cope with such things.  I'm not sure when the husband stories came up but a few of these were shared too.  All women bond over husband stories.

 And then we were on to concerts we had attended; some of the performers were given glowing praise and some were so bad that the applause at the end had not been for the show, but that it was finally over.  More stories and more laughter.

The thing about small town life is that while we do know each other for our entire lifetimes, it's not like our relationships are static.  It's more like a case of life ping pong-ing us in and out of each other's orbit; going to school together unites us, marriage takes us different directions.  Having kids in the same classes brings us back together, having different jobs or hobbies creates another gap.  In the end we have a lot of shared history, but there's also lots we can learn from each other.

Time ticked by.  Other tables were emptying and refilling with fresh faces but ours remained the same.  The conversation bubbled on ... happy themes and more sombre moments.  I began to regret that this happy time would soon come to an end.  Who could have ever guessed that this afternoon would have held such fun?

Once or twice one or another of us would make some mention of it being time to go, but it seemed we were all reluctant to break the spell.  Somehow the topic of conversation moved on to our late '60s school years and the fashions of the day: the tie-dyed shirts, the modified bell-bottomed pants, the bleaching, the embroidery, the platform shoes, the velure fabric.  The words from Mary Hopkin's 1969 hit popped into my mind; it seemed the perfect thing to do - I sang the first line and these wonderful women, my old/new friends joined in ...

Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end! 
We'd sing and dance forever and a day. 
We'd live the life we'd choose, we'd fight and never lose. 
Those were the days, oh yes, those were the days!

The people at the other tables probably were wondering what we had in our coffee that they didn't have in theirs.  Maybe they had been all along.

The truth is whatever it was that settled over our table can't be bottled and it can't be forced.  Call it Karma or Fate or Voodoo, it felt like magic to me.  Long after we parted ways the memories continue to bubble to the surface and I find myself laughing again.  

And the idea strikes me to change the words to Mary's song to the present tense:  "These are the days, my friend!"  Days like that are pure gold.  I wonder what my horoscope had to say about it?

An Untraditional Christmas

Christmas is one of the most traditional times of the year.  The music we listen to, the foods we prepare, the way we decorate our houses, the stories we tell, the family customs we observe - almost everything we do at the end of December has some kind of ritual symbolism attached to it.  Whether you're in it for the Santa scene or the Nativity scene, chances are the way we celebrate the season tends to repeat itself year after year - not in a boring way, but in such a fashion that we feel content with the comforting traditions that trigger happy memories.  Humans seem to need to punctuate their lives with holidays and festivals, and Christmas is the biggest one of all.

Every family writes its own storybook on what they consider important: which treats they love most to eat, the kind of gifts they tend to give, where the celebration takes place, whether their trees are decorated with precious family heirloom ornaments or done in ultra-modern colour coordination with the wrapping paper theme of the year.  Some families keep it small and simple, some have the whole fam-damly for a huge gathering.  Some insist on turkey and plum pudding, some go all crazy by never having the same menu twice.  Some count Christmas's success by how many gifts are under the tree while others spend the day serving others at a soup kitchen.

This might sound like I'm going to get up on my soap box and give a morality lecture about the meaning of Christmas, but no, I'm just saying everyone does it differently.

I've been thinking about this tradition thing quite a bit as we approach the Christmas season this year because there are so many things that will be different in 2017 for us.  This is not the result of any momentous decision to purposely alter how we observe the holiday, it's just a myriad of small things that all seem to be happening the same year.

Like, for instance, I already have my outside Christmas tree decked out in lights.  I didn't plug it in until after Remembrance Day but it's been up and ready since October 25th.  That's right, the Procrastinator-in-Chief is way ahead of the game, not because of any grand scheme, but because it was a beautiful day and I was looking for something to do outside.  It looks magnificent in the hoar frost.

The inside tree will be breaking with tradition, as well, and given my plans for it I could probably go ahead and decorate it right away too.  For a normal Christmas we usually buy a natural tree (bent, crooked, or lop-sided if it's me that picks it out - another tradition) and I decorate it mid December because if I do it sooner it will be needle-less by the big day.  A running sub-plot to the tree decorating performance is that the peanut gallery always wonders why I haul a tree-sized house plant out of the living room to fit another tree in.  2017 is the year I take his advice and I will be decorating the umbrella plant - and with the money I save we will travel to Australia!  Well not quite, but they are related.  I'm keeping Christmas super simple this year because we will be in Australia by New Years Eve.

Another tradition being phased out is the family gift exchange.  We've done it forever - drawn names amongst three generations of family - more to keep us connected across the miles as the family grows than anything else.  This year, after much discussion, it was decided to let it go.  On the one hand relief - it means less gift buying to do.  On the other hand regret - sad to see it go.

In another twist of Fate, the hostess of the big feast this year is of the next generation.  Again with the two hands ... on the one hand, yay, this is a good thing to pass the torch.  On the other hand ... this means Christmas dinner is more than an hour away!  Up until now it was the young folks who had that drive to come to our house.  Talk about a double edged sword!  It's not like we can put some kind of distance caveat on who gets to cook the turkey, and the only daughter-in-law who would qualify might get mighty sick of the honour.

And because of where Christmas Eve supper is happening this year we will be doing a Christmas sleepover at the grandkid's house instead of the other way around.  The menu for the 25th also is likely to be not-a-turkey.  After all, why stop the "outside the box" thinking?  We are on a roll here.

Well, okay, some things show no sign of changing: I am only barely started with my gift shopping and can only think of more ideas for the people who I've already bought for - that's very normal.  And so is the desire to get on with the holiday baking ... so that we can eat it all ... so I can make some more ... so I can eat some more.  It's very traditional for me to struggle with this every year.

All this thinking about breaking with tradition has side-stepped into considering if this will have some effect on our future too.  I know, it's kind of superstitious, but what if keeping our rituals has an impact on what happens in our future?  Our usual tradition is to watch the fireworks over the Harbour Bridge in Sydney, Australia on our TV; this time we will be there.  In person. 

It makes me wonder, what does 2018 hold for us?

THAT Kind of Day

You know that the day ahead might be a bit challenging when first thing in the morning you can't figure out what's wrong with your hair until it occurs to you that maybe you forgot to rinse the conditioner out.  On the one hand the problem is easy to fix; on the other hand you can't help but wonder if you should go check what your horoscope says.  Maybe it would be a good idea to just crawl back into bed for the day.

There are two ways to look at it.  My sister and I have discussed the random brain farts we have experienced, and how at our age the possibility of dementia lurks at the edges of our consciousness.  Believe me, finding the milk in the cupboard and the salt shaker in the fridge is something you want to blame on an occasional bad day, not a developing pattern.

That morning it was back to the drawing board - rinse the slimy-ness out of my hair, dry it, and carry on with my day.  Although I wasn't too sure what I wanted to tackle: I had a couple jobs lined up but if my powers of concentration were such that I couldn't organize a shower, maybe I should keep it simple for the next 24 hours.

With my 'that kind of day' experience fresh in my mind I happened to be talking to a young mother later in the week.  If there was such a thing as a Bad Day Contest, she took the gold medal, especially if there was a sub category of 'The Grossest Day Ever'.

Her day had begun with a baby with a head cold.  You know what that means - an over abundance of colourful mucus, an aversion to Kleenex, little baby hands that rub gross yuckiness into their hair and all over their clothes, and great bubbly sneezes that make a person gag a little when they have to wipe up the mess.  That was yuck number one.

Which seemed kind of like a merry stroll in the park when confronted by yuck number two.

The dog barfed.  In the living room.  The only room in the house that has carpet.  Put the snotty baby down, toss the dog outside, and go to clean up the warm, gooey, smelly mess. 

Oh, wait!  Look at this!  Why is the  dog barfing?  Could it be a case of worms?  Gross!  Gross!  Gross!  Do not add to the puke.  Do not add to the puke.  Call husband to get dewormer before he comes home from work.

And not just for the dog.  Need to be proactive about a thing like this.  Yuck.  Yuck.  Yuck

After completing an intensive sterilization ritual on the carpet and putting the baby down for a nap she decided to tidy up in the kitchen.  In sorting through the fruit bowl she found an over ripe banana, not enough for banana bread so she went to throw it away only to discover it was REALLY over ripe and had liquefied in the bottom of the bowl.  If she hadn't just had to deal with the mess in the living room this would have been a minor thing. 

But, she had just dealt with hideous dog vomit; the slimy banana just about did her in.

At this point she probably would have run away from home but her vehicle was in the shop being fixed.

The Fates weren't through with her yet, though.  Toward the end of the afternoon she got an email from the playschool teacher reporting that a case of head lice had been discovered in the student population.  Of course!  This was only natural.  The perfect ending to her perfect day. 

Well, not quite.  Right after the dog got her worm pills she also got a flea bath.  You want proactive?  She'd show you proactive!

It left me wondering what her horoscope had said that morning.

As for myself and my day that started out wonky - I decided to tackle doing books in preparation for income tax.  I know a lot could have gone wrong with that picture but it didn't - I'm all caught up, it's a great feeling.  I also have very soft, shiny hair.

The other job I had on my slate for that day was to reinstall a duvet inside a freshly washed duvet cover.  I didn't push my luck that far.