Generally Speaking

People say things without thinking. To be sure, this generalization applies to me, too. I once had a teacher who enjoyed saying, “All generalizations are false, including this one.” Still, as a whole, we say things that we often realize in retrospect, were foolish.

Of course you and I experience this less often than some people. You probably think I’m headed for the politicians, don’t you? Surprisingly, I’m not. Fish in a barrel, and all that. No, I’m getting at the inane things announcers say in commercials. Specifically I am addressing one in particular.

I’ve been hearing a mattress company ad on television lately that raises my blood pressure and sets my teeth on edge. Oh sure, lots of ads do that, and I couldn’t tell you the name of this advertiser even if I thought it advisable. There are dozens of them, and they all sound alike. Mattress Giant, Mattress Firm, Mattress Source, Mattress Direct, Mattresses R Us… I think you could play MadLibs and insert any noun after the word ‘mattress’, and you’d find there’s a company somewhere operating under that name. Like Mattress Canary. I’m just saying.

Here’s the irksome line: Nothing is better than a good night’s sleep.

Yeah, it sounds innocuous enough. We all like to sleep soundly. Heck, I’ve gotten to the point where I could safely say I cherish a good night’s sleep. It makes the world a better place in which to wake up. A good night’s sleep refreshes and rejuvenates us. On nights when we’re disturbed by storms, nightmares, sickness, phone calls or whatever, we really feel reduced the next morning. It’s harder to get going, harder to focus at work (or play) and our senses generally feel dulled at whatever we attempt.

But ‘nothing’ is better than a good night’s sleep? Really? Not a cure for cancer? Not selling the house you’ve already moved out of? Not finding the siblings from whom you were separated as children? Not getting pregnant when you thought you couldn’t? Not holding your newborn child/grandchild/niece/nephew/neighbor? Not winning the $389 jillion Power Ball jackpot? Not reading a headline about WORLD PEACE? –universal disarmament, clean water for everyone, renewable energy breakthroughs, a return to sanity and civil discourse? Really?

I know, I’m getting carried away, and it’s just a mattress commercial, but I can’t get past the unconditional, unqualified, categorical, absolute and unrestricted notion that NOTHING is better than a good night’s sleep. It sounds like one of those things you wish you’d never said.

A good rant, like a picture, may be worth a thousand words, but a generalization, like Yogi Berra’s famous observation about the verbal agreement, isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. And you can take that to the bank.

Just Enough of a Good Thing

We just returned from a week on the sunny gulf coast of Florida. And you know that when I say ‘we’ I mean my husband, the Center of the Universe (CoTU) and I. In contrast to previous Florida visits, this time the weather was perfect. Every day was warm and sunny. Even the days that began as cloudy and overcast became bright and beautiful by late morning.

Our trip was planned as a visit with our dear friends, snowbirds who we’ll call Fred and Nadine. Because those are their names. Kidding—they are not, and I’d like to protect them from any fame that might come their way as a result of this column. Also, I would not like for them to sue me for invasion of privacy, or for anything else for that matter. Moving on…

We walked on the beaches, we sought out several art fairs, we poked around numerous antique shops and we drank more than a little wine. Life was beautiful. There was much relaxing, reading, dining in, dining out, and the ever-popular collecting of sea shells. By the seashore. I’m done.

So this was a lovely vacation for us—we were able to spend lots of time with each other, and with Fred and Nadine, who are always gracious and generous hosts. They encourage us, dare I say they try to entice us to buy a condo nearby and join them there.

I see the appeal of wintering (that is now a verb, I believe) in the warm and sun-kissed clime that is Florida. I love the idea of spending a week wherein the biggest decision you make is “Soup or salad?” I just can’t see myself spending months at a time there. Too much happiness.

No that’s not it. Here’s the real reason: I’d miss my stuff. I don’t mean shoe collection, kitchenware or tchochkes. I mean the stuff I work on every day, like my sewing machine, my fabric stash, my yarn and my knitting books. I missed the computer and the internet a lot, and while it’s true that we could take a computer down there with us, I’d have to share it with CoTU, and ‘share’ is not a word that comes to mind when we speak of CoTU. He got his name for good reason. His “It’s All About Me” coffee mug suits him to perfection.

So I can relax with reckless abandon for a week, and I’d be willing to try two, but I’m pretty sure that into my third week on Fantasy Island I’d start to go a little crazy. Without the hobbies of golfing and boating that so many people enjoy in Florida, I think I’d be rather a lost soul. There are only so many online Scrabble games I can play at one time, and even those look a little fuzzy after a couple of glasses of Riesling.

The bottom line is that we will remain in St. Louis, probably forever. Winter is winter, summer is summer, even when they both occur in the same week. This is home, and we claim it. Besides, even if we decided to move tomorrow, it would still take us five years to clean out the basement. We have a lot of stuff, and just enough happiness.

Is My Phone Smarter Than I Am?

For the past four years I have said that I did not want a Smartphone. I said it so often that I began saying that I didn’t want a phone that was smarter than I am.

All four of our kids and their spouses have Smartphones. I maintained that I was perfectly happy with a compact device that enabled me to make contact while away from home. I rarely used it for conversation, per se. I wanted the reassurance that in an emergency (mine) I could call for help, or in an emergency (anyone else’s), they could reach me.

Sure, we’d had numerous dinners out with one of the kids when a question came up that one of the wisenheimers answered with the help of the internet, simply by picking up his or her cell phone and Googleing for help. Still, I wasn’t prone to joining that club.

Then suddenly, inexplicably, a few months ago I decided that I had been kidding myself. I, too, wanted to be able to connect via satellite to the worldwide web from the chair crammed into a meeting room, from the noisy seat in the airport waiting area, from the passenger seat of a car. I, too, wanted to be able to look up the name of that guy—you know, the one in the movie with what’s her name—oh yeah, Glenn Close, where they—well, not that it matters, I just WANTED to. I wanted to be able to put my hands on that knowledge wherever and whenever the urge struck, because, let’s face it, at my age when I plan to look something up when I get home, odds are that it will never again cross my medulla oblongata. And if you don’t know what that is, you can look it up on your Smartphone.

Now if you know me at all, you know that in my General Rules of Life book, the top five includes the following: Don’t ask for anything. Part and parcel of this is never to say “I want ______.”  Somehow I have adopted the worldview that the less you ask for in life, the greater your worth as a person. Now, I know that this does not make sense. I would spend serious time counseling anyone I know to abandon such a tenet. Yet I can’t seem to shake it as a personal credo. Until now.

My former inclination to eschew any requests for anything of a material nature went right out the window. I’m sixty-two goddamn years old, and I don’t think I have the right to ask for (by which I mean buy myself) a particular cell phone? That’s nuts, and I know it. So I broke my rule and I asked.

Then I researched all the data plans, the activation fees, the software and the hardware and I did the hokey-pokey till all the numbers swirled in front of my face and made me slightly nauseous. But I pulled up my socks and went to the kiosk of the best deal and got Smartphones for the Center of the Universe and me.

Now I can find any quilt shop in the United States because I have an app for that. I can read the New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today in the palm of my hand, because I have an app for that. I can scan the bar code of any item in any store and comparison shop it across the universe because (wait for it…) I have an app for that.

But more importantly, I can play Scrabble with my son, Wordfeud with my stepson, and soon Scrabbleicious (I think) with my son-in-law. And I can do all of these 24/7. This makes me very happy. It’s a cool way of being connected around the clock.

Now I don’t mind that my phone is smarter than I am. I just need an app for my addiction to it.

Running the Race

I’m running a marathon. Don’t faint—it’s not the 10K for cancer research. It’s not the 5K for heart disease.  It’s the never-ending race against the relentless dust and grime in my house.

How does it accumulate so fast? It seems as if by the time I’ve finished dusting and vacuuming I could write my name in the new deposits on the coffee table. Is that fair? Shouldn’t I at least get one day’s grace?

I feel so good when I’ve cleaned the whole house that you would think I’d be looking forward to the next time I attack it. You would be wrong. I still curl my upper lip and flare my nostrils at the thought of Windex, Formula 409 and Lysol. At the end of a day of cleaning, I’m sure I need a good detox from inhaling all those fumes.

I guess I like it being done, not so much the act of doing it. I can think of a thousand things I would rather be doing, and so can you. You know how it is: your baseboards need dusting, your windows need washing, your shower has soap scum and if only modern technology hadn’t eradicated waxy yellow buildup, you’d be battling that, too. There are not enough hours in the day, and this is now that I’m retired from ‘work’. And did you notice how I shifted this from my problem to yours? You’re in this, too.

How did this happen? When I worked full-time I was gone fifty to fifty-five hours a week, including the commute. I always fantasized that when I retired my house would be neat as a pin and clean as a whistle. (Why pins and whistles constitute the gold standard for household presentation I cannot explain, but they do.) I imagined that my closets would all be color-coded, hangers lining up like little soldiers—all their heads and shoulders at the same precise angle. My shoes and purses would look like the gorgeous photos in splashy magazine layouts, which are clearly shot just to make us all feel inferior.

I fantasized that my kitchen drawers would all be so neat and tidy that Martha Stewart could drop in at any time and pluck a spatula of just the right size and shape from the second drawer. If Oprah herself had rung the doorbell, I could welcome her in without a mad dash through the house to pick up a stray newspaper or coffee mug. And if Dr. Oz ever dropped by to inspect my medicine chest, I’d be so proud when he opened the door to see my neatly organized and categorized supply of pharmaceuticals, not a single one out-of-date.

Need I tell you that none of this has come to pass?

My closets still look like I frantically ransack them for the perfect item on a twice-daily basis. The house is tidy, but my floors have a protective coating of dust that the Guinness people are coming to measure on Friday. The outsides of my windows make me cringe when the sun shines. I’m a failure.

One of these days I’ll wake up with an uncontrollable urge to clean everything in the house. That will be the day I sign up for the marathon at the Senior Olympics. I’ll just have to find out whether Windex would disqualify me under the doping rules.

That's How We Roll!

What’s the best thing about spending eleven nights in a hotel?

Fresh and ironed sheets every day? No, but that’s certainly in my top five.

New towels hung for you every day? Not really, but still it’s way up there.

Not having to make your bed at all? Definitely a 'plus', but not huge in my book.

Here’s a clue: it relates to something you have to do at home, that your husband NEVER does, that has to be done every couple of days, and that can—at times—create an emergency.

Yes. Changing the toilet paper roll.

Husbands have been proven to be 96.3% incapable of achieving this seemingly simple task. (Some rare events –we’ll call them anecdotal evidence—have been cited elsewhere, but I remain dubious.)

At least when you’re in a hotel, they generally put a fresh roll of toilet paper out each day, and you don’t have to run out, don’t have to seek a replacement roll, and don’t have to make the swap yourself.

I know, I know, this is a tiny task that takes so little time or effort—why do I let it bug me? I think every one of us has a particular chore that simply irks us, whether it makes sense or not.

In part, it’s this: I don’t mind changing the roll; I mind being the only one who changes the roll. Especially since I’m not the only one who’s using the stuff.

So what happened on this particular trip? Don’t ask. Okay—actually, if you don’t ask, there’s no point in this blog post at all, is there? Well, here are a few documented photographs of my experience…

Every time I went into a bathroom, anywhere, it seemed, the roll was empty when I got there. There was always access to a replacement roll, in contrast to the times when you go into a public restroom stall, only to realize just when you need it most, that there is no paper to be found. Those are the times I am grateful that I (nearly) always have Kleenex in my purse or pocket.

Even at my daughter’s house, I went into the hall bathroom on my first day there and found this:

No big deal, of course, but it became funny very quickly. Mostly because if you don’t view it as funny, you will begin to tear your hair out by the fistful. So I took a picture. (My cell phone was in my pocket. –as in, is that a cell phone in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?)

And the problem snowballed. Every time I entered a bathroom, I just expected to see an empty roll where toilet paper should have been… And I was not disappointed. Hilarity ensued.

I somehow lack the joy that my husband and so many others share, of never having to worry about toilet paper. Conversely, I do have the lovely gift of parking karma. I tend to find the first spot in the first row by the door of wherever I’m going. It also works if I’m a passenger in someone else’s car. Certainly there are exceptions, but by and large I get the best parking spaces on a regular basis.

Would I trade parking karma for t.p. roll karma? Hmmm… I suppose not. So I guess I should keep mum about this particular complaint and learn to live with it.

And in case you’re wondering how I know about the 96.3% of toilet paper rolls changed by women, I submit the following evidence.

Some time ago, I discussed this irksome task with my husband, the Center of the Universe (CoTU.) He innocently professed that it was his belief that he changes the roll with great frequency, and never shirks from his responsibility in this regard. I raised my eyebrows and nodded my head and quietly went about the business of saving the empty rolls instead of discarding them.

first box...

Here are the rolls I replaced.

First pile...

Second pile...

second box

third box

Here are CoTu’s. 

Pathetic, isn't it?

Case closed. By the way, it was really 99.7%, but I scaled it back out of charity. Even though he only changed these because I was out of town.

And as for the best thing about staying eleven nights in a hotel? Trick question. The answer is coming home to sleep in your own bed.

Secrets of a Happy Marriage

I learned a great lesson on how to keep a marriage happy from the French master chef Jacques Pepin. He was on the radio on Thanksgiving Day (on NPR, of course—you know me!) talking about cooking for the holiday with Lynne Rosetto Kasper of The Splendid Table. She does a turkey day program every year called Turkey Confidential. Listeners can call in and ask all manner of questions regarding the preparation, cooking and serving of virtually anything you can imagine. It’s quite informative, and lots of fun to listen to if you happen to be alone in the kitchen on that day!

Lynne Rosetto Kasper

 

One of her guests was the aforementioned Jacques Pepin. He’s very amusing and entertaining, and being a Frenchman of the old school, I must say that he is also charming. In the midst of all the discussion of how to choose your ingredients, how to clean, slice, and dice them, how to safely cook them and how to beautifully serve them, Monsieur Pepin slipped in the most valuable nugget of info of the decade. I will share it with you. Perhaps many, many marriages and other relationships can be saved.

Jacques Pepin

Jacques Pepin noted almost offhandedly that there was a point on which he and his wife disagreed. They therefore did what she wanted, as their plan is that when they differ, they do what she wants. At the same time, when they agree on things, they do what he wants. This, he avers, is completely fair. I agree. It just ain’t never gonna happen in this marriage. You recall that I am married to the Center of the Universe, so we handle things differently.

In our marriage, CoTU handles all the small decisions, and I handle all the big decisions. We’re just so lucky that in all these years we’ve never had to make a big decision.

Hair and There

I have no idea why I spend so much time and energy ironing the backs of my pants. Let’s face it, by the time I drive anywhere, they’re so wrinkled, I might as well have spent that time drinking. Unless I’m dressing to have people over at my own house, I hereby vow to stop wasting time ironing the backs of my pants. Until the guilt gets me. It got me. I’ll iron ‘em, I promise.

But it’s a lot like combing the back of my hair, or more specifically, the hair on the back of my head. I twirl my round brush with one hand, wave the hair dryer over it with the other hand, and then I check it in the hand mirror, to make sure I don’t look like a wacko. Well, at least not like a wacko who doesn’t know enough to fix the back of her hair. Then I get in the car to go where I’m going, and the headrest makes the back of my hair look like Woody Allen. From the front. Seriously, it ends up looking like a matted and misshapen stuffed animal is perched on the back of my head. It’s gross.

This brings me to a question that’s been bothering me for years. Now I’ll bring it up here and it can bother you, too. Or perhaps you’ll have an answer for me, and I can start sleeping through the night.

We –that is my husband, the Center of the Universe (CoTU) and I --will go out on a Saturday night with friends. In preparation, we shower, shampoo, rinse and repeat. I fix my hair, he shaves, we dress, I put on makeup, not necessarily in that order. But close. I frequently iron my pants, his pants, and God knows whatever else happens to need ironing.

I’m pretty sure the other couple we’re going out with goes through the same rigmarole. Except for one thing. At least half the time, we see other adult men in a restaurant or at the theatre who, while nicely dressed, and driving nice cars, don’t seem to own a comb or a hairbrush. Or if they do, they don’t know what it’s supposed to be used for.

Now I understand that men of a certain age (though I’m uncertain as to what the ‘certain’ actually means here) are no longer trying to attract a mate, having already accomplished that feat. Same thing can be said for women. But I never see women who go out (except on the way home from the gym) without at least trying to make their hair look decent. Women may not always curl, straighten, flat iron, or spray their hair, but I’ve yet to see a woman on a Saturday night at a restaurant who hadn’t at least COMBED her hair. Men? –not so much. I’ve seen hair that looked as if it hadn’t even been combed when the barber cut it. It’s scary.

Again, I can even comprehend that it slips a guy’s mind, and he’s more interested in who won the Big 12 game that afternoon, and what dinner’s going to cost him. The real mystery is how his wife doesn’t pleasantly suggest that he comb his hair before they leave home. You know, a simple, “Mortimer, your hair looked so nice when you combed it last month. Would you like to try that again tonight?” Unless his name isn’t Mortimer, and then it just wouldn’t make any sense at all.

Maybe she was busy ironing her pants.