Giving Mom a hug has been on my mind all day, so slides of her are what y’all get here. I know that if you’ve met Mom, you adore her, so that works out well for all of us.
In the first picture, my brother Ron shows up in his Bow Tie o’ the Day again. It’s a dapper outfit. I think the baby Mom’s holding in one of the photos is my brother, Rob. The picture of Mom eating on the porch in her slippers is a gem, but my personal fave photo here is of Mom fishing in her curlers. That’s one thing I’ve never done in my life. I must put it on my Bucket List. Note to self: Buy curlers and fishing pole.
This is one of my favorite photos of my mother. She looks so pretty, despite clearly being under the weather. She wrestled with her own depression demons, at a time when nobody talked about such things. Still, she never gave up on getting through the storm. Notice that she’s reading her scriptures.
TIE O’ THE DAY has only one thing to say this morning, and I’m yelling it in my head: IT HAS BEEN 122 DAYS SINCE I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO HUG MY MOM, AND I DON’T LIKE IT ONE BIT! I understand the reasons it has to be so, and I’m grateful Millard Care and Rehab keeps her so very safe and entertained. But understanding why something has to be the way it is does not make it any easier for me to not hug my mother for 122 days in a row. A hug over the phone is just not the real thing.
Remember two years ago when I was growing out my hairs because y’all voted for me to grow it out for a whole 12 months? And remember when my hairs got so hideous that I created Hairs Thursday here, so you could see whatever hairsdo I could muster at that point? Well, I am inadvertently at it again. My last hairscut was at the beginning of February, right before we visited Nashville and then went into pandemic mode. I’m like Mom: I am picky about who cuts my hairs. In Centerville, I refuse to have anyone but Miss Tiffany do the honors, and she has not yet been available to chop my locks and shave the right half of my noggin hairs.
It seemed like Hairs Thursday’s were a success in the TIE O’ THE DAY chuckle department, so I’m gonna do them again for however long it takes Miss Tiffany to fit me in for my shearing.
Suzanne offered to model Bow Tie o’ the Day and Face Mask o’ the Day, along with my new “business cards.” I thought adding jewelry to the staging of the pic would add an extra dollop of visual interest for y’all. You’re now looking for the business cards, I’m sure.
Believe it or not, when I’m out and about, strangers often ask me what’s up with my neckwear—especially the bow ties. The sillier the neckwear, the better. I’m happy to listen to their comments and answer their questions. I tell ’em about this tblog, and sometimes they scribble a note to themselves about the tblog name. So I thought, “Hey! I need business cards to hand out.” But doing things the usual way is not very stand out-y, so I cogitated about what kind of business card isn’t really a normal business card. Ta-da! The tie-o-the-day.com wrist bands. That’s more me-y. I have to wear a few at a time so I have ’em handy to give inquisitive folks I meet along the way in my day.
FYI Suzanne loves every one of her rings, whether they’re valuable or plastic. She has eclectic taste in jewelry, but sticks close to vintage pieces. She regularly wears a particular vintage ring set which is beyond meaningful to me for a host of reasons: she wears Mom’s wedding ring. How cool is that?!
I’m sharing this washed-out slide before it completely fades away. It’s a swell photo, but I had to make a DIY Bow Tie o’ the Day before it qualified to be in a post. My Sister Who Wishes To Remain Nameless (SWWTRN) probably also wishes to Remain Faceless, but too bad for her. The crowds demand to see my SWWTRN occasionally, especially when she shows up in a slide taken in 1967. We were both such flower children at the time! She is thirteen years older than I am, but we have always been tight. We “get” each other’s wit. And I have always been in awe of my SWWTRN’s resilience, relentlessness, and quiet generosity. Those are three of her best qualities, and striving to emulate her example of those characteristics is often what keeps me going.
FYI Yup, my SWWTRN is wearing a wiglet. Wiglets used to be the thing, back in the time of hippies. I guess. I dunno.
BTW We always snapped our photos across the alley in my grandparents’ yard—with their luscious foliage as background. No matter how hard Mom worked to bring forth a beautiful garden for us, our yard grew only a smattering of pitiful flowers and towering weeds.
The title of this post is the title and first line of a Mary Chapin Carpenter song which I often sing in my head when I’m in a certain kind of funk. This slide is one of my all-time fave pix of myself, for one simple reason: there is no trace of my bipolarity to be found on my mug. I was five. In so many photos of me as a kid, the bipolar darkness and worry that has always inhabited me had already begun to show itself on my face. This was clearly a day when I was blissfully unaware of the suffering ahead. This was a day when I didn’t even need all my teeth or a Bow Tie o’ the Day to be happy.
I apologize that this slide is of such poor quality. It is over 65 years old, so I’m lucky to even have it. The dapper little lad is my oldest brother, Ron. Look hard and you’ll see he’s sporting Bow Tie o’ the Day. It’s a family thing.
I owe Ron bigly for giving me some of my cool. Ron taught me how to play basketball. He taught me how to golf. Ron dressed with flair, fedoras and all. I learned some of my snarkiness from him too. Ron even baptized me.
And he gave me a name. Not a church blessing name. But a name that has stuck for more than five decades—at least, between us. He nicknamed me “Queenie.” I don’t know why he chose that name for me, but I suspect it was likely because—as the baby of the family—I was spoiled by my parents, my siblings, my grandparents, and so on. My wish was their command, I’m sure.
I was called Queenie so frequently while Ron still lived at home, that one day I came home from elementary school and found that Mom had renovated my bedroom door. This is a photo of the actual door, which still hangs in its original place at Mom’s old house in Delta. One day, the “Queenie’s Castle” door will live with me, where it belongs. It will perhaps become the door to The Tie Room, here in my current castle. That would be groovy, eh?
No matter where the castle door is, I will always be Ron’s Queenie. He’s my big brother. And he’s my friend.
I’m just sittin’ around on my expanding old lady butt, wearing fish tacos on my shirt. I’m also wearing a baseball Tie o’ the Day to remind me how much I didn’t miss Major League Baseball one iota this pandemic spring and summer. That’s sacrilegious—sacri-baseball-ious?—for me to say, based on my baseball-y relatives. If my nephew, Ron, were still playing pro baseball, I’d care about it. But he’s not, so I don’t. [You’ll notice that when they are on the field, baseball players have always pretty much been arranged at grand social distances from each other.]
Other than that, I’m just so happy I have this fascinatingly purty Face Mask o’ the Day. It’s so purty I’m wearing it even while I’m home all by myself this afternoon. I kinda want somebody to drop by in their boring mask for a visit-at-a-distance, just so they can be jealous of my piece of fabulous face-wear.
I’ve got a bigly jumbo butterfly Bow Tie o’ the Day for y’all this morning. I will definitely remove my Face Mask o’ the Day before drinking from my infamous commode cup. I just had to fit this potty cup in my selfie, since the post’s topic is plumbing.
In my last post, I mentioned the plumber had been to the house last week to conquer a few issues. But I forgot to tell you about two groovy things that happened during the plumber’s time here. At some point the plumber says to me, “My hearing aid battery is about out of juice, so if you need to get my attention, you’ll need to yell.” Of course, I am a wearer o’ hearing aids myself, so I yelled, “312 batteries?” And he said in astonishment, “Yes!” So I handed him a 312 hearing aid battery from my stash. Hearing accomplished. I did not present him with a bill for my services.
My favorite moment was when he came downstairs to do his paperwork—tablet work, really. He promptly said, “With all the ties and sewing machines I’m seeing around the house, I’m betting you make ties for a living.” I explained the sewing machines belonged to the crafty, sew-y Suzanne and had nothing whatsoever to do with me. And by the time I finished regaling the man with my quirky love for ties and bow ties, and how I have a blog so I can show off my neckwear and tell stories—well, the plumber was shell-shocked, to say the least. But I enjoyed it. I always love instances when I can go into my what-do-you-know-about-bow-ties-and-would-you-like-to -know-more pitch.
My all-time fave experience with a plumbing problem and the plumber who fixed it occurred a decade ago. We still lived in Ogden at the time, but also still had the Delta house. I was at my desk in Ogden when I got a call from someone at the Delta City office. Apparently, the outside water at my Delta house had sprung a very leaky leak underground, and my water meter was racking up the gallons at full speed—lickety-split enough that my water usage had caught the attention of an astute water-watcher in the office. I was 175 miles away from Delta at the time. What to do?I herded the dogs into my car, and off we hauled to Delta. In the car, I immediately called a Delta plumber, of course. I had his number already in my phone, because the Delta house was an old house, and plumbing problems had often occurred previously. I said, “Hey, Kelly. I know you’re busy, but Delta City called me and said I have a major leak, but I’m not in town right now. Could you please go over to my place and check it out ASAP? I’ll be there in 3 hours. Mom has a key to my house, so I’ll call her and have her unlock my door. Feel free to go in and out as you need to. Whatever you think needs to be done, go ahead and do it.” I wasn’t worried on my drive from Ogden to Delta. I was confident the problem would be properly dealt with.
When I pulled up to the Delta house, the plumbing crew was already working on fixing the problem. And Mom was sitting on my front porch supervising them. I love small towns.
