Witty & Wise Ties, Trivia & Lies
I’m no fool: Skitter’s devotion to me has more to do with her love for my Batman wood Bow Tie o’ the Day than anything to do with me personally. I don’t mind, though. A dog kiss is still a dog kiss, with all its salty stinky charm. Secret of Life #38: Never say “no” to a dog kiss. 🐶 💋
We use infrastructure like bridges and roads and water pipes daily, and we usually do it without giving these things a second thought. We just expect these things to work effectively and safely, whenever we need to use them. Of course, infrastructure needs continual planning and vigilant maintenance, which is what allows us to not have to think about it. We’re kind of spoiled like that, as we should be. If we approach a bridge while we are driving, we are generally safe to assume it’s not going to come crashing down if we drive across it. There are people whose job it is to look out for us when it comes to stuff we routinely use. If everybody does their job correctly, things go smoothly and we don’t even notice.
Likewise, there’s plenty of metaphorical infrastructure to plan and take care of as we go about our lives. We have to make plans for “in case” or “when”—as in, “in case one of us has to go to a care center,” or “when one of us dies.” Yes, we spent the afternoon meeting with an attorney to do our estate planning. It’s not a glamorous task, but it is a kind of infrastructure that needs to be set up to make sure your money and material things do what you need them to do, as well as what you want them to do. (We even signed up our dead bodies to go to the University of Utah for research.) I don’t want relatives fighting over who gets my ties and bow ties. And Suzanne doesn’t want anyone arguing over who gets her towering stacks o’ fabric. We certainly don’t want to leave all the decisions for Rowan to manage, so we’ll make the decisions and get them all in writing. If we’ve planned the documents correctly, when we die things will go so smoothly that nobody will even know we’re gone. 🤡 ⚰️ ⚰️
[This is another repeat about plumbing from July 2020. It’s mid-afternoon and I’m still tinkering with the troublesome garbage disposal.]
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 potty cup. I just had to fit this toilet 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 said 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 to him that 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 tblog so I can show off my neckwear and tell stories—well, the plumber was shell-shocked, to say the least. He stood all amazed. 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 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 city 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 occurred previously. I got his voicemail. I left a message: “Hey, Kelly. I know you’re busy, but Delta City called me and said I have a major outside leak at my place—possibly inside,too—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 now and have her unlock my doors. Feel free to go in and out as you need to. Go ahead and do whatever you think needs to be done.” I was only slightly worried on my drive from Ogden to Delta. I was confident the problem would be properly dealt with. When I finally pulled up to the Delta house that day, my yard was torn up and gutted where the pipes were. The plumbing crew was already hard at work fixing my water problem. The leaky water situation was under control.
Mom was at my waterlogged-grass house, too. She was sitting like usual—like a queen—on my front porch in her wild socks, supervising the plumbing crew’s work and promising them a batch of her homemade cookies for their help. I immediately noticed she also had her usual huge, fountain Pepsi-with-mostly-ice from Cardwell clutched in her arthritic right hand. Mom clasped her drink so tightly it looked like a prosthetic that would forever be attached to her real hand. And wouldn’t she love to have a Pepsi-with-mostly-ice permanently attached to her paw, if it could be made a reality! Mom is so cool. Cool learns its cool-osity from Mom. I love her, and I love my small town.
I have always been a fan of the audacious, the eloquent, the visionary—the extraordinary and unexpected stuff of the world. But I also have an abiding love of the routine, the ritual, and the everyday. Most of us build lives out of both what makes us comfortable and what challenges us—by what we understand and by what makes us wonder. Our tendency is to vividly remember—and to talk about—the surprises that we encounter, but be all ho-hum about the bulk of our everyday living. Last night as I got ready for bed, for some unexplicable reason, I reveled in the routine litany of bedtime tasks to do before turning off the light. I felt almost gleeful about going through the ritual formalities of preparing to simply go to sleep. Every bedtime to-do seemed almost magical. I was paying attention to the customary, and it felt anything but dull. The very sound of Suzanne brushing her teeth in the bathroom brought me an important peace. And as I pulled a clean t-shirt over my shoulders before I crawled into bed, I realized that putting on a fresh t-shirt is one of the most amazing everyday feelings a person can enjoy. It requires only the act of paying grateful attention to what you’re doing.
During the night, a bold rain began to fall. We were sleeping with the windows open, and I listened intently as the rain pelted the deck for twenty minutes, then abruptly ceased. I smelled the petrichor. I felt the change in humidity on my skin. I counted what seemed like one solitary minutes-long flash of lightning. It was all normal, regular summer stuff I could have just as easily slept through. Most of the time, I do. But I woke up for it and paid attention to it. And that has made all the difference. I can already tell that it has made all the difference in this regular day I am just now beginning. A regular day I am spending in yet another clean t-shirt, with yet another magnetized t-shirt Bow Tie o’ the Day. How fabulous is this routine?!
Sometimes a stray Primary song wafts its way through my brain, and I mine its lyrics to find stalwart shards of wisdom. Do not be dissuaded from paying keen attention, by the fact that a message hails from a mere children’s song: simplicity can often rule the day. In any situation, there is always time and space to heed this tiny nugget with huge implications. I hope you can memorize it for future use. Here it is:
“Give”
—a profound quote from the little stream
I most assuredly cannot improve on that directive for us all, which comes straight from the water’s mouth. 🌊 (Pretend the emoji is a stream, not a tsunami.)
FYI If you don’t “get” this post, ask a Mormon.
Recently, Suzanne threatened to make me a new cape. She didn’t actually say she was going to sew one for me. She simply laid out the fabric and put the pattern on top of it. That was a week ago, and since then, Suzanne has not gone near the project. Now, the cape-in-process just lays there, all stretched out and staring at me—looking exactly the same as the day it was set out. I’m beginning to feel it’s mocking me. It seems to taunt me every time I walk past it. It just lays there, like a smooth trophy pelt from some fabric beast Suzanne slayed on a hunting trip to a fabric store—which is exactly what it is. Often, I hear it calling to me like a bratty child: “I’m not your cape yet! I’m not your cape yet! I’m still not your cape. Still not your cape.”
I have no clue why there seems to be a work stoppage with the cape. Maybe I’m in the doghouse and this is Suzanne’s way of punishing me for an indiscretion, but I don’t recall doing anything that would make her mad enough to leave me in cape limbo this way. Perhaps, after she so carefully laid out the cape caper, she suddenly got too busy with work and doesn’t have the time to create it right now.
I could make it simple: I could ask Suzanne what’s up with the unborn and overdue cape. But that would be too easy. There’s no fun in being direct about solving this mystery. I’d rather attempt to figure it out for myself. Trying to figure out what goes on in Suzanne’s mind is a challenging game, and I’m always much wiser after I come up with the answer on my own. The answer is usually surprising, so decoding her behavior is a fulfilling form of entertainment for me—like pondering a logic puzzle. I’ll keep you updated if I stumble upon the answer. If it turns out Suzanne really is just miffed at me for some reason, I can’t wait to decipher what offense I committed that warrants the seemingly permanent installation of the ever-mocking cape-to-be. Whatever it might be, I certainly don’t want to do it again. 😇
Here at TIE O’ THE DAY, thanks to recent SCOTUS decisions, we’ve been feeling like my gun has more Constitutional rights and protections than my body does. Nevertheless, I believe that a woman has the right to determine what her body will and will not do—especially when it comes to what happens inside her body. She is not an incubator. The ultimate choice in matters of potential childbearing should be made by the one person who will bear all the health risks, most of the practical responsibilities, and all of the physical, emotional, and moral consequences of her decision. A right is not a freebie. Every right we exercise comes at a huge cost. It seems to me that the one who will pay the price with their very body is the one who gets to decide what to do with it. I side with free agency and its complicated consequences.
Years ago, Suzanne handed me a copy of a meme she’d printed out. It said, “You can’t please everyone. You are not a taco.” I still have it somewhere in my piles of files. I like running onto it occasionally, because it’s a smart reminder. When I saw this t-shirt, it made me muse about the meme yet again. My own life’s experience has taught me, over and over again, that pretending to be what you are not might seem to work for a while. But it will inevitably end up hurting all who are involved when the truth finally seeps through the facade and shows itself. And—trust me on this—the truth will ALWAYS show itself in the end, despite any meticulous planning you might do. Remember: you are not a taco.
I don’t know why other people’s opinions of us often carry so much weight. Why do we so often feel the need to be what other people want us to be, instead of being content to be the mysterious and fabulous person we really are? It makes no bloody sense. I don’t know how it works with you, but I have found that I am the only one who has to live with me every minute of every day and night—which means I’m ultimately the main human whose opinion of me matters. Think about it: you are the main character in your autobiography. Your life is your story, and your story is about you. Your opinion of yourself as you live your unique life matters, so you probably ought to get comfortable with being the real you. Make your authentic self someone you can stand to live with. If you do that, you’ll likely find that you naturally make the people who matter to you oh-so very, very happy—without even trying. 😃 🌮
Here’s my excuse for not writing an afternoon post to accompany this flighty Tie o’ the Day: I had snapped the photo and was composing a lovely post for it when Suzanne came home from work early to begin her Spring break. I had to close up the laptop and pay attention to her immediately, so she knows she’s home and free to relax. Believe it, or not. But it’s the dog’s honest truth. 🐕 📄 💻
When one has a virtual visit with one’s long-time pain doctor, and one is trying to look upbeat when one is—in all actuality—in a great deal of pain and, therefore, in a grumpy mood, but one really likes one’s pain doc and doesn’t want to make one’s pain doc feel like a complete failure in her work with one, and so one wants to disguise to said pain doctor the routinely excruciating pain one will most likely always feel in one’s pancreas and back, one wears a bright, sequin-covered Bow Tie o’ the Day and a bacon-and-eggs Shirt o’ the Day in front of the laptop camera. With that kind of bow tie, no one in the virtual appointment can be sad. 🤡 At least, that’s what I would do: I would pretend. 😑