Peggy’s Prompt—husks—11/29/2011

Sometimes I feel like my husk, my body, is getting ready to shed, leaving only “me”—my core, my soul, my essence—behind. And where will I be then? Or maybe the question should be, what happens to the core “me”? Some would say heaven or hell. Others would say the essence returns to the universe in some other form. Others say that “I” will be born again, perhaps as some lower being, perhaps as a more enlightened being. Some might believe that, after death on this planet, the soul returns to somewhere in space where it originated. All those ideas are attractive to me in some ways, but not completely satisfactory. I have a very hard time “believing” in anything that takes place after I’m gone from this earth. Even though I take on faith that electricity makes the light bulb glow, and I can’t see electricity. But then, almost everyone agrees (has been taught) about electricity. But not everyone agrees about what happens after the body, the husk, has been shucked.

My body, the body I’ve never been all that fond of, has proved to be much more resilient than I every imagined it could be. It has survived, although with considerable wear and tear, numerous and considerable assaults—from chemotherapy and radiation and immune disease and countless episodic drugs for infections and “conditions” like gastrointestinal upsets of various kinds. I should be more appreciative of this body, this husk that protects the real me, as best it can. There’s only so much an old husk (I am 70, after all) can do to beat off the many threats to its integrity. There comes a time when rejuvenation, or return to the original state, is no longer possible. That’s where my body is now. And I find myself (the real me) frustrated with this. I miss the good old days when I could come down with something and then get over it. There’s no getting over it anymore. As one of my friends says, now it’s just all patch, patch, patch. Making do with the “new normal”, which changes frequently as my body deals, successfully or not so much, with new challenges—new drugs, new problems in the body, new attitudes in the “real me.”

Lately, I’ve noticed that the general culture has picked up on the insight that positivity is a good thing. And that “being present” can relieve stress. So we have lots of platitudes posted on websites and sent in emails and embroidered on pillows and printed on greeting cards, and in fact, just about everywhere. Be here now. Smile, God loves you. Love is the answer. But I’m still stuck on shit happens! And that’s how I view the wearing down of my body, my husk. It’s just one of those things. Shit happens. And as to what will happen to me, my core, my essence when my body, my husk fails totally, well, it’s always good to have a little mystery in your life.

.THE HOUSE I GREW UP IN SMELLED LIKE...

01/29/09……..THE HOUSE I GREW UP IN SMELLED LIKE


fried fish most of the time, although occasionally it smelled like whatever Mama was cooking in her pressure cooker or in her version of a slow cooker—a big heavy oval metal pot with an extra heavy lid. That would be “roast beef”, or really chuck roast, or a picnic ham, whatever that is, or a whole stewed chicken. Those were our Sunday staples. The rest of the week it was fish, fish, fish. Not that I minded. Luckily for food-picky me, I loved fish. Although sometimes in the summer when the river and ocean water got warm and my commercial fisherman father’s catches were small and didn’t pay well, we’d have fish all seven days of the week. During those times my mother would try to vary the lunch menus (fish was for supper) with different kinds of “luncheon meat”—mostly boiled ham—they actually called it boiled ham on the label—or bologna, or something awful that my mother liked called liver cheese. All served on fresh, locally baked white bread, of course, slathered with lots of salad dressing—not plain mayonnaise—always salad dressing.

But fried fish were the mainstay of our diet. Daddy would bring home raw fish that he had scaled and filleted at the dock, all wrapped in old newspaper (waste not, want not), and leave the package in the sink. Then when Mama had time, she’d take the fillets out of the newspaper wrapping, rinse them off really well under the tap, let them drain a bit and then put meal-size portions in plastic bread wrappers (waste not, want not again) to place in the freezer or the meat tray at the top of the fridge. I had no clue at the time of how well we were eating, both in terms of nutrition (if you ignore the fried part) and cost. All I knew was that winter or spring, fall or summer, if you walked through the front door of our house, you were going to smell fried fish.



Addendum:

And Mama fried the fish in a little tiny kitchen on a tiny little stove in a big black iron frying pan. (Mama called it a frying pan, not a skillet.) And the stove was on a wall away from the two windows in the kitchen and there was no vent fan (I was so surprised when I went to college and lived in the Scholarship House to find the stoves had vent fans above) so naturally the fumes and aromas of whatever was cooking would hover in the tiny kitchen and then overflow to the rest of the house.
Some people look down their noses at houses that carry the aroma of cooking food, but I always thought our house smelled delicious!

Peggy’s prompt—091010—whiskers

Whiskers on a man’s face is one of my earliest memories. My Pa, my Daddy’s father, would sit on an ottoman beside my grandmother’s chair, and hold me on his knee. And every so often, he’d gently rub his face against mine, and I would feel the raspy growth he’d acquired since morning. He never wore a beard, nor did my dad; I guess it was too hot in south Florida to wear a beard, but as commercial fishermen it must have seemed a real waste of time to shave every day. Anyhow, Pa would wiggle his cheek against mine, and I would say oooh, Pa, you’ve got wisters. That wasn’t the only word I mis-pronounced early on. I also remember saying chembley, for chimney. But back to whiskers. As a child, I assumed that every man shaved and thus had whiskers at the end of the day. Although there was a photograph of my grandmother’s Pa and Ma at the head of my Pa’s bed and he had a long beard down the front of his suit, I never gave a thought to the fact that present day men could also have long beards, if they just didn’t shave every day.

Shaving whiskers seems to be one of those things that children observe with great interest when they see their Daddys doing it. One of Jonathan’s first “accidents” was when he was between one and two, and he tried to shave his cheek with his Dad’s razor, leaving two parallel bleeding lines on his smooth little face. On the other hand, he never seemed to notice that I shaved my legs, much the same way his Dad shaved his face. Once when somehow the discussion involved the shaving of legs by girls, he said But you don’t shave your legs, Mom. And I said Yes, I do. No you don’t he said, I’ve never seen you do it. Another example of how children are the center of their universe. Anything I haven’t seen doesn’t exist. At least to Jonathan.
But back to whiskers. My Dad also enjoyed rubbing his stubbly face against mine and my sister Mary’s. He would always chuckle when he did it, and I would always squirm away, complaining that it hurt. It was his awkward way of showing affection to his girls, I guess, never mind that we didn’t like it.

Larry had whiskers--curly,  and if he didn’t shave regularly, the growing hairs would curl and grow back into his neck, whereupon I would be called on to come with tweezers and pull the hair out by the roots. That must have hurt, but perhaps the irritating and often infected re-grown hairs were more painful. The things women don’t know about men.

Whiskers. Whiskey. Any connection? I just noticed the similarities. Did men use to put whiskey on their whiskers? Maybe as a disinfectant? That bears looking into.

So much for Whiskers today, Friday Sept 10th. Tomorrow is the 9th anniversary of Sept 11th, and in addition to all the fuss about a possible Muslim center two blocks from Ground Zero, we also have the attention-seeking clown pastor in Gainesville—it would have to be in Florida—threatening to burn Querans on the 11th. What a waste of emotion, air time, ink, and breath that all is. Neither story is worth the fuss, but such is the time we live in, where Muslims are now our current Boogeyman, and we must fear and hate them. So say the fearful and hateful ones. It just makes me tired and so discouraged about the human race. And a few in my own family are part of the furor. What is their problem? Or how did I not get the gene for isolationism, racism, fear of the unknown? It’s a mystery, not a puzzle. Puzzles can be solved. I’m afraid this quirk of human nature is not something to be solved by chemists.

Off I go to the cardiology clinic—my every-three-months visit. I’ve gotten pretty blasé about these echocardiograms, as they’ve always been “normal” and so I’ve been able to stay on the Herceptin, but complacency is dangerous sometimes. Let’s assume this will not be the day for surprises.

Peggy’s Prompt—sharp as…..110311

Sharp as….a tack, a marble, not the sharpest pencil in the pencil box, sharp as a knife, a razor, an ax, this reminds me of those internet thingys that go around purporting to be things kids say—as in, sharp as a sharp marble---well, maybe the things the kids says really ARE funnier. Sharp is one of those words that the more I type it and really look at it, the less it seems like a real word. Sharp---gets me thinking like I did when I was a kid about how words got invented. So what relation, if any, does the word “sharp” have to its meaning as something that’s not dull.

Now that I think about it, almost all words are “meaningless” in the sense of conveying something of their meaning in their sound or their spelling. But, then again, some words, like “splat”---there’s a good word that sounds like what it is. And “ethereal” and “evil”, especially if pronounced in a long drawn-out manner. And “cool”, as in not too cold. Likewise “sweaty” and “luscious” and “creamy.”

And I love those “z” words—jazz and razamatazz and paparazzi, and zephyr and zipper and fizz and dizzy and fuzzy and tizzy and zenith and zeppelin and buzz and fizzle.

Sizzle has the connotation of “hot” as in steaks on the grill, or dancers in a sexy number, or frying eggs on the sidewalk during a hot spell. It’s not the kind of word you would use loosely. Not like “nice” or “real nice” or “sorta nice.” No, if you say that woman sizzles, you know exactly what you have in mind, and so does the woman. On the other hand, if you say the water in the tap fizzled out, you know it didn’t quit abruptly, it dribbled its way to a halt. And that’s all I have to say about zee words.