Let Them Eat Cake

 

Twenty Five Years Ago

My back pain has caused me to try every non-narcotic pain pill there is. None of them have helped much. I've given away an expensive king sized bed and spent a thousand dollars on a new, more firm, queen size bed. That did not help. So I finally went to the doctor, and the doctor sent me to physical therapy. Twenty four years ago I was in the best shape of my life. I went to the gym three times a week and looked great. Then I met Mark, and he cooked the best food I have ever eaten. Slowly I gained weight and got lazy. After a few years I quit going to the gym. I got fat.

Tuesday was my first visit to the physical therapist. She asked a lot of questions and then she gave me five things to do, twice a day. She told me that I needed to strengthen my core. Seeing that my 'core' is made up of ninety percent gelatinous goo, I had to agree. I don't have a fat ass, I don't have a fat face. But oh that core, it is fat. All of the things that the therapist instructed me to do twice a day, were basically stretching moves. Fine, I thought, this is going to be easy, a piece of cake. And then I started craving cake. I didn't give in to my craving and dutifully did my stretches twice a day. Yesterday, Thursday, I returned for another session. This time Mariel the therapist got real. I thought it would just be more stretching, but no. I now have a bunch of physical crap she wants me to do every day. Exercise, I'm supposed to do exercise. Leg lifts, stomach crunch like things. Hurtful things that make my muscles sore. This had better be worth it. I expect to look like I did twenty five years ago when this is all over. Now, where's that cake?

Oscar Again

(A repeat of a post from eight years ago. I did not watch the Oscars last evening. I never did before I met Mark, so I'm kind of reverting back to my pre-Mark way of doing things. Anyway, this is about one of his parties and what went into it. As much as I hated doing all that work, I do kind of miss Mark's parties. Of course it is easy to miss them now. Until I read one of these old posts.)

  

Monday, February 25, 2013

 

Oscar Party

Seven o'clock on Sunday morning, and I am up and out the door walking the dogs. A normal Sunday morning and I have the street to myself. Also on a normal Sunday, by the time I get back with Sasha and Chandler, I would be able to eat a bowl of cereal and go back to bed. Not this time. I walk in the door and there on the kitchen counter is a bowl with butter and eggs in it. Mark is getting ready to bake for his party. From the bedroom I hear Mark call out to me, "Clear off the dining room table, start cleaning the house, scrub the kitchen floor, dust the ceiling, wash the cats, and clean up whatever is left to clean up and then clean that up." It's Mark's Oscar Party Day. Bigger for him than almost any holiday except Christmas, and that's getting close to being eclipsed.

After cleaning all morning and schlepping crap around the house for Mark, it's time to eat lunch. Mark has been in the kitchen all morning cooking, baking, and generally creating aromas that are making me salivate. But those things are not for me, not for my lunch. Instead Mark runs out to get us a bag of our traditional party day snack, McDonald's. Thirty minutes later I'm in the bathroom taking my traditional McDonald's, party day snack, dump. Nothing does it better than a Big Mac, not even Ex-Lax.

Now it's nearing Oscar time, and we expect guests to arrive at any time. First, however, I have to re-clean the kitchen. In the last eleven hours Mark has turned my clean kitchen into a mess. There is cake batter on the walls, cheese on the floor, chocolate smeared across the back of the stove, and something very gooey on the ceiling. I can't even begin to imagine what it is or how it got there.

It is now after midnight. Twelve hours cleaning, five hours of watching the Oscars, and I am dead on my feet. I am also bloated with food because Mark went crazy again and made three times more than he needed. But it's all okay, and that's because some of our guests brought enough vodka to last me until at least April. As for the Oscars, it was very entertaining and I think Jack Nicholson won something. I might be wrong about that, but I do remember seeing him at some point.

A Raw Deal

 

I had sushi for dinner last night. I and a few friends went over to our favorite sushi restaurant and ate dinner together. I ate raw eel. For sure, it was in a maki and combined with avocado, cucumber, and sweet soy sauce, but I was eating raw eel. That's not the only thing I've had at that restaurant. I have tried just about everything on that menu as long as it isn't too spicy. Yummy, raw fish.

Why is this so special? It isn't at this point in my life, but go back sixty five years and things were much different. I would only eat a short list of foods. My vegetable of choice was corn, which I know isn't a vegetable. However, the only other vegetables Mom would serve were canned, very mushy peas, and canned nasty flavored, green beans. Oh, and the corn? It could not be creamed corn. In fact if Mom put creamed corn on my plate and it touched any of my other food, I would not eat that food. To this day I hate creamed corn, the vomit of the garden. When it came to meat, I liked chicken. Fried chicken, but only and exclusively, the leg. Do not try to put one of those crazy breasts on my plate. I also liked meat loaf, hot dogs, and hamburgers. One other meat thing that I liked a lot, but everybody else hated, was liver. Either beef liver or chicken liver, I loved liver. Weird, isn't it. Mashed potatoes usually were on my approved list, unless Mom screwed them up by whipping them too long. That's when they got gooey. Or whipping them not long enough. That caused lumps and I hated lumps in my mashed potatoes. Other approved items, cranberry sauce, but only the piece sliced from the end that had the imprint of the can on it. Turkey stuffing on holidays, but not the turkey. And that's about it. I was a picky eater. Yet here I am many years later eating raw eel.

Back Again

 

So is this what being over seventy years old is all about? On Friday I pulled a muscle bending over to load the dishwasher. Searing pain in my lower back. Honestly, if it weren't for the fact that you shoot heroin directly into your vein with a syringe, I might be a junkie today. I hate needles. As it was, I took two Tylenol. They didn't help. So two hours later I took one of the pain pills that the dentist gave me after my root canal. It didn't work. Before bedtime I took the one pill left over from my visit to the back pain doctor thirteen months ago. Those pain pills didn't work then, and they didn't work on Friday. My final pill of the evening was one Benadryl. Not for pain relief, but because those usually knock me out for at least six to eight hours. So it's just another part on my body that has gone bad and probably won't ever return to what I think of as normal. It seems that after I turned sixty five, when something would go wrong, the doctor would just shrug his shoulders and say something like, "You're getting old. Get used to it." Sometimes I think that it would be so great if I could feel like I did when I was fifteen years old, just for one day. Then I remember. I had pimples, a bad haircut, I had to go to summer school, I had to share a bedroom with three brothers, I wasn't allowed to drive a car yet, and I couldn't buy alcohol. It had to be the dorkiest year of my life. Which reminds me, I haven't tried vodka yet. Good old vodka, it usually makes the pain go away. For awhile at least.

Lady in the Orange Vest

 

After three tries I finally was able to transfer title of our car from Mark to my name. On the first try I drove over to the DMV only to find that the Vehicle Services section was closed on Monday. The rest of the place was open, but not the section that handles title transfers. So I left and returned the next day. I had every form the web site said I would need, and more. I had Mark's will, power of attorney, forms downloaded from the Secretary of State's office. I even brought Mark's last driver's license. It was not enough. I left with more forms to fill out and get notarized clenched in my angry fist. I returned yesterday. This time absolutely sure I had all I needed. I got in line outside the door and waited. When the lady in the orange vest asked me what I was there for I showed her what I had and what I wanted to do.

"Sir, do you have the RU-DE-9 tax form?"

"I'm sure I do."

And I started rifling through the large pile of forms I had with me. The lady in the orange vest was impatient.

"Let me see those..."  She flipped through my papers, "Nope, you don't have it."

She handed me another form and sent me over to a table to fill it out. As I entered the data, it all seemed familiar. So I looked again in my large envelope full of documents.

"Ah ha!" I shouted, "Here it is!"

I walked back over to the lady in the orange vest and showed it to her.

"Okay, fine. This is good. Wait in line over there."

By this time the line had built up longer and I noticed other people being let right in.

"Um, excuse me, lady in an orange vest? Why are those people going ahead of the line?"

"They're seniors sir."

It was a backhanded statement. Yes, very nice that she didn't think I was over sixty five. Sad that I had to use the old age card to jump the line.

April 12, 1940. Eureka Springs, Arkansas

 A found photo

 

It was a beautiful day in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Anne was feeling the season and was in good spirits. She had checked into the Crescent Hotel next to the Hilltop Cottage Tearoom on Circle Drive. Anne had just arrived from Saint Louis and hoped things would be better now that she had left Harry. 'Certainly he'll never find me here', she thought. Harry was abusive and when he was drinking, which was most of the time, he would disappear for days. Usually to be found with another woman at the Tower Motor Court. So Anne left hoping to find Marge. She was sure that Harry knew nothing about her. She had met Marge on a women's Christian retreat the year before. They had bonded immediately as friends, and on one special night, shared a bed in a way that Anne had never done with Harry.

Anne called Marge from the hotel room.

"Hello."

"Marge, it's me, Anne. I'm in Eureka Springs and I want to see you."

"You are here?"

Marge put her hand to her breast and let out a quiet sigh.

"Where are you right now?"

"I'm at the Crescent Hotel, next to a little tea room. Maybe we can meet there."

"But of course. The Hilltop Cottage. I live very near there."

So that afternoon Anne and Marge met at the Hilltop Cottage Tearoom on Circle Drive in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. They nibbled on sandwiches and sipped tea while talking about many things.

"Oh Anne, I can't believe you got my letter and came here so quickly."

"Letter? You sent me a letter?"

"Yes, a very personal letter. I have thought of you ever since our time at the retreat. Certainly that's why you are here. I wrote you asking you to come see me. I was hoping and  praying we could..."

"I never got a letter from you. When did you send the letter?"

"A few days ago. Certainly you got my letter. I mean, you're here. Right?"

At that moment Anne looked out the window. Right outside, Harry's Oldsmobile pulled up in front of the teahouse......