FLARES ARE POSTED HERE AS A WARNING TO READERS:

I really don’t want to wish my life away, especially now that I am on the far side of the middle of my life span. However, today has been just a day of a miasma of doom. I am upset about the government; I am aggravated by the speed of which internet twitter remarks and news opinion pieces can zoom around the world and are manipulative and seem to threaten bad things if one were to simply ask, “Well, has this been considered?” I am disappointed by people who just want to be angry at everyone all the time and throw away all their opportunities. I am disappointed by myself. My head aches; it’s hot and humid; I cannot make myself do anything productive today – psychically lifting myself to my feet is not working. Okay, I made a meatloaf. All these hours awake and I made a meatloaf. Wow.

I am going to throw myself into a cryptic crossword, which may or may not give me the slap I need.

Perhaps the spelling in the title should be ‘the eggman’ as in ‘the mailman’. However, because it is a word one no longer hears frequently, if at all in some quarters, I am making it clear: this is about the Egg Man, a figure from my childhood.

It has taken me a long time to realize that I grew up in a Grant Wood and small town Norman Rockwell bubble. Being born in the rural Midwest a few years after the end of WWII, I grew up as part of a continuation of over 200 years of pre-United States colonists who just moved slowly a little bit west and stayed pastoral.

One tiny part of that experience is The Egg Man. When I was little, just at the point of forming memories, going out to the chicken house with my grandma to gather eggs was a treat. We would walk up the path to the barn, past the rhubarb, which looked like an ugly plant to me, and go through a fence and then open a primitive door and smell hay and chickens. Grandma had a basket and the activity was to pick up eggs from the nests, and sometimes even stick your hand under a warm chicken and get warm eggs. This was a privilege to me; it was routine to Grandma.

Now, in that time period, Grandma had a lot of eggs and she would load them into partitioned crates for the Egg Man to pick up. I vaguely remember helping to do this and the crates seemed big, but I suppose my size had something to do with that perception.

I know the Egg Man had a truck that looked like a delivery van, one he could just step out of. The money my grandmother received for selling her extra eggs was her “egg money” and was saved up for use at special times.

I also remember people saying that the Egg Man often said how much he appreciated Grandma not putting the big eggs on top and sneaking littler ones on the lower tiers. I gleaned from overheard conversations that this was a great compliment.

Another activity I took pride in was being allowed to prime the pump. We had one right in the kitchen along with a sink with running water. That’s another story for another day.

This might seem like an abrupt ending to this post, and I suppose it is, but it is only the beginning of all those things that make me seem like a hick to those who grew up in cities.

Tuesday I went into a cleaning mode, taking out discarded clutter and forgotten things that had, let us say, passed their expiration date. And I went to bed making plans of what I was going to do on Wednesday. Making plans, wise but there is always a caveat: things aren’t certain. I awoke with an over-strained neck. I added the “over” to strained not to be redundant, but to distinguish between neck strain that causes one to walk with a crooked stance and some pain vs. the kind that results in neck muscles in such tight spasm that they cause dizziness and misery. That was a long sentence. It matches this paragraph. And it was a long day, sitting with my head propped against the sofa back, arms in a totally relaxed position and making all sorts of promises to powers that be that I would be more careful and virtuous and all sorts of good things if I could just feel better.

It took a day and a half and already I am struggling with reneging on my promises. I’m incorrigible, absolutely incorrigible.

So why didn’t I at least write. Wellllll…. at the end of Tuesday I felt my neck stiffening as I held my head in an awkward position to use my laptop. I knew it and I chose to ignore it. So no computering, Just keeping my neck muscles straight and relaxed and, as Der Bingle suggested, heat.

I hope to be back tomorrow.

Continue reading I was serious about writing →

I don’t have a problem taking pills. Oh, occasionally, I’ll pop a capsule in my mouth and go to get a drink and get sidelined and have an issue with the outside of the capsule dissolving in my mouth and the powder inside tasting really bad. (Please don’t let this happen to you with green tea supplements; it took me forever to get the overwhelming taste off my tongue.) For the most part, though, pill taking is not something I think about.

Vitamin C tablets got me doing so, however. These tablets are 500 mg and are about as big as a dime in circumference and – measuring from bulge to bulge on each side – close to a third of an inch thick. It was a big bottle and a big letter C on the bottle but I had no idea they were huge.

I know it now. When I first looked at one, I felt a bit of apprehension but tossed it in my mouth and started drinking water. That tablet was basically riding the waves of the incoming attempted swallows. Oh, the water went down but the tablet would bounce back and eventually I was sloshing water out of my mouth and wondering if I was going to choke. Obviously, it worked out. But it was not a one time deal; it has become a challenge. Fortunately for me, I have learned a method, but I am not so certain of this method and don’t attempt a Vitamin C encounter in front of anyone.

This was the second time I have been confronted with a big, dry pill. The first time was when I was five and had the chickenpox. I definitely remember being bundled up on the sofa with a little bed tray over my lap that held some breakfast and the morning pill that was a cube like one of a pair of dice. This memory does not deal with my first time taking the medicine; I think I blocked that out of my mind. This was the time I decided to hide it under the saucer on my tray. My mother eventually picked up the tray and, yes, not too long later she returned to grin and ask, “Did you hide that pill?” There’s not too much a five year old can do when the jig is  up – I confessed. And I don’t remember what happened then. Maybe, just maybe, she cut it up.

Another thing I remember from my kindergarten year was coming home in the afternoon and deciding I would try out the idea of entertaining myself. For a few hours, I played “store” and kept to myself. I heard my mother say to my father when he came home that I had played all afternoon without bothering her. And, although I can’t remember the sophistication of my vocabulary at the time, I very definitely remember the essence of my thought: “Well, don’t count on it happening again, lady, because it was incredibly boring.”

Mother was undoubtedly happy when first grade came and I went to all day school.

I really don’t have anything funny or profound or even mundane to write about today, but I just wanted to check back in and ease myself back into writing.