Category Archives: Just Me – AmeliaJake

Just Me - AmeliaJake, The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

How many pitfalls are there anyway?

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Yes, I was up and actually functioning when . . . the dreaded summer cold struck, mixed in with a bit of intestinal distress. I have had to postpone my second cataract surgery and that was a bummer, but having a stuffed nose, a racking cough and a fever made a good case for it. Only a week’s delay, so really not a foot-stomping event. Although, I have to say the shaking chills at 2 am one morning made me grateful it was a summer cold and not malaria or yellow fever. Remembered passages from books about Japanese POW camps and the Panama Canal workers haunted my dozing off thoughts; there’s no doubt about it: if you have a choice, go with the sugar plum fairies.

I am hoping events will even out somewhat, and I have such an urge to constantly knock on wood that I need to live in a log cabin or have Al Gore standing within arm’s reach at all times.

Just Me - AmeliaJake, The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

Good Heavens, I had to take a couple of tries to remember my password

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Sitting in Fairborn, Ohio with my feet up on the coffee table and music playing on my iphone through a cute little speaker with lights that change, I venture into this space once more. God, there’s a lot of dusting to do and, drat, I see I’m going to have to clean out the cooler – you know, the one that looks like a chest freezer and you lift the lid and find drinks nestled in an ice bath.

Well, there’s nothing for it, but to get busy. So I guess I’ll turn off the iphone and plug in the jukebox. I’ll need something with a nice, bouncy rhythm – How about Red Dress? After all, they always said red was my color.

Just Me - AmeliaJake, Kendallville, N. Riley House, The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

Is it really me, AmeliaJake?

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I think so; I think I have emerged from the shadows. I may wander back in, but while I’m here, I guess I could at least say HI.

Let’s see, Der Bingle was taken to the emergency room on April 19th with lights flashing and the siren going. I was three hours+ away and did not find out about it until five hours later. I could tell a long story – anyone who knows me at all realizes it could meander around every emotion and hospital corridor and long, sleepless nights; BUT no need for going through it again – he turned out to be okay.

Then two days ago I had cataract surgery, which went very well and for which I thank the researchers who did the necessary “how to” work and the doctors who went to medical school and mastered the “can do” part.

And in between, I had vertigo.

If it weren’t for all that, the big news would be the glass shower door shattering out of nowhere on my daughter-in-law. She got some cuts, but is doing all right . . . and they tell me you could see her footprints left in the tub full of pebbly glass. I’m going to have to track down the warranty material – now that I can read it.

So, actually eating healthy and doing muscle building exercises doesn’t seem like drudgery. I could post before and after pictures, but given the existence of photoshop, I will either get in shape or get very good at carving away bulges and flab with a cursor. The latter would be a useful blogging tool, but I’m going to try for the first option.

Just Me - AmeliaJake, The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

Bored but not wanting to exert

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I feel like doing something, but I don’t want to do it alone and a lot of the work around here is overwhelming and tedious, especially if I happened to catch a snippet of a HGTV show where people are complaining because a perfectly fine house is – yes, here comes my oft-used word quote: dated. Some of the people are ridiculously snobby and snotty. It brings out the worst in me. One woman was so condescending I found myself looking hard at her and coming to the chanting conclusion: Really big nose.

I interrupted my little rambling here to ichat with Der Bingle and now I am thinking about a nice peachy iced tea with a splash of non-caloric berry soda.

Just Me - AmeliaJake, Kendallville, The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

Hands in dishwater

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That post title up there? Well, that’s all that is left of a post I wrote this morning, not because I goofed up and fed it to cyberspace, but because I looked at it and thought, Jeez, Louise, AJ, this is rotten writing, rambling, just muttering around . . . whatever. I erased it; I thought it was the best thing to do. Of course, taking the time to wish for World Peace would have been a better use of the time, but that’s been well-covered in beauty pageants and movies spoofing movie pageants.

And explaining why I just wiped a bit of today’s writing off the face of the earth serves also to give reason as to why I am not writing anything else.

Sigh and ok: World Peace.

Just Me - AmeliaJake, Kendallville, The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

The surprises that we allow

Of course, a vague post title. Even I sighed. You do your best, cut the slack, hope for the best . . . and then it comes: the little announcement or action that all along you knew would come. It’s usually the little things that disappoint the most – the ones that indicate – in some people’s eyes – that those who have held the fort have not strived, not been pained, not sacrificed. And you sigh and say, “I see.” It’s not really a surprise: it’s more the out of the blue moment when it pops out; you knew it was there but you just wanted to pretend maybe it wasn’t.

This is, for the most part, a fill in the blank post. I in our lives, so many of us have situations where the truth of the matter is the same, just the details vary.

I feel better, having rambled on. I would recommend rambling on to anyone who has experienced the let down of being left to hold the bag, and reminding oneself of what we have always known: the bag has been empty.

Just Me - AmeliaJake, Kendallville, The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

Look at the sidebar on the left

Her birthday, not that today is the only day I think of Jody. I see that picture framed by where I sit; I think of Thomas Bickle everyday too – his light is still shining on the wide window sill of what was once the old north porch. You can see it better from the outside now that the bushes have been trimmed, but that’s just with your eyes. Thomas Bickle’s light burns straight to one’s heart.

But this is about Jody, about her picture, actually. It is my favorite picture of her; I once wrote to someone that she reminded me of a young Queen Elizabeth II. I said she looked so royal.
The person to whom I was writing – a very intelligent person – responded that yes, she did look regal. Of course, regal was the word I should have used; it’s an adjective . . . and I am a stickler for grammar. But for some reason, when I look at that little face under the scarf smiling out over her shoulder, I don’t see a description, I see the an essence. I am looking at someone royal.

Just Me - AmeliaJake, N. Riley House, The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

Johnny Cash – what I didn’t know

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There are, I’m certain, a lot of things I don’t know about Johnny Cash. But last week, there were a lot more. That changed because I came into the living room, sat down and realized: Oh, my gosh, the remotes are here-not misplaced. So, I turned the TV on and there was the beginning of Walk the Line; I have seen this listed many times and it was in the movie theaters in 2005, but I never watched it.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Johnny Cash. I don’t know why I avoided it, but I did. Then, well, there it was, right in my face and I decided Joaquin Phoenix actually looked like Johnny Cash . . . and I was open to an excuse not to do anything else.

Very early in the movie, I learned that Johnny Cash’s worshiped older brother Jack was killed in a sawmill accident and that his father laid a lot of blame on him. Jack was 15; Johnny (then known as J.R. was 12). I watched the entire movie, but that first part haunted me and so I researched.

Not believing everything I read, but pulling together a reasonable summary of the story: Yes, Johnny’s father expressed the idea that it should have been Johnny who died, that Jack was the good son, the one determined to be a preacher and so forth. I suspect that Johnny would have got that idea in his young head by himself, but I think his father’s judgement forced that feeling of guilt into his heart.

Of course, that young boy should have been led to realize there was sorrow in Jack’s death, but not guilt. He wouldn’t have fully believed it, of course, but he might have understood that life and death and accidents are often like the flip of a coin. I know I feel guilt for what have might have come from mistakes I made that, for some reason, missed disaster by a second, a fraction of an inch. It is unnerving when you think of life not in turns of what might have happened good, but in terms of what might have happened bad – what you might have had to live until the grave. If you really think about it, a shrug and a brief thought of “close call” should be replaced with gut-wrenching, nightmare terror. A nightmare that didn’t happen, not because you woke up, but because you got for no good reason – lucky.

It wasn’t even a mistake Johnny Cash made; it was just the way the day played out. In fact, Jack didn’t do Johnny any favors when he said, Go ahead and go fishing, J.R.; he didn’t say he knew it was not save for one person to be alone with a big old saw. In fact, Jack was 15, the good one, the one who was supposed to show his 12 year old brother the responsible way to do something. Oh, and J.R. was going fishing to try and get some food for the extremely poor family.

I don’t know what the pain and hurt and guilt and the accusations of his father did to J.R.’s mind and heart, but I suspect there was cultivated an anguish that became unbearable at times. And I won’t make any judgement because he stumbled on something that eased his pain and he had a hell of a time fighting it.

Maybe the reason he always started each performance with Hello, I’m Johnny Cash is because he was never going to let people think he was some man hiding who he was and what his pat included.

Just Me - AmeliaJake, The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

Kingman, Indiana: A chair from Byron Grismore’s barbershop

My grandfather wandered around a bit in the beginning, visiting the Chicago Exposition and helping to dig the locks between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron; he then went and stayed with an uncle in St. Louis and went to barber college. He spent oh, lots and lots of years running the shop in Kingman, Indiana and it was where the “menfolk” all gathered and discussed just about everything. My cousin, Glenda, says she never heard him say a bad word about anyone. He sang in the real barbershop quartet.

After he had died and my grandmother had gone to a nursing home, which really wasn’t necessary and she did complain about there “being only old folks here” to my dad, her sister-in-law Maude Drake outright insisted my father load one of the chairs from the shop in the back of his car and bring it home.

Aunt Maude was a classy lady and when my mother told me, “Maude made your dad take it,” I knew that meant he had absolutely no choice.

A rather crude way to put it would be that most of the male butts in Kingman and the surrounding area, along with traveling salesmen sat in that chair at one time or another. Farmers, merchants, doctors, lawyers, judges and the old-timers my dad said used to tell tales of fighting Indians in the Old West. Many an election was discussed, many a basketball or baseball game, many the news of the wars, both One and Two and Korea.

I don’t believe there were any real established hours; the lights burned as long a men were willing to sit and talk. Sometimes I stare at it and imagine the flow of men who sat there as the country went along for half a century; their faces pass in front of me and I can almost hear the conversation, the greetings called out as someone new came in. It was a place where everyone knew your name.

I’m just about the only one who sits in it now, but somehow I never feel alone.

Just Me - AmeliaJake, Kendallville, The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

Be yourself

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I think this commonly given advice needs to be re-evaluated. I think it’s closely related to thine own self be true, but there is a dangerous twist in equating them. Look, I’m feisty and sometimes nasty and we all know that; now, it would be good for me to be aware of this and try to work around it. However, when someone throws caution to the wind and says, “Be yourself”, it’s likely they are going to come to the conclusion I am rubbing them the wrong way.

I am certain that I have known all along that I am judgemental, but lately I have really come to see it more clearly. And when I get on a judgemental roll, I can keep going even when an incline would slow a stone. It is a scientific anomaly, probably. I think it feeds on itself; one clever, but snide aside can help to clear the path for many more. It just happens. Oddly enough, most of the time, I really have no interest in the object of my mocking intolerance.

Pausing here, it occurs to me that it’s not a matter of not tolerating; it is stumbling on something fun to mock and then letting loose. I know mocking is not supposed to be a sport, that it is considered unkind, cruel, plain old bad . . . and yet something will serve as a trigger and there I go.

I am pleading an unfortunate deal in the card game of genetics. I think I need to be shuffled. Or muffled. I’m back at my old argument that some people are born nice and some people not and it ain’t fair when the natural nicies think I’m going out of my way to be obnoxious.

I sometimes actually fantasize about being a naturally nice person; it would be, well, nice. As it is, I’m afraid I may go into withdrawal now that Joe Biden has Amtraked his way to Delaware. Well, a word oF advice to the state: BEWARE.