Every time someone tells me a story about a marital dispute someone they know is having, or some other calamitous, or even stupendous happening, in someone’s life I may or may not know, I invariably want to know the back story.
In pursuit of my ongoing quest to ‘get rid of things’, I came across, once again, one of my favorite shirts. It is camp style, with nice pockets. It is made of linen, so that when you wear it you are suddenly transported to Gatsby’s backyard, if it could be called that, instead of perhaps the lower forty, where you are having afternoon Bloody Marys in your tennis whites. Except my shirt is beige. Which is where my life diverges from Daisy’s in more than one way; she only wore dresses, and she would never buy anything in a color simply because it ‘goes with almost anything’, the reason I own so much black.
Literature is chock full of orphans. There are so many orphans in storyland, you have to wonder whether an epidemic was killing off most couples at any given time in history. To name just a few of the better known ones off the top of my head: Harry Potter, Batman, Superman, Jane Eyre, Tarzan, Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon, Heidi, Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden, Pollyanna, Little Orphan Annie, Oliver, David Copperfield, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz, Kinsey Milhone, the kick-ass private eye of the alphabet mystery series, and Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights.
I am a proud beneficiary of self-publishing. I say that with a touch of sarcasm; since I am too lazy to send my manuscripts to a zillion publishers, and I am not a famous person who writes an immediately successful children’s book, I took advantage of self-publishing. I think my writing is pretty decent, but I have no assurance that a traditional publisher will feel the same way about it. The hell with them. I’ve got Kindle and Smashwords.
My mom is haunting me. I used to tell her before she died that if she knew what was good for her, she would never commit homicide. I know that sounds like something the Gambinos might growl at each other, but I didn’t tell her that just to protect her hide from me, or my hide from her. I told her that because she was Kleenex challenged. Now, she is haunting me.
Regrets should not include spitting at someone, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. I heard a young woman say recently that she didn’t want to dance in public because she thought she was bad at it. My goodness, if all of us followed this maxim, YouTube would be half-empty, and America’s Funniest Videos would be scrambling for filler. Certainly, Seinfeld would have one less episode, as Elaine would never dream of dancing at her office party.
I had heard that many women, and even men, hate women who are beautiful. There is some question as to whether the Republican Party, made up of both men and women, hates women. I’ve never been sure that this hatred of beautiful women was absolutely true; is it based on scientific evidence, and does this theory hold water for beautiful women, too? Do they also hate other beautiful women, or do they just feel like a member of a club?
The other day a complete stranger accused me of condoning murder because I didn’t want society to revert to the coat hanger technique of birth control. This is the kind of knee-jerk reaction I’ve come to expect from many people who are right of center. There is something intrinsically wrong with misinterpreting someone’s comments about contraception, and accusing them of such a thing. It was one of those ‘huh?’ moments, until I realized that the person was a white male and probably hated me because I am beautiful!
I am compiling a list of ways that I know I am officially of the ‘older generation’. This isn’t easy for Boomers to wrap their minds around, y’know. Especially when we are still listening to the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. We still think we can change the world, but we’re too busy to try. We salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance with fervor, but remember the days when our contemporaries burned the flag, and we understand why they felt that way. We love all the new gadgets, but are perfectly happy without them. We know we should dress our ‘age’, but take things from our kids’ closets, anyway. Following are other ways things have changed:
1. Nothing surprises you anymore.
2. You hear the ‘hidden’ agenda in everyone’s statements, and take nothing for granted.
3. Everyone younger is suddenly as ‘cute as a button’.
4. Sneezing unexpectedly can be very risky.
Heartbreak and obsession over a break up is, without a doubt, emotional. It is not necessarily only emotional, though. It has physical manifestations, in the same way physical pain has emotional manifestations. Both can wreak havoc on the immune system, and 
lead to isolation and detachment from other people.
My son just told me a story I read to him when he was little, ‘The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins’, by Dr. Seuss. The story was familiar, but I couldn’t remember the point of it, or who had written it. I looked it up on Amazon, and there isn’t an obvious point, as was so often the case with the good doctor.
