Category Archives: Nostalgia

An admiring…blog?!

By Posted in Nostalgia, Write & read Tagged , 3 Comments

Time flies. Today is September 13, 2014. Already! We’re not quite two weeks into the month, but Labor Day might as well have been months ago instead of just twelve days.

What is that?

Is it age? Is it the way we live these days? Is it all the electronic wizardry we’re beholden to that makes everything instantaneous and time fly?  Whatever it is, I really hate it.

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Twelve months, 365 days, 46 posts and 26,144 words later, I’m still here. Blogging activated my previously sluggish creative juices so that ideas tumble around in my head like clothes in the washer, while bad ideas still clonk annoyingly as if they were coins in the dryer.

On this date a year ago, I clicked “publish” and sent my very first post, “We’ve arrived and to prove it, we’re here”  out there, into the great wherever!  My heart pounded and I was so light-headed I thought I would faint. Terrifying and satisfying, at the same time.

A couple weeks later I was almost blasé about the publishing process. And, if you had peeked in my window on October 6 you would have seen me doing the happy dance because my seventh post, “Nasturtiums askance,” was accepted to the Erma Bombeck Workshop site. Since then ten more have been published there.

Last month, I jumped into the deep end of the pond and started another blog, “Dementia isn’t funny.”

What was I thinking?

Are you thinking, La-dee-whoopin’-dah?  Just who does she think she is anyway? Lots of people, millions of people, write blogs, multiple blogs, and they have a lot more followers than she does.

Well, fifty-three years before I was born, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) summed me up in eight lines and forty-two words, in what has always been one of my very favorite poems. This is who I am:

I’m nobody!  Who are you?
Are you — nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise — you know!

Screen shot 2014-09-09 at 12.26.51 PMHow dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog —
To tell one’s name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Blog Bog!

 

 
 

Rock. Hard place.

By Posted in Family matters, Nostalgia Tagged , 4 Comments

If your age is north of seventy and south of eighty, let’s say, and you decide to go tubing on a rocky river, you might want consider the saying, “Caught between a rock and a hard place.” I did not and I wish I had.

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This is how we looked when we went tubing in my day.

On Sunday, Leslie, Martin, and Samantha convinced me to go tubing, something I hadn’t done for, oh, sixty years! Back then, I was a flexible teenager who wore a bathing suit and cap instead of baggy water shorts and tee-shirt, and I tubed in a slow-moving central-Ohio river with no rapids, while drifting lazily in the noonday sun.

When Leslie rolled the tubes out the shed door the memories flooded back — the faint sweet smell of talc, the satiny black tube, the comfy bounce that would cushion me. Ah-h!

Sam’s tube veered left out of the shed and, though she gave chase, it picked up speed and bounded down through the woods like a cat with a firecracker you-know-where. My granddaughter inherited her fear of snakes from me and wasn’t about to go after it. Leslie and Martin found the tube and saved the day.

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I’d been led to believe the Smith River’s gentle rapids were Class I, but I’ve since learned they’re likely Class II. The trip was a bit like a kiddie roller-coaster. Getting situated in aslippery inner tube was laughable; getting back into it, after I’d impaled myself on rocks and ditched, was painfully hilarious. Harder still was keeping my bum elevated so the jutting rocks wouldn’t become weapons, ahem, of ass destruction. 

On Monday, I remembered every rock and hard place I’d met the day before.

 

 

To see or not to see…

By Posted in Nostalgia Tagged 4 Comments

Back in my day, if a girl was wearing a sleeveless blouse and her bra strap happened to peek out, she would dash to the restroom in tears. A slipped slip strap was just as bad, but a half slip that slithered off in the hallway was the worst.  It happened.

Today’s young women wear tops that ensure that their straps do show, while at the same time, I’m told, they wear thongs instead of panties so so there are no panty lines to show. At least the brassieres of today are prettier than those of my long ago — we had a choice of white, black, or flesh.

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I’m not a prude, but I am a bit prudish.

A catalog I get regularly sells several things that make me giggle, while other things make me blush! I’ll only list those that relate to the part of the anatomy that teenagers in my era called “first base.”  That was when “hook up” meant to attach your stockings to your garter belt or one side of your bra to the other. For example:

  • You can buy a flimsy triangle-shaped cover-up that attaches to your bra — assuming you wear one — to make a plunging neckline discreet or to create a layered look without adding actual layers. In the photos they look like thongs, and I don’t mean flip-flops!
  • There’s a “boob tube” that is nothing like your father’s 1956 RCA console TV. These knit or lace bandeaus hide cleavage too.  Frankly, my cleavage has gone so far south that the waistband of my panties works for me.
  • If your wraparound top doesn’t make it all the way around, Swarovski crystal and pearl cabochons serve as dainty buttons. No more safety pins and tape. I have to wonder, would buying the next size larger shirt alleviate the need for these things? Just askin’.
  • Wrinkly decollete? There is a gen-u-ine, one hundred percent, medical grade silicone pad that sticks to the cleavage area to smooth chest wrinkles caused by sun damage, aging or side-sleeping. And, get this, you can actually wear the thing under your clothes, perhaps with one of the above items to hide it.
  • For side-sleepers, there’s a lightweight, slip-resistant plastic cylinder that, if I were so inclined, I could snuggle between my bosoms so they’re in a more natural resting position. Sorry, but for my money, “natural resting position” is wherever “the girls” want to rest, under my arm or over my shoulder!
  • There’s a form-fitting band that’s really on the border between “first” and “second base.” Lace-edged, it fits over the waistband of your jeans, for example, and under your top. It gives the illusion of a cami without the bulk, and it helps smooth out a “muffin top” too, all the while hiding butt cleavage!

Makes me think, there’s a new market to be tapped here: get rid of the lace, manufacture the band in denim or camo, and market it to plumbers!  You get the picture!

 

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Wonder who invented the word “cleavage?”