Neighbors

May 18, 2021

I saw a sign on someone’s car today in the Walmart parking lot: Restless and Refurbished. There’s a title, to mull over. Then at the self-checkout lane there was a happy chubby redheaded baby about 15 months old in the seat in a grocery cart. His masked mother kept track of an older kid while the dad, also with red hair stuffed under a hat, packed up the parcels. The baby in the seat just kept shouting out his best word for all the world to hear, “Da da! Da Da! Da Da!” As I passed them the dad gave me an embarrassed eye and I wanted to stop and cheer, “What a great kid you have! Enjoy every minute of his life!” It made me so happy to see that child, letting all of us know how smart he is. I came away feeling so good, so hopeful.

Listening now to Sonny Rollins after a day of phone encounters, push 1, push 2… with T-Mobile, Medicare and Comcast was a round-about like a new automobile one installed to organize traffic but makes your head spin; then a visit to Dr. Chu, the wonderful pain specialist, for a little shot in a nerve in my side rear end that might be causing the muscle ache in my leg, the name of the ligament escapes me. It’s the one that wraps up the thigh in a nice package capable of heroic feats of endurance and strength. The one that from the dawn of man, or woman, realizes in a moment of panic, that the leg needs all tits quad muscles activated at top speed and screams “No!” to an advancing saber tooth cat, “This is it man, Ma’am, I don’t give a damn who you are leg muscles - get moving now with all the propulsion available to you - we’ve never done this before and this is your chance, upright hominid that you are to save yourself and propagate the planet with a body capable of miracles that will inevitably get old and you’ll see your friends perhaps sicken, let’s hope not, but sometimes, die, but certainly age, there’s no denying that. Go quadriceps! Go Dr. Chu!

I went to another of my “ologists” last week and it was shocking, shocking. In comes the most handsome doctor you ever did see, what a specimen of perfection, he was descended down no doubt from one of those athletic early hominids to show up here in 2021, how far we’ve come with physical beauty! And that little child the other day shouting to the ether, “Da Da Da Da….” was perfection, too, all potential, the person we would all like to become, or perhaps believe in. Sometimes I feel pretty good on the inside, but why the dermatologist has you strip off your clothes in front of a full length well-lit mirror is anyone’s guess, shocking, it was shocking. And the kind Dr. Adonis was more than gracious, almost as comforting as the Mississippi National Guard sergeant in Pascagoula who whispered in my ear in the sexiest voice imaginable as he gave me the Covid-19 vaccination last January, “This is going to be the best shot you’ve ever had in your whole life.” If only he’d added the word, “Baby.”

Some people are afraid of shots, not me, I worked for Public Health! Of course you cry and so does your beautiful child. Crying releases your endorphins! Fear not! Of course, fear has ruled religion for centuries, what can I say about that, did that kind of fear really do us collective good? Let’s be hopeful and have faith. Let’s vaccinate! It’s good for me, for you, and all the world’s beautiful children, and they are all beautiful.

We all want to feel what? Powerful, loved, obeyed, feared, healthy, revered which I suppose is loved in a way. I’m watching, “Marseille” on Netflix in the evening while I eat supper and spill it all over my lap. If I watch the TV screen across the room instead of on my laptop which of course is in my lap, I can spill and slurp with abandon. I just need to wash up, sweep and change clothes. No harm to the technological wonders that rule our lives, no soup on the keyboard. Holy smokes! What a week, I’m still trying to get things done before the next leg of my road trip.

Last Friday I ordered an iPhone 12 with the merciful help of my generous son, Nick and Ms T-Mobile herself who patiently and without rancor navigated this hearing impaired customer trying to save a few dollars. Well guess what? In a few days shy of a week, including the weekend, I have an iPhone 12 in Pacific Blue and it is perfect except I can’t figure out how to connect it to the Bose speaker, but will have to say, in this informational plug, that’s a small price to pay because the speakers in this baby can just about satisfy my geriatric ears who refuse to wear those over-5000 dollar hearing aids what with glasses, mask and an occasional hat.

Now I need to start some supper because one of my nature buddies is coming over for dinner bringing a salad and the contents of his refrigerator before he leaves in the morning for Montana to see an old girlfriend who lives in a tent and has for the last two and a half years. It’s cold in Montana in the winter and frequently in the summer. She’s one tough cookie, young and fit. He said he asked her what she has planned and she said, “A nine to thirteen-mile hike in the pouring rain.” Sounds like fun, I said. They took a similar hike last summer when we visited her and he was on his 300 mile bike loop in Idaho for which I was the chuck-wagon, but that’s another story. And by the way, when you follow bicyclists on their adventures you are the sag-wagon, not the chuck-wagon.

We had broccoli spaghetti and hamburgers with onions; Cherry Garcia for dessert. Tomorrow at 1:20 I’ll pick him up and take him to the airport shuttle after, of course, a lengthy meeting scheduled with an underwriter about switching my Plan B insurance. I always wonder about underwriters, weren’t typewriters named that? I wish I still had that portable Corona that walked across the table as you typed, the same one my mother went to college and graduate school with, and so did I, I might add, although the small letter ‘a’ always looked like a dead spider; I shouldn’t have given it to the grandchildren, now it is a mash of metal. Great-grandmother Evelyn is rolling over somewhere in the great blue yonder. Maybe I can resuscitate it, the typewriter. Or some talented artist could recycle it.

A few weeks ago a friend and I went to a wonderful art exhibit at the Shack in Everett, all recycled entries, many most extraordinary, detailed and highly crafted. It had a different title, the exhibit, but it could be called Restless and Refurbished, for all I know perhaps that was what the sign on the pick-up truck was announcing: resuscitated art: phone books and crutches forming the Seattle space needle, an ancient butcher block table now a sprightly black angus steer, lacy tablecloths stretched like canvas painted in colorful patterns, a leather and paper-mache head of Elvis the size of a prizewinning Atlantic Giant pumpkin, telephones squawking that looked like herons, a kitchen-aid mixer upside down like some sort of baboon… it was delightful, and a most startling and stupendously crafted whale, a Minke perhaps, one half open with welded rebar ribs and the other shining metal glimmering pacific blue.

While I’m waiting now for the underwriter I can hear my refrigerator making its customary squeaks. squawks and thumps. Late at night in the dark the noises sound downright scary, I whisper to myself, it’s just the fridge, it’s just the fridge.

When I came home the other day there was some excitement out on the road. Evidently my neighbor, Margaret, thinks someone is living under her house; she’s been complaining about it for a while, to no purpose for the house is built on a cement slab. As I drove in there was a little green tractor across the street pulling out our old mailbox posts. When I asked what was going on, the neighbors all gawking watching said, “We’re getting locked mailboxes now, someone has been stealing mail.” Another neighbor rolled his eyes. Trying to be helpful I said, “Do you suppose it’s the person who lives under Margaret’s house who has been stealing our mail?

“She’s just a battle-axe,” another neighbor whispered quietly in my ear. “We all try to help, but it doesn’t do any good. Yah, yah. Yah got to make the best of it, everybody’s different yah know, everybody’s different.” I’ll say and every body is different, too. I’m sure the handsome dermatologist in his pacific blue hospital scrubs said as I left the room, “Now there’s a winner, an interesting case who could definitely use some refurbishing.”

Anyhow, we are all winners is the message for today. And the good news is that the redheaded person living under the house who steals the mail is just your refrigerator. Da Da, Da Da, Da Da!