Words from The Crone

Well, I have been blogging now for about four months and I am as confused as ever about certain things like php somethings and plugins. While I have been known to be a complex person, I like to keep certain things simple.  I guess one of the problems I am having is that my tech support (daughter) set up my blog which left me out of the loop and clueless.  And, so I struggle whenever I want to do something that isn’t basic enough for me to grasp quickly.

For example, I would like to have a place on the right hand side of my blog that says something like “Get posts by email.”  I’ve seen that on other blogs but for the life of me I can’t find out how to do that in my blog.  I think it is one of the plugin things but God help me if I can figure out how to do it.

I wander around in the cyberspace of blogging feeling like an idiot that I can’t do simple things on one hand, while on the other hand I feel rather pleased that I can manage the basics of blogging at all.  And while my blog people have page after page of instructions I can easily see that this could take me the rest of my life to read through it and, already being an old crone doesn’t give me all the time in the world.

Why not ask my tech support you ask?  Well, because while she set up the basics of my blog she doesn’t know all the workings of things “bloggy” and so we just sit and stare at each other and hope for some divine inspiration that will give us the answer.  Sigh.  Maybe I’ll just have to go down to my local computer store and see what they know.  Or, better yet, call one of my blogger friends and ask how they managed to do whatever it is that they do that I want to do and can’t!

The soul of a human being becomes the poetry of our universe.  In college I took a class in poetry and only God knows why because I had never had much interest in poetry before.  I remember learning about all the meters and lines and names like Sonnet and I have long since forgotten most of it.  But what I remember about poetry was our collective trying to understand the meaning of the poem as the author wrote it.  There were as many opinions as lines in the poem.

For me poetry was always those couplet or quartet of lines that rhymed.  They surely produced some strange poems as people struggled to make them rhyme – “I love a brown cow, I know not how.”  Then I came across some poems that weren’t like that at all.  In fact, they didn’t have a rhyming bone in them.  They were free-form in structure it seemed to me and many didn’t make any sense to me.  Our class struggled with those most of all.

And then, one afternoon as I was awakening from a nap a poem came into my head about shoes of all things.  It doesn’t make any sense really, but it came from deep inside my soul and must be an expression of that soul somehow.  I don’t know what it means except to say that earlier in the day I had noticed a pair of sneakers hanging from a telephone wire that crossed over a street.  Anyway, for what it’s worth here it is.  Maybe you can make sense of it!

Shoes

 Shoes have soles.

We have souls.

How peculiar, these shoes, these souls.

Shoes – varied, mixed, new, old, bumpy, smooth.

Laced, snapped, strapped, and Velcro closed.

Shoes with soles.

We have souls.

Souls – spirited, righteous, evil, gracious, good.

Open, closed, generous, stingy, kind, spiteful.

Souls as textured as our many personalities.

Soles are flat yet not. 

Treaded, smooth, slippery, paper thin or tractor tire thick.

Shoes reflect the wearer – rugged, dainty, durable, flimsy.

Shoes – clean, trim, neat, dirty, ragged, messy.

Soles for dancing. Souls for dreaming.

Soles for standing. Souls for thinking.

Soles for running. Souls for imagining.

Soles for prancing. Souls for praying.

Shoes have soles.

We have souls.

Our soles reflect the wearer.

Our souls reflect the bearer.

Doesn’t exist. I grew up with Elizabeth Taylor of Hollywood stardom fame and to date she has had eight marriages to seven husbands. I raised my children with Erica Kane of All My Children soap opera fame and she has had more marriages than Liz. I think both of them are looking for the perfect man. He doesn’t exist.

Now I am old enough and wise enough to know that some men are just plain miserable husbands and a woman should never have married one of them in the first place. But they do. It is okay to divorce them in my book. And it is really okay to divorce them if they physically or emotionally abuse you. No excuse for that.

But I really feel sad for all those women out there looking for the perfect man. Some women marry one after the other like Liz and Erica, while others go through one boyfriend, significant other, or live-in mate after another never finding the perfection they seek. Most of them don’t even know what the perfect man would be anyway. How do I know this? Because these women leave one who is too attentive, or one who doesn’t help enough, or one who doesn’t appreciate the same things. The excuses go on and on, and will continue to go on because the perfect man doesn’t exist.

So girls, if that perfect man doesn’t exist what should we do? Personally, it is a matter of living with the “For better or for worse,” whether married, living together, or just hanging with a man. We all have our warts and bumps. My spouse has an unbelievably messy desk and I am a relative neat-freak. He is as stubborn as a mule but will do almost anything I ask. His driving drives me to being the ultimate back seat driver. I nag at this or that and he has learned to kick back. Darn. We’ve had our ups and downs, some serious, most not. We niggle and giggle and at the end of the day we go to bed loving each other more and more.

One morning I woke up and realized that not only doesn’t the perfect man exist –neither does the perfect woman! But if you can find a man who loves you in spite of your warts and bumps, keep him. If you can find a man who has the same basic values you have – keep him. If you can find a man who considers your wants and needs – keep him. If you find a man with whom you can share your innermost thoughts and feelings – keep him. And, pray that he keeps you!

Learn to live with his warts because he is living with yours. Overlook them, pick out the beauty in that man, raise him up in love, and every single day tell him you love him. And when the wart is really bad like an affair, or lying, or humiliating you, well, then the best thing to do is to forgive him as he forgives you. We never forget those things, but they are in the past, can’t be changed, and hopefully everyone learns from them. You’ll never find a perfect man, but if you focus on the positive you’ll come close. I wonder if Liz and Erica will ever learn that nobody’s perfect!

The earthquake in Haiti is like the fire in the forest – a natural disaster that wipes its path clear and leaves utter decimation and destruction in its wake.  The world stands in awe of its mighty power and weeps.  We weep for all those souls who died from the almighty power of its strength.  We weep for all those souls who are wounded and maimed and need healing.  We weep for those who survive and now must live with not only the enormous loss of one, or two, or more loved ones, but the loss of home and hearth and light and water and only God knows what else has been lost.  We weep for all those souls.

We are a resilient race, us humans, and somehow, someway, we pick ourselves up and go on.  We give, we love, we care, we help, we support, we are present, we come together.  And, it is together that the rebuilding and the healing takes place.  It is who we are and it is what we do.  It doesn’t matter whether we are all strangers or all related or something in between…when the greatest upheavals occur, we band together in a relationship of survival and renewal and life.

Please make a donation to Episcopal Relief and Development online if you possibly can, at www.er-d.org, or telephone 1-800-334-7626 ext 5219.

My spouse and I are having an ongoing discussion on the dirty, grimy, nasty condition of his eye glasses.  They are the big aviator kind with lenses forty times the size of his eyes and they consume one-quarter of his entire face.  When I sit next to him and look at him I can see through the side of the glasses through a thick film of disgusting particulate collected over God knows how many months.  I wonder how he sees anything.  Maybe he doesn’t.

One morning, as I was cleaning my glasses (that happen to be small and attractive and only cover most of my eyes), I asked him if he would like me to clean his glasses.  Annoyed he told me that he just cleaned them.  “Just” I pondered?  “How many months ago was that?” I asked sarcastically.  “Yesterday,” he replied, “But, if you want to clean them again, be my guest.”  I left the room.  He followed me.

Then he went on to continue our regular discussion of what constituted “dirt” on a pair of glasses. Sigh, it was getting so old.  “Well, I said, “You brush your teeth twice a day because of the moss that grows on them, and you should clean your glasses every day like I do, (think halo over my head).”  He shot back “Moss doesn’t grow on glasses!”

Well, of course I had no valid response to that so, being a stubborn, outspoken, opinionated, old crone of a woman, I said, “Does too!”  He walked out of the room!  Done, I thought.  Not.  Two minutes later as we were sitting at the table having breakfast, he said, “Moss would only grow on the north side of glasses.”  I smirked at him.  Then he said, “Maybe it is lichen that you see on my glasses, not moss.”

Sitting there bantering on about moss and lichen and particulates was just more than my funny bone could take.  My mental picture of lichen or moss growing on the north side of glasses just cracked me up and I began laughing and laughing and laughing.  My spouse joined in and soon it was that wonderful, uncontrollable laughter when tears dribble down your cheeks, your chest heaves as you try to catch your breath, and you just can’t stop laughing.  Finally, when you do manage to collect yourself you feel amazingly refreshed. 

 So who cares if he can’t see through his glasses.  But, I did notice that he cleaned them up real good before he went off to his Council on Housing meeting!  Hah!

Today I discovered something that has been around long enough for me have figured it out – I am referring to that icon RSS Feed [a small orange square with a dot and three radiating lines which I can’t seem to duplicate here] found on the left side in my Outlook® email/contact/calendar software.  RSS means ‘Really Simple Syndication” I am told.  Which means really simply, selling one story or product to multiple sources.  In other words RSS basically says what it means.  It also means that I click on the RSS feed symbol and browse for an internet link, select it, and Voila! there it sits waiting for me to open the link.  Or, use any of a variety of links I may have selected.  What a time saver – I don’t have to go back and forth between the internet and my email accounts.  I am only a click away from my favorite internet sites.

Now, I must admit that I noticed that little orange RSS square a couple years back and wondered what it did.  But, it took my youngest daughter to fill in that blank in my brain.  She is not quite a five-year old, but at least one of the more with it, younger techno brilliant generation.  I am thankful that she lives with me for “Tech Support” is now only a shout away not an interminable, button pushing, 800 number, hours away!

 But, I’ve also noted a conspiracy going on that I believe started with corporate America in the 1960’s.  Acronyms.  GE, NBC, ABC, etc.  Letters began meaning longer words and spilled over into the secular world with things like AA or AAA or SCUBA.  Well, now those acronyms are everywhere.  Here are some most commonly used in internet conversations or texting:  LOL; OMG; DD, BH, IMHO, EOD, ROTFLOL, POS, and FAQ.  There are even those techno acronyms like RSS, HTML, and CSS.  Want more?  Google “Internet Acronyms” and have a go at them.  Or go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronyms.   There are about 4,000,000.

 The conspiracy is that those of us over 70 have never heard of most of them and are left standing in the dust wondering what is going on right now (or WIGORN?).  I just learned that EOB was “End of Business Day” and there are many with the letter “F” in them that I will never use.  Some common words like “Picnic” don’t mean a party on the lawn anymore but, “Problem in chair, not in computer!”  Beware, you seniors, soon text messages, emails, FB entries, and tweets will look something like this:

          2F.  R u rotflol @ it?  WRU? CUL or CUIC! O POS GTG.

 There is even an acronym for the acronyms: CUA (Commonly Used Acronyms)!  Well, at least I have discovered the RSS feed for now, but I think I need to get myself an acronym dictionary and keep it at hand!  Or, I can always look up an acronym at www.Acronymfinder.com .  Imagine that -+!

It was not the New Year’s Eve that I imagined.  In fact, if I recall all the New Year’s Eve’s that I can recall (not many), I would have to rank this last one as the worst, the absolute worst!  It all started out just as planned:  Champagne and hors’ d’oeuvres, filet mignon with made from scratch Béarnaise sauce, asparagus, and wild rice.  An early celebration of 2010 and then to sleep somewhere around 10:30 p.m.  An almost perfect “for those over 70” evening.  NOT!

 At 7:00 p.m. I turned off my laptop, draped my long, flowing, white knit shawl over my shoulders and headed downstairs for that glass of champagne.  Oooops………………..on the first step my right foot caught the edge of my shawl and I soon found myself airborne – literally.  My fully rounded, matronly body was flying down the stairs and my feet were not on the steps.  I remember thinking “Oh, S—t!”  But not for long.

 CRACK – my right hip landed on the edge of the hardwood step and I swear I heard the bone snap.  My ankle hit another step and then nothing but white pain flooding my body.  “Oh, no,” I thought, “this is not good.”  No kidding.  It was not only not good it was bloody horrible and I was in a blanket of pain I hadn’t felt maybe ever.  Of course those two with whom I live came running as I sat there gritting my teeth wishing away the pain that only got worse…and worse…and worse.  911 call in my immediate future.

 Blessings upon blessings always seems to come my way when I look for them.  A couple of hours in the ER with accompanying X-Rays showed no broken hip or ankle.  WOO HOO!  But, oh my, the pain kept up and up and up.  Was finally able to put some weight on the old leg and the ER crew stuffed two Percoset® into me and sent me packing home!  Champagne and Filet here I come.

 We ate our yummy meal, donned our celebratory hats, blew our horns, toasted in the New Year and watched the ball descend on Times Square.  12:06 a.m. – off to bed to rest for the next four days, ice on thigh, husband waiting on me hand and foot, aaaahhhh.  The dinner plate sized deeply purple bruise on my thigh will fade with time as will the pain which is already getting so, so much better – more blessings!  Thank you, Jesus.  But, I think I’ll not try to go downstairs wrapped in a flowing shawl again.