Sunday, Sunday, can't trust that day...

Wake up late and think, "Ahh, gonna have a great day!" After all, it's Sunday! First my youngest daughter phones. "Can I come over and use your treadmill?"
"Of course."
She brings her Boston Terrier, Andre, who is pissed - I washed his bedding and the funky smell he usually leaves on them is gone. Plus, it's all puffy, making him a bit of a woosh if he actually sleeps on it. So he sits instead. We can't talk him down. While I'm cooking breakfast, daughter 2 decided to share the meal first before she exercises. Spinach pie with yogurt topping it. She needs the iron.
She heads for the exercise room upstairs and that gets me to thinking I need to do the same. Leslie Sansome is my hero so I put on her DVD and then sneak upstairs to watch daughter 2. She doesn't need much coaxing to join me with Leslie. We've lost 3 hours already. Daughter 2 states our home is like the Bermuda Triangle - she gets "caught up in it"- and she can never figure out how to leave once she gets here.
Daughter 1 calls. Wants to get a haircut with me and also, have granddaughter 1 get her first haircut ever. She's 3 1/2 and has long, stringy hair. She really needs a cut and she's really excited about the whole prospect. Her mamma has been explaining everything, step by step. Granddaughter decides she'll watch us first. (Gives her "chicken out" time.)
After another 3 hours, we are all cut, blow dried, and looking very nice. Granddaughter sat immobile for the cut. Now she keeps tossing her head, feeling her hair whip in to place.
So, the day headed for minor greatness except while waiting for those two to get their cuts, I kept looking at myself in the mirror and realizing, "This really isn't going to help much." I can see it's happening. At 62, I'm seeing that I am "exponentially aging" and it's not going to be pretty no matter how many times I go to a stylist, exercise or change my eating habits. I can see the hanging neckline, the thickened kneecaps and the drying hair. My skin looks discolored. My hair stylist has to cut off lots more than he usually does and although he doesn't say anything, I noticed he was extremely light-handed with the hair beauty products.
When he finished though, he exclaimed, "Beautiful, just beautiful," and I find that aging isn't that big of an issue after all.

My Jokester

            Tommy did it again. He pulled another practical joke on me. He's been doing this for a very long time, but recently he's had a thing about my earrings. He's like Houdini – one minute I have those earrings in my hand, and the next, POOF! One of them is gone.

            Thing of it is, Tommy's been dead since 2007. You'd think his jokes would have gone with him.

            We knew the summer of 2005 that he might be seriously ill. He was having trouble with his throat.

            He beat the cancer without surgery but he couldn't beat the liver disease that slowly destroyed him two years later.

            At first I thought it was one of his practical jokes. He lost his sense of direction and wanted me to go the most bizarre ways to his home after his treatment in the hospital.

             He gave me weird instructions like, “Go south on Lake Shore Drive. (He lived north.)  “I know a short-cut. Go to 294.”  I ignored him. I wanted to know what the joke was. It wasn’t though.  It was the poisons not getting filtered from his liver properly. He died a few months later.

            I can't begin to describe how devastating it was to watch Tommy die during his favorite time of year, the Christmas season. Family surrounded his bed, crying, telling stories and watching his heart slowing down. Mickey, our oldest brother, thought we should wave our goodbyes to him at his final heart beat. You know, get that last joke in on Tommy. As we turned to wave, crying and carrying on, he returned once again. We couldn’t contain ourselves; that was Tommy. He wouldn't let us have that final joke on him, no sir. He left us, hearing our laughter instead of our cries.

            Tommy was like that. Joking around, smirk plastered on his gaunt face. His death should have ended it.  Yet here I am, telling you about other practical jokes Tommy played on me.

            It started right after we had services for him. We had him cremated, giving his ashes to his boys and saving some for mom's grave and his favorite – the White Sox ball park. I went home a bundle of nerves, missing him, wishing he had given up those final months of drinking that probably sealed his fate. Why was he able to beat the cancer and not taken advantage of that great gift of life? He should have lived! He could have lived! Those thoughts kept playing, over and over in my heart.

            The next day, my keys were gone. I always placed them in the same spot, on the laundry table, as soon as I entered the house from the garage.

            I moved all the stuff around and finally off the table, but I couldn't find my keys. This went on for three days. In frustration I yelled out to Tommy.

            “Please return my keys!”

 My daughters stood in the laundry room with me when we heard a “bling.” First a White Sox token fell to the floor. I didn't know I even possessed a White Sox token.

            I looked at them and said, “Oh my God, if my keys fall to the ground like that, I know Tommy did it.”

            We almost jumped a foot off the ground as sure enough, my keys fell to the ground. I think they may have been stuck to a towel but what had I just said? Wasn't that proof that Tommy did it??

            During these past few years, Tommy demonstrated again and again that he's around. Earrings fall, disappear and turn up a day or two later. One earring was gone for a year! I learned to never throw away that single earring because the other one would surely turn up.

            On my daughter's 32^nd birthday, we were sitting around the kitchen table when all of a sudden, one of my granddaughter's toys began to play. The only way it goes on is when you press the candles on its top. Since Tommy always called his family with birthday greetings, we knew it was Tommy.   Besides, it was candles!

This past weekend my daughter and my grandkids joined us for a little holiday. When I was getting ready to go to the pool, I took off my earrings - posts - and dropped them into my jewelry box only to have one "pop" out - and completely disappear. I looked in the open drawer, the dresser, and crawled over the rug, vainly searching. I had my daughter’s husband with his eagle eye-sight, give the place a once over too.  I had a few things in the big dresser drawer so I squeezed each item, shook them and nothing happened. It was gone.
The next day, after a full day of constant mini-searches, I gave up but my husband didn't. He began the search again, looking in the drawers, behind the desk - everywhere.
After my shower I opened the drawer and in plain view, there's that earring! I screamed. When my husband saw it, he was converted. He told me he finally believes.

            Tommy is my forever jokester. I guess I'll learn to live with it.

Senioritis will not get the Better of ME!!

I worked at CPS for 22years and have now been "laid off." Shouldn't have been cuz I've got seniority. When the "powers that be" want you gone, all the arbitration and grievances filed aren't going to bring back what you had. It's gone. Final. Kaput.
People ask me why didn't I fight for my position. Well, it's simple. The fight, no matter what the result, will never give back to you what that final decree took away. So I didn't.
I go out with my girlfriends and find ways to laugh about it. Today, my friend K said that we are now "exponentially aging." I'm 62 years old and I get it. Boy, do I ever.
When I was in my 20's and 30's, I worked for Illinois Dental Service. (Doesn't exist as that now so I feel safe to mention the name.)
I was a major player - supervisor of the keypunch and clerical department. Had over 30 people working under me. My manager slept most afternoons. How he got away with that is beyond me but one day, it dawned on him that I was a major threat to his position. I knew way more about the operations than he did. He was slowly on his way out. So what did he do? He made my life miserable at every turn until I was about to resign. I even wrote a resignation letter and gave it to a trusted employee/friend. After I calmed down, I decided to stick it out.
Somehow he got wind of the letter. He coerced that poor girl into giving that letter to him and viola! I was out of a job.
So, I hired a lawyer. Fought the injustice of it for almost a year. I was given back a position in the keypunch department but like I said in the beginning, when it's taken from you, you don't ever get it back. Not ever in the way you remembered.
I lasted about a year feeling totally humiliated. I had to leave again. It let a bitter taste in my mouth and I was way too young to understand what that taste was.
Now as I've crossed the same path once again, I know what that taste is. Defeat, humiliation but, if you swirl it around a bit, taste it thoroughly and then spit it out, it becomes another great adventure in life.
I plan to change my course. Exponential aging will not be getting the better of me just yet.