DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE?

There’s been a lot of discussion about Time Magazine’s cover story about favorite children within a family. My husband says we didn’t have one out of our five children. I said that my answer to the question was always “whoever’s the baby or whoever is sick”.

However, now that the children are grown there’s no longer a “baby”. Ours is now in her mid-forties so she no longer qualifies for that role, although I’ve told her she would always be my baby. The answer is “whoever needs us the most right now”.

We’re always willing to help, especially with lots of advice which probably won’t be listened to, but it’s nice to be asked anyway.

ANOTHER FUNERAL

Another of my bridge playing friends died last week at the age of 94. I called a friend to see if she would like to go with me to the memorial service that evening. She told me she would like to, but there may be a problem, but she would contact me later in the afternoon and let me know if she could come. Her daughter was having cataract surgery that morning and she had to drive her to and from the surgical center.

I was totally surprised because my friend is 91 years old and she’s transporting her daughter around. I guess we elderly people do have our purposes.

THE SOLOIST

Years back when I belonged to the church choir, we had an Italian tenor with  tremendous vibrato.  Unfortunately he didn’t really fit in because singing in a choir requires you to blend with other voices. At one point when our director gave a solo at Christmas to a soprano, the tenor’s wife, who also sang with us, asked why her talented husband was not given that particular solo. Everyone was aghast at her outrage, because he really wasn’t a very good soloist and we all understood the director’s position. His wife was absolutely furious, but the director didn’t give in.

Knowing what I’ve told you, you might enjoy a story about this man which I heard a year later.

The tenor and his wife toured Italy and at every church they attended, he would sing the “Ave Maria” until his fellow travelers told him to stop. Upon hearing this story, I thought that he must have been attending Mass and singing it at the end of the Mass, which could only have been as few times in the week or two they visited the country.

I discovered how wrong I was when we toured Italy ourselves. In our ten day tour of Italy, every day we were in a different location and touring at least one church a day and sometimes two or three. It then dawned on me what the tenor had been doing.

Picture this, every church you would enter with other touring groups would be given a history of the edifice when suddenly a man in the crowd would start singing the “Ave Maria” in an extremely loud voice. Obviously he had been doing this in every church and everyone in his group or in the other groups finally became furious and demanded he stop.

I really think he told this story himself thinking it was funny, because I don’t know of anyone else who was on that tour. Talk about “The Ugly American”

THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY

In the past year of writing this blog, I’ve learned so many things that I didn’t know when working on the computer. The latest was finding about my stats. I never went so far as to get information on where my viewers were from. I assumed they were basically my family and a few friends who might have looked at it once in a while.

However, when I delved further I was astounded to see that I have readers in Russia, Germany, Great Britain and China. I know about the China person and the one who was possibly in Great Britain on business recently. My son tells me he thinks the others were looking up MJ for Michael Jackson and stumbled onto me.

So I want to thank those Michael Jacksons fans for staying with me a bit. I hope they understand my background and humor. I do sing, used to dance and still act a bit when doing play reading and I also have a skin decease known as psoriasis, which is the principle reason I always wear long sleeves although the other reason is to hide the wrinkly skin on my arms.

I’m pleased to have all of you with me. MJ  (aka Mary Jane)

WAY BACK WHEN

I recently watched an old movie circa 1950’s and saw a woman wearing a suit with several fox furs arranged on her shoulders with the animals’ heads and tails still intact and hanging from their dried dead bodies and I had to laugh at how we women were such idiots. That was the current fashion and most women aspired to achieve that look.

As I watched the black and white movie, I realized that a young person today watching the same thing would probably be horrified to see those dead creatures worn today. Such furs were in style, I have no idea why, and yet I wanted to wear them too, ugly as they were.  Fur coats and fur pieces were part of our culture then. The ultimate symbol of success then was a mink or sable coat, usually worn by glamorous actress’s or wives of wealthy men.

At our tenth high school reunion held in July of 1958, one of my class mates came wearing a mink stole. I think she expected her fellow grads to be jealous. We weren’t, after all it was extremely hot and the rest of us were in fashionable summer clothing.

There were some young women from wealth and society who deigned such trappings. I remember reading of one who received a mink stole for Christmas from her parents. Not being a fashionable person, this young married woman put an ad in the newspaper offering to trade her mink for a new saddle. Another daughter of wealth not interested in furs or designer clothing traded or sold her expensive clothes to fellow college students, who were totally excited to share in the booty. The clothing which was not suitable to wear in a classroom environment had been gifted to her by her mother, Nancy Reagan. (I was told this many years ago by one of her college classmates)

WHAT’S UP WITH THE WEATHER?

Last night I dreamed I was taking a walk in the fall weather up north and feeling so elated. I then woke up to our usual 90 or more degrees of temperature here in Florida.

Today was my husband’s golf day and after eating lunch, he sat in a chair on our screened-in porch and took a nap. It was still in the nineties. I stayed indoors, as usual.

Every day has been the same for the past two or three months, 90 or more degrees of hot weather every day. Nothing seems to change and yet when I went into JC Penney’s last week they were putting out Christmas decorations.

Next January or February I expect will be the start of another cold winter. The last two years we’ve had the coldest weather we can remember since moving here almost thirty years ago. We’ll both be bundled up in sweaters and covered in blankets hoping warm weather will soon be here. So the cycle will continue.

With record snows, floods and hurricanes in all sections of the country, you wonder could global warming be here. Nah, there’s no such thing.

(The above was written on last Thursday.  Saturday morning’s weather report says it now ten degrees cooler. I can now go outdoors, but for how many days?)