The Contents of My Not-So-Presidential Library

 

Carolyn J. Rose

 

I never ran for office. Okay, sure, my high school classmates voted me Most Likely to Succeed and Class Clown. But, in my defense, it was a small school. And, for the record, I didn’t know I’d been nominated.

 
I don’t intend to run for office. Any office. Ever. So, I won’t hit you up for a donation. I won’t urge you to form a committee to build a library commemorating my life (long) and accomplishments (few). Nevertheless, I did some research (approximately three minutes worth) into what such a library contains. Then I put some thought (a whopping four minutes) into what I have to display.

 

First: Official Documents. Boxes in the garage are stuffed with tax returns, real estate transactions, utility bills, and rejection letters. I also have my birth certificate, passport, divorce decree, second marriage license, college diploma, substitute teacher certification, car registration, and the latest lab results from my health care provider. Compared to executive orders, details of tariff negotiations, and records of phone calls to world leaders, that’s pitiful. But, hey, my cholesterol level is down.

 

Second: Personal Papers. I can toss in the 20+ novels I’ve written, correspondence, and recipes. Note # 1: These are complete recipes. I’m not that person, the one who agrees to share but intentionally leaves out a key ingredient. Note # 2: I long ago burned letters admitting I inhaled. Note # 3: I’ll include no exchanges with the guy in the classic Thunderbird.

 

Third: Photos and Recordings. Shots of me as a scrawny month-old, red-faced bit of humanity will be here. If you’re curious about dogs and cats I’ve lived with, you’ll see their photos. You can listen to my favorite tunes, music from before the disco error. (No, I did not intend to type era.) I’ll share shots of my vacations and a video of the inside of our sewer drain. As a bonus, I’ll enlarge photos from my most recent colonoscopy.

 

Fourth: Physical Objects. I have a nifty collection of garden art acquired at thrift stores, furniture my father built, and a ten-year-old SUV. (Only 42,000 miles on it, in case you’re interested.) I’ll also include that stack of overdue books, soaps and shampoos lifted from hotels, nubby socks I intend to wear one more time, and two pairs of jeans I might squeeze into after the next recession. 

Fifth: Educational Resources. This section will feature an interactive display giving you an opportunity to win gift shop coupons by correctly guessing my favorite adult beverages and cheesy snacks. I’ll also post a map indicating the location of said gift shop as well as the snack bar, restrooms, and, most important, the exit. Not that you’ll need it. If I parked the car outside, all this should fit in a building only slightly larger than a bouncy castle. And, trust me, a visit to a bouncy castle would be a lot more entertaining.

Sensory Overload in Aisle Nine

 

Carolyn J. Rose

 

While grocery shopping recently I found an aisle blocked by an elderly man. Hunched over his empty basket, he studied a slip of paper with the intense concentration that cracked the Enigma Code. I waited. He remained motionless. I executed a U-turn for the chip aisle.

 20 minutes later I saw him again. He was on the move, but still squinting at his list. In his basket was a single can of beans.

 The next day, I wondered if he was still roaming the aisles. A day later I imagined him as a modern-day version of Charlie, the doomed Boston MTA commuter immortalized in a Kingston Trio song.

 While you’re humming that song about the man who never returned, or perhaps finding it on YouTube, I’ll get to the first point of this essay. There are a lot of older men—and probably women as well—who could use help navigating supermarket aisles. Maybe their partners abruptly handed off shopping duties, leaving them struggling to decipher handwriting, locate items, and bring home the correct brand and size. Maybe divorce, or even death, cast them adrift in a sea of selections. Struck dumb by the vast number of possibilities, vision blurs, steps falter, senses overload. They become paralyzed with indecision.

 (But wait. Let’s go back to the MTA for a moment. Has anyone else wondered why Charlie’s wife managed to hand him a sandwich but not the coins for the exit fee? Was this shoddy thinking, or was their marriage on the rocks?)

 Supermarket paralysis, a friend insists, affects men more than women. Men, he claims, are genetically programmed to hunt large game and women to gather nuts and berries. Women therefore excel at distinguishing small details and remembering where to find soup or celery. Or, perhaps women are more familiar with the terrain and more accustomed to coping with varying layouts and constant tides of new products and packaging.

 (But let’s return to the MTA for another moment. If Charlie couldn’t get off the train to get to work and earn money, how did his wife pay for sandwich makings?)

 Now to my second point: I see an opportunity for supermarkets to tap the sensory-overload market by establishing special shopping hours. Employees might supply maps or crash courses in the use of shopping apps. Stores might provide a place for shoppers to meet, compare lists, share tips, and even strike up friendships.

(One more return to the MTA and that sandwich. Was it the same every day? A pickle on the side? Chips? A can of cola?)

 

Okay, too much overthinking. Perhaps that man in the supermarket wasn’t paralyzed with indecision. Perhaps he was simply lingering to enjoy time away from home.

 And maybe that was Charlie’s intention. After all, he put only 10 cents in his pocket. Not enough for the exit fee. And certainly not enough for a return ticket.

Think about it.

While you're pondering, you can paste the link below into your browser if you're in the market to make MTA by the Kingston Trio your next earworm. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7Jw_v3F_Q0

 

The Colors of My Life

 

Carolyn J. Rose

 

Many of the photographs from my early childhood (late 1940s and on into the 1950s) are in black and white. So I’m not surprised that my mental snapshots are also in shades of black, white, gray, and sometimes muted greens and reds. There is also pink in a variety of shades because my grandmother, who sewed many of clothes, believed firmly that boys wore blue and girls wore pink. (She also made everything a size too large and a few inches too long because I was sure to grow into it. But let’s not go back to that land of schoolyard embarrassment.)

 

My clearest memory of a color beyond the traditional blues (navy and powder) selected for my brother’s wardrobe, involves the discovery of a shard of robin’s egg dropped beside a dirt road. I stared at it for long moments and then hunted for other pieces but found none. (Robins may eat shells or carry them some distance from the nest.) Disappointed, I took it home and put it on a shelf in my room. Later, when I could be trusted (but not far) with a paint brush, I slathered an attempt at matching that color on my bedroom walls.

 

Perhaps it was that same year when I marveled at the deep blue of the Colorado summer sky. Don’t talk to me about how sunlight is scattered and why the sky appears blue. I know what I know. “Bluer than can be believed,” I called it. Photographs couldn’t capture the depth of the color, but it imprinted on my brain and caused me to fall deeper in love with all shades of blue.

 

Cobalt

Azure

Lapis

Sapphire

Cornflower

 

When it came time to paint or repaint, my choice was always along the blue spectrum. No matter that others indicated by their expressions or comments or complaints that they were done with blue. Only occasionally did I cave, going for silvery gray, greenish gray, or an off-white barely smoke-like shade of gray. Once I even made the daring choice of—are you ready?—apricot.

 

It was a brief romance, and one without chemistry or electricity.

 

And then it was back to blue. This is, after all, my life.

To Mudgeon or not to Mudgeon?

    My wife has accused me of being a curmudgeon. She’s even gone so far as to buy me (and insist I wear) a t-shirt captioned “Captain Curmudgeon” with an amusing (snort) caricature splayed across the front. But am I really a curmudgeon? I decided the first step would be to consult the folks at the Oxford Dictionary as to the actual definition. 

cur·mudg·eon /kərˈməj(ə)n/ noun 1. a bad-tempered person, especially an old one. 

YOU KIDS GET THE %$#&^ OFF MY LAWN!!!

Okay, okay, I’ll own up to the “old” part of the definition. I have been around the sun 76 times. (And bought a souvenir key chain at the gift shop.) I’m admittedly no spring chicken. 

    

But “bad tempered”? I beg to frickin differ!!! I think I’m perfectly even tempered. After all, I made no attempt to burn Mar-a-Lago to the ground when “he who shall not be named” finagled his way into the White House a second time. And no matter what egregious muckery Elon Musk has perpetrated on any given day, I have yet to spray paint the words “Sieg Heil!!!” on anyone’s Tesla. 

    I do confess, as the years stack up, little things that shouldn’t raise my temperature annoy the hell out of me. Such as:

• The guy in front of us in line at the recycling center, as we waited to turn in one expired cell phone, felt it necessary to carefully exacto knife all 79 cardboard boxes he had transported there in the back of his pickup. A glance back would have alerted him that he was holding up the line. But did he? Not on your life. 

• The fact that I have to learn yet another song in Latin for my community chorale concert. “Laudate eum in timpano et choro.” Or words to that effect. After two choir concerts with Latin lyrics, I feel supremely confident I could go back to ancient Rome and confidently order a McCleopatraburger. 

• Since we’re on music, pet peeve 3 is songs where the title appears nowhere in the song. Examples? “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. “Baba O’ Riley” the Who, “A Day in the life” by the Beatles. And worst of all the Jefferson Airplane’s “3/5 of a mile in 10 seconds” in which they sing the entire song and then, at the end, Marty Balin shouts (for no apparent reason) “3/5 of a mile in 10 seconds.” I don’t know what drugs they were using but I’ll take a hard pass. 

• Young women (with the occasionally male exception) who croon “purrrrrfect” after taking your order at a restaurant. As we all know, pobody’s nerfect. 

• Guys who equate their manhood with how badly they need a muffler job on their “tricked-out” little Mitsubishi. (Or insert your favorite noisy, smelly rackety car here.)  

• Pedestrians who hold a cell phone 3 inches from their face while they cross the street mid-block. The last thing in the world I want is for someone to plow into a screen-junky slacker. Which is why I shriek “pay attention future corpse” as I drive by them.  

• People who can’t remember their PIN number when paying for stuff at the supermarket with a debit card.  

Oh, wait, that’s me. Never mind.

 

The Norovirus Diet

 

Carolyn J. Rose

 

On the plus side, catching the norovirus is a sure way to lose weight. I’m down three pounds in two days—just in time to get into the summer wardrobe.

 

A bout of this virus can also make you lose your appetite for some of the favorite foods you ate in the hours before you found yourself doing the tight-cheek tango to the bathroom. In my case, those were foods I should steer clear of—cake and cookies and cream cheese, fried shrimp, creamy salad dressing, and all manner of chips in crackly packaging. Yes, cheesy snacks.

 

And if you’re looking for a clean-out similar to that achieved before your last colonoscopy, here it is.

 

On the minus side there’s the nausea, sometimes only a vague feeling and sometimes a full-body, full-on experience.

 

There’s also the uncertainty. Do I lean over that porcelain bowl? Or do I sit? From sad experience, I’ve concluded that either choice can be the wrong one. But I see an opportunity for an inventor to create a bit of bathroom “furniture” that would somehow allow a norovirus victim to do both simultaneously.

 

And then there’s that strange stomach symphony of sounds, a clash of rumbling and grumbling playing at a pitch never before heard in my lifetime. At times I’m concerned I’ll set off the sensors monitoring for volcanic activity from Mt St Helens. And if I were to submerge myself in the Columbia, there’s a good chance that migrating gray whales off the coast would pause and try to decipher the gurgling message from my stomach as it works to expell the virus.

 

Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet to cure this crap. (Pun intended.) Fortunately, the worst of it lasts only 2 or 3 days. Days, I might add, which seem to stretch on endlessly as I swill electrolyte-balancing drinks and nibble an occasional cracker.

You Should Talk!!

 The other day, while exchanging texts with my emoji-prone sister, I began thinking about the roots, development, and deterioration of human communication. Hey, I’m retired and have way-too-much time on my hands.

It must have started with a cave couple gathered around the campfire, waiting for that triceratops haunch spinning on a spit to reach exactly the right degree of dripping, bloody perfection.

She, gesturing back toward the cave, issues a series of grunts, clicks, and keening sounds that translate to “That thing you drew on the cave wall. The one that shows you chasing down the triceratops and slaying it with a club?”

He, blinking frantically, a stegosaurus-caught-in-the-headlights look in his eyes, offers his own series of grunts, sniffs, and jowl sounds that offer his retort. “Uh, huh. What about it?”

Grunt, chitter, squawk. “Everybody knows you came across the beast already dead.”

Grunt, grunt, grunt. “Deadish,” he insists. “Possibly expired.”

“Anyway,” she continues with her insistent cave woman exasperation, “I don’t like it on that wall. I want it on the other wall.”

Mankind progressed rapidly from there of course. Soon developing grunt-free language. Nouns, verbs, and metaphors soon rolled from the lips of people through the ages. Useful terms like “zounds” (Gods wounds) “ostler” (like an Elizabethan parking valet) and “Hey nonny, nonny,” (a verse from a medieval pop song “Land of a thousand prances,”) were created, used, then discarded.

And then the idea occurred to someone. What if we could talk to someone who isn’t even in the room? The technology soon leapfrogged from rudimentary two-soup-cans-and-string devices to smoke signals, semaphore flags and then, miracle of miracles, the telegraph. 

Now the most complex messages could be sent hundreds, nay thousands of miles, via a series of dits and dahs through a wire. That no one on the other end had any idea what the dits and dahs meant was an obstacle that took a while to overcome.

After that, it was Katie bar the door. Pony express, wireless radio, the printing press, and poon-shazam Alexander Graham Bell invents THE TELEPHONE! You could now hear the actual voice of a person on the other end asking you if you needed aluminum siding.

Fast forward a century and a half (give or take). From Gilligan’s Island on TV to Spice Girls music videos and movies featuring multiple car crashes, explosions, and snarky super-heroes, we have perfected the art of human communication.

Or have we? With the advent of cell phones and the internet, we can carry on conversations without actually seeing or even knowing who we’re talking to. No longer is it necessary to type actual words to transmit the meaning. “Hw R U. I M fn.” Before long we’re be text-grunting at one another. And emojii’s, those little cartoony hearts, faces and animals will eliminate the need for even the animalisms.

Well, I’m about done ranting. Time for dinner. I think the triceratops should be roasted to perfection about now. 
 

Night Noises

 

Carolyn J. Rose

A few nights ago our dog exploded from the “bunker” of blankets between us and ran to the door barking. This was unusual behavior for a ten-year-old mutt known for sleeping through the night with only an occasional grunt as she changes position. Since she’d never been concerned about the sounds of neighbors coming and going after dark, we flipped aside our blankets and, with much creaking of joints, trudged to the window.

What dire threat was bearing down on us at 3 AM? Terrorists? Insurrectionists? A pack of possums? House flippers wanting to buy our home at a deep discount? Evangelists? Aluminum siding salesmen? Librarians coming for those overdue banned books?

None of the above.

Instead, we saw a young man checking recycling bins for cans and bottles. No threat to us. Just a sign of our sad and chaotic economic times.

There was nothing for him in our bin and he moved on quickly. We returned to bed at a slower pace. With a final growl, Nikki joined us.

Before I fell asleep, I thought about other night noises, sounds from my childhood carried on sultry summer air. I recalled the faint bark of a dog from a farm perhaps half a mile away as the crow flew. Two miles if that crow followed the roads. It was a more a bark of affirmation than warning. “I’m a dog. I’m here. I can bark. Listen.”

The next memory is of a screech owl, the sound almost like the whinny of an injured horse, and so unusual and frightening—to my young self—that I woke my father. He assured me the bird was the size of his fist and no danger to me. But until the owl flew off to hunt elsewhere, I could not relax into sleep.

The next summer another sound woke me, a scream that came again and again from the wooded hill behind our house. It sounded like a woman. A woman gripped by pain and terror. I roused my father, but this time he had no ready explanation. He seemed puzzled and even concerned. Definitely concerned. He pulled on jeans and shoes, grabbed a flashlight, and then loaded his rifle.

Naturally he told me to stay home. And naturally I slipped into my sneakers and followed his bobbing flashlight beam across the lawn and up the hill. The scream got louder. We emerged into a clearing and the flashlight beam slid across a brush pile. The next scream came from deep within the heap.

​My father shouted. “Who are you? Are you hurt?”

The scream gave a twisted echo of his call.

I scooted up behind him. There were bobcats in the Catskill Mountains. And I’d heard stories about panthers. Panthers screamed. Didn’t they?

My father shouted again. “Answer me. Who are you?”

The next scream was followed by the crackle of breaking twigs.

My father handed me the light and shouldered his rifle, aiming at the source of the sound. I shivered and cowered behind him, images of teeth and claws and blood filling my brain.

The crackling grew louder.

A final scream morphed into a yip.

A beagle pawed its way from the brush pile and ran off.

My father waited a few moments, then lowered the rifle, made a noise that was half laugh and half sigh of relief, and turned for home. “Probably chased a rabbit in there.”

I’d never seen the dog before and never saw it again. When winter came we burned that brush pile. A few days later I poked through the ashes looking for signs of a rabbit burrow. I found nothing. 70 years later, awakened by other sounds from the darkness, I remember that night and wonder what became of the dog. And the rabbit.