Storm Stories

If you are fortunate enough to survive, a decent hurricane can provide you with some good stories for years to come--for example, those people who lived through the tsunami in Thailand probably don't have to think of anything else to talk about, ever. I have a storm story, although once I had a child it seemed more alarming than interesting, making me wonder how I reached adulthood considering some of the questionable decisions made by my parents on my behalf.

Hurricane Donna occurred on the twelfth of September in 1960, when I had just begun the 8th grade. I was living on Long Island, which was expected to get a direct hit. Waking up early and praying for a day off, I was severely bummed but not surprised that our schools were scheduled to be open; in Rockville Centre, nothing short of a nuclear meltdown closed the schools. Nevertheless, peering out the window, things sure looked bad to me. But my mother said, as she always did, "If the school is open you are going," unless she wanted me to go somewhere with her, like to the beach or shopping in Manhattan, at which time she would say, "You'll learn a lot more walking through Times Square than you will cooped up in that damn building all day." (And another piece of the puzzle falls into place....)

So that morning at about 8:00 AM I walked the block to the bus stop and boarded the school bus. The whole time things were getting worse outside, making me think maybe a tree would fall on me, or even a house, or maybe that nasty Miss Gulch from "The Wizard of Oz" would ride by on her bicycle, cackling. None of those things happened and I got to school safely, although quite wet. I was finally settled in my homeroom when, at about 8:45, the principal's voice came booming over the PA system that the storm was "very bad" and that we should return to our buses and go home. In the very bad, not good, terrible, much worse storm.

On the ride home, with branches flying and hitting the windows, our school bus got sort of stuck in deep water, and while trying to making a turn, fell over on its side. Kids screamed, of course, but mostly in glee; nobody got hurt since we had been going about 2 MPH. The bus driver told us to get out and go home, advising us to "Run!" (Good tip.) Now I was about eight blocks from my house and had to make my way in the rain and wind and flying debris, all the while thinking that if the wind blew a bus over, what chance did I have? It was only later that I learned that Hurricane Donna had winds of 140 mph when it hit, and that 50 people died and that damages totaled $130 million on the East Coast.

My son has accused me of making up many of my childhood stories, saying, "Nothing like that ever happened to me!" Damn straight.

Drink to Your Health

My husband's recent surgery, which took place exactly two weeks and eight and a half hours ago but who's counting, has given me a new perspective on sickness, health and the whole damn thing we call living. Ever since Mitch authorized a surgeon to cut into his shoulder and mess around, our entire life has been about nothing more than that very thing. His right arm--and he's a rightie-- is in a sling that keeps it immobilized, and thus he cannot drive or open pickle jars or feed the cats or slap around an intruder should one appear, although he swears he would rise to that particular occasion.

Still, he sleeps--or more accurately doesn't sleep--in a chair in the living room, forget the marital bed. Let it be noted, however, that he can cut his food, and please God, forgive me for that one time I tried to do it.

Bottom line: We take our health for granted and complain about petty things, while everyday life for many, many, many people is so much harder than everyday life for most of us. We are busy stocking up on supplies for an impending Category 2 storm, while the residents of Haiti, many of whom lost limbs, are still living in huts and tents more than a year after a devastating earthquake flattened their country.

I am reminded of the old adage: "I cried because I had no shoes, and then I met a man who had no feet." I am trying hard to count my blessings, but it's hard to remember to be thankful when your once-debonair husband has trouble zipping up his own fly.

Help Me Help You

In my ongoing quest to find paying work, I came upon an ad seeking a "Self Improvement Blogger." It required a degree in psychology, which I lack, but went on to describe other attributes for the interested candidate, such as an understanding of personal development, productivity, and psychology. To further explain, it expanded:  "While the focus of the site is psychology, we're looking for someone who can can write on a broad range of self improvement topics and take a positive approach to how an understanding of psychology leads to greater happiness and fulfillment."

Now I can write on pretty much anything, with the possible exception of why Arabs and Jews hate each other, but I am drawing a blank on how psychology leads to greater happiness and fulfillment. Anyway, it got me thinking about the whole subject and my own plans for self-improvement. I got started right away by adding a hyphen between the words "self" and "improvement," which immediately made me not just feel better but actually be better, at least better than the person who wrote that ad, since correct grammar and spelling surely are high on anyone's list of virtues.

In this heightened mood, I feel like sharing how I plan to improve myself this very day:
1. Bleach hair on upper lip.
2. Call the mortgage company and tell them to ignore that check they got that was intended for my cell phone provider, who sent back the check for the mortgage they received in error.
3. Write new checks for cell phone and mortgage.
4. Vow to be more careful when paying bills.
5. Stop looking for paying work and do that thing for Rick (already)!

Another Natural Disaster Heading to D.C.

There's a hurricane a-comin' and it looks big, like maybe it will be a terrible disaster and wreak havoc and cause power outages and make people keep their TVs on 24/7, which of course is what the weather people hope for, live for and dream about. This could be the "worst storm in decades" according to The Weather Channel. People are being evacuated up and down the East Coast! States are being declared disaster areas even before the first raindrop hits the ground! It might rain a lot in our nation's capital!

Along with Hurricane Irene come many questions, the most pressing one being, "Do we have enough toilet paper to last the storm?" What is the driving force behind people flocking to their local supermarkets for the stuff--could it be all that talk of evacuation? And how little toilet paper do most people stock in good weather that they will run out in a day or two? And again I must ask, why do they show bears using toilet paper in advertising? But the most important question of all is how is it possible that Governor Rick Perry, of dubious moral character by the looks of him, is already the leading Republican candidate?

Talk about your disaster areas: Irene will pass in a day or two, but the President blows hot air around for at least four years.

It's Never Too Late to Be a Sex Kitten

In her recent autobiography, former film star Jane Fonda has divulged her secret ingredient for maintaining a strong libido at age 73. (That Jane, we always could count on her for all the important stuff.) And she is such a do-gooder, she's out there telling us what it is, so we don't even need to buy her book to find out. In fact, it's so simple, it's a wonder I didn't think of it myself: It's testosterone, that stuff men have in spades! Jane took hers in pill form starting at age 70, around the time of her third face lift, although it's also available in a patch and a gel that you rub on, god knows where.

The good news is that, according to Jane, it's given her the best sex of her entire life! And the down side is minimal--just some pesky little side effects that wouldn't hurt a fly. So go for it, ladies--and keep me posted on how many men you find who want to sleep with a muscular, over-the-hill granny with greasy hair, zits, a deep voice and a hairy chest.

Elective Surgery: Doctors Have to Eat Too!

A rotator cuff tear is a common cause of pain and disability among adults. It will definitely weaken your shoulder, making many daily activities, like combing your hair or getting dressed, slightly painful and difficult to do. You could choose to live with this pain or shave your head or join a nudist colony, or you could hire a surgeon to rip open your shoulder and put in some pins and sew it up, and then it will be excruciatingly painful and completely useless for many months, until some time in the future when it might get better. By then something else will hurt, however, since bodies do tend to fall apart eventually, especially if you use them a lot.

You'd think that with about 40,000 rotator cuff surgeries being performed in the United States each year, there must be solid medical evidence supporting the effectiveness of that treatment. However, not so. Actually, more than 150 published medical papers conclude there is "no solid evidence that rotator cuff surgery benefited patients more than no surgery." (Please do not tell my husband about this.)

However, despite the absence of any published papers in medical journals, we can certainly all agree that rotator cuff surgery benefits the surgeons greatly.  In fact, the smartest boy in my high school class, our valedictorian, became an orthopedic surgeon in Salt Lake City, giving him unlimited access to all those athletic skiers and snowboarders and hikers, each with a couple of shoulders, not to mention hips and knees, needing repair. Last I heard he had moved to Moab, probably plugging into all those rock climbers and mountain bikers....ouch!

So if you want your kids to make a lot of money to pay off their school loans, have them become orthopedic surgeons. After all, those aging baby boomers--there are about 75 million of them alive today-- have two shoulders apiece, and that is a whole heck of a lot of shoulders.

God, Shmod

I'm getting a little tired of everyone talking about this guy named God. (I know--some people, usually lesbians, insist he's a gal.) It seems to me that with all our incredible technological advances that allow us to send cameras up into space that can take pictures of the fungus growing underneath your toenail from light years away, that someone--sometime, somehow-- would have snapped a picture of God while he was busy "saving" them.

Now don't get me wrong: I am not an atheist-- not that there's anything wrong with that. I do believe in a Greater Power, or else how could there be so many different flowers and bugs and body parts, but I'm just saying I don't think that he/she/it hears our prayers and brings us to live with him up in the clouds just because we're nice to people or give to charity or go to church every Sunday or say we believe in him on our death beds, or even our regular beds. As for his son Jesus-- don't get me started.

I write this sober stuff because around my house all Humor is gone, having packed up and moved out while my husband was at the hospital having shoulder surgery ten days ago, and taking my Muse with it so I'm not painting either. What I am doing is hauling in bags of ice from the supermarket for my husband's ice machine and watching him suffer, not always in silence. By all reports he'll be better in about six months, so I should be funny again by next February, just in time to mock Valentine's Day.

What Thornton Knew

Everyone wants to know everything; being right is so important and if you are wrong you are just a dummy. The good news is that these days it is so easy to be right, all you have to do is Google it! If you have an iPhone like my husband, every fact is at your fingertips. And if you have a computer, like everyone else, you know about things you don't even know about, like Jesse is back with Kat and Kim's wedding will cost 20 million, and that new princess in England is refusing to eat, and her sister Pippa is suddenly out of favor with the press. Jen still has a hot bikini body and a 10-year-old cover girl is infuriating mothers who think it is wrong to sexualize children. Several Israelites were killed in the Gaza--what else is new. Obama's popularity is sinking along with the Dow, and Apple will unveil its new iPad in 2012 and it will be much better than the one you just bought, and get ready for the 10th anniversary of 9/11, this will be big according to Mayor Bloomberg.

But nowhere, nobody, no website, no TV station, no newspaper reporter seems to know what happens after we die or what we should be doing while we are here, and nobody seems to care-- how odd! The closest we've got is when Emily comes back to life for a day in Thornton Wilder's play, "Our Town," which granted was only his personal take on life after death but it's the best I've ever come across. I will go read it again right now.

Just Elgoog It!

I have a great idea for a brand new website that should become an instant Internet sensation! It's still in the very early stages, i.e. I thought of it while I was falling asleep last night, but I believe it has great potential: It's called Elgoog, which for the slower among you is Google spelled backwards. You go to Elgoog.com and search for anything, and you will get only incorrect information. This would give you a wonderful advantage in political conversations, for obvious reasons.

In fact, I see this as a tremendous boon to civilization. Google is almost as good, but still there are those annoying nuggets of truth sprinkled throughout, which is so confusing at times. On my website, you will have the confidence of knowing immediately that everything you learn is 100% wrong. For example, if you believe me when I say my mother was a direct descendant of Cleopatra and my father owned the New York Yankees until his death in 2005 when he succumbed to Legionnaire's Disease on the QEII, just Elgoog it--if it comes up there, you know it's fake.

I just Googled "elgoog"and learned there already is a mirror site of Google that gives all the information backwards, but I'm not sure that's true. Who can live with that kind of uncertainty?

Who You Callin' Black?

Texas Governor Rick Perry, in a speech yesterday at the Iowa State Fair-- and what better place for politicians to hawk their snake oil--dubbed our national debt "a big, black cloud hanging over America."  The formerly Reverend Al Sharpton, who is now less reverend and earns his living looking for racial slurs made by Republicans, expressed shock and outrage at this blatant and ugly reference to Barack Obama, who you all may remember is black.

How ridiculous! Obviously Perry, a dead ringer for a child molester if you ask me, was talking about Sharpton himself. The confusion came from his incorrect analogy: Al is much more of a windbag than a cloud, and since his diet of a few years ago he is now quite thin, making an accurate epithet for him a "small, black windbag hanging over America."

Can't those guys get anything straight?

Ouch!

Even in the bleakest of situations I can usually find something to laugh about; at the very least there is irony or fodder for biting sarcasm. For example, at the age of 22, I was visiting with my bedridden grandfather while everyone else was off at a family wedding. He was reminiscing about "the old country" when he suddenly stopped talking and declared that he was thirsty. I left the room to get him some water and returned moments later to find him dead. Hysterical, I rushed to the phone and called my then-fiance-- who I later married and then divorced, and who could blame me-- and he said, "Boy, he must have been really thirsty!" We both laughed, even with Grampa dead in the bed beside me.

The comedy continued the next day at my grandfather's funeral service when they wheeled his coffin into the small chapel of the funeral home. I went to see him one last time, and was shocked to see it was not my grandfather in there at all, but a completely different dead person, about 20 years younger to boot. I rushed to inform the funeral home director of the error, but he insisted that I was wrong. "Grief does that to people, you're confused, " he said. "And besides, people look very different in death." While he nattered on about how I was mistaken, a woman in the neighboring chapel began wailing and screaming about how much older her dead husband Morty looked. "I'm pretty sure she's got my grandfather, " I said to the funeral home director.

Funny stuff, those dead grandfathers. So much funnier than shoulder surgery for a torn rotator cuff, which my husband underwent three days ago and which resulted in his two-day hospital stay, swallowing enough painkillers to choke not just one horse but all the horses in the Kentucky Derby. I have nothing funny to say about that. In fact, forget I mentioned it--just read the dead grandfather stuff again. And have a nice day. :)