Friday Round-Up: Hideous Meets Hangnails

I stopped writing this week. Curiously, I also seem to have stopped drinking. I have had three beers in that time, though I don’t consider beer-drinking drinking since beer is a beverage unlike wine which is more of a tool. It’s been a  week with moments of annoying physical labor interspersed with tubercular coughing and having to lay down to rest and look at my phone. Here are the highlights.

I am running an assisted living facility for two aging dogs. They lay on their beds and watch CNN all day. We have their meds on the kitchen counter along with a log where we write down which got what when and, yes, I am giving a 12-year old scruffy, not all that charming, cloudy-eyed Bischon insulin shots twice a day. Next week I’m supposed to start testing his urine with the little test strips they sell to humans. This seems beneath me.

The schlepping of stuff is wearing me out. I know I wrote a few weeks ago how I wanted to have this amazing, fry it up in a pan physical life.  Driving my truck, hauling those big pink bags of donations around town, smoking an imaginary cigarette. So cool. This week it was Granny Clampett sprawled on my rear end reaching for the far back bags while homeless women smoking real cigarettes watched me, asking silently “what is your deal?”

My granddaughter asked me if I had ever felt like I needed to be a different person in order to fit in with the popular kids. She asked me this, not thinking for a single moment, that maybe I had been one of the popular kids. I said yeah, sure, but then told her to forget the popular kids, they’ll all flame out by the end of high school and become dumb and boring. Look at me, I told her, I’m finally getting my footing as an extremely cool person. I know how to fill an 11-year old with hope.

I was part of a victory this week. A small group of us organized a community protest of a proposed funding cut to emergency shelters. Just winging it, we spurred a ton of emails and phone calls, an online petition, and then a press conference at the county courthouse. While the County Board committee discussed the funding cut, a homeless man next to me held his sign and looked straight at them.  It changed everything.

Being sick makes you feel old, especially if you already are old. But it’s all temporary, right? Until it isn’t. Grim business and then there are the hangnails on top of it all. I resolve to focus on my cuticles, slather them with Nivea Creme, smooth them out, and have them heal by morning. I hope the sun is shining and I am well again.

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash