Friday Round-Up: Tired

We are going camping for a week. The last time we camped it took an hour and a half to put up the tent. We could feel neighboring campers put down their marshmallows to watch. So I bought a pop-up tent which, just like in a Three Stooges movie, practically leaps out of its flat round carrying case and explodes into a tent. I know this because we tried it on our front lawn. Then we had to watch three different YouTubes to figure out how to put the genie back in the bottle. There is no WiFi where we are going but we do have a truck so could just load the thing whole, I guess. Here is said tent.

People we know are wearing diapers and they aren’t babies. The ghost of Christmas Future looms large when you reach a certain age. It isn’t death that is so paralyzing; it’s what may come first. It makes one’s mouth go dry to hear or see or learn that someone you knew as brilliant, productive, and exceptional is waiting for a change. There but for fortune covers a lot of unpleasant contingencies.

I met Senator Tammy Baldwin tonight. She’s a Steady-Eddie progressive, no flash or drama, just a studious person who works very hard and looks out for people because she was once a person who needed looking out for herself. Her opponent in the fall election is a state senator who is a very conservative, Trump-supporting, NRA-endorsed woman who filmed a commercial for TV with a handgun on the table in front of her. I met Bill DiBlasio, Mayor of New York, tonight, too. But I didn’t get a picture of him.

Earlier this week, I watched the man across the street use a bicycle pump to put air in the tire of his car. It never occurred to me that a person could do this, thus avoiding all of the complex business of going to the gas station and finding quarters. You could just keep a bicycle pump in the car; not sure why this isn’t more widely known.

Our dog is still alive. We talk about killing him every other week. And let me just say here that we don’t talk about ‘putting him to sleep’ which is what we always tried to do with our children. Either he is going to die on his own or we are going to kill him. He’s 14, diabetic, and blind. He is also weirdly telepathic and has found the fountain of youth which is hidden somewhere in this house but only operating occasionally. As soon as the appointment is made for the sleep-putting, he begins scampering about. He does this until we cancel.

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Photo by Imthaz Ahamed on Unsplash