Pull the Plug Friday Round-Up

If you can start things, you can quit them. I am about to wrap up a community thing that I’ve been doing for a long time. I don’t have the passion for it anymore, other groups can do it better, and I want to start something new. Still, it’s dreadful hard to pull the plug. I circle around it every day – not the decision itself, just the plug pulling part. Tomorrow, I say, every day. Tomorrow will be the day.

I was asked to do the reflection for this month’s Commission on Aging meeting. So I told the story of how five homeless guys pulled my son out of a burning car a few years ago and how that changed how I felt about homeless people despite having worked on the ‘homeless issue’ for decades and, at the end of my spiel, the people in their little Zoom boxes clapped but they were all muted. The Commissioner who is deaf waved his hands in the ASL sign for applause which I heard and appreciated dearly.

When the dermatologist burned off potential skin cancer sites, I imagined myself paddling in our canoe with my husband in the back steering and paddling. I’ve used this image before when I was being put out for my implant surgery and I think it’s becoming my go-to serenity trick. It is the perfect thing – the canoe skimming, the paddle dipping, the dragonfly lighting on the tip of the bow just for seconds. When they tell me it’s time to go, I believe it will be in a canoe.

The Great Escape remains a great movie. If you like all male casts, a ludicrous premise, oh, so loosely based on something that actually or might have happened or been imagined, and the doomed escape from a German prisoner of war camp by a dozen extremely great looking guys, then this is your movie. Personally. Steve McQueen.

Today we ate at Ma Fischer’s. It is an east side diner known among the older, very older crowd as the place to go to finish a night or morning of deep drinking. Those of us who remember those days now sit with younger folks eating their omelets with extra feta cheese who have no idea the clutter of regret and bummed cigarettes that littered the 3 am counter of the old Ma Fischer’s. They don’t need to know. It’s not like the old days were anything to be proud of, for heaven’s sake.

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Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash