Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Line ‘Em Up Friday Round-Up
Most of my adult life has centered around the question: what am I worried about next? Was it a class I was teaching where I wasn’t sure of the content? An unavoidable confrontation with a colleague? A family dinner where one or more of the attendees would bring their issues instead of dessert? These things used to jam up at the door like crazy shoppers at Walmart on Black Friday. Now, I have them line up, one can’t come in until the one in front has left. It’s very orderly and centering and nobody gets crushed trying to get to the $99 big screen TV.
I told my new hairdresser guy that I wanted my haircut to be between Jamie Lee Curtis and reality. “We have to talk about your ears,” he said and so we talked for several minutes, the goal being to come to a complete understanding about how long the hair would be in front of the ear and how to treat the around the ear challenge. “We have to talk these things through,” he said, like we were getting off the elevator at the marriage counselor’s. And then he said, “we’re done, you can take your stuff off,” and I put my cochlear receiver and hearing aid on the counter and did nothing but smile at him for the next thirty minutes. No words. We said all that needed to be said.
I’m going to get rid of the bikes in the garage. There are four of them. Two of them work, two don’t. They all need to go. I’m done with the myth that I’m going to ride my bike anywhere. My balance is for shit and I can’t take the dogs along. It’s only sad if I loved biking which I haven’t since I was about 12 and would ride my bike on the dirt roads near my house. That was delicious but it was a long bite ago.
When I was a kid my older sister would lay a string down the center of our room and order me not to cross the line or else. It seems that we have a new neighbor much like my sister (who returns my letters unopened because apparently I did cross a line at some point in our relationship). So we have surveyors coming with their fancy instruments who will put down stakes with pink flags to mark our territory. But I’m thinking that may not be enough. We might need sentries to patrol the border. It could get intense, I tell you.
Because our dog, Swirl, is an unpredictable but powerful chewer, I signed him up for a monthly serious chewer toy box. This costs what my mother would say is a ‘pretty penny’ but my figuring was that having all these classy things to chew would keep him from gnawing on my dictionary or Howard’s signed baseballs. But he eschews (I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it) all the expensive, made just for big time chewers and now I have a giant bag full of them. Sometimes I spread peanut butter on one to see if he’ll take the bait. He just licks it off and goes to look for a watering can to chew. Oh well.
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Photo by Tom Wilson on Unsplash
7 Comments on “Line ‘Em Up Friday Round-Up”
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The bike decision got my attention. I finally agreed to let my perfect three speed black English bike with a wicker basket on the front go to the curb.(We live on a busy street and things are snatched up quickly, sometimes before we have even made it back to the house.) I somehow thought I could regain that college student who peddled merrily with a skirt up to my whatever around Cambridge.
Yes. Our minds are in many places at once – don’t you think? Riding the bike when I was 12 was always the feeling I wanted to recapture at 30, 40, 70 but it just never happened. It’s okay – there’s plenty of outside to love without being on a bike.
And I can easily remember the riding without worrying about my thighs!
It could be rocks, flat stones or very hard wood. We had a Jack Russel that would attach herself so tightly to the end of the hose that you could swing her around, high in the air, for hours. She damaged most of her teeth but would seek out anything that even vaguely resembled a garden hose until the day she died. XxX
Luckily, Swirl doesn’t have a chance to get to the hose but, yeah, it would stand a chance.
Duke is not a chewer, but we have had several chewers, one so bad that she needed barely a minute to completely despoil ANY electronic object. She beheaded Barbie dolls if my granddaughter wasn’t giving her enough attention and the moment we left the room, she’d dismantle the remote controls. We got so paranoid about it that we never left the room together except to sleep and then we had to pack up everything and lock it in a room into which she couldn’t get.
She wasn’t a mere chewer. She thought carefully about what to chew. She had issues with various people and would specifically target their stuff. I loved her for her entire life, but ten years after she passed, I’m still afraid to leave anything where Jaws can get it.
You may have a thoughtful chewer of your own because if it was just a toothy issue, she’d chew anything she was given but since she targets particular items, there’s some serious thought in progress. Best of luck!
You’ve made me think on this one. Swirl has so little animosity toward anyone and not a whit of snarkiness but I wonder if there is some very deep-seated dog logic to his bizarre chewing choices.