Chili Shakers Friday Round-Up

The woman sitting next to me at the Alzheimer’s breakfast inched her hand slowly across the white tablecloth and slipped the spoon off the saucer holding my coffee cup. I picked up the spoon and moved it to the other side of my plate and so she decided to fold our napkins, lining them up with the tablecloth first and then folding. Later, when the choir sang, she rocked back and forth to the music, and reached over to hold my hand.

People I know are going everywhere but we are not. It seems everyone is in Europe or touring Israel or cracking coconuts open with machetes they borrowed from a local. We are here. We hope to have a camping trip this summer. Right now, we are glad to go to the coffee shop, to meetings, to walk around the block together. We’ve had a rough patch and we’re coming out of it so sitting on the back porch seems lovely like sinking into a hundred hotel pillows.

I met a very charming and important government official today. He smiled when he talked which I think is a hugely positive attribute which I have practiced but can’t pull off. He seemed interested in every little thing and carried an air of joyfulness which spread like a fabulous air freshener in the van that we took from one event to another. He ate the overcooked, very pale broccoli at the senior meal site with gusto and I loved him for that.

If we continue to have terrible thunderstorms in Wisconsin, Swirl and I are going to need counseling. I’m not exactly the Dog Whisperer but I am pretty close to this particular dog. i can read his moods, I know where he is all the time, I wrote a story (fiction) about him getting caught in a riptide in Lake Superior and a fictional lady saving him. I mean – I truly love this dog. But the other night, after hour 4,000 of the thunderstorm and him going off his rocker despite his Thundershirt and tranquilizer and CBD oil, I wanted to take him back to the kennel in the U.P. where he was a sled dog and leave him hooked up to his old dog house with his 199 mates. Let them all howl and be crazy together.

Get yourself to Goodwill and buy yourself some chili salt and pepper shakers. I am not quite there yet but I think I am on the path of permanently eschewing buying new things. Today, I bought a pinstripe blazer, a rose cardigan, and something else (I can’t remember) along with the salt and pepper shakers which were still wrapped in paper inside the box. How sweet is that? $1.99 and now they’re my favorite things in the kitchen, right up there with the dog adorned dish towel, the corner of which Swirl chewed off last week.