Not Completely Out of Gas But Close Friday Round-Up

The highlight of my week was the line dancing teacher coming over to dance next to me and then after watching me go a few rounds said, “That’s it. You’ve got it.” She dances in a t-shirt that says, “Dance Like No One is Watching,” and always has a towel around her neck. She calls out: Right, Left, Right, Left, Right, Crossover! Crossover,” this last part involving a bit of twirling. And always the count – 1-2-3-4. Keep the count and you’ve got it she says, so I keep the count and look at the wall instead of at other people who can mess you up because they don’t always keep the count. You know?

I wrote a piece on aging and marriage that I think is very good but probably not great because I can’t dislodge myself from my sudden, late life fascination with Leonard Cohen to whom I refer in the piece and who not everybody knows or gets. The song was “Suzanne” which I quoted in the original piece but my writing groups said, “Nope! You can’t do that. Copyright infringement.” So, I learned you can talk about lyrics but not quote them which is way harder than it sounds plus not everybody fell in the Leonard Cohen rabbit hole.

We have a hundred and ten year old basement with brick walls, mostly hidden under slapped on concrete or drywall or something heavy and rock like. Every couple of decades the slapped on stuff starts falling off because of water getting in the basement and then we ignite the age-old debate about whether we have a basement problem or a landscaping problem with contractors trading snark and playing the ‘if you sign in the next thirty seconds, I’ll drop the price $5,000.’ One guy drew us a diagram with a set of twenty markers, upside down just to impress us, and then made us wait while he put every marker back in his proper place for the next dunderhead couple.

I’m sitting on the bed where I was conceived. This is probably unusual. When my parents died, the only things I wanted from their house was their bedroom furniture and my dad’s minnow bucket. I got both. I needed a toaster at the time but didn’t want my brother to think I was so hard up I couldn’t buy my own toaster so I said nothing. I told this to my friend later and she bought me a toaster.

It hasn’t been a bad week, just one with many curve balls. So, I have had to do a lot of juking, which is something I’m pretty good at but this week came close to wringing out the last of my capability. In case you don’t know, juking is a sports term that means to “turn or bend quickly, typically to avoid someone or something.” So, yeah, a lot of juking around here.

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Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash