I’m Not Extraordinary but I Keep Trying Friday Round-Up a Day Late on Saturday

Lately, I have been getting to know a man who is legally blind. Sometimes I give him a ride home from meetings and we talk all the way like we’ve known each other for years. We talk about him going blind and me going deaf, what it was like, how life-altering the transition was, how we have been embarrassed by our inability to hear or see, how we got to the other side (mostly) and are able to walk tall. He walks tall wherever he goes, stands as straight as a rail, and always has a smile on his face. So I try to emulate him. Find the joy in this disability. Or maybe it’s the joy of survival. Both.

My son broke his arm playing soccer and was off work for two months, so I bought him basketball tickets to celebrate him going back to work. Except I screwed up and bought tickets from a ticket broker instead of the actual basketball team and today spent a full hour in the hell that is customer support with the person telling me to practically reprogram my phone in order to download the tickets. I said, ‘Everybody in America has the phone I have! Why do I have to do all these extra things? and then she gave me a list of new instructions that involved changing my email and password, playing hopscotch in flip-flops, entering my grades from third grade including the teacher’s comments, and counting to a hundred holding my breath. I did all of it but it didn’t work.

To celebrate not getting the tickets, we took two lamps in for repair. It is not possible to describe BBC Lighting to anyone not from here. It has amazing light fixtures, fans, chandeliers, lights of all kinds all ablaze, intermixed with statues of Elvis, signed photos of JFK and Frank Sinatra, gorilla statues and a popcorn machine. There is also a basket of fortune cookies by the door. The lamp repairman had a Ph.D. in lamps, gave us a short course on three-way lamps, and said our lamps had been hand-tooled. I didn’t know. They were from my mother-in-law. We didn’t have lamps and then we got hers. There are so many things I should’ve paid more attention to. Like polishing the lamps, for heaven’s sake.

I testified at the County Board budget hearing and talked at other public events this week, and I wasn’t great. I am so often eloquent (mostly when I’m alone or in my car) but not this week. I was kind of a confused mess, but I showed up. At one of those meetings, I found out later, there was a tiny nail stuck to one of the magnets on my head. You know, the magnet that connects the processor on my ear to all the machinery inside my head so I can hear? Yeah. There was a tiny nail on it, origin unknown. So there it is. I showed up, for sure, with a nail on my head. It could have been a bottle cap. That’s how I look at it.

Kamala Harris is up 3 points in Iowa. A very well-respected poll just released today shows her 47% to 44% over Trump. And we know why. Women. We are going to save the country. Bless us and keep us well until every one of us gets to the polls and marks that box, especially those of us who really know what ‘going back’ means. We’re not going back.