Old Times There

I got a banjo for Christmas! (Fear not gentle reader! I also got some music lessons.) Predictably, I have been messing around with it every day since. That toasted pecan finish, those twangy strings, that drum skin face are all irresistible. Just picking around by ear, though, what tune do you think I found?

Dixie.

Coincidence? Ya'll be the judge and jury, heah?

What Old Friends Are For

I was facetiming with an old high school chum this evening. She lives in Colorado, and at first refused to accept the call, keeping her thumb over the camera so that it was nothing but an audio call. "I'm embarrassed for you to see that I'm still in my pajamas!" she told me, but when I reported that we were having a lazy day around here, too, she relented.

"Look it's snowing here!" she turned the phone to reveal a lovely landscape of new fallen snow and Rocky Mountains beyond. There was nothing but cold rain out the window here, and so we caught up with what had happened to each of us since last we spoke.

As we chatted, her dog came into the room, and she put him on the screen, so I, in turn, presented first our dog and then our cat. "Now who's that?" she asked when she saw the cat.

"Penelope," I replied.

"I thought you were going to name your next calico cat Matisse," she reminded me, and I laughed, because that was true about 20 years ago. "Remember?" she continued. "You couldn't wait until it did something naughty so you would be able to say, Cut it out, Matisse!"

Supply Side

I have a distinct memory of sitting in the back seat of our station wagon watching the little plates on the gas pump fall one after the other as my mom filled up the tank. It was 1974 and the Energy Crisis was in full swing. The price per gallon of gasoline in our New jersey town had recently topped fifty cents. At twelve years old, that seemed like an impossible amount to me; I remember shaking my head and thinking that a whole dollar would barely buy 2 gallons.

If that was one of my earliest economic recollections, six years later I got another lesson when I stayed with a friend and her family for a few days in Italy. In Europe, gas was three times as much as it was in the states, but I had flown there from our home in Saudi Arabia, and when her dad asked me about the price of gas in the Kingdom, I laughed when I told him it was about 28 cents a gallon. His outrage surprised me. "Everyone should be paying more for a commodity in such short supply," he fumed. "It should be a free market."

Today I feel lucky to be a person who rarely drives over 5 miles a day; I can go over two weeks without filling the tank. I'm also fortunate to be able to pay for gas whenever I want to take a longer trip, even when it's over four dollars a gallon like it was in 2008. And I understand that the price of a gas is a function of many things: economic, environmental, and political.

Even so, this morning when I filled my tank for less than 35 dollars? I did a little happy dance.

The More Days of Christmas

When I was a kid, New Years day was one of the most boring days of the year. The drone of football floated over the drowsy living room, and upstairs the only other thing on was the Mummers Parade, a confounding pageant of feathers and stringed instruments capering down Broad Street. It wasn't hard to see that Christmas break was definitely over.

These days I like it better. Heidi and I always go to the first movie of the morning, and then the day is filled with preparing our traditional meal for family and friends. That takes the sting out of the end of vacation. And then there are some years, like this year, when school doesn't start until next Monday.

Four more days off? Now that's the way to start a year!

Legal in Virginia

When you know it's right, it's right.

This morning after 16+ years together, Heidi and I went on down to the courthouse and got us a marriage license, and while there was no walk down the aisle, there were many wedding day smiles when the civil celebrant put it all to rest, as long as we both shall live.

Bragging Rights

A few months ago my brother complained of hip pain that grew excruciating when he was forced to sit still, for example on airplanes (on which he traveled on all the time for work), for any length of time over a little while. "I know what it is," I said. "It's bursitis."

I was able to speak with such authority, not only because I'm a notorious know-it-all, but also because, I, too, had suffered from such pain. Regular readers might recall that back in May of 2012 I sought help from an acupuncturist for my malady. Back then, after a couple of months of semi-weekly treatment, I was pain-free. Recently, though, that hitch in my left-side giddy-up has returned and so I also returned for a little more spinning needle therapy today. Although my relief was not quite as immediate as last time, I am looking forward to a couple of 30 minute snoozes a week for the next month or so.

Oh? And when, a couple of days after that conversation, my mother called to check in with my brother about his own hip, he had been diagnosed and treated, and in response he spoke some of my favorite words:

"Tracey was right." 

Shipping News

The guy at the UPS store saw us coming: he burst out the door to help us with our burden of parcels and bags and boxes to be shipped. Once inside, though, it was him who seemed to be hyperventilating. "We'll get through this!" he said under his breath surveying the load now stacked neatly on the floor by the counter.

Our eyebrows were raised; we knew there was a lot to send, but this was a shipping store, wasn't it? And as nice and helpful as he was to us, he was a little testy with any new customers coming in the door, "It's going to be a few minutes," he informed them curtly.

Each box that was taped up, weighed, and labeled was a personal triumph, a huge weight off his shoulders and onto the pick-up pile. And when, 85 pounds later, at last I swiped my card and signed the slip to finalize the transaction, for a moment it seemed like he might vault the counter to give us a high five or something, so it was a little anti-climactic when he simply nodded and said, "Next customer?"