Slightly Compromised; or I’m Sure I’ll Be Fine

My memory used to travel down seasonal paths.

What’s that?  What restaurant?  Oh, yeah!  When were we last there?  I remember it was cold, but no snow.  Was it November?  I remember wearing the “winter white” coat, the one with the fabulous collar.  And Diana wore flats with no socks?  How does she stay warm?  Oooh, and do you remember the restaurant on the lake?  Peg was there.  She wore a one-piece pantsuit she came to regret around the end of her second drink.

People.  I remember hanging out with people, sometimes in large groups.  We sat next to each other, broadly grinning into each other’s faces.  Sometimes we hugged or sang karaoke.  

Now?  The sun rises, falls.  Little changes but maybe my shirt.  When did I last wear a pair of pants with a zipper?  Was it yesterday?  Was it last week?    Does it matter?  

Is there anyone keeping score?

Pearl, to borrow a phrase, has become unstuck in time.

I mean, don’t get me wrong.  I hear people.  Sometimes I even see people.  Almost five months into a work-from-home situation that I would’ve thought far more pleasurable than it actually is, there are people on Zoom. 

There are people just over that fence.  People on TV.  People upstairs. 

But are they present?  Nay, my friend.  Pearl – who now refers to herself in the third person, occasionally with what she imagines to be a 19^th century English accent – can go days without a mask-to-mask conversation.  Unless, of course, we’re talking about the mask I’ve adhered to the wall, the one I call “Wilson”.

Wilson and I are tight.  

It’s like he can read my mind.

Perhaps things will be better in the fall.  I’ll find that coat, maybe get a mask to match.  Wilson and I will go out, split an order of fries.  Maybe share a straw.

It will be magical.

Oh, You Know. Just Squeakin' By.

There is a drawer at my desk that currently contains a can of organic carrot soup, an envelope of dried soup, canned peaches, a ziploc baggie of dried apricots, and, for crying out loud, a dozen packets of Kikkoman soy sauce.

Good heavens.  What am I preparing for?

Canned food.  Dried fruits.  Lotion, band aids, birthday candles.  Wrist guards, silverware, a spare umbrella.  Salt packets, dried-up pens.  A bottle of Beano sent by one's sister, who worries, often and aloud, about office courtesy.

It is when the sky grows dark, with thunderstorms, blizzards and/or black helicopters that I imagine, all over the world, the drawers of the terminally employed.  In my mind, I go quickly from Pearl, Office Wonder Grunt, to Pearl, Last Woman on Earth, skittering through the Habitrail-like skyways and tunnels of Minneapolis, gleaning the canned fruits and extra socks from the abandoned offices of downtown office workers, stopping, perhaps, to nibble, nervously and mouse-like, on random packets of saltines...

Wait.  Am I a rodent now?

Representin'! or People. Huh.

The bus, this morning, smells of hot dish.  Some sort of tomato-based, Italian-sausaged, crusty-cheese-topped hot dish. 

It is 6:35 am, and I am ready for dinner.

What time did this person get up, anyway?

For the uninitiated, there are many potential smells to the bus.  The February unwashed-winter-coat smell of the horror of middle winter.  The weed-y What?-I’m-holding-this-for-a-friend smell creeping from backpacks.  Smells of flowers bought at the farmers’ market, of exuberant cologne wearers, of wet hairspray.

Generally, though the bus smells of nothing. 

Impressive, no?

How do they do it?  Of the hundreds, maybe thousands of people that ride a bus in a day,  can it be that the majority of us are reasonable human beings?

I got into a conversation the other day.

"I don't know how you do it," she said.  "Riding the bus?"  She shudders, shaking her head.  "Ugh.  So dirty.  All those people.  You just don't know what kind of person you're dealing with."

"Weird," I said, "that's what they say about you."

And didn't that get me a look.

I took a good look around today.  Just who are we dealing with?  The guy who wears long sleeves no matter the weather, the psoriasis peeping from his wrists.  The woman, dab-dab-dabbing moisturizer on her face for the three miles downtown.  The man in the business suit and track shoes, reading 1984.  The woman who went from slender to pregnant to mother of a six year old -- she shakes now, relies on a cane -- maybe early 30s.  The man with the pointy head, traveling with a boombox and usually dressed as an NBA player, circa 1976.  The middle-aged lady in sensible heels and a jaunty hat, her purse balanced on her lap, waiting...

Bus Friend Sandy boards.  "Look at you," she says, sitting down.  "All dressed up."

I smile at her.  "Just holding up my end of the bargain," I say.

On the Other Hand, I Can Belch When I Feel Like It

Hello hello hello!  Acme Gravel and Grommets Corporate lackey here!  I’m so glad you dropped by!

You know, I don’t always come into work on time, but when I do, rest assured it coincides with the days that there is no one else on the floor.  People on vacations, people working from home (WFH, or as those in the know say, “whiffing”), people working from, oh, who knows where.  It’s the anything-goes 21^st century, where people take conference calls from the beach and people in the office are alone with their computers and overcome with the sound of the heating/cooling system, a gentle whoosh that makes you grab last winter’s shawl and contemplate the under-desk nap you’ve been meaning to take for the last 30 years.

An intern skulks by. Backpacked and pale, she heads toward the elevator bank, beaten down through long hours (here and at school) and a propensity for introversion.  Poor thing.  She hasn’t built up any work defenses yet. Shall I tell her of “the ropes”?  Tell her where the good pens are hidden?  Would she possibly be interested in knowing of the offices most likely to produce quality, under-desk naptime?

Far down the hall, the World’s Busiest Assistant is whistling.  She’s been in this line of work since certain fish took to land and is remarkably unwilling to learn anything beyond what she already knows.  But oh!  The pressure!  Has she told you of the time she had to order lunch for 20 and THEY FORGOT THE NAPKINS?

She will.  

And on the day she tells me again, I shall smite her.

Note to Self:  Must warn intern of making eye contact with the WBA, that to agree to lunch is madness, that she should never leave with her to a third location. 

Ah. 

So there was a reason for me coming in today, after all.

What Time is It?

My grandson’s first birthday was this last weekend.  It was a wheel-based affair, in keeping with his unabashed love for all things rolling.  

The oldest man in the room, my grandson’s great-grandfather, sits at the kitchen table, unmoored in time, drifting among the years he spent in the Navy. 

“Where’s Pearl?” he suddenly exclaims.

I remember him taking The Boy and me to the Swedish Institute when they had a Viking ship on display.  He took us to lunch afterwards, and I ordered the chicken breast in aspic, just to impress him.

Aspic, for those not raised in the 18^th century, is a meat gelatin.

You’re welcome.

I sit down opposite him at the table.  I can see that he doesn’t recognize me, and I swallow hard.

We stare into each other’s eyes.  Slowly, he remembers.  He leans across the table and pats my hand. “You’re very pretty,” he says.  He winks.

I smile – he always told me I was pretty. I stand up, walk to his side, but he’s gone, back to the early 1950s, when he is young and strong and stationed in the Philippines.  “It’s just beautiful, the water. Just look at it.”

I run a hand across his shoulders and head back to the living room, where my grandson is spinning the wheels of his new tractor, and my ribcage feels too small. 

Stop, Feeth!

There’ve been a rash of “theft from car”s in my neighborhood lately, particularly ones in which the windows were not broken but the door simply opened.

NextDoor is abuzz with incredulity.

Imagine.  Thefts!  From cars!

“They got my laptop, my wallet, and my good umbrella!”

“Someone took the jar of change I keep in the backseat.”

And here it is where we stop – hammer time – and reflect on all the things I will not say in response.

Things like:

Was the car locked?

And of course

They took your UMBRELLA?!  That’s IT!  I’m getting my conceal and carry!

I’m not an idiot, according to my mother, and I don’t say these things, because what do I know?  People work late, they forget, and there’s always someone waiting to take advantage of someone else’s lapse in judgement.  Me, I drive my car maybe twice a month and therefore keep very little in it.  On the other hand, as a bus-dweller, I am known to carry both a backpack and a bag I could smuggle small dogs in, so again, what do I know?

Grandma went into town with a lipstick and car keys and did just fine. We now carry things with us that cost hundreds of dollars.

"I didn't know it was that kind of neighborhood," writes one young, newly disillusioned neighbor.  "Guess I'll have to start locking my doors."

And I feel for her; not because she sees her neighborhood differently, but because she once believed she could leave a laptop in an unlocked car.

Who Do You Gotta Know to Get a Snack Around Here?

There are lemon bars in the work lunchroom, leftovers from yesterday’s Birthday Celebration and Monthly Placation.

We’re a cared-for little group, those of us at Acme Grommets, Gravel and Industry (a world-wide Octopi).  In the fall, there are apples every Wednesday.  Once a month there are “treats”.  And almost quarterly someone from the mailroom runs up and down the halls shouting “There are leftovers in the breakroom!  Leftovers in the breakroom!” whereupon we lurch from our desks and stampede toward free food. 

You have to be fast.  Some of the departments here are frighteningly young but many are on the plump side.  Disturbed middle-aged desk monkeys such as myself use guile and experience to edge them out.  I find that cutting through the bathroom and throwing elbows when necessary to be a winning strategy.

Get away from that stale donut, you pup!

I’ve been working for an uncomfortably long time.  I’ve gone from electric typewriters and, so help me, carbon paper, to a docked laptop that I can take home with me, should the urge to work come over me whilst cooking dinner.  I’ve seen dress codes move from panty hose and enclosed-toed shoes to bare legs and flip flops.  I’ve seen numerous people changing their pants in the obliviousness of their open-doored offices. 

I once knew a woman who kept a tiny TV hidden at her desk and watched her “shows” during her lunch break in the bathroom. 

The bathroom.

I said all that to say this:  There are lemon bars in the lunchroom.  To my similarly experienced, randomly hungry coworkers, we will meet in the bathroom immediately. 

As in all things, get it while you can.

Just Shut Up and Ride

Having been reminded this last weekend of physical frailties in general, and the tensile strength of your average pair of capris specifically, I lean against the back of the bus seat, willing myself to relax after a full day of work.  It is particularly after a good stiff Monday that I find myself with the bearing of an irritable Theodore Roosevelt, so I slump a little – just a little! – and think soft, abstract thoughts.

The bus driver, a portly man looking suspiciously like a biker-ish version of Sebastian Cabot, has the most elaborately macramé-ed earring I have ever seen.  A vivid blue, it dangles past his shoulder, swings as he turns his head to check his mirrors.  A tiny bell from the end of it rings as he calls out the stops.

“Next stop, Spring Street.”

I wonder about people, about the patches on their jackets, about the tattoos on their arms, the memories and stories behind them.  There was a man on the bus last summer, a thin, rough-looking man, pocks on his cheeks, his thinning hair pulled into a pony tail, the thighs of his jeans wearing through over the pockets.  Among the visible tattoos on his arms was the head and upper torso of a smiling child with what appeared to be dates inked in a filigreed scroll at his wrist. 

The tattoo of the smiling child was too heart-breaking to consider, and so I wrote it down, to consider it another time.

I wonder, now, if the earring has that sort of sentimental value.  Did a permanently capitalized She from his past make it for him?  Did he buy it at an art fair?  Did he find it?

We don’t know, do we?

And we won’t.  As they will not know about us.

Shake, Rattle, and WHO LEFT THIS HERE?!

I took a good hard fall Friday night.  What?  No, there wasn’t drinking involved!  Why would you even say that?

Oh.  Yeah, well.  Good point.

But no.  Drinking was not involved.  It was a clean fall, a perfectly reasonable fall that included a sloping sidewalk, an armful of recyclables, and a child’s bicycle that had not been there just 10 minutes before.

Knees.  Palms.  Ribs.  Wrists.  ELBOW.

Much elbow.

When given the option of not charging briskly into a prone bicycle, my advice is to take it. 

Since then, of course, I’ve been listening to my body complain: an exclamation from my back, a shout from wrist.  Even my eardrums, afraid of being left out, have hollered once or twice.  I’ve begun imagining myself as a skeleton, clacking and jiving down the mean streets of Minneapolis. There may be a jaunty hat involved, something I tip at all the other skeletons.  I’ve got an index finger in the air, wagging it to an imaginary beat.  Howdy-howdy, what’s buzzin’, cousin? 

Not sure why, but my skeleton sounds like she’s from the 40s, a wise-crackin’ skeleton, see?  A killer-diller dame with moxie.

From one set of bones to another, Happy Monday.

But Sometimes it IS Cold

It’s layoff season over here at Acme Shovels, Grommets, and Rope (A Worldwide Octopi Corporation, Pty, LTD, M-O-U-S-E) and the bell?

For whom does she toll?

The bell tolls for Jerry.

A 26-year veteran of these carpeted halls, Jerry got the ol’ corporate heave-ho yesterday. 

I like Jerry.  He once walked blocks out of his way on a bitterly windy January night to ensure I got to the bus stop free of the unwieldy encumbrances of the city, ie., panhandlers, skeeves, and earnestly entitled executives. 

He confesses that he has lost the ability to feel cold, something I have never heard of.

“What do you mean, you don’t feel the cold?”

He shrugs.  “I was working in the barn one night –“

“Wait,” I say.  “The barn?”

“I have a place in South Dakota.”

“Ah.”

“And it was, I don’t know, January?  February?  Super cold.  I mean, I knew it was cold?  But I wasn’t.  I stood in the barn in just a tee shirt and long pants and threw hay for a good two hours before I felt even remotely cold…”  He trails off.  “That can’t be right, can it?”

“Well,” I say, “you were doing physical labor.”

“No,” he says.  “Come on.  Ten degrees.  And that barn’s not heated.” 

We cross Marquette at the lights and I notice that while it is probably 10 degrees right now, he’s not wearing a coat.

We’ve been walking for several blocks, and he isn’t shivering.  I reach out, pull a glove off, and lay my hand on his bare arm. 

Warm.

There's a crowd as he leaves.  It is no longer winter, and yet there's a nip in the air at the elevator banks.  The same man who once called me "honey" in a meeting ("It's what I call my girlfriend.  I'm so sorry!  Please don't call HR!") waves good-bye.  

"I hope you feel cold some day!" I say.

And the others in the office turn to stare.

I'm Maturing; or Hey! Pearl's Doin' Stuff!

Now, normally I don’t believe in the verbification of words (even writing that was painful); but having said that, I have to admit:  I am now adulting at an unprecedented level.

Sorry.

I sometimes walk around my house, though, late at night – putzing, we call it in the Great White North – shaking the cat dish into an appearance of being full, randomly dusting small glass birdies, picking up something from one room and taking it to another  – and I wonder:  When did all this happen?

To be honest, I had forgotten how much work it is to run a life.  I’d been married, you know, for a good dozen years.  Over that time, chores peeled off, to me, to him, and pretty much stayed the purview of whoever gravitated toward them.  To that end, it is safe to say that I had not taken out the garbage, filled my own gas tank, or brought my own laundry up from the basement in that same amount of time. 

And now?  I've been forced to - ugh - grow.  I mean, I must be seven feet tall by now.

Look at me!  I’m picking up sticks in the yard.  I’m schlepping laundry.  For cryin’ out loud, people, I know when it's time to take out my recycling! 

Would you believe me when I tell you that I am the proud owner of a lawn mower, a weed whipper, and a snowblower. 

What's next?  Lawn furniture?  Card tables?  RUBBER BOOTS?

I tell ya; anything could happen.

Plumbin'; Or Jack the Dripper!

The house is old.

“Hey, I hate to say this,’ she says, “but there’s a bit of water in the basement.”  The tenants upstairs are leaving as I am coming home. 

There had been an absolute deluge the night before, and there’s nothing like a 124-year-old house for water in the basement after a storm, so I take the information with a grain of salt.  I pull out one of my earbuds.  “No worries,” I say.  “I’ll take a look.’

“Well,” Susie worries, “I’ll be back in a couple hours if you need any help.”

Help?  I think.  Have they seen me?  Do I not give off an air of self-sufficiency? Nay, of common sensical ability?

I jam my earbud back in, go directly to the basement. 

It is a reasonable basement, if not a bit dank at the moment; and last year’s cobwebs, having been swept from the exposed ceiling, have been replaced by new ones.

Two hours later, still in the clothes I wore to work, the cement floor, while damp, is cleaner than it’s been since, oh, the last big rain.  And yet – why is there still water?  I have been listening to a podcast about crime in Merry Old England, and I’m just coming to the realization that there seems to be water leaking from under the washer when –

“PEARL!”

And though in hindsight what I heard was most certainly “PEARL!”, what I understand it to be at the moment is “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!”

I leap into the air.

Kurt has come down the stairs.  “Don’t you hear that?”

I pull both earbuds out.  “I don’t hear anything,” I said.  “I’m busy wet-vac-ing all this water…”

He makes a face.  “But don’t you hear the water?”

And then I do – the spray of water that has burst from a hose behind the washing machine.

“Well,” I laugh, “that explains why I can’t quite finish up!”  I follow the pipes to the shut-off valves, and the spray falls to a steady drip that no amount of tightening will help.

The plumbers have been called.  And I am still alive.

Please Accept this Individually Packaged Coffee Creamer as a Token of my Esteem

I don’t want to get bogged down in the facts – as one does – but I’ve been working for a little more than 100 years now.

What?  Sure I’m including the door-to-door selling of greetings cards in second grade.

I’m also including the clarinet-polka stylings of my misbegotten teenage years.

As my father once confided to me over a can of Pabst (his, not mine), “You work and you work and then you die.  Are you writing this down?”

I was not - I was six, after all - but I recall the words as if spoken yesterday; and I relay this to you now:  HELP ME.

Not big help.  Not pay-my-bills help.  A joke, maybe.  A Netflix recommendation.  Because if there’s one thing I think we could all use, every now and then, is a distraction.

My new boss has been wonderfully distracting. 

We are in our honeymoon period, and I'm thinking of buying her flowers.

“Can I just tell you that I feel we could be friends outside of work?”

I grin at her.  “And can I just tell you that I feel that we are friends, inside of work?”

She smiles.  Rochelle is attractive and slim, a quick-witted chick.  She stands.  "I know this is our touchbase, but can I leave you here while I run to the bathroom?  Sorry."

"Of course," I say.

She leaves.  I rifle through her drawers, take out a credit card in her name, and send her husband a picture of my feet.

"Sorry about that," she says.  "I have no bladder."

"Really?" I say.  "None at all?"

She sits down at her desk, frowns at her phone and puts it back in her purse.  "Not really,"  she says.  "I am just the peeing-ist person you'll ever meet."

"We should do a Happy Hour," I say.

"In the bathroom," she beams.

We laugh; and for a moment, we're both distracted. 

Showdown at the OK-But-Can-Ya-Make-It-Happen Corral

A slip of paper with what appears to be a prescription written on it appears at my desk.  I look up.

“I need this meeting this week.”

I slide the paper over and read:  MTG next 48?  Oh no.  I look up.  “A meeting this week?  In the next two days?”

“Yes.”

I have a sudden view of the back of my own skull.  “We can try.  Who should be in it?”

“Me, Lorena, Hein, and Christoph.”

I squint, in that adorably astigmated way I have.  “Lorena and Christoph are in Frankfurt.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t come in until 9:00,” I say.  “That’s their 4:00."  I wiggle my eyebrows.  "In European, that's 1600.”

“Yes.”

“And...”

“Can you make it happen?”

“My first thought, I say, smiling, “is that you make yourself available earlier.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Nein.  I work late.  I need that time in the morning.”  She sighs.

“Well, I can look.”  Clack clack clack.  “Nope.  They do not have 1600 available either day.”

“Can you ask them if they’ll stay late?”

I set my elbow on my desk, set my chin in my hands.  “Why would they want to stay late?”

“Hmm.  But you can ask them, right?”

I smile.  “Do you want to ask them?”

“No.”

“Sure,” I say.  “Yeah.  I can ask them.”

“Work your magic, Pearl.  Really appreciate this.”  She gives me pistol-fingers as she backs away from my desk.

Pew pew!

Maybe I Should Reevaluate

I am standing on Hennepin Avenue, waiting for a bus.

Hennepin, as you may recall, is the only street in the world where I have been mistaken for a prostitute.

Twice.

Today, however, I am not mistaken for a prostitute but an ATM.

“Do you have any change?”

I look at her.  “Yes,” I deadpan.

"Can I have some?"

"No."

She moves on to the next person.

By the time the bus arrives, I have been standing in the sun for a full 40 minutes -- which, by the way, is enough time to freckle yet retain office pallor.  

It is a good ten minutes into the ride that I realize that this is not my beautiful bus (with apologies to The Talking Heads).  The funny thing is that, once you’ve boarded a bus, there’s no real way of knowing what bus you’re on.  I mean, sure, you could ask someone, but where’s the sport?

Behind the bus driver is a wall of bus schedules.  I’m on either the 18 or the 11.  The 18 would’ve dropped me off a few blocks ago.  The 11 takes me roughly 12 blocks from home.

Eventually I de-bus and point my feet in the correct direction.  Less than a block in front of me is a weathered man dressed for urban camping.  He appears to be speaking into what may or may not be a walkie-talkie.  

When I reach him, I stop, look at what he's looking at. On the ground, lying in the grass and reaching for the hedge there is a white squirrel.  He is perfect, no trauma, and yet he is dead.  

“He is never going to reach that hedge,” I say.

The man with the walkie talkie gives me a stern look.  “But ya just gotta keep reaching, right?”

And I walk home thinking about that.

Oh, Just Shut Up and Lie Down Somewhere

I’ve been sitting here for, oh, three days or so, breathing through my mouth and contemplating a future in voice-over.

Surely everyone would be as amused as I with my voice?  Somewhere between the croak of a hungover amphibian and the creak of a rusty hinge, I amuse myself intermittently with “Ave Maria” and my impersonation of me, with a cold.

“What’s that, Pearl?  You’d like some cough syrup?  Ha ha ha!  You don’t have any!”

Apparently Prior Pearl has failed Present Pearl in this.

She will be spoken to. 

Through the advances of technology, of course, I am no longer just sick, but I am now Sick and Working From Home, or as we in the business like to say, “Swiffing”.  Working in this state leads directly to emails that begin “Come in, Tokyo!” and end “Hugs and Kisses, Pearl”.

I may be exaggerating.  Or maybe not.  I worked until 10:00 last night, and who knows what those last few emails said?  Sure, I could check; but what’s the fun in that?  Better I wait for a response – or some sort of communique from Human Resources.

In the meantime, Dolly Gee Squeakers (formerly of the Humane Society Squeakers) is confused.  She crawls in and out of the backpack in which I brought the laptop home, mews piteously at her food bowl (which is only three quarters of the way full), walks from the couch to the dining room table back to the couch in hopes that I will join her.

Cats.  What do they know, huh?

Nature’s Bounty; or What’s with the Discarded Hair Ties Everywhere?!

The streets are full of promise for those clever enough to watch for it.

Take, for example, hair ties.  Why, if a gal plays her cards right, she may never buy an elastic hair tie again.  And as someone who regularly pulls her hair into a my-hair-turns-to-baling-twine-in-this-humidity yoga braid – much like your common, everyday braid but with more sweat – I gotta say, let the savings begin!

I mean, look around.  Bus stops, intersections, sidewalks.

Who are these people?  Clearly they’re on their way somewhere.  Is that them, over there, the ones with the flowing locks?  Is it those folks over there, the ones with their hair in their faces?

Why do these people hate hair ties?

Or perhaps, the hair ties are migrating.  

Maybe they’re tired of that mop you call a head of hair and have just quit, maybe thinking of going into a bit of light cinching. 

Perhaps, after a life of living in the cough-drop, Kleenex, hand sanitizer confines of a purse they’ve finally absconded of their own accord.

Most of the time, I am alone when the ground ties make themselves known to me.  And I always feel that the experience would be so much more enhanced – if you can believe that! – if there were someone with me.

“Look at that,” I’d say.  “Another free hair tie!”

And then that person would shake their head sadly.  “Oh, Pearl,” they’d say.

And then I’d just tap the side of my nose and wink.  Because I’m the one with the free hair ties.

A Morning on the Bus with My Peeps

The woman on the bus is taking up some space. 

She sits across the seats as if stretched out in the back of my old Ford LTD.   Her feet extend into the aisle, and those of us boarding – a term also used in the air transportation business, I believe – clear her boots gingerly.

She is rough looking, perhaps she has slept outside.  Her age is difficult to guess, her skin sun damaged, her eyes hard. 

I grumble internally, briefly, as I ponder the hubris.  The bus is full, as I have taken the second to the last seat.  If anyone wants to sit, they will have to ask her to move; and this being Minnesota, I’m guessing only one out of 20 would.

We don’t like confrontation.

But we will grumble to ourselves.

I judge her for a minute or two.  In the end I decide that perhaps this is all she has, the imperious demand for not one but two seats.  She’s only going to pay for one, dagnabbit, but she’s taking two.

I shrug, internally.  So have two.

There is a clatter at the front of the bus, and I watch a smiling, dimpled man in a suit, a recent immigrant from India, chase a water bottle.  For the next 30 seconds I watch as the thermos rolls, just ahead of his outstretched hands.  Out of his bag, it rolls under his seat, across the aisle, under two more seats to where it finally rests next to the duffel bag that Two Seats has on the floor.

He straightens up.  He smiles, says something I cannot hear and leans in to pick up the bottle, whereupon he returns to his seat.

And she smiles, slowly, pulls a phone out of her pocket and begins texting.

Have You Seen the New TV Shows? Me, Neither.

I’ve been without cable for almost two years now.  

I have access to about 14 channels, depending, I swear, on the season.  Whole channels disappear for months at a time.  I will miss Mystery Science Theatre when the axis tilts, but if I have to flip by Hunter again — a renegade cop who breaks all the rules! — I may be forced to do something radical, like starting another afghan or replacing the quarter-round in the living room.

At my place, Laugh-In is still playing (and John Wayne is dressed as a large blue bunny), the What’s My Line's panel is dressed in evening wear, there are three different weather channels, and I have the choice of four PBS channels (two if you expect them to have both audio and visual for the full show). 

Then again that’s just the winter line-up.  In the summer there is Celebrity Bowling, where you can watch Roy Rogers and Bob Newhart play against Richard Dawson and Charles Dierkop.

Roy Rogers is a helluva bowler.

It’s the 40s in my house.  And the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.  

It’s so many decades but the current one.

I sometimes watch Let’s Make a Deal.  Monty Hall gives out $10 apiece for bobby pins, and I clap when women pull them out of their purses. Women wave manicured hands along the lengths of Cadillacs, wearing pantyhose under their stylish 1970s swimsuits. Adorably self-conscious men and women blush when he asks their names, look to each other while deciding if they will go with what's behind Door A and Door B with a lack of guile now found only within dog parks.  

On my TV, there is no plastic surgery.  I watched Dick Cavett interview Shelley Winters the other day.  She was plump and wrinkled, and apparently she had done her own hair.  I almost wept with relief.

Frankly, it’s starting to affect my life.   I've taken up mending and sipping hot drinks from large cups.  I'm thinking of smoking just so that I can do it from a cigarette holder.  I'm wondering if a cocktail party would be out of order and if I could get a go-go dancer for it.

I recently watched a game show where a contestant answered a question with “Carole Lombard!” and I, from my couch, Dolly Gee Squeakers (of the Humane Society Squeakers) at my elbow, shouted,”Good effort!” because, it was.  It was a really good effort, but the answer, ladies and gentlemen, was, of course, Eva Gabor.

Eva Gabor.

That cocktail party is looking better and better.

It Was Either That or A Tote Bag

Every now and then, we here at Acme Gravel and Sprockets take a quiet moment to reflect that, hey, there are worse jobs.

Delivering food on roller skates, for example.  Or crime-scene sanitation. 

Or working where Margaret does.

“Don’t,” she says, “Tell anyone where this came from, but this is a gen-u-wine email from our VP.  Oh, and don’t tell them I work at Global Stickers.”

Sure, I say.  That’s safe with me, Miss Margaret Olson, 5248 Lefse Boulevard.

Random Capitalization and Punctuation included for your Pleasure.

Team,

Recently I noted on the company bulletin board that the TPS reduction goal for 2016 was met!  This was a great accomplishment.  We here at Global Stickers had committed to providing a Pizza Party to the Company in the event we reached our Goal, and since we did, Global Stickers is excited to be providing that Pizza Party. 

Organizing the Pizza's for your team will be the responsibility of the Manager and supervisor. You will have this party on April 1.  Two pieces of pizza per person will be purchased.  Drinks will not be provided.  Multiply the number of people by 2 and divide by 8 to get the number of large Pizza's to order.   Pizza’s must be cheese, pepperoni, or sausage. 

You may order from anywhere in town as long as it is Domino’s, Costco, or Pizza Hut.  No other’s allowed! I would order them in the morning or even the day before to give them time to fill the order.  I have a script if anyone need’s it.

The supervisor or manager should pay for the Pizza's and expect to be reimbursed.   Write clearly, using black or blue ink.  Be sure to include the name of your department, if anyone took more than two pieces, and the exact start and end time of your celebration.  I will review. 

Thanks for the determination you’ve shown this last year, and I look forward to posting this coming year’s next initiative.  Fingers crossed for next year’s reward:  tee-shirt’s from last year’s Inventory Lock-In!

Best regards,

Snidely W. Lash, PhD, OCD, SOB