Sunday, July 17, 2016

Clearing Clutter

There are claw marks on everything I have had to let go of so, as you can imagine, my closets are in bad need of weeding.  I anthropomorphize everything I have ever owned. 

Old books, broken at the spine and disintegrating are loving reminders of my youth.  Any rational person would have thrown out Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd” in the trash as it was so beat up that it would have collapsed but was being held upright on the bookshelf between copies if MFK Fisher’s’ The Art of Eating” and “The Portable Dorothy Parker”, which by the way survived two years in the Peace Corps, nibbled away by silver fish, and crumbling away should also be tossed.  I just can’t seem to be objective and trash them for more room on the shelf.

Threadbare t-shirts frayed at the collar would be better put to rags but I can’t seem to toss them into the Goodwill box.  I kid myself by saying that when I buy a new t-shirt I will have to toss an old one, and it never happens.  As a consequence I have dozens of shirts, surviving dozens of washing hanging like a list of places visited and tasks accomplished.  There’s the Bulgaria one silk-screened in Cyrillic, the Italian t shirt purchased in Perugia written in Italian saying something to the effect that “If you want to know me watch what I do.”  It has been washed so many times it has gotten smaller and smaller.  (I couldn’t have gotten bigger and bigger!). And at least six Jungle Party Volunteer t-shirts, in yellow, orange, red, light blue and green sort of like battle ribbons issued over the years at the zoo.

And how about that lovely white lace crocheted long sleeved dress I wore to my wedding?  Don’t think I could fit into again and I surely will never wear a wedding dress again, but gosh I can’t recycle it to Goodwill.

On a larger scale I drove a Fiat 124 white convertible and I loved that little car.  It was temperamental.  Although I bought it new, when it rained it leaked water in from the floor – not the roof.  And I needed to give it a tune up every 5,000 miles.  It was like a high-strung racecar and it was my magic carpet, taking me everywhere.

One dark night I was driving home from a party and I thought I was just about ready to run over a paper bag in the middle of the road.  Unfortunately it wasn’t a harmless paper bag but a foot diameter rock which hit the low-slung oil pan, which jammed the pump up into the engine block and cracked it.  It killed that little car and I felt like a great friend had died as the tow truck hauled it off to the auto graveyard.  I mourned that little beauty for months afterwards.


I really have to get a grip on what is real and what is inanimate. I have an awful hard time distinguishing between the two.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

High Heels

The thing about high heels is that they are meant for little tiny short girls not for someone like me at 5’10”, when for cripes sake, I am already taller than most of the boys and sure as hell don’t need no freaking heels to make me look taller. 

Brewster Freeland was the cutest damn architecture student with black curly hair and eye lashes to shame a woman.  He was about 5”6” and wouldn’t you know he asked me out on a date. I mean a real date to have Chinese food at the Mandarin the only “foreign” food restaurant in Eugene.  I wore my heels, as ladies did on those days, which shot me up almost to the ceiling.  And, my gosh, he wore a crisp white shirt, jacket and tie.  I thought he was very sophisticated when he asked if I would like a drink.  I was so innocent I said I didn’t know what to order so he said that I might like a “Grasshopper”.  It was delicious and tasted like melted chocolate chip mint ice cream. 

We had a romance for several months.  In those days romances were quite chaste unlike today’s vulgar display of some young women looking like hookers and all to willing to do just about anything, if you know what I mean.

I do digress - we were talking about high heels.  I don’t know who started the fad probably during the 9th century when men wore high heels to keep their boot in their stirrups. And we sure see the foppish men in the 16th century wearing high heels along with wigs with dangling curls, velvet jackets with white lace and pantaloons, puffy sleeves and tights.

Short stocked royals, the result of inbreeding, took to heels to make them look taller.  They got over that style pretty quickly when rude comments were made questioning their masculinity. 

Then women started wearing the contraptions.  And today it is simply amazing to watch young women, hoping to be fashionable and sexy, wear tall leather boots up to their crotch and titter on 5-inch stilettos. 

Speaking of stilettos when my husband and I had refinished all the downstairs hardwood floors in our Victorian South Slope house which we were putting on the market. Some real estate agent brought a potential seller into the house when we were not there and there were thousands of pockmarks, made by metal stilettos, all over our new floors.  We had no proof who did it but my suspicions were that they knew what was happening and did not confess to it.  So much for women who wear heels.