Time in a Bottle

The words of the Jim Croce song, “If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do, is to save every day until Eternity passes away, just to spend them with you,” resonate a great deal with me lately. It’s a love song, but it applies to many people in my life.

Time goes too quickly, and the older we get it seems the faster time goes by. Saying goodbye seems to be a big part of life. I’ve said goodbye to my children when they left home and again when I left them in Minnesota. I’ve said goodbye to dear friends who have visited, not knowing if I’d ever seen them again; and I’ve said goodbye to friends and relations who have gone on to a better life.

Every one of these goodbyes has been difficult and at times heart-wrenching. But with each goodbye I’ve come to realize how precious and short life is, and consequently, how important it is to live every day as if it were my last. Life is too short to hang onto real or imagined hurts or slights. It’s too short to hold grudges or not speak to people who were once friends. We don’t know if the last thing we said to a friend or loved one will be the last thing we ever say to them. Tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us.

If I could have saved time in a bottle, I’d spend more time with people I love and make sure they knew they were loved. I’d spend more time listening and less time talking. I’d give more hugs and fewer frowns. I’d take the time to really get to know the people in my life, not just who they are on the surface or what they can do for me. I would make more time for living life and spend less time on the sidelines as a spectator.

If I could save time in a bottle, I’d certainly use it more wisely than I did many times in the past.

Attack Cat

You’ve all seen those cute signs that say Attack Cat! on them, haven’t you? I have my very own attack cat! I hadn’t realized that until I took him to be groomed. My apologies to the groomer.

I have four cats, two of whom are fairly long haired. Not wanting my summertime guests to see my scruffy looking cats, I took the two long hairs to a groomer to be brushed out and mats removed. Now Sadie, my senior citizen of eight years old, is usually quite content to be brushed; we do it quite often out on the deck and she just lies there and lets us detangle her. Pippin, our one year old kitten, whom we’ve only had for about five months, has never been groomed to my knowledge. Any time we’ve tried to brush him he thinks it’s a game and wiggles and squirms and tries to catch our hands with his claws and then tries to bite the brush.

Let me start at the beginning. I loaded both cats and carriers into the car for the trip to a grooming place in a not-to-be-mentioned city about 30 miles from here. (I’m trying to protect the groomers by withholding their name and location.) Sadie is a seasoned traveler and when let out of her carrier, curls up on the console beside me and sits there for the duration of the trip. Pippin’s only experience with a car is his two trips to the vet in Westfield. Pippin cries the entire trip. So with the sounds of meow, meooow, meOOOOW in my ears we took off on our adventure. To Pippin’s credit, he has a range of about seven miles for his crying; then he slacks off to an occasional whimper.

Upon reaching the groomers, I informed her that Sadie would be a sweetheart and that Pippin would likely try to bite her so an Elizabethan collar would be advisable. And I left them.

Two hours later a slightly frantic voice called me on my cell phone to inform me that my “little darlings” were done.

When I got there, the groomer who had worked on the cats was not there. In retrospect, I suspect she may have quit. I asked the other employee how they’d done. “They were awful,” she spat at me, to which I chuckled to myself and asked what had happened.

It seems Sadie did not like the environment or the groomer, not sure which. She hissed and spit and when that didn’t work, she growled and batted at the groomer. Because she was afraid of being bitten, the groomer brushed out Sadie’s side and back, but not her tummy.

Pippin, sitting in his carrier all this time, and listening to Sadie and the other animals, went ballistic when they removed him from his cage. He escaped the hold on him, raced around the room looking for escape, and according to the report, “bounced off the walls, all over the room.” The poor thing ran frantically back and forth the room, jumping up on counters and window sills, under tables and over people.

He was attracting a crowd outside the window of the room. As more people gathered to watch and laugh at the spectacle, one of the groomers said, “Get those people out of here! He’s ruining our reputation!”

During the mayhem of trying to catch the cat, we discovered something else about Pippin. He HATES dogs. There was a dog in the room, minding his own business, getting brushed out, and Pippin jumped onto his grooming table and attacked him! Well, he didn’t really attack him, just hissed and yowled and batted at him. But it sure scared the dog – and the groomers as well.

I’m not sure how they caught and restrained Pippin; they never said. But somehow he got most of the mats taken out of his coat. They didn’t say so, but I think my cats are not welcome there again. I quickly paid the bill and got my little darlings out of there.

I never heard a peep out of Pippin the whole way home. Poor Pip.

Honesty? Honestly!

While shopping at Wal-Mart the other day (evil mega-conglomerate that it is) we picked up several items, both big and small. In the process of checking out, Bob turned the two larger items so the clerk could scan them without removing them from the cart. Items bagged and paid for, we proceeded to the car, whereupon we realized that one small bottle of Calamine lotion had been hiding under the bathroom tissue and hadn’t been scanned. Without much comment, Bob turned around and took the item back into the store to tell the clerk we hadn’t paid for it. After laughing and saying she couldn’t believe he came back for that, he paid for it and left.

What kind of sad commentary is this on our sense of honesty? Not only do some of the customers think it is okay to walk out with unpaid items, even the store employees now see it as no big deal.

Shopping lifting, or an honest mistake like ours, gone unrectified, costs businesses money; they in turn, raise prices to cover the cost of lost revenue. According to some experts, the average family spends $300 a year more to subsidize the cost of what shoplifters steal. Higher prices mean customers may not support that business, impacting the store’s ability to stay in business.

It’s easy to say Wal-Mart, and similar large chain stores, can afford it when an item is stolen. Suppose their profit margin is 10%, only an example on my part. For every $2 that is shoplifted or slips through the check-out, they have to sell $20 in merchandise to make up for that loss. “Grocery stores typically operate with only a 1% profit margin. If someone steals a $7 steak, the store must sell goods worth $700 to recover the loss,” according to an article from Rutgers University. Seven hundred dollars is perhaps two or more week’s pay for a store employee. How long before stores start laying off workers to help defray the cost of these unpaid items?

When did we become so complacent about stealing? Back when the “mom and pop” stores were the norm it was just common sense that you didn’t shoplift from them. You knew these owners. They were your neighbors or belonged to your church, and you knew they would suffer from the lost income. How many of us as kids took something from the store and when our parents found out, were made to return it with full apology? Honesty was a part of our upbringing. Has that really gone by the wayside?

Shoplifting has become a cost of doing business. Stores plan for a certain percentage of loss. That should disturb all of us. It costs the stores and it costs us as consumers not only in higher prices, but in loss of integrity, and loss of credibility to our children. So in answer to the young lady at the checkout: yes, we returned for just that small item. Your job could depend on it.

June Cleaver I Ain’t

Several times in the last few days I’ve heard a variety of men complain that their wives don’t cook or bake; particularly they don’t cook “like my mother used to.” Now ain’t that somethin’.

“My mother’s kitchen always smelled like baked bread (or cookies or meatloaf, blah blah blah).” Have men given any consideration to the idea that maybe their wives don’t cook because they’re tired of being compared to mama? One woman’s story is that she had to make chicken soup like his mother made: cook the chicken in a pot of water, remove the chicken, pour the water/broth over noodles and voila, chicken soup with chicken on the side. She tried adding leftover shredded chicken in the broth one time and was told she had RUINED the soup.

I blame June Cleaver for this. Leave It To Beaver was quite popular in the 50s and 60s, what with the Beaver’s brushes with trouble and the iconic middle class lifestyle, it was a hit with even the men. Who could resist a wife who was always impeccable in the dresses and high heels she wore around the house, which was always perfectly clean and neat and always a full course meal ready on the stove?

Women in the 40s, 50s and 60s, by and large, stayed home with their children. Not all of them of course, but perhaps many of those that did became proficient at cooking, cleaning and sewing. Once they had spoiled their darlings with home cooked meals and fresh desserts, they turned them loose into an economy where women needed to work in order to make ends meet.

For a lot of years we women have tried to do it all. We worked full or part time, came home and picked up the dirty clothes, threw a load in the washer, started supper, made the bed, vacuumed the carpets, swept the floor, checked dinner, washed and dried the dishes after, sat down for ten minutes, then went to bed and started all over the next day. And that’s before the kids came along.

However, after ten or twenty years of trying to be super woman and being compared to how mama used to do it, many of us have given up. I have had my share of boyfriends and husbands (current one excluded) who criticized my cooking because it wasn’t like his mother used to make. Fortunately my husband’s mother was not known for her cooking skills. I do cook and bake, and I’m pretty good at it if I do say so myself. Contrary to popular opinion, just because I spend many of my mealtimes at Meeder’s doesn’t mean I am unable to put a meal on the table myself. It just means I simply haven’t the time.

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Dear Politician

Are you stupid, or just incredibly arrogant? What kind of representatives of our government have we elected? Are you not aware that everything you do, say, post or send on the Internet is open to public scrutiny? Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and blogs are not private.

Another elected official bites the dust in Rep. Anthony Weiner, from New York (why are they always from New York?), who admitted he sent lewd photos on the Internet to women he had never met. I particularly love the headline, “Weiner admits he sent lewd picture; won’t quit.” That’s probably truer than we know.

What are these people thinking? They must know they’re going to get caught sooner or later. Do they not care? Are they trying to get caught? What goes through their minds? I certainly don’t know.

There isn’t a one of us who doesn’t have some sort of skeleton in our closet. But most of us aren’t exposed to the revealing light of the new media, and who would care anyway outside of our own little circle of friends and relatives. Gone are the days of public figures being protected by and from the press. Franklin D. Roosevelt had polio and was paralyzed from the waist down. This fact was kept from the American people however, by a media that was more sympathic with the delicacies of the disease.

John Kennedy, now exposed as having multiple affairs, was portrayed as the debonair, handsome young president, devoted to his wife and religion. Those were simpler times.

I’m not sure when or why our relationship changed with our rich, famous and political figures. The paparazzi have regular feeding frenzies when there is a hint of scandal in our public figures. If there isn’t enough blood being drawn from the current scandal, the new media is not adverse to making up some of their own.

So what part of this do our politicians not understand? Is power such a strong aphrodisiac that they think they’re above moral or judicial law? It’s a sad state of affairs, pardon the pun, when one after another of our politicians fall into disgrace over their desire to be thought a “hunk.”

I’m not sure whatever goes on in the private lives of politicians, actors, or other public figures is any of our business actually. Rock Hudson was gay, but generations of women didn’t know or care. Countless presidents have had secret trysts with women who were not their wives; and Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t the first man to have fathered a child by his hired help. But it seems the current climate demands we be voyeurs into the lives of those who choose a public life.

If we’re looking for perfection in our public servants, we’re going to have to look a lot harder. Nobody is perfect, but our politicians are going to have to help us out a bit and not publically broadcast their indiscretions. Wise up gentlemen. You are NOT irreplaceable.

Shower Stall Blues

Ladies, have you taken stock of what is in your tub/shower lately? It seems what we deem necessary in our desire to have shiny, silky hair and smooth fresh-scented skin is a major annoyance to many of our husbands.

This revelation came to me when I overheard a conversation between men about how one husband, trying to be considerate of his wife, took a shower late one night after his wife had gone to bed. He inadvertently hit one of the bottles of shampoo sitting on the shower surround with his arm, sending it crashing down to the bottom of the tub. Needless to say, said husband was roundly abused, at least in his mind, by said wife for waking her out of a sound sleep; to wit he replied, in that loving way husbands have, “What the %*@ are all these bottles doing here anyway!?”

Indeed, what are all those bottles and tubes of hair and skin products? I, myself, have a very reasonable number of items in the shower. I have shampoo for taking the yellow out of my hair; I have a clarifying shampoo, which as close as I can tell, is to take the impurities and soap scum out of my hair. I’m not sure why “regular” shampoo doesn’t do this, but I’m told I need this special shampoo for shinier more manageable hair. Then I have cheap, store brand shampoo for my husband’s needs. There are also two bottles of conditioner; his and hers.

I have liquid soap and bar soap. I have an additional special liquid soap for moisturizing, body exfoliate scrub and special cleaners for my face. I’m not counting the spray bottle of Skin-So-Soft moisturizing oil spray that I keep on the shower caddy to keep my not-so-young skin from drying out when I’ve completed my ablutions. From time to time I also have a jar of sugar or salt scrub on the edge of the tub.

In my impromptu and unscientific survey of husbands who shall remain nameless, one husband ventured to comment as to the necessity of all “those poufy things on strings and brushes and that sandpaper kinda thing.” Another hapless husband could not understand why “there are at least seven bottles of stuff that are almost empty. Why can’t she use one up before she opens another?” He went on to suggest that a large pair of utility shears could be used to open the bottles from top to bottom and a basting brush placed in each in order to get every last drop out if his wife didn’t want to waste it. Another helpful spouse emptied all the bottles into one, thereby saving space by mixing all the shampoos and soaps together. His wife was not happy and he swears he’ll never do it again.

Now I admit, in addition to the various shampoos and soaps in our shower, I have a variety of sponges, poufs and brushes from which to choose. However, a particular sponge is mine, not to be used by my spouse; although his pouf (yes, real men use poufs) is fair game for us both to use. I used to stock a loofah until I caught “himself” using it on his feet.

In light of the overheard conversation about knocking things off the edge of the tub, I am considering installing an additional free standing shower caddy, although my husband graciously says I really don’t have too many things stocked in the shower. My husband is a very smart man.