“I’m going to save a lot of money on the receptacle for Aunt Melinda’s ashes, X!” She seemed genuinely excited.
“How so?” I asked.
“My Aunt Melinda was a clairvoyant, seer, and psychic,” Susan told me.
“Okay, I still don’t see how her being a psychic will save you money,” I told her.
“Look here.” She help up her phone for me to see the image. “FedX makes a medium box.”
Random Act of Kindness: I stopped the ice cream truck as it slowly trolled the neighborhood. I handed the driver a pile of money and told him to give the neighbors down the street a few houses on the left whatever they wanted. I don’t know the family, but there were 6 or 7 young children outside playing. The woman watching the passel of kids reluctantly approached the ice cream truck as he waved and said, “It’s free!” I heard one of the kids scream, “Papi! Free ice cream!!” All the kids ran en masse toward the van, dancing and singing as only young children can. Mom and Dad ended up with ice cream too. I went back outside a couple of minutes later to see the children still excitedly comparing selections and laughing with complete abandon.
I didn’t do much today, but I managed to give a few children a moment of complete joy. Not only did they each unexpectedly get a treat, but they were able to choose whatever their heart desired. Despite my age, I can remember what such a rare treat felt like when I was young in heart and body.
P.S. I teared up a bit.
The absurdity of some people is astonishing. Earlier in the day, I entered a popular non-essential store. Not a single person wore facial protection. Most didn’t pretend to observe safe distancing. My post isn’t about that, though. At best, such stores have shown a compliance rate of 1 in 5.
It’s about the huge store packed with people. Outside, a disinterested man stood stoically and tapped his tablet as each person entered and exited. The stacks of carts were marked “Disinfected,” even though I could see that they hadn’t been. Human boredom and lack of interest had caught up with the process. It’s only natural. The guy collecting empty carts was doing so without any PPE, and pushing the dirty carts into the holding area. I watched as he started a new line and pushed it all the way through to where the customers could grab them. The zombie hitting his tablet observed him doing it, but said nothing. Customers would assume that the signs saying “Disinfected” were in fact clean. They weren’t. I said nothing because this store does not welcome commentary.
Inside, signs were everywhere, warning of the necessity of maintaining social distancing and practicing safety first. About 1 in 4 or 5 wore facial protection, including employees. A customer stood 2 feet away from the deli attendant, leaning over to within a foot. Neither flinched as they engaged in an animated conversation. Along the back, where the slaughtered animals lay packed in small packages, a woman with a small girl in her cart passed, coughing openly and without a facial covering – and without bothering to cover her mouth.
At one of the registers, the clerk wore gloves. She used the same pair of gloves across customers, touching their groceries, coupons handed to her, as well as reaching over to handle their cards and press buttons on the self-pay kiosk at the station. She handled cash, handing it across without sanitizing her hands. The customers were mostly doing the same.
Waiting for my wife, I watched the behavior of both employees and customers. Other than the number of signs, it was no stretch to imagine we were back to normal. I could make a list of no-nos. You get the idea, though.
Waiting in line, I noted the blue tape on the floors, spaced 4 feet apart. (Not 6) Of the customers ahead of us, 1 wore a mask. None of the others did. I watched our cashier handle things handed to her by the the customer. The cashier handed one back and then put her fingers inside her mask and pulled it down, then run the back of her left arm across her face and nose. She reached back up and pulled the mask up as the customer handed her more items. A manager was called as the light flashed above. The cashier pulled her mask down again, hooking her fingers inside her mask. She wiped her hand across her face again. The manager pulled her mask down and handled the same items handed over by the customer. She leaned in and repeated herself a few times. Her face was 2 feet from the customer and even closer to the cashier, whose mask was down. They finally figured out the coupons and how to ring up the items separately. She pulled her mask back up and left.
I began to load my things on the conveyor. The cashier didn’t throw a separator on the belt. I moved around within the 4 foot sections of tape. “Sir, can you move back?” the cashier hissed at me. “Yes, of course,” I replied as I retrieved the separator and moved back around, shaking my head at the stupidity of her focus.
In the next line back, a woman with a small boy was simultaneously hollered at by the cashier. I had seen them twice earlier in the store. At one point, the woman carefully reminded the boy to keep his distance to avoid touching things.
The people currently at the cashier weren’t wearing facial protection. The cashier pulled her mask down by putting her gloved fingers inside her mask and hollered, “Move back!” The woman apologized. The man behind her, fed up with the charade the store offered, cursed and said, “Just check the f%%% out already. No one is covering their face and you’re sticking your fingers inside your mask and using the same gloves on everyone, so what exactly are you doing correctly?” Stunned, that cashier went back to work. The woman with the small boy, although embarrassed, nodded in appreciation to the man. Note: when the man reached the register where the other cashier had hollered, he politely asked her to use sanitizer on her gloves before handling his groceries. She reluctantly complied.
My cashier kept looking over her shoulder, trying to get a good look at the man who had admonished the other cashier, even as she checked out my items. I had no doubt she was going to say something mean to him. I made eye contact with her to let her know it would be wise for her to say nothing. Had she done so, I was going to say something that would have really angered her. While she checked us out, I observed her reach inside her mask twice and scratch her face. I knew she had barked at me because she was unhappy that someone required her to wear a mask. It’s easy to bark at customers. It’s a mistake to bark at those of us who’ve made the extra effort.
The entire store is a testament to the folly of viral safety. Though there practices and protocols in place, the people who are supposed to enforce them don’t. I observed employees without masks, employees failing to wipe carts (as promised), stick their fingers in their masks, constantly pull them down, stand much to close to both one another and customers, wear gloves across multiple people, fail to use sanitizer on hands/gloves, and handle items across the customer-employee barrier.
Two weeks ago, I (correctly) predicted there would be an increasing rush to back away from isolation protocols.
I’ve witnessed the push grow. Stores here in Arkansas are great places to observe customers and see whether they think the protective measures should be followed. Lowes, Home Depot, furniture stores, Dollar Tree, Dollar General, and many grocery stores have driven home the observation that our compliance rate was always low.
I’m out in the world everyday and have been since the virus started. My job requires me to be out in it.
Even before the virus, I had many problems with people in my profession failing to practice basic contact precautions. Even with the virus, I’ve continued to witness what can only be called ongoing stupidity.
I’m not making a case for whether our protocols are warranted, or even that I know the answers. I’ve many instances of perplexity in confusion as I watched employers and public institutions wing it as the virus made its demands.
I am saying, though, that our single biggest problem is that we’re more committed to the idea of safety theater than actual safely. Human sloppiness will always derail our efforts to protect the public safety.
It’s always been that way. And always will.
Proper safety costs money. It costs effort. And most of all, it requires consistency.
Two weeks ago, I bought an excellent frame. It was marked down to $3, which seemed like a mistake. It was at Walgreens. I felt like I found a free bag of money.
On the way home, it occurred to me that the frame deserved a home worthy of the bargain I paid.
I printed a picture of someone I know and trimmed it to fit exactly in the frame. They’d be mortified to know their picture was used. (It’s not the first time I’ve used their picture for this kind of nonsense.)
The next day, I took one nail and a screwdriver with a hollow reservoir for the screw tips. I put the nail inside and brought the most excellent frame with me.
I hung the picture in a conspicuous place, using the screwdriver base to push the nail into the wall.
I’m not going to say where.
But…
It’s still there, proudly hanging exactly where I placed it.
I’ve done this many times before.
For whatever reason, I’m proud of this one.
These covid times demand more nonsense.
There’s a problem, though. I now have the urge to see how many of different people I can get on the same wall before getting caught; or rather, caught and asked what in blazes I think I’m doing.
.
.
In years past, I did this sort of thing often. It’s one thing to replace the pictures on the shelf at the store, another to ignore cameras or people watching you as you hang one. I once put two pictures on the desks of bank employees with at least 20 people milling around.
I wrote this last week but posted it because a friend sent me a similar prank that went viral.
° Also – there are now TWO pictures on the wall in the place which shall not be named. °
This is a story written by a friend, one which details a family member experiencing a brush with the unknown…
*
About a ten-minute drive from the interstate, the farmhouse sat on a dirt road a mile or so off the main highway that passed through a tiny community. The house had gray, wooden steps that led onto a nice wide porch with the front door beyond. A few miles further down the road were woods—the best kind for hunting deer and other game; not too dense to navigate but dense enough to provide a good home for wildlife.
It was a Friday night like most Friday nights. She was at home with the company of only her dogs and the television. Her husband was an outdoors man—a farmer and a hunter. He was out hunting that night in the woods close to home.
It was dark out but not yet late enough for the 10:00 newscast, and she decided to get ready for bed before the news came on. She rose from her favorite chair and started for the bedroom at the back of the house. Closely on her heels followed Mindy, a sweet, rescued dog named for the lead female in her favorite TV comedy, and Peanut, a happy beagle. The other dog Jake was with her husband in the woods.
As she reached the middle of the kitchen, something powerful stopped her in mid-step. She didn’t know what it was, but it caused the hair to stand on the back of her neck, and she broke out all over in a cold sweat. At the same instant she froze, Mindy and Peanut froze too and began growling; their hair raised along their backs from head to tail. Nausea from fear swept over her briefly before her legs unfroze, and she darted to the bedroom to grab the gun her husband had placed in the nightstand several years ago.
She had never wanted, much less felt the urge, to use a gun, but she had been instructed on the mechanics and knew instinctively now was the time for it. She snatched the gun from the drawer and rushed the dogs into the bathroom—the only room in the house with a lock.
She and the dogs crouched along the north wall of the small room, near the toilet and as far away as possible from the east-facing window and west facing door. Gripped with fear and gripping the gun tightly, she waited…for what, she didn’t know…while the dogs continued growling that growl that comes from deep in a dog’s throat when it means business and intends to protect the person it loves.
They stayed this way for what felt like an hour when, in fact, only ten to fifteen minutes had passed. Suddenly, the sound of someone banging on the front door and a familiar voice frantically yelling her name broke through the fear that had electrified her and the dogs.
She ran to the bathroom door and emerged to find her husband bursting into the house and running toward her, asking what was wrong and if she was okay. All three dogs were now alternating between barking urgently and growling in warning.
She quickly told him what had happened. He sent her back into the bathroom, and he ran back outside to search the property for signs of an intruder. He searched everywhere—under the house; inside the doghouse, the pump house, and the storage shed; behind the carport. He even went to the edge of the field that flanked the house on three sides and flashed the light into the darkness looking for a telltale sign of an unwanted visitor. After exhausting every place that could be searched, he returned to the house where they double-checked the locks on all windows and exterior doors.
Finally, they sat. Exhausted physically and emotionally. Dripping sweat. They compared stories and timelines, reliving details as they talked. At the same time she was frozen with fear in the kitchen, he was several miles deep into the woods and also paralyzed with fear. His fear was caused by a bluish-gray, smoky light that appeared suddenly; floating nearby. Jake began barking and baying at the light while running toward it. As it hovered, Jake “treed” it as a hunting dog trees an animal. The light continued to glow. At the same time, the man heard the voice of his father who had passed away only a few months before. His father’s voice clearly and strongly stated, “Get home to her!” Stunned and staring wildly at Jake and the shadowy glow, he heard his father’s voice a second time, “Get home to her!”, adding an urgent and forceful, “NOW!”
The man jerked the handlebars of his three-wheeler toward the edge of the woods and pushed the gas lever as far as it would go. The engine revved, the machine jumped, and the wheels spun crazily as he raced toward the tree line to reach the clear path at the edge of the woods. As she, Mindy, and Peanut braced in the bathroom, he and Jake flew down the edge of the trees to bypass an irrigation ditch and reach the relative smoothness of the dirt road. Yanking the machine to the left, he barreled down the road toward the house and soon saw the light from the bathroom window in the distance. He wished desperately for the three-wheeler to go faster.
As he skidded into the yard and slammed the brakes, he cleared the three-wheeler and jumped straight from the ground to the porch. Flying over the steps, he landed at the front door and began frantically beating the door while yelling for his wife. As he and Jake burst through the door, she came running around the corner from the kitchen into the living room.
There would be no sleep that night. Instead, they sat for the longest time comparing their memories, timings, feelings, and gut reactions. They analyzed it over and over for missing pieces and how the parts they did have fit together. There was one fact they never acknowledged or discussed. He had, at some point, wet his pants from fear.
To that point in their lives, neither of them believed in “ghosts,” but, from that moment on, they believed without reservation that his father’s visit to him in the woods that night is what saved her. Still unknown is from who or what.
A friend wrote a chilling account of something that happened to a family member years ago, in a place where most could easily imagine things unknown to us, ones which still move around in the old forests and marshes of the South.
For those of us who don’t believe in ghosts, apparitions, or supernatural forces, it’s a story that makes the doubters hesitate. Maybe we’ll get to see it, perhaps not.
Even though my friend’s last story was read by well over 100,000 people, she’s reluctant to share this one, even anonymously.
I just thought I’d share the fact that there’s an incredible story floating around that might never see the light of day, no pun intended.
I made a picture to convey the feel of the story, even though the story is told as it was experienced: through a lens of terror.
Whatever it was, I fear it still lingers in those forests, biding its time.
You must either post or perish. The road between reassuring affirmation and privacy is indeed narrow. If you fail to share the complex and multi-faceted path that got you here, people will not understand your sudden departure from the thing you declared to be angel’s elbows and dancing unicorns.
Corollary: If you don’t share a multi-faceted explanation for the arc of what you’ve experienced, people will judge you on single-issue concerns. We’re all voyeurs and we all tend toward oversimplification.
If you’re going to use social media, you must do so while bowing to the truth, even if it is not immediately glittering.
Don’t imply your life is perfection while you are eating hotdogs over the sink or looking out your window with teary eyes. We only share our humanity when we share it all. No matter what you’re going through, we’ve probably experienced it or helped someone else as they did.
Almost everyone agrees that sunlight is best. Yet, most shroud their goings-on with a bent elbow.
We not only judge when we have incomplete information, but also when we have all the information. It’s a no-win situation. But if you opt for secrecy when you claim everything is perfect, I’m going to look at you cross-eyed when you want to know why everyone is so curious.
You can’t have both affirmation and privacy: they are mutually exclusive.
P.S. I wrote this rule while in observance of someone whose marriage disintegrated. It’s a trajectory I’ve often seen: joy, distrust, implications, none-of-your-business posts, followed by resignation and a push toward the next phase of life. Repeat. But it applies to so many other areas too.
A friend (and writer, though she fights the label) sent me a picture from her childhood. She snapped a picture of the old orange photo with her phone. I removed the orange tint from it, knowing that greater revealed detail might cause surprising observations. The hand originally seen holding the picture as she quickly snapped it is almost 40 years older than the innocent face smiling at us in the picture.
As I looked at the picture, for a brief second, I felt disembodied and as if I’d traveled back in time to City View Trailer Park and glanced briefly through the cheap window of the trailer. My eyes crawled across the scene; my friend in the background was smiling because she was asked to by her mom, the photographer, while her stepfather wrestled with a sibling on the bed.
In that instant, the moment became frozen forever, also disembodied and ethereal. My friend’s smile could be authentic happiness or adopted camouflage. It’s easy to take pictures and memories out of context. Due to the convergence of so many aspects of my friend’s life and mine, I can look at such pictures and interpret them in the harsh shorthand we learned separately. Such preconceptions can be wrong.
Her life has arced away from the world contained in the picture. Such victories are unheralded. She is excavating her truth from all the stories inventoried in her head. Despite what we’re told, memories are fluid, often refusing to take solid form. Who we are at the moment drives our focus toward the conflicting elements in our memories and pictures.
Because I shared most elements of family in common with my friend, I too can hear the cacophony of anger and control, even as I feel my heart swell with some moments which escaped the discoloring of the lesser parts of my life.
She’s looking through a long series of windows, trying to balance the tapestry of fact against emotion and her loyalty to those who shared her path when she was younger. It’s a delicate tiptoe and seldom leads everyone to agree.
It’s possible to be momentarily happy and yet inexplicably ruined. We don’t understand our lives until they’ve made an aged trajectory. Even then, our glimpses into the window make us feel traitorous to our own lives. It is as if we owe ourselves an explanation, even though we know we’re blameless for choices we didn’t make.
So, in turn, I peer into my own childhood. I feel the cheap paneling against my back as I lean against the wall in the narrow closets. I hear the shouts from other rooms. And sometimes, I recall the joy of stolen moments, ones which do not fit comfortably with the mythology of my recalled violence.
In those same closets, I opened books and dreamed of other lives – and momentarily forgot that my life was diminished and small.
I look at this picture through my window and see the smile as a captured moment, fragmented away from those in the photograph.
David and Goliath: long-range missile before long-range missile was a thing.
The Goliath Rule: Why throw a punch up close when you can insult from a distance?
Once again, I opened my email to discover a message telling me exactly what I needed to hear. A sister of one of my paternal aunts wrote me, telling me she’d noticed I added another 100+ pictures of her sister on Ancestry. These are archived in original resolution. My aunt’s sister told me she’d cried a bit, something she hadn’t expected. I wrote her back and told her I put every usable picture I owned of my aunt on there, in the hopes they might last forever, for anyone to see. I also told her I did the same for my uncle and my cousin Jimmy, both of whom now have hundreds of pictures on their respective pages. If you didn’t guess, putting so many pictures on accounts is a rarity.
It was a labor of love and honor. It’s the least I could do. These pictures are in my possession, but I don’t think I own them. They belong to us all – anyone who shared moments, laughter, or time with those in the pictures.
Yesterday, I wrote a post about high school pictures. I used a horrible picture of myself from many years ago. It was a bit satirical, but the message was one I’ve written about a few dozen times: vanity and hoarding regarding pictures is sinful. I’ve never owned a picture that I haven’t offered to everyone who might have an interest. I don’t get the urge to hoard pictures in a box, under a bed, or in a seldom-used closet.
More than one person got irritated at me for preaching the gospel of sharing. Some people righteously guard their past appearance, as if history isn’t going to kick that door open with time anyway. Others play the role of Gollum and greedily keep their pictures hidden in the crook of their unapproachable arms. The last tendency lessens everyone’s ability to remember and cherish people in our past who’ve passed on to the next life.
When my aunt’s sister reached out yesterday, she didn’t know that it was what I needed to hear. My actions months ago opened her heart again, even if for only for a while yesterday. In those moments, she could see that I had paid homage to her sister, to life, and to people we love.
All those pictures? Some of them have been downloaded dozens of times, each time by someone who discovered my treasure, one freely given. I am merely the guardian.
Love, X
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 