Years ago, I wrote a sewing blog when that was a thing. In it, I had random posts called Flypaper Thoughts where I put exactly that. Ideas that flew across my mind, didn’t go anywhere, but stuck with me.
I’ve just got back from an almost three week trip, for my mom’s memorial service in Winnipeg and to visit my sons and family/partners in Berkeley and Seattle.
Back in my own time zone my mind is still discombobulated (now that’s a word worth reviving) l so this seems like the right moment to revive flypaper thoughts.
Many hours in airport lounges have qualified me as an official spotter of face lifts. It’s an entry level job and to be honest does not take much skill.
The reason is there is only one face. See one, see them all. Like the one that the woman who married Jeff Bezos has. Duplicated, replicated. Identical. Was there only one textbook in medical school?
Nature has enough sense not to do that.
What if women went to plastic surgeons and said.
“Give me a wise face,” “Give me a kind face?”
“A face that could be trusted,” “A face that people wanted to talk to.”
Oh wait.
Nature does that.
A girl, now obviously a woman, came to my mom’s memorial.
Last time I saw her was in Grade Nine.
I loved coming to your house, it was always so fun.
Her mother had a degree in home economics and her house was immaculate.
My mother once washed the carrots in the washing machine because it was faster.
Domestically she was a short-cutter.
As you would have gathered.
A text came in from an old boyfriend I last saw 52 years ago.
You had the mother everyone wished they had, he wrote.
These small kindnesses were worth any amount of hymns, readings, or refreshments after the service.
Thank you.
When I got home the dog did lapses around the kitchen, jumped her 35 pounds onto my lap. Sat beside the bathtub when I washed the airline off.
The cat sidled off.
In the night I woke up to a sound.
Her purring on my pillow.
We all have our ways.
I walk through customs and the officer waves me through.
“Welcome home Barb.”
Returning to Nova Scotia sometimes feels like putting your feet up on a thirty year old footstool.
My granddaughter and I went out for lunch.
Of course, she wanted to sit up high on the mezzanine.
I looked down and saw below us six randomly spaced tables.
At each one was grey-haired person eating alone.
No, that’s not true.
They had their phones on the tables beside their plates.
It was all I could do not to go down those stairs and push those tables together.
A man came up to me in a parking lot.
“Do you ever lose your car?”
He had obviously spotted me from forty feet away as someone who probably did.
“All the time,” I said. “But I’m trying a new thing. Paying attention.”
It’s true. It’s all it’s cracked up to be.
“A blue van?” he asked.
We found it. Three aisles over.
"I’m not sleeping,” he said. “I exercise, I take magnesium. But every night. 3 o’clock. I wake up thinking. I can’t stop.”
“I’ll think of you tonight at 3 o’clock” I said.
What if we decided, instead, that older people are supposed to do this?
What if doctors said, “Here’s what I want you to do. Go to bed at nine, wake up at say 2:30, think about everyone in the family, everything you have to do, and then go back to sleep at 4:00. If you can’t manage that, come back and see me.”
We would all sleep better if they said that.
At the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley there was a sign.
“This is what scientists look like” it said.
Six pictures of women.
The man behind me snickered. I moved away from him.
To the next picture. Ernest Lawrence, with his team of 40 students, Nobel Prize winner in Physics, as were a number of his students.
Every one a white man.
My bet is that the women with those aptitudes were home loading carrots into the washing machine.
I have been fooling around with AI.
Excellent way of conducting fast research.
As long as you know it has no sense of humor and little imagination.
And this thing called hallucinations means that it cannot say “I don’t know”
So if it doesn’t, it improvises, which is what we used to call make things up.
I don’t find this a problem.
I used to teach. I had students like that. Can spot hallucinations a mile away.
I had a boss once.
The boss of the bosses to be exact.
He once complained that the “stewardesses” these days were a disgrace.
Old ladies he said. Who wants to see that?
Apparently the same people beside him at meetings.
Close enough to see his paunch, the comb-over, and the liver spotted face.
Perhaps at the meeting when he told us to all disregard this thing called the internet.
“It won’t last, believe me. I’ve seen all this before.”
Actually he hadn’t.
My two year-old grandniece knows what she wants to be for Hallowe’en.
The Incredible Hulk.
I’ll sew that costume.
I used to write a sewing blog you know.
I try to zoom out to common sense and kindness. We are all the same is my core belief,
Carroll thanks for sticking with me through all my writing experiments. I mainly do it to connect with women like me out there and it is so nice to hear from readers like you. Appreciated.