A tree skirt of books and a train running round and round

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Long, strange book trips

We joke that the library has the World's Largest Collection of Travel Guides, like it should be a giant ball of string or maybe Wall Drug. We've got your Fodors,  Frommers, and Rick Steves, Insight and Eyewitness, National Geographic and Lonely Planet, Michelin and Off the Beaten Path.  We've got at least a hundred places you must golf before you die. We are branching out into Falcon Guides for hiking , biking, and waterfalls. Whether you are into glamping or food trucks, we probably have your guide.

2020 was unfortunately the year of no travel. True, my buddy kept her Jeep filled up just in case Texas did something so incredibly embarrassing she had to drive off toward the horizon. This being a frequent occurrence, just saying.

Of the four long, strange trip books I read this year, the standout is Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder, by Kent Nerburn (the 25th anniversary edition). A white writer is challenged with telling the story of a Lakota elder. How do these two learn to trust and listen to each other, and preserve the story for future generations? How can spirituality bring healing to both? By driving an ancient car off-road in the South Dakota Badlands. 

Out of Darkness, Shining Light tells how the African expedition leaders and slaves enabling Dr. David Livingstone to search for the source of the Nile carried his body 1,500 miles from the interior of the African continent to the east coast so he could be buried in his homeland. They also carried the doctor's expedition journals. The heavily researched novel considers colonialism from the Africans' viewpoint through the voice of an outspoken slave cook and road wife, and a pompous freed slave educated by Christian missionaries. Recommended by Nancy Pearl.

The Last Great Road Bum: a Novel, by Hector Tobar is an experiment that doesn't quite work, but has some good spots along the journey. It is the very Sixties tale of a real person, Joe Sanderson of Urbana, Illinois, who did a great deal of no-budget traveling, writing letters and diaries for a great road bum novel, without ever managing to learn much in the process. Tobar discovered the real diaries and in the course of his fictionalizing them the nonfiction Sanderson keeps interrupting.

Sometimes I just like the book jacket! Natural History, by Carlos Fonseca, is an even more complex experiment. Again a writer is given a packet of letters and notes, and embarks on geographical and philosophical journeys in search of truth or reality, or camouflaged butterflies and masked revolutionary guerrilla leaders. I didn't understand it, but it was appropriately surreal reading for the Covid shutdown. Oh, and there's a famous fashion designer with a mysterious disease.

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

To get home eventually

The first traffic jam on my commute after over two months without jams and without traffic  and mostly without commutes was an alternate reality ninety minutes. Nearly all the drivers were staying at safe distances and signalling their need or intention to change lanes. Where was the typical panic to change lanes in any direction? Where were the arrogant pickup drivers plowing to the exit ramp or driving on the shoulder? What had occurred to shut down most of the freeway lanes? I felt an abnormal lack of Need-to-Know.

Every driver save one I observed seemed pretty calm, although that one woman did look harried. How odd to be wondering where she needed to be, who she needed to pick up at an appointed time.  I did not seem to need to be anywhere but where I was. I bet she was finally going to a haircut appointment!

No big lighted signs alerted us to the coming traffic slowdown, or to take alternate routes. I'm still blissfully ignorant of traffic apps or the cause of the shutdown.  Why were there so many white semi-trailers? The cars all seemed to be white or silver. The sky had that late afternoon cloudy gray glare so typical here.

Strange sense of floating for a very long time on a very slow river, probably getting sunburned with my arm roasting on the black inner tube. Tubing on a Texas river of traffic.

My personal inconvenience, my individual delay, my normal aggravation were next to nonexistent. Just floating along. Check my blood pressure. Am I even breathing?

Maybe we could come out of this tragic pandemic with a brief and temporary sense of being part of a grand organism that works together, that allows space between beings,  that breathes in and out. Maybe we will improve our ability to wait, and not take it as a personal affront.


© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Pit stop heaven

Being kidnapped and taken to Buc-ee's is a Texas thang. Your friends feel sad for you if you have not experienced the roadtrip wonder that is Buc-ee's. So they take you to the nearest one and watch as you go slack-jawed. Welcome to the cult!

Buc-ee's is not a truckstop, nor a convenience store with gas pumps. Buc-ee's  is a Texas phenomenon with World Famous Restrooms.  The restrooms are clean and huge, and the stalls are large enough for a mom and several kids. They are the restrooms you wish for in every airport you've ever had the misfortune to visit.

Except for the Buc-ee's Ugly Christmas Sweater-style t-shirts I wasn't tempted by the branded merchandise. Planning ahead for next year's employee ugly sweater contest didn't seem worth $15.00.

The exciting news for this old litter educator is that Buc-ees and the Texas Department of Transportation have a cross-branded campaign to reduce litter on Texas highways. Don't Mess With Texas with Buc-ee's should be a powerful ad campaign.

My kidnapper and I are old enough to remember entering the gas station to get the key to the Ladies' Restroom out around the back of the Sinclair or Texaco station. Once in Utah the key was not required because the door had fallen off its hinges the last time the restroom was cleaned.

My mom, Fritzi kept a travel notebook in the glovebox. She noted mileage between clean restroom locations along highways AND places t o get a good piece of pie. Fritzi would have been a Buc-ee's cult convert!

On this day in 2010 my sister and I drove our dad from Lincoln, Nebraska's Eastmont Manor to the Life Care Center of Plano, Texas, the most difficult road trip either of us ever undertook. Today's adventure lacked the snow, the dementia, and the Depends, thank heaven.



Bob Daddy-O Wade passed away this week. Thank you, Daddy-O for the inspiration of your giant frog sculptures at Carl's Corner Truck Stop. They set me on a papier mache adventure of great creative joy.

Road trip reminiscence references:

• Stuckeys rhymes with Buc-ee's. A feature of mid-Sixties travel on Interstate 80. 

•  Sapp Bros. "Big Coffee Pot" truckstop west of Omaha.
• Bosselmans in Grand Island, Nebraska.
• Wall Drug in South Dakota.

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

Fifty mile field trip with phonetic spelling

It's getting trickier to see any fields on a drive north in Collin County. In celebration of sunshine after a miserable gray week we went for a little road trip up Texas State Highway 289 aka Preston Road all the way to Celina.  As we drove, we kept saying, "This used to be way out there." It all used to be WAY OUT THERE, but now it's not.

Between the sprung-up subdivisions, the Sinacola and Komatsu heavy equipment scraping away, and restaurants lined up to the horizon, there are a few longhorn cattle. Not sure if the longhorns are there for real, or for faux Western ambiance. I'd just had a dream that I was smoking a Meerschaum pipe while sitting on a buffalo wearing a Disney princess costume, and Monday's sunlight was preternatural. 

*To clarify, I was wearing the Disney princess costume and smoking the pipe. The buffalo was not wearing a costume or smoking. The dress was yellow. I had slept straight through sixteen hours due to a sinus headache, and the dream was extremely vivid.*

Celina, Texas, is a pronunciation problem. According to the Texas Pronunciation Guide, Celina is pronounced suh-LI-nuh. But Salina, Kansas is pronounced sal-eye'-nuh (i.e. singular, with a long I in the second syllable), as distinguished from the city of Salinas CA, which is pronounced sal-ee'-nus (i.e. plural, with a long E in the second syllable). 

If you need to say, "This used to be way out there," it is ðɪs juzd tu bi weɪ aʊt ðɛr. 

Gawking at the subdivisions filled with two-story, tall-roofed houses a song fragment bopped me on the head: 

They're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

Whuh?  Sparing you the googling, the song is "Little Boxes," by Malvina Reynolds, most notably recorded by Pete Seeger, not Burl Ives , Roger Miller, or the Kingston Trio.  The houses sprouting from here to the county line are not cheap ticky tacky, but they do look all the same. For safety sake, we waited to google until after the fifty mile field trip.

And because it all used to be way out there, if you can remember the Viet Nam draft, I recommend Richard Russo's Chances Are....

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

A whole passel of puzzles

Lettuce pause for a moment of self-doubt followed by the Serenity Prayer and a daily dose of gratitude for my sister who mailed me a whole passel of jigsaw puzzles. She mailed them in a Crate & Barrel box.

Q. How many 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles did she send?
A. A whole passel.

Q. How do you spell "passel?"
A. "Passel" is spelled like "tassel," and unlike "hassle." "Passel" is a real word. Thank heaven! I didn't just dream it up. It's right there in the big red dictionary.

Just seeing the box of puzzles unleashed an inner endless-loop of the Andrews Sisters singing "I Love You a Bushel and a Peck."

Q. How much do I love you?
A. A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.

Q. Is a bushel bigger than a passel?
A. That is comparing apples to oranges with a festive sauce of linguistic idiosyncrasy.

Q. At Christmas dinner the cook opined that peeling 6 lbs. didn't make as many mashed potatoes as it used to.
A. Should that be "as much" or "as many?"

It is still a passel of mashed potatoes. A "passel" is a large quantity although etymologically-derived from "parcel." And "to parcel" means to divvy up and dole out fractions of a whole.

Q. When was Bob Dole on the Republican ticket?
A. Let's skip over this part.

Q. Why do we say "part and parcel?"
A. To mean the whole kit and kaboodle. Also, since part and parcel mean the same thing, the expression is for decorative emphasis with all the bells and whistles.

Q. Does everyone know that The Idiot by Elif Batuman is a really dry funny novel about college, language, linguistics, narrative, meaning, constructed worlds, attending foreign films, Dracula, and conflicted romantic relationships?
A. No, but they need to read it.

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

A busman's holiday and the Battle of Philly

What is a busman's holiday?

For this busperson it was a very relaxing weekend. And the most relaxing hours were spent at my computer doing pretty much the same thing I do forty hours a week for peanuts and benefits; sorting, describing, categorizing a body of creative work so the individual pieces can be accessed in the future. Why my digital nature photos might be accessed is not the concern at this moment, but perhaps the subject collections will lead to new creative endeavors.

So: noun: busman's holiday

1. a vacation or form of recreation that involves doing the same thing that one does at work.
2. 
   

I always associate the idiom busman's holiday with "The Honeymooners," going for a weekend ride with driver Ralph Cramden, wife Alice, and the Nortons, Ed and Trixie. In the early Sixties Dad would set the black and white tv on the kitchen high stool for viewing during Saturday night supper. We didn't become a two-car family until about 1965, so Dad rode the bus to work.

Twenty-plus years earlier, Dad had a different bus experience as a sleep-deprived armed guard on the Philadelphia transit system during the "Battle of Philly."  This may have been his introduction to civil rights issues as a young white man from a rural mid-America community.

© 2013-2018 Nancy L. Ruder

History paused, or ...waiting for preservation

Sis, we were one of the Div. who stayed with the 9th Army last winter. It was mighty shaky too, our lines were spread mighty thin. By the way, the slide rule that didn't get home was probably a victim of the "Bulge." They picked off a lot of mail. You also remember how late it was during that time.

It's typical that Private Mastalir, (soon to be Tech Sgt. Mastalir), would attempt to mail a slide rule home to Nebraska for his sister to use in high school math class. That he posted it during the "Battle of the Bulge" was unfortunate, as it never got to perform calculations in Pierce.

Dad loved slide rules, and I remember how excited he was to bestow one on me in high school. Sadly, I have no idea how to use one any more, and no idea what those calculus algorithms were all about anyway! Still I remember sitting with him at the dining table long after supper while Dad demonstrated the slide rule's magic precision, efficiency, and cool design. Soon we would enter that ugly teenage daughter/square disapproving father dynamic, but at that slide rule moment we were still a team.

My WWII project has been paused while looking into storage and preservation options for the letters, photographs, clippings, and even ephemera! My order of archival sleeves will arrive any day now. "Ephemera tipped in" is probably my very favorite MARC field 500 general cataloging note ever:

EPHEMERA Printed material of passing interest in every day life (e.g.: advertising, ticket stubs, photos, postcards, programs, some booklets and pamphlets, etc.). Of interest to collectors because they are often the only record of many quotidian events.

TIPPED IN Paper, photograph, or print glued down by only a narrow strip.

The 1965 movie "Battle of the Bulge" was viewed sitting on the cold, hard linoleum squares of the next door neighbor's dark basement close enough to the t.v. to make us blind. It joins the "Outer Limits," the "Twilight Zone," some "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," and occasional "Wonderful World of Disney," viewed in this venue. The "Battle of the Bulge" had lots of tanks, but no intergalactic giant ants as far as I can recall.

Dad's letter from July 1945 referring to the Bulge and the slide rule sent me to the mildewed booklet, 102 Thru Germany. Dad and the 102d were not in the Ardennes region during the "Bulge." His cookies and letters from home were slowed, but still reaching him along the Roer with the 9th Army for Christmas 1944 and New Year's 1945. His letters from that time took 4-6 weeks to reach Nebraska, and I can imagine the agony this delay was for his mother, aunts, and sister.

I was so glad to find 102 Thru Germany already available online at Lonely Sentry. Dad's copy is full of stains and mildew. The 406th of the 102nd was defending the Wurm River between the towns of Wurm and Barmen at Christmas 1944, although the letters just say "somewhere in Germany." By July 1945 Howard could give more locations in his letters.

Had another one of those heart breaking letters from a brother (a Lt. in the Pacific) of one of my buddies who was killed. I had written the boy's wife and this letter was a thank you for what comfort that gave them and also a request for more information. They are so hard to write.

© 2013-2018 Nancy L. Ruder

Rothenburg on the Tauber

December 1945 finds Tech Sgt. Mastalir transferred to the 15th Tank Battalion in Rothenburg, Germany. As he writes home, he is in the redeployment pipeline, "but the pipes are frozen." He is staying with eleven guys in two rooms, and having trouble getting any peace and quiet to think straight. To add to the chaos, he has developed some sort of nasal blockage that will require surgery before he can finally travel back to the States. Plus, and this is a big plus, he has just gotten word that his older brother Milt has married Marge, a woman friend when Dad was studying at Georgetown. (Although he insisted she was not his "girlfriend.") Dad's aunts are sure Milt has "stolen" Dad's girlfriend. Never mind that Milt is six years older than Howard, and Marge is older than Milt. It must have been a major soap opera in tiny Pierce, Nebraska, considering how invested the townsfolk were in writing to their young soldiers and hearing readings of letters from overseas.



Growing up I was fascinated by three wood inlay pictures of a fairy tale village*. Both my memory and my photos are incomplete, but it looks like Dad sent the framed pictures home from this time in Rothenburg on the Tauber. They must have resonated with his interests in architecture and woodworking, and his need for clarity and order. The inlay pieces fit so neatly, while his life must have felt very disordered.

No date on the tourist guidebook

The town seems to have been both a symbol of Nazi ideology, and protected from shelling by the Allies due to its history and beauty.

One of the Rothenburg postcards in the trunk.

   

*Even Rick Steves calls it a "fairy tale dream town."

© 2013-2018 Nancy L. Ruder

Dot-to-dot, part one

Above the hi-fi behind the sliding cabinet door you may be granted permission to peruse the shelf of grown-up books. Such splendid, serene, sustaining times as a kid flopped down on the living room carpet paging through the big books, smelling the paper and ink and binding, saving the images to memory. I still have three of those books, though I occasionally regret letting go of the first 25 years of New Yorker cartoons, and a history of chair design. Dad was good about answering my questions if I didn't understand the cartoons. Dad would also talk about cartoons in Bill Mauldin's book, though he rarely mentioned his time in the service.

 

He didn't say much about the book in German with the cross stitch cover beyond that it was a gift, which made it mysterious. Seven decades after the gift, and more than five since I suspected it held more than it told, I am trying to decipher the meaning of the cross stitch book. 

Title page

Title page verso

Inscription

Bookmark 

  

After V.E. Day, Tech Sgt. Mastalir remained in Germany eight months. For the first he was just grateful not to be sent to the Pacific. Then he spent his time moving from town to town, packing up, setting up, packing up, setting up. His letters are typewritten, and tell of guard duty, occasional raids, and his overworked state when the First Sgt. was laid up with severe athlete's foot. 

My own toes are tired after a long week, and I am fantasizing about texting in sick due to severe athlete's foot. My boss would not believe I am a severe athlete... That is all for tonight history mystery folks.

© 2013-2018 Nancy L. Ruder

Quick, hand me the pliers!

Enjoyed my trip to the dentist this morning, which is to say I did not gag or have a panic attack. I was truly dreading my second crown, as the first about ten years ago was a ghastly experience.

Last evening I reread Pvt. Mastalir's description of military dentistry to work up some enthuiasm for the civilian type. Also some gratitude for dental insurance...

When Dad was finishing his Army Specialist Training Corp program at Georgetown University in December 1943 he woke up with a very stiff jaw, sore throat, and sore tooth. He went to sick bay, and the doctor told him he was cutting a wisdom tooth, and the upper tooth was biting down on the gum.

The next day a dentist at Fort Meyer told a different story. Dad's lower wisdom tooth was embedded in his jaw. The upper wisdom tooth biting down had caused an infection in the gum and tooth. The only treatment would be pulling the upper tooth, then treating the infection before pulling the lower tooth. So the dentist yanked out the upper tooth, and Dad wrote his Ma before the feeling came back.

"Treating the infection" seems to mean mostly gargling with hot salt water for two weeks. Dad was a lifelong believer in this practice. A couple weeks after the first extraction he rode the bus back to Fort Meyer. He got in the chair at 1:15, and was all done and back outside waiting for the bus at 1:45. It was the easiest extraction the dentist had ever done, and he was sorry he sterilized so many tools he did not end up using.

Dad gloated about his free dental work that would have cost $25 for a civilian! Not today. Not this civilian.

I always feel like a total failure at the dentist. The dentist, hygienist, and other staff are all trying to carve Mount Rushmore in my teeth with their  picks and mirrors. My tongue is always trying to knock Gutzon Borglum off the mountain.

For the first time in my life I was offered nitrous oxide. Glory Hallelujiah! Then Denise used a magic wand to take digital CAD images of my tooth. I just kept thinking it was like the Google street view camera car back there and I hoped it wasn't bulk trash day on my cul-de-sac. That and trying to remember who sang the songs on the Dental Oldies Radio playlist. (answers below)

Little Ditty About Jack and Diane--John Mellencamp
Runnin' Down a Dream--Tom Petty
Still the Same--Bob Seger
Open Your Heart--Madonna
Gimme Three Steps--Lynyrd Skynyrd
Hit Me With Your Best Shot--Pat Benatar

© 2013-2018 Nancy L. Ruder

It's Saturday night and I'm reading about mumps

Army immunization register

This might not be healthy. Mumps are on my mind. I had mumps in kindergarten or first grade. It wasn't fun.  I had to stay home in bed for at least a week drinking ginger ale. Mumps was as miserable as chicken pox in my childhood memory.

My kids did not get mumps because they received the MMR vaccine. They did get chicken pox during a memorably miserable spell between Christmas 1987 and Valentines 1988 in Edmond, Oklahoma.  Worse, they shared the disease with an adult male at a Christmas gathering.

My grandchildren will not get mumps, measles, rubella, or chicken pox. At least if they are not exposed to the diseases, before they can be immunized. How would they be exposed? By a child whose parents opted-out of vaccinations. So this Grancy is grumpy about mumps.

Private Howard Mastalir came down with mumps the last day of basic training at Ft. Belvoir, VA.  He was headed to the hospital for ten or twelve days when he wrote his Ma not to worry.  He would miss his TMD [troop moblilization departure] for ASTP [Army Specialist Training Program] but was developing a soldier frame of mind. Who cares? Let the Army worry about it. Never mind that mumps can cause encephalitis, deafness, and swollen testicles in adults! There were other guys with mumps arriving in the ward, and guys with measles down the hall.

Lunching with teachers today, I learned my city, Plano, is a hotspot for nonmedical exemptions (NMEs), children entering school unvaccinated.  With this many exemptions the greater population is no longer protected from illnesses. Parents who have never seen a case of mumps are less likely to understand the consequences to the community of a mumps outbreak. Why have they never seen a case of mumps? Because their generation had required vaccinations.

From the Texas Medical Association:

Researchers identified 15 large metropolitan areas where more than 400 kindergarten-aged children have not received their vaccines. Texas has the most “hotspots” with four. Michigan has three (Detroit, Troy, and Warren); Washington has two (Seattle and Spokane); and Utah has two (Salt Lake City and Provo). The other hotspots are Portland, Phoenix, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh.

“The high numbers of NMEs in these densely populated urban centers suggest that outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases could either originate from or spread rapidly throughout these populations of unimmunized, unprotected children,” the study says. “The fact that the largest count of vaccine-exempt pediatric populations originate in large cities with busy international airports may further contribute to this risk.”

Dad wrote about getting lots of shots in the army. What were those immunizations?  Smallpox, triple typhoid, typhus, and a flu shot after the war ended.

In the prevaccine era, mumps gained notoriety as an illness that substantially affected armies during mobilization. The average annual rate of hospitalization resulting from mumps during World War I was 55.8 per 1,000, which was exceeded only by the rates for influenza and gonorrhea.  --  How WWII spurred vaccine innovation.

A little evening reading while you are sipping ginger ale through a straw. We each have a responsibility to protect ALL of us.

• How General George Washington had the Continental Army inoculated against smallpox.
• How WWII spurred vaccine innovation.
• Smithsonian Institution history of the measles-mumps-rubella antibody initiative.
• Center for Disease Control description of complications from the mumps.
• Remember that part about busy international airports?

© 2013-2018 Nancy L. Ruder

Where in the world is Carmen Monoxide?

Waiting around for the electrician to install a carbon monoxide detector in the vicinity of the apartment fireplace today I had an attack of retro-PBS. It was scary with audio  hallucinations, but not as bad as Barney flashbacks.

Carmen Sandiego, a mysterious woman with a large hat, was a big fave with my elementary school sons. She outdid Waldo for disappearing in a crowd. She was parent-allowed television viewing before childhood was taken over by screen and apps. And she had a catchy theme song.

The new carbon monoxide detector was installed on the ceiling between the fireplace and ceiling fan. Since I had to clear off the mantle and all around the fireplace it may be time for a big cathartic room rearrangement and throw-away festival. Wish I had the right hat.

© 2013-2018 Nancy L. Ruder

I contain multitudes : unhappy macnam

Many people on this ride have been wondering how to put the President in maintenance mode today. Never imagined I'd be turning on extra lights and peering through my bifocals to find "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus," in a stack of dusty CDs. While the chief executive is a whirling vortex of contradictions, the general sense of his messages sinks lower and lower.

On lunch break I started reading Ed Yong's book, I Contain Multitudes. It is much less upsetting to my innards to imagine my body full of whirling microbes than it is to listen to the latest news. The gut microbes are my friends. With this President, who needs enemies?

Walt Whitman's quote from "Song of Myself" inspired the book's title:

Do I contradict myself? 

Very well, then I contradict myself,

I am large, I contain multitudes.

On the gut scale between beneficial microbes and nauseating news there is the eerie experience of the remote I.T. contractor roaming around inside my work computer. I can watch the progress via a teeny tiny camera on the nose of a giant intestinal worm. Occasionally my physical effort is required to to reboot or type in a password. 

Are the billions of microbes within each of us the original I.T. department? Have they been making adjustments and corrections invisibly since we slithered from the cesspool?

I hold out small hope for Clem to say, "this is Worker speaking." If you don't know Firesign Theatre, it's not too late!

© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

Glorious day in the neighborhood

Perfect day for spending another three hundred bucks on my baby Buick. Now the window goes up, the window goes down, and the interior stayed dry during yesterday's rain. Used a variety of art supplies to wrap the gap -- clear cellophane, graphic acetate rejects, packing tape, even some iridescent "opal" cellophane. No duct tape or trash bags. This was an arty car window party wrap. Christo and Jeanne-Claude woulda been awed.

Perfect days are not usually associated with January, but we get some real sparklers this time of year. Absolutely gorgeous blue sky, bright sun, light wind, and temps roving from 45 to 60 degrees F. My walks from and to the repair shop were not walking meditations, although I paid attention to my feet, my steps, the rhythm. It was very restoring and peaceful.

 

In between the dropping off and picking up of my dear, if occasionally aggravating vehicle, I watched "Napoleon Dynamite" twice. Once didn't quite do it justice. The movie unwrapped some long buried junior high and high school memories. These were not peaceful and rainbow sparkly!

There is one positive development that might improve the teen years:

Hail to the Spartans.

© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

Hope, park, purse, fly

In a year-end display of flagrant optimism I purchased a new purse at DSW today. It is not a perfect purse, or a stylish handbag, or even vaguely appealing. It just seemed workable, and the extremely workable purse of the previous 2.5 years bit the dust.

Yes, it has come down to workable. How will this purse work traveling through the TSA screener and under the seat in front of me? Does it have a cross-body strap? Can it be cleaned up with a Clorox disinfecting wipe after a bad Panda Express moment? Will it hold a bagel sandwich, a library book, or all of my prescriptions? Will it preserve my invisibility as a woman of a certain age? Please don't let it make a statement!

The 2017 fiction audiobook that rises most often to mind is not the amazing Lincoln in the Bardo, performed by a full cast. It is Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, by Katherine Rooney, narrated by Xe Sands. New Year's Eve 1984, and 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish, former ad copywriter genius, takes a ten-mile stroll around a gritty Manhattan in her mink coat ruminating over her six decades in NYC. How do we travel? How do we stroll? What's in our heavily-packed psychological wheelie luggage?

I would not want to lift the karmic baggage of 2017 into the overhead carry-on bin. The stress of 2017 won't fit in the bin, and I don't fit in the ever-shrinking airplane seats. It's all I can do to stow my purse under the seat.

Not to be downer Debby Dystopia here, but life in the Trump administration has been a drag on my in-town miles-per-gallon in 2017. Being hopeful, or at least staying calm, is an everyday challenge. That's why I love leaving the Buick at Park'N'Fly. 

The guys who drive the shuttle vans have a unanimous appreciation for the 2002 Buick Century. They tell me I could sell this beauty for big bucks. They rhapsodize on its fine points and pristine condition. They ooh and ah about its mileage total. It's Mad Max meets Fidel: Road Warrior. 

I drive off in my magic pumpkin coach with my purse of invisibility. Maybe we can survive after all.

And hey, there's a purse museum in Little Rock. And hey, there are some Buick museums, too.

© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

Ladling oatmeal with millennials

Let's learn about work with Weekly Reader!

Punch in: To check in formally at a job upon arrival.
Punch out: To check out formally at a job upon departure.


Hold the fort: To take responsibility for a situation while another person is temporarily absent.
All hands on deck:  
A call for all members of a ship's crew to come to the deck, usually in a time of crisis. By extension, everyone 
available to help with a problem, or a call for those people to help. 

 The mail must go through.

Work your fingers to the bone: Boney fingers 
 Your job may be crucial for the greater good: Keep the ships from crashing on the rocks no matter how small you are.
Ladle that cream of wheat through holidays and blizzards: Sick people need to eat, and so do the folks taking care of them.

Find your own sub: You are responsible for covering the time and the work you are assigned whether or not working is convenient.

The show must go on: Regardless of what happens, whatever show has been planned still has to be staged for the waiting patrons.

Just a tiny cog in a big machine: You probably aren't as important as you imagine.







Another day older and deeper in debt: Tennesse Ernie & ZZ Top.

Perpetual tardiness is arrogance: It’s simply that some people no longer even pretend that they think your time is as important as theirs. And technology makes it worse. It seems texting or emailing that you are late somehow means you are no longer late. Rubbish. You are rude. And inconsiderate.

Let's just get it out there: Working with millennials is not always a picnic in the park. I birthed and raise three of them, but most of the others are from another galaxy. Even so, many are amazingly committed to causes and passions, an inspiration to older coworkers, and a bonus to any team. Except when one wants to boot them off the island... Kids These Days gave me valuable new and often infuriating insight into how we created the Millenials and the economic situations they face.

Bring out the hammock:  You didn't just imagine it. Our weekends have lost the restoring, relaxing powers we desperately need.

Much has been written about Hillbilly Elegy and The Glass Castle. Jeannette Walls' book is the more powerful to my mind, bringing out so many choices we make about work, callings, parenthood, and personal responsibility. Do any of our choices make more sense, and why?

    
    

David Brown's memoir is a powerful description of police work, but also a celebration of vocation, meaning and purpose in one's life work.

The Promised Land of Error is a reminder that for much of mankind's existence work took up less of each day than it does in this time of labor-saving devices and technology.

And now this Christmas evening I will hang it up without ranting about earbuds on the job. Be present.

© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder