Planning

Jenny and Charles are beating us at our own  game by coming here before we go there. I breathe a big sigh of relief when I write that because it has taken months to arrange this trip and we're tired it. 

Should I clarify? It's the women who are  tired of it,  J and I.  We sent the emails and haggled with price-gouging profiteering proprietors and asked a million times, are you SURE there's no room? The men did nothing at all except repeatedly ask us when we were going to make some PLANS. And excuse me for saying so, because I love Art and think Charles is one helluva a nice guy, but they're sure to want credit for every nice place we stay.

My friend Fiona loves to observe how stories quickly change tenure and focus, depending on who's telling the story. The truth, she says wisely, depends upon the individual. If Art tells you he rescued a bedraggled kitten from a raging teacup poodle, you better believe I'm the one who came away scratched from pinkie finger to pinkie toe and bitten on the leg.

Anyway after J and C arrive from So. Africa, we're off on a two-week expedition thru Melrose, Montana, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Jackson Lake and Jackson Hole. The guys'll claim it as their idea; Jenny and I will roll our eyes. You'll know who's tellin' the truth by the name on the blog

Aging

A good friend of mine wrote me a note: "I think you should wait until Art's mother passes, then you won't break her heart, and we'll have you around longer!" 

Got me thinking about one of the Boomers' parents' dilemmas. As they planned--or didn't--their families, many of them thought of their kids as a reserve against old age. Millions of them were right; millions were wrong.

Here's how I responded to my friend's kind-hearted note. It'll clue you to how I really feel about leaving my mother-in-law just where she is while we pursue our dream.

As far as Art's mom is concerned, she's 86 years old, has perfect blood pressure, does not take any meds--the only thing wrong with her is bad bones. She comes from a long line of people who live to be 105 and she's only 32 years older than i am....sooooo thanks for the suggestion and i love you too, but  NO. NO. NO. Can you imagine waiting for her to die? oh too morbid for me, it'd turn into something too scary.

I once had a mean-spirited friend who passionately hated her mother. The old lady lived in a downstairs apt that  my friend couldn't wait to turn into an art room. The "joke" was, every time we talked, i'd ask, "she still alive?" "yes, dammit," she'd reply. Funny, i knew why my friend hated her so, but i kinda liked the old lady.

I had long ago lost that friend when a distant acquaintance told me what a gorgeous work room her friend had in her basement.

I wasn't surprised when she mentioned the friend by name.

I wonder if she's  any happier now that she's got this great space, remodeled for art, glowing with natural light? All i can think is that her mother lived a mighty lonely (miserable?) existence downstairs from her one surviving daughter, a mean woman who hated her so badly she talked to her only about business matters. And then practically in the third person.

Of course, as i write to you, i'm writing to myself--so thanks for the question. I love Art's mom, who btw, is home now. i visit her way too often to fit my busy schedule. She lives in a great community where everyone--EVERYONE--loves her. She's not alone--she has more friends now than she ever collected in her entire life. Too bad she's got just one child. 

All that justifies why we can't and won't wait for her to  die. It answers the question that so many Boomers ask themselves about their parents....and their own kids. If you have children to care for you til the end time, you may not be so lucky. Yes, her heart will be broken. But that'll be the signal for her friends to gather round her, close ranks, so to speak.

I'm 58, Art's 62. Let's say she lives to 100, which she easily could. i'll be 72, art will be 76. Geriatrics on photo safari? So Africa may not even BE there anymore....even if we could get the walkers into the plane's overhead bin.

Money

We had dinner with a friend the other night. He's an insurance salesman, but we try not to hold that against him. For some reason, we make friends with insurance guys; one of our oldest friends is someone we met across a sales desk. (It was actually a bar, but that doesn't sound as respectable.)

Anyway, this guy, I'll call him DavidCampbell, is a good man, sensitive and slightly depressed in the best of circumstances, morose in the worst.  He's a voting member on the board of Friends Who Worry About Us, and who could blame him? Art is 62 and I -- well -- I am the right age to have a 62-year-old husband. We're the "older couple" on our block (some might add "crazy" to that description), the ones playing at youth one final time. 

But DavidCampbell worries about us with class and finesse. You won't catch him wondering about how many kinds of spiders might kill us with just one bite or how far we should we keep from a mother elephant and her new darling. Oh no, when DavidCampbell worries for us, he worries about money. How we'll get it in the first place, how we'll spend it (or not) and how we'll get some more. Budget, that's the answer, a magic word full of intrigue. Oh right! I know nothing about keeping a budget....and i do not want to learn. DavidCampbell is a thoughtful man--the only person I know who ain't afraid to use his MBA for something other than wallpaper. He tries to make us smarter; he succeeds in making us braver.

Money. That's what life's all about, enit? For us, however, money's more like what it isn't about. We don't have any, but that's not stopping us.

The insurance part of  the dinner discussion didn't last long, but the part about red wine went for hours. And hours.

(I miss you, John Boy)

Pouting

I forget to blog. Sorry, but I feel as if I'm spinning a web with no tensile strength, practicing journalistic masturbation, humming a tuneless doldrum to a small audience that rarely notices. (Thank you Inger-lis.)

I recently sent emails, inviting people to a private reading gone public. The response was pathetic....brought me from three to six followers. Don't know what I expected. Guess I thought I'd have a wider audience. 

Identify  your audience is the No. 1 rule in any writing. If I know anything, I know that. So. Who's my audience? Am I writing for the unknown reader or for me?

I just this very second experienced an "ah ha" moment. It's me. It's ME.

OK--on with it. 

Illusion

I see animals.

OK, you say, so does everyone.

Yes, well....I see animals  that frequently are not there. I see birds where others see only a clump of leaves. I see a lion where there's a big tan rock. I see hoofed animals that turn out to broken tree branches. I see rhinos where....well, I actually do see rhinos.

I don't think of myself as blind, just lucky. Many people have mocked my "sightings" but I know they're only jealous. Not everyone has the keen imagination necessary to see a stone wall as an elephant and her child. Knowing and loving the power of  illusion, I live for game drives, keeping my eyes open to what I may discover. I'm always the first to spot a troop of baboons (rocks strewn across a field), a giraffe (a yellow fever tree) or a huge crocodile (a fallen log, floating). I enjoy muttering, "Oh, false alarm," to my companions' signs and groans. 

Call me the little girl who cried wolf, er.....leopard. But don't make me get new glasses.

Gifts

Jenny sent us a care package for our birthdays--a box of  So African goodies. You'd think from the looks of us that Americans are the chief snackers of the world. I can confirm that with the size of my seat. But certain SA treats put our reputation to shame and threaten the popularity of the junk that made it happen.

Enough to say Art and I were like two children on Christmas Eve, a week after being adopted by a wealthy and loving family. We pawed happily through the smooth Cadbury chocolate bars in flavors we don't get here: Top Deck, Turkish Delight, Milk, Dark Chocolate. Yum. There were short-bread biscuits--that's cookies to us--and yummy sodas called -tizers: grapetizer, appletizer. We doled the goodies out one-by-one. We inevitably ran out, long before we wanted to, or even realized we were getting low on supplies. 

That was a great gift--the second of its kind Jenny sent us, so to me it feels like a tradition in the making. Wonderful as the new box was, it lacked my two favorites: rusks, those hard-as-biscotti dried up things that look like big croutons but are most delicious when dipped in coffee or tea. AND biltong! 

That's OK though--Jenny ordered this stuff from a California shop called the African Hut. For some reason, biltong thru a US shop is OK. Biltong thru the airport in your hand luggage is not. That "legality" kills it for me and lets me quickly "forgive" Jenny's omission. It's simply not the same recipe. 

I like my biltong spiced with intrigue and subterfuge and encounters with meat-sniffing dogs. 

Painting

We're getting the house ready to sell. Don't laugh. Damn the economy, all the house needs is some paint, right? And with Popped Corn and Parmesan, we're reforming the place. You can laugh now cause those are the colors we're painting...the corny color is a pale, pale yellow, just off white. The cheesy one is shiny white. Corn on walls, cheese on woodwork. Does that mean we need do nothing in the kitchen?

Painting is painful. I can't say that I enjoy it much, but it's the least we can do for this poor old house. We've concentrated everything on the garden, leaving the inside to fend for itself. So now we're trying to whip it presentable, tho I'm not sure violence is the answer.

Unless something drastic happens politically to prevent us, we're going to Africa. Hell with politics, our So African friend Jenny says. In order to go, and to stay for the extended period we want to stay, we gotta sell this place. 

Spring threatens to pop soon, and if only the snow would stop, I could feel even more optimistic. Our lovely garden will sell the place, I'm sure, with a little help from the corn and the cheese.