A Sock and A Sock and A Shoe and A Shoe

Something amazing is happening on television. Networks are bringing back shows we watched when we were younger. I Love Lucy has been off and on the networks but I am now seeing shows like Three's Company, Barney Miller, M*A*S*H and All in the Family. These are shows that pushed the envelope in terms of sexual roles, societal expectations and race relations. People really thought this way? Apparently so. And worse.

When I watched them as a wide-eyed teenager, I never noticed the ground-breaking precedents they were setting. I was simply entertained and yes, occasionally pleased to see women sticking up for themselves, sarcasm rather than violence coming from a mistreated African American or Archie Bunker getting his come uppence from Edith, his milk-toast wife.

It's funny to think that there are scenes from thirty-some years ago that can still tickle the funny bone but more odd is that we can recall moments that shaped who we became in adulthood. These shows had that power.

I am reminded of an All in the Family episode where Archie takes offence at the way in which Meathead (Michael) puts on his socks and shoes. Michael slips on one sock while Archie is talking and then he reaches for a shoe. Archie is pulled up short when Michael then reaches for the second sock. Archie grabs the sock from his hand and after a minor argument asks a simple question.

"Don't you know the whole world puts on a sock and a sock and a shoe and a shoe?"

Perhaps this questions illustrates the whole theme of that show and many of its kind. Characters blatantly flout the established world order, they actively go against the norm. This behaviour defined the sixties and seventies. It created a world where young people saw everything as possible and nothing as restricted.

Unlike their parents, who saw everything as having a single purpose. A place for everything and everything in its place. Replace the word 'everything' with 'everyone' and you've got the closed-minded, policy-following, conservative older generation. Archie was conservative, Michael was liberal. Archie was unreceptive to change, Michael changed everything in Archie's world.

We humans don't like change but we've settled down a bit and don't parade around with signs asking for integrated water fountains or the right to vote. We've identified an equality quotient and we're working hard to spread it across all cultures. Those who don't agree are in the minority. At least, we hope.

So the next time you are putting on socks and shoes, try doing it differently. A sock and a shoe and a sock and a shoe rather than a sock and a sock and a shoe and a shoe. See if you can break your own little mold.

It's good these shows are coming back. It reminds us of just how far we've come. Or perhaps, it infers how much further we have yet to go.

Be Prepared

It may come as no surprise that I was a Brownie and a Girl Guide. If I'd been willing to do all of the fundraising, I would have gone to London, England on an exchange program during the year I was 14. Each girl needed to raise (or pay) $2,000 in order to go on the exchange. I can't remember exactly how many did it but it wasn't more than a dozen ambitious girls out of more than 50 in the area.

They say you only regret the things you don't do and that's one of the things I regret. Not going to London.

I recall, as a girl of 14 that I was unsure if I could do the fundraising myself. My parents were raising four children (a monumental feat in this day and age but pretty average in the 60's and 70's) on a blue collar salary and there was certainly no extra cash for such an undertaking. If I was to do this, I needed to raise every penny myself, something I couldn't fathom. Two thousand dollars was a fortune in my mind.

A good friend of mine who was a year older, a goddess to me, had family near London so her parents didn't hesitate to send her. Plus she was only one of two children in that household so there was likely more cash on hand for such opportunities. She sold a lot of cookies but I couldn't imagine how many I would have had to sell to go with her.

When I lived in the States, I had to get used to calling them Girl Scout cookies. I received emails about them from co-workers whose neighbour's sister-in-law's step son's daughter was selling them. In the States, you get more than just Oreo wanna-be's. You get Thin Mints, Samoas, Do-Si-Dos, Tag-alongs and Shortbread.

In Canada you get chocolate or vanilla.

I fell in love with Samoas...chocolate, caramel and coconut. One year I was told you could buy Girl Scout ice cream at your local grocery store. Vanilla bean ice cream with chocolate, caramel, coconut and chunks of Samoa cookies. And the young girls still got a piece of the profits. I nearly passed out.

I'm back in Canada now and although there is less variety with cookies (you can get chocolate covered mint cookies as well as the regular chocolate and vanilla - woo hoo) they are still very good and go to a great cause.

At 14 I missed an opportunity. I won't do it again.

To this day, I will not hesitate to buy Girl Guide cookies.

Misery is Not Just a Stephen King Book

I felt the bile rise in my throat, heat emanated from my neck and cheeks. I knew it was anger, I was boiling with it. Something pulled at my chest, the urge to run or to strike out, I wasn't sure which. Fight or flight.

Fight.....or.....flight.

My legs twitched and I balled my hands into tight fists, fingernails aching to dig into the palms like a bull longing to drive it's horns deep into the bullfighter's ribcage. My jaw tensed, the bones of my skull pulsed with the pain of teeth not yet ground down to stubs.

A sick feeling settled into my stomach. Had there been enough food contained inside, it would surely have made its way back into the light of day by the shortest route possible. I swallowed hard. Hard, because the space of my throat seemed to have shrunk so that even the tiniest ball of thick spit could not pass. Sticky saliva pasted itself to the inside of my esophagus, deep enough to bypass the gag reflex but not far enough down to prevent the formation of a tight knot in my chest.

A bead of sweat worked a path down the side of my face but I dared not pat it away. I couldn't show my cards. Despite the rising rage, I had kept my face neutral. The blush of redness and the tight jaw muscles were not flashing neon but merely pale yield signs at the end of a cautious merge lane.

Yield.

And so I yielded. Hands unclenched, folded neatly into my lap. Jaw slackening. The deep frown easing into a smooth forehead. I let out my overfilled tires, feeling relief as air escaped my lungs in a controlled wave. No pursed lips, just slightly opening my mouth, gently engaging my diaphragm to aid in the relaxation effect. Yoga breathing came to mind. I turned my head to the right, felt the cool breeze on my face and inhaled slowly. In for four, out for eight. In two three four.....out two three four five six seven eight.

Inhale, I breathe in.

Exhale, I breathe out.

Namaste.

When the Stars are Aligned

I'll admit I'm a worry wart, but not a hand-wringer. In other words, it's not all that obvious to those around me that I am worrying over something. And I do tend to worry over the least minutiae.

I don't wring my hands and I don't eat the entire contents of my fridge. In fact, I'm not tense to the point of jumping when the phone rings. I don't pace the floor. I appear, for all intents and purposes, to still be myself.

In moments of actual worry, when I am waiting to hear the outcome of a decision, a game or a test, my mother's words come to me. "It will happen if the stars are aligned."

I am uncertain as to what this means, in the symbolic sense of course.

I am a skywatcher and so I am aware when the stars actually do align. And by stars, I mean planets, since stars don't shift with respect to each other in their universal paths. They shift away from us seasonally but not in relation to their neighbouring stars. They are, in essence, too far away to show any real shifting of position. Orion's belt always has three stars, Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. They remain the three points of the belt around the waist of the constellation of Orion and is one of the most recognizable objects in the night sky after the dippers, big and little.

The planets, on the other hand, are much much closer to us than these constellations made of distant star clusters. The planets dance in the night sky, appearing like the swirling skirts of a lady on the hand of a capable leading man, disappearing into the crowd of couples as the strains of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik carry gently over the breeze. The planets swish in and out of our vision in the same graceful manner. Sometimes the trails of Mercury can be seen in the wee hours of the morning, just before sunrise. And Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, illuminates the face of the moon with her late evening glory. Unlike the stars, they are not always there.

Were we on another planet, we would see our beloved Earth as a spot in the sky, glowing with the same sunshine that emanates from the yellow dwarf we call our Sun. We might even wish upon it, mistaking it for a genuine twinkle in the night sky.

Star light, star bright
First star I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight.

This childish mantra, coupled with the vastness of the universe laid out above my head very effectively removes my worries. They just don't seem that big anymore.

3:45am

I have seldom been awoken from a deep sleep, mostly because it is usually impossible to rouse me once I am REM-ing my brains out. Last night, or more accurately early this morning, the phone rang. I eventually woke up, wondering what the noise was....Richard thought it was his sleep machine and sat bolt upright, stared down at the unit and asked, "Why is it making that sound?" We both realized at the same time that it was the phone.

He leapt from the bed but too late to catch it before the answering machine kicked in. Nobody was there. No message.

Now, under normal circumstances a call in the wee hours is not a good thing. Well, unless a family member is due to have a baby, then it's good news. But even then, unless you're the grandma, no phone call is necessary until people are awake! We have no pregnant women in our family at the moment and my friend Amanda already had her baby last week.

Good news travels at the speed of sound but bad news travels at the speed of light.

If my uncle hadn't just recently (Friday) passed away, it wouldn't have fazed me and I could have fallen back to sleep. But we both tried to figure out the area code it came from to be sure it wasn't something important that one of us needed to know at 3:45 in the morning. Richard used call display and phoned the number back. Kids picked up the line but there was no conversation, just noise. A sleepover or party with no parental supervision, was my guess.

Sleep came after about an hour of gathering my wandering thoughts. The universe can play tricks on a person's sub-conscious mind. Mine has a tendency to think nothing happens by coincidence. That phone call, regardless of the source, was meant to wake us up. Why?

Was I about to have a nightmare and that phone call saved me from it? Doubtful. Were those kids about to do something dangerous and Richard's callback scared them out of it? Maybe. Is the universe just trying to teach me patience? Likely.

I'm on my 5th cup of coffee and I don't feel human yet. That's a nightmare in and of itself. Patience....while I brew another pot.

Bazinga

It comes as no surprise to my friends and family that I am a science fiction geek. As such, I enjoy hanging out with other science fiction geeks. That includes watching The Big Bang Theory, a show populated with my species. I get the Star Trek references, I know who Stan Lee is and I am a fan of the defunct Firefly series (and like Sheldon Cooper, I cannot fathom why it's not still on the air).

What should be surprising then is that I have only the bare minimum of cable television, which does not include the Space Channel. It was a decision I made when I was cutting back on some expenses and frivolous indulgences were the first to go. One might argue that a true sci-fi fan wouldn't be able to give up that kind of access to their lifeblood but at the time I was living alone, working full-time and involved in several leisure activities so my tv time was pretty small. I simply couldn't justify spending money on something I might use. I mean, it's not like car insurance. You might never need it but if you do, good gawd, you'd better have it.

For those of you who have followed my blog (or my Facebook page...or my life) you know I no longer live alone. My boyfriend is a tv watcher, he likes late-night movies and while I am also a movie fan, I often can't keep my eyes from drooping before the closing credits in the wee hours of the morning. Ever since moving in though, he has lamented the lack of available variety in my channels and therefore has suggested that he pitch in and upgrade the cable package. Oh boy.

I am usually not capable of hiding my emotions. In other words, I can't lie and I certainly can't hide my excitement. I'm a terrible poker player. I remain calm but my pupils dilate like crazy and my skin flushes if I get a pair of aces. If you pay attention, I will never take your money.

If he'd been looking at my eyes when he said he would expand the cable, he would have seen my pupils pulsing and perhaps even heard my breath catch.

I can tune in the Space Channel again. Come to mama.

A Legless Luke Skywalker

I need hinges for a door so I thought I would go to the one place I know I can get them cheap. Value Village. No, not Canadian Tire or Rona or any other hardware store where yes, I can get them new but not likely for the $1.99 that Value Village charges for miscellaneous household hardware.

So I swung by the VV and went straight to the guy in the red bib. He directed me to two places in the store. I looked and looked....then I looked some more, to no avail. No second-hand hinges. I was disappointed.

On my way out I saw a stand covered with keychains and costume jewelry so I decided to take a peek. There were City of Kingston medallions on keychains and various initials that were once "gold tone" but are now showing their true nickel colouring. There was a large, plastic yin and yang symbol done in colourful daisies, and a heavy stainless steel disk with Colette engraved on it and the year 1992. Apparently Colette did something pretty wonderful in 1992, perhaps she got her first car and this keychain was given to her to hold the keys. I wondered why Colette would give away something so meaningful and then a sudden, morbid thought struck me. Perhaps Colette died in a car accident. Awful thought, I know, but it came anyway.

As I was moving away from the thought provoking turnstile of semi-shiny second-hand bobbles my eyes were drawn down to knee level and I saw the saviour of the Rebels, enemy of the Empire, Luke Skywalker. He was mature, with long hair and stood about four inches tall. Or he would have if he'd had legs. His brown robes fell from his shoulders, wrapping around an empty space where two legs should have been, perhaps with shiny, black boots on the feet. But this Luke Skywalker had no legs. There was no jagged plastic where a dog may have bitten them off. Nor was there a peg (or hole) where legs might have popped on like a Lego piece. Nope, there was simply a flat end to his lower body just below the crotch.

I was taken aback. I kind of wanted him, if for no other reason than to save him from the humiliation of children's cruel comments about his disability. I picked him up, sliding his key loop off the hanger. He had a pretty good face, painted well enough to see his eyes and lips clearly, not just blobs of paint in roughly the right locale. His hair was blonder and curlier than the real Luke. And his face was thinner. But it was unquestionably Luke Skywalker, Jedi wanna-be.

I looked around and saw no other Star Wars figurines with a short chain protruding from their backs. Luke was alone and he was original, given he was only half the man he used to be. I looked at his price. He was marked one dollar. I knew I had a dollar in my purse and enough pennies to cover the taxes. I toyed with the idea of hanging him from my rear view mirror but then, just as quickly, came the realization that I would constantly be reminded of his shortcomings and right behind it would be the question of why Colette doesn't have her keychain any longer.

But then I had an epiphany. This WAS Luke, just as he was at the point when he lost his legs in the liquid fire while he battled Master Kenobi. Is it possible that this Luke was part of a series of Lukes, pre-fight, post-fight (the one I held in my hands) and then after his transformation into Darth Vader. This explained why he had no legs and did not seem to have any way to attach legs.

As I put him back, a distant deep voice in my head said, "These aren't the 'droids you're looking for." I smiled and walked away on my two good legs. Bye Luke, perhaps someone else will recognize who you are and will want to have you hanging from their mirror. It won't be Colette and it won't be me. You have no legs.

Let It Beeeeee

I have been wanting to write the story of a bee, not a Disney-Pixar bee or a Dreamworks bee but a real bee that lives in a colony in the middle of a huge field of clover. It doesn't sound too interesting, I know. But I once read a book called, Rat: A Novel by Andrzej Zaniewski. It personified the rat and told the story of a rat growing up in, well, a sewer but it was told from the rat's perspective. I'd like to do that with a bee.

Am I crazy? Probably. How does one get inside the mind of a bee anyway? Do bees even think or are they all black and yellow instinct?


I think they may be smarter than we think. They are certainly team players, collectively accomplishing what they each could not do alone. 


Plus it's a maternal society. Who doesn't love a woman who can take charge of twenty thousand males and force them to raise her children? Then have them prepare her food and tend to her every whim....I admire that kind of control. And yet the males never mutiny, they never go on strike, they don't even put notes in the suggestion box to anonymously push ways to improve the colony experience.


What is it about the hive set-up that's so appealing? Is it just that the worker bees know they only get one chance at sex and if they're not chosen to be a drone, they end up working their antennae to the 'bone' for the rest of their short lives. Then again, if they are chosen, they usually die after they've done the deed. Kinda risky unless the Queen is really good!


I guess I have something to think about....can I write like a bee? If a bee could write, that is. 


They can certainly spell.