Worrywart

Once upon a time, a scorpion came to a river and saw a duck swimming near the bank. “I can’t swim,” said the scorpion. “Will you take me to the other side?” “No!” said the duck. “If I let you climb on my back, you will sting me.” “I promise that I won’t do that,” said the scorpion.

So the duck let the scorpion hop on his back, and he began to swim to the other side. When they got to the middle of the river, the scorpion stung the duck. “Why did you do that?” said the duck. “Now we will both drown.” “Couldn’t help it,” said the scorpion. “It’s just my nature.”

The prominent theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr authored the famous Serenity Prayer:

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

 And wisdom to know the difference.”

It’s that third part that always gets me, because I am a worrier. It’s just my nature! My mother had beautiful wavy black hair, crystal blue eyes and a patrician nose. I didn’t inherit any of those traits. No, instead, she gave me the worry gene.

My mother worried when there was nothing to worry about She even worried about why she wasn’t worried. Today was always the tomorrow she worried about yesterday.

I try very hard to adhere to the advice given by Vikrant Parsai, “It is foolish to worry about something which is beyond your control---such as your life.” But it is really difficult to do so.

My friend, Barbara is also a world-class worrier. My consolation is that she has 3 children and 8 grandchildren, so she has 9 more worries than I do. However, I think she found it comforting when I suggested she not worry about the world coming to an end today, because it’s already tomorrow in Australia.

I am too busy to worry too much during the daytime, but there is nothing as aggravating as worry in the dark of night.  That’s when unsorted thoughts start churning in my mind and lead to sleeplessness. For instance, one night I lay in bed and thought, ”Where is the nearest Urgent Care Facility? What if I start bleeding, and I have to drive around looking for it? I’ll bleed all over the car before I find it.”

Shannon Celebi would admonish, “You’re worried about what-ifs. Well, what if you stop worrying?” Anticipating trouble or worrying about what may never happen reminds me of how little control I really have over future events.

I’m going to make a real effort to change. Maybe, I should write a story about it.

Exaggerated worry in the middle of the night is like waking up with a hangover--- finding out that there was no party---and that I didn’t have any fun at all. And, I am going to try to remember that today is the tomorrow that drove me bonkers yesterday.

Esther Blumenfeld (“Do not worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.”) Joey Adams

What I Did One Summer

When I was a kid, finding a job in a small town was not easy. I needed the money for college, so I had to take what I could get. I spent the summer in men’s pants.

The largest employer in town was a trouser factory, and that summer I got a job as a temporary office worker. My duties were to take over the job of whoever was going on vacation for two weeks. It didn’t leave much time for training, but I knew I could fake it—at least for two weeks. Never having used a time clock, it took me several days to learn how to properly punch in and out. That did not bode well, and I knew I was in trouble when the office manager said, “I have my eye on you.” She was a bit cross-eyed, so I didn’t know which eye she meant, but I was forewarned.

After one disastrous week on the copy machine, the office manager banished me to the stock room. The lighting was very dim—as was I---since no one explained how to handle incoming (or was it outgoing?) orders. I was told, however, that I was not allowed to sit down. Order handling was to be done in a standing position.

Undaunted, I gazed at the piles of papers on the desk and remembered the advice of a friend of mine who was a kindergarten teacher: “When you take thirty kids on a field trip, you have to come back to school with thirty kids---not necessarily the same ones, but it has to be thirty!”

So, at the end of the day, the orders were all in envelopes and the desk was clean. I still don’t know if those orders were in corresponding envelopes, but fervently hope that men, whose pants didn’t fit, went on diets. Perhaps there’s one less heart attack out there---one less over-the-pants-belly to my credit.

Only once did I enter the factory proper to deliver an order, and that’s when I saw the workers toiling at their sewing machines. Most of these employees were women. The work was difficult and they were paid by the piece.

It didn’t come as a surprise to me when these seamstresses went on strike, and other factory laborers joined them. I had never experienced a strike, nor had I ever crossed a picket line. When I got to work, I saw people yelling, “Scab! Scab!” at picket line breakers, and I was hesitant to proceed. However, when one of the sewing-machine women saw me, she said, “Don’t worry, girl, we know what you do. You can go ahead. No one wants YOUR job.

Hell, I didn’t want my job, but for the rest of the summer I pretended to do the work of the vacationing staff, and the office manager pretended to keep one of her eyes on me. Shortly, after I quit, the owners sold the factory. I guess they just couldn’t get along without me.

Esther Blumenfeld (“I hold a little fundraiser every day. It’s called going to work.”) Stephen Colbert

From: CROSSING WITH THE BLUE LIGHT, Blumenfeld c. 2006

A Fair Hearing

My attorney suggested that I review my will every five years. I agreed with his assessment and added, “It’s probably a good idea to do that while I can still hear what my family is saying about me.”

Snakes hear with their jawbones, fish respond to pressure changes, and male mosquitoes use antennae. Human ears never stop hearing. Even when you sleep, your brain just ignores incoming sounds.

I’ve always considered myself a good listener, but in order to listen carefully, one has to catch all of the words being spoken. My hearing loss was gradual, and, not being in denial, I realized that word clarity was becoming increasingly more difficult. I kept asking people to repeat themselves. I kept missing dialogue in movies and stage productions, and I often strained to hear what was being said in class.

So, wanting to get back into the conversation, I went to an audiologist who confirmed my suspicions that my ears were not filled with wax, but that I had a hearing loss that could be helped. 

Consequently, my days of saying, “What?” or “Talk louder!” are now over, because I have invested in an amazing technology called, “top of the line, digital computerized, miniature hearing aids.” These little miracles have once more opened up the total world of sound that I was missing.

Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan---He said, “Since I came to the White House, I got two hearing aids a prostate operation, and I was shot. The damn thing is I’ve never felt better.” While I don’t expect to have prostate surgery, and hope that the only shot I experience will be a shot of Scotch, I too, with hearing aids, “have never felt better!” Clarity of words is back and the stress is gone. I have always been a bit offbeat, but I no longer have to worry that people will think I am a total dimwit.

A 12-year study conducted by the Neurology Department at John Hopkins School of Medicine found that untreated hearing loss increased the risk of dementia. It is suspected that, “becoming more socially isolated is a risk factor for dementia and other cognitive disorders.”

An actor on stage has to hear his cue. It would ruin the play if she said, “The hills are alive with WHAT?” I am an avid fan of British television shows on PBS, but in the past I had difficulty catching much of the dialogue. So, to check out my hearing aids, I surfed the channels until I found a British comedian. The good news is that I understood everything he said. The bad news is that he wasn’t very funny.

Yesterday, I dropped a pin on the floor. I could hear it drop. However, I am still looking for it. Guess my next trip will be to visit my ophthalmologist.

Esther Blumenfeld (Now I know that “Thursday” doesn’t mean, “Let’s go get a drink.”)

Now You See Them---Now You Don't

When I was hiking in the mountains, I saw a man staring at a tree branch. “What do you see?” I asked. Excitedly, he pointed and said, “That’s the cocoon of a very rare (I don’t speak Latin). I looked where he was pointing and saw nothing, but not wanting to disappoint him, I said, “Wow! That’s really something,” and walked on.

Had I been on the mountain with Moses, I would not have said, “Moses, the sun is in your eyes.” If he saw a burning bush, who am I to deny his vision? After all, he did hike back down with a very good set of rules.

Someone once accused me of seeing people not as they are, but as I want them to be. Recently, I received an invitation to my 60^th high school class reunion. The invitation intimated that if you are still alive you are encouraged to attend. The big incentive in the invitation was, “A prize will be given for the best decorated walker, cane or wheel chair.” I declined with a note saying, “You are all frozen in my memory as 18-year-old kids. Not a bad place to be!”

Notwithstanding, I have come to the conclusion that I see people the way they really are---not the way they pretend to be.

For instance, the toilet in my guest bathroom wouldn’t flush, so a man who pretended to be a plumber came to fix it. It took him no time at all to break the mechanism he had come to repair, and it took me no time at all to conclude that this man obviously placed dead last on his plumbing exams and probably never received his golden plunger at graduation.

The next two plumbers informed me that my first plumber “didn’t make it,” an obvious euphemism for “he was fired.” They then explained, in plumber talk, (along with a moving demonstration) the mistakes that my pretend plumber had made. Flushed with success, they left.

That evening my toilet performed a marvelous imitation of an airplane propeller. Now my guests can be seated and come in for a landing.

It just proves that you don’t have to wait for Christmas for the fruitcakes to arrive. It would not surprise me at all if these pretend plumbers matriculate later in life finding stimulating work on our missile defense system, because life is like that.

Esther Blumenfeld (Yes, I definitely see people the way they really are.)

CROSSING WITH THE BLUE LIGHT, Blumenfeld c. 2006

Urban Grotto

Moving into a neighborhood usually involves reaching out to new people, so I invited a couple of neighbors over for an afternoon respite of coffee and sweets. I had learned that they were both artists, and thought the conversation might be interesting. He was very tall and lean, and she was as big as a minute. After a pleasant visit, as they were leaving, the wife said, “ We so enjoyed meeting you. Unfortunately, we can’t reciprocate, because there is no place in our home for you to sit.”

Twenty years later, I recently ran into this tiny energizer bunny in the grocery store. Her husband had died, and she invited me to visit her. I didn’t ask if she had purchased a chair, but being naturally curious, I accepted her invitation.

As I arrived, I noticed that both of the heavy gates were unlocked, and she greeted me at the door saying, “Welcome. Would you like a tour of the gallery?” As I entered the house I felt as if I had fallen into the rabbit hole along with Alice. Without warning, I had walked into an ancient dusty world where hundreds of masks stared at me from the walls. My hostess explained that she and her husband were lifetime collectors of pre-Columbian art. Huge urns blocked my path, ceremonial headpieces hung from the ceiling, and pre-Columbian ear spools reminded me not to stick Q-tips into my ears. This was the chair-less living room.

On our way to the dining room, I squeezed around a wooden canoe that was actually a very old drum. I noticed a long wooden beast blocking the fireplace. I thought, “Good thing about collecting antiquities is that you don’t have to deal with the artist.” Scattered about the dining room were animal forms and human forms and human-animal forms and pagan deities stored in glass cases.

We then entered the bedroom where her husband had died. His bed was surrounded with gruesome masks staring down at the bed. “I think maybe they scared him right before he died,” she said.  They scared me, and I wasn’t even sick. Her bedroom was a repository for her paintings and many, many clay pots representing several of her pottery periods. I learned about wheels and hand thrown and kilned and un-kilned until I glazed over more than any pot in that room.

The kitchen was blocked off so her howling dog couldn’t get out. She explained that he was “stone deaf”, so he howled, but she suggested we could sit in the kitchen. I told her I was expecting a telephone call and would have to leave soon. Actually, the kitchen looked pretty much like a kitchen fit for a howling dog.

“You can’t leave,” she cried. “You haven’t seen the studio that we added to the house.” At that, she threw open a door and led me into a cavernous grotto that would have comfortably parked three or four huge moving vans. This was the place where she and her husband created their art. Hundreds of huge paintings were stacked everywhere. Plexiglas cabinets protected his gigantic contemporary sculptures that resembled enormous entwined licorice sticks. The bathrooms had been turned into storage units and her pottery seemed to have multiplied faster than rabbits. But, the tour was not over yet-----

The next room was a repository for the most dramatic of the pre-Columbian collection. Standing on a long table was a collection of huge 10-foot warriors. My tour guide told me that before her husband died, they had stood as sentinels in their living room. There was also a head of a man with a facial deformity. I guess that’s what you call the loss of a nose.  The tour ended with a walk through a backyard of dirt (“because it’s natural”) and broken pottery (“because I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out ”).

Art buyers are now purchasing works from this home museum. My mother-in-law said, “Live long enough and you will see everything.” Now I know what she meant.

Esther Blumenfeld (Is art supposed to give you nightmares?)