Afflicted and Conflicted
Hi, all.
When I was 19 (and possibly pregnant) I had an album of Liza Minnelli’s called “Liza with a Z” which I’m sure I had memorized after two or three playings. (In case you were born relatively recently, Liza Minnelli is Judy Garland’s daughter; if you don’t know who Judy Garland was, I can’t help you.)
Possibly my favorite song on “Liza with a Z” was titled “Yes”:
“Yes! Say yes.
Life keeps happenin' every day - say yes!
When opportunity comes your way
You can't start wonderin' what to say
You'll never win if you never play - say yes.”
……..and I was going to send you the entire lyric, but really, it’s better if you just see it and hear it for yourself:
And this was brought on because even though I am catching myself more before I volunteer for yet one more thing I really don’t have time for, I’m still managing to say yes more than I should. Jim and “my” Mary (next door) are keeping tabs on me, thankfully. I had decided recently that what has happened is that I now have two brains inside my skull. They are always at war, but both of them tend to say “yes” when one of them (you’d think) should be saying, “Hey, let’s run this by Mary or Jim or one of Lucy’s siblings before we say yes.”
It’s kind of amazing to me that I didn’t die a long time ago, after saying yes to various total strangers throughout my young adulthood. For instance, the motorcyclist who picked me up the one and only time I hitchhiked from Big Bend to Milwaukee. When he dropped me off, he invited me to join him and a bunch of friends - one of whom was campaigning via an environmental platform to be an alderman - on a whitewater canoeing trip on the Wolf River “up north,” which in SE Wisconsin means “not around Milwaukee.” Despite the fact A) these were strangers, and B) I’d never been on white water (and didn’t know what that actually meant), I said yes. What I remember about that trip was being in an aluminum canoe with the candidate and that we broke the canoe in half and lost our shoes. It is highly unlikely that Jim - who is running for County Commissioner - will ask me to campaign with him in a boat on a scary river (they are LOTS scarier here!), but if he did I definitely would not say yes.
Today, I said yes to the chocolate cookies left over from some Chamber function (I volunteer there on Monday mornings), and I said yes to a nuclear doughnut at the LitFest board meeting, but then I made up for that by saying yes to a spear of asparagus offered to me by a neighbor who sells eggs and fresh produce. (She’d been harvesting asparagus, set the pile down, turned her back, and her dog ate all but one spear. She can’t go to the Farmers Market with one spear.) I was there merely to return a bunch of egg cartons, as she was running low. But I’d decided to walk there - maybe half a mile? - and - get this: leave my phone at home.
I used to walk all the time, and about the time cell phones got to be The Thing, I also got out of the habit of walking. It doesn’t help that Sadie and Fang don’t like to go for walks, because they’ve become my excuse. The walk was so pleasant; I noticed things I wouldn’t have were I in the car. For instance, after I-don’t-know-how-many-years, the town has replaced a section of chain-link fence that had been broken on N. Main Street. And that the Japanese knotweed (a friend calls it “the dick plant”) is still dominating the high banks just north of the square.
After I delivered the egg cartons, I walked down to Main Street, where I maintain a bulletin board kindly donated by Patty & David McIntosh. I allow only free community/cultural/literacy/health type of events, and a couple of times a week I have to remove somebody’s business ad. My neighbor Kathleen was hanging out on a park bench near there, so we walked back together and got caught up on some weird neighborhood doings. I fear that - for the first time since I moved here 20 years ago - I’m going to have to start locking my car. Sadie will bite the crap out of anyone who thinks they’re going to come into the house without me, which is good, since I’m not sure where the keys are.
Before it was too dark to see, I managed to figure out a “square” sprinkler Jim loaned me, as the garden-edge weeds have gotten out of control. In the morning, the whole area will be soaked and as soon as the sun is up, I’ll be out there pulling everything up that isn’t food.
And when that’s done, I’ll be creating a ramp patch - using leftover lumber to box in a 4’x6’ (ish) area in the shade out back, dump a bunch of potting soil and milky spore into it, and plant the ramp roots leftover from the neighborhood low-country boil (which, because of the inclusion of ramps, we renamed as a “high-country” boil). It was delicious! The very best part was getting to cuddle our newest neighbor Jacobo, born in January!
I’m sure there’s more, but TTFN,
Lucy