Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: May 2021

• Me More-ial

  Posted at 4:59 pm by kayewer, on May 29, 2021

  

  Special holidays like Memorial Day give us a reason to have fun, and this one is big because it’s the first major holiday since New Year’s. Most of the country has opened up again, the major vacation spots are posting crowds for the first time in over a year, and even with nasty weather in some spots (like the East coast), it looks like some happiness has returned to the nation.

  The holiday is meant to recognize the sacrifice of our country’s military personnel, so as a veteran myself I’m proud to count myself among those who served. Of course, I served in peacetime and was on duty in a time when women did not serve alongside men in the battlefield, and a lot of firsts for women happened long after I got my honorable discharge papers, but it was still an experience I’m glad I had.

  The month of June will have me doing more self-care regimens than I’ve done in about eight years, having come off of elder care duties and spending the aftermath overcoming some health issues for which I continue to chastise myself, so this holiday weekend marks a door closing on some of the most unusual journeys of my life.

  Since yesterday was plagued by rain, I waited until today to venture out. Despite the morning storms, I broke out the umbrella and visited the farmer’s market to buy produce–farm picked tomatoes, onions and potatoes–for my hamburgers and potato salad. They needed the patronage, since the prospect of getting wet keeps most people at home. Besides, I enjoyed the walking. Afterward, I did some non-fridge food shopping at the market and got some beverages, clementines and such. After that, on to the big box stores to take advantage of bonus cash before the deadline and use up two gift cards with unknown balances on them.

  Still on the agenda: gardening, summer clothes duty (along with boxing winter clothes duty), laundry, crafting (hoping to finally get a few hours to make something), take a few chapters from my online class, make potato salad and plot my meals for the four-day regular week.

  This is not the weekend for shore excursions or cookouts for me. It’s not easy to do patio parties for one, but every holiday I do some darned good holiday meals, and whether it’s for one or more than one, it’s a way to celebrate, reflect and have a bit of fun. We all need that right now.

  I’m glad we got to this holiday. Let’s make the rest of the year a memorable one.

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• Hilo Hello Haole Hell?

  Posted at 7:39 pm by kayewer, on May 22, 2021

  

  We know Karens have issues. The moniker, given to women who are caught on video vocalizing their displeasure or rhetoric in the middle of emotional bad moments, have kept audiences laughing on social media for some time. Let’s focus on one noteworthy individual who deserves a second look.

  From the details available, it seems a Kindergarten teacher named Lisa Platt was at a Walmart on the big island of Hawai’i a year ago, when an altercation began with Hilo police officers over an issue in the parking lot. She called for aid after a local referred to her as an unwanted “haole” (used in a derogatory way to refer to non-indigenous and/or white people), and told her to return to the mainland where he felt she and her ilk apparently belonged. The officers and she did not get far with the conversation, because she had felt threatened by the local, was not receiving support from the officers, and at last she became enraged and began dropping f-bombs, then continued with an equally volatile rant about her issues with the locals. The language was not pretty, as you expect in any “you people” speech.

  The problem with Karen videos is that the camera usually rolls only after the first volley has been fired, so we see only the return fire and don’t get what set it off. The cops arrived in response to Ms. Platt’s phone call, so there is no record of the local’s speaking which started it all, unless there is a parking lot camera which recorded his face, and an interpreter could lip-read.

  The video of “Hilo Karen” went viral (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtzamSbln58), and Ms. Platt now is the notorious intro sequence for a YouTube channel called “Karens in the Wild.” She also lost her teaching job and, despite a public apology, Lisa Platt is another statistic of cancel culture, public shunning and our society’s festering morals wound that we re-infect with every new rejection.

  The human way of handling people in the grip of bad judgment used to be correction of the behavior, not shutting out the person. We throw Karens (and their male equivalent Darrens) away like the weekly trash without a care, but not all of them are the same. The local probably could have benefitted from some sensitivity training himself.

  Lisa Platt was on the attack after being backed into a psychological corner, but some Karens are anti-maskers who spend their time poring over resources which they can quote to boost their excuse to go facial commando. Other Karens have issues over waiting for proper service when ordering food. Still others ominously judge people in public places or the neighborhood who don’t seem compliant with the laws or guidelines said Karens are so diligently watchful over. Video cameras capture their passionate soapbox speeches, and we watch open-mouthed as they throw things, upend displays or leave their vehicles to get up close and personal at the drive-through.

  We are white privilege personified when we show half a Karen story, don’t help those affected, or act like a full-fledged one ourselves. We shouldn’t turn away from our own shortcomings, but embrace them with solving them the true goal.

  And we are capable of being better than a label.

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• Project: Chaos

  Posted at 5:06 pm by kayewer, on May 15, 2021

  

  I was invited to do a project this week, and it involved going someplace to do it! That’s the first sign that things are getting back to normal, when you’re not asked to figure out a remote version of anything. Fortunately my clothes were ready and they fit. Still, I got an early start to make sure I remembered how to do the morning routine, seeing I had given it up fourteen months ago. The traffic turned out to be easy as well, so I guess navigating the rush hour is the same as learning to ride a bicycle, and one never forgets. Also, the same doofusses who were making the commute difficult last year are still out in force this year. Some things never change.

  The best part of the project was being in a space with another person. It had awkward moments, mostly when we had to navigate one-way corridors and remember to not enter by the exit only door in the building, but we had checked with each other and our immunity was assured. Thank goodness we also still had a sense of humor, because when we started the project, we needed it.

  The task was to spend a day each week mailing out gift cards of various denominations. The word we received was that the prizes had been counted, verified and sorted, so my partner obtained the weekly names and prize amounts, and I did the addressing, stuffing cards and mailing them out using labels on envelopes.

  My partner had instructed somebody who had done the ordering and receiving part to leave the materials for the project in a certain locked drawer. They ended up in another drawer which we had to hunt for. Fortunately they were someplace with a key which was available. That would have ground the whole process to a halt immediately. However, it set the tone for what was to come.

  My partner supplied the names of the recipients, so my first job was to pull the addresses and type labels to go on the envelopes. This part went smoothly, as I am blessed by my nearly forty years of experience in this realm. Labels were typed, placed on the envelopes, and when the final piece was emailed to us–which gift cards went to whom, which was determined by random drawings–it was time to handle the cards.

  From my understanding of how the process began, the box of gift cards arrived and were processed by another party. When we opened the box, we expected them to be rubber banded together by denomination, but no labels appeared on the individual piles; not even a sticky note.

  The card values started at ten dollars to one hundred dollars. The amount was only on the card itself, and each gift card had its own holder folded in thirds, with semi circles into which the card’s corners were inserted to secure them inside, then the holders closed with a tab. The person before us apparently was either not told the whole story about how the distribution was to be done, or they may not have been running their day on full mind power. Every holder was taped shut on all open sides, with one piece of tape over the tab closure. It was impossible to read the dollar amount on the card, and it wasn’t written on the generic holder. We looked at each other and expressed our surprise, but thank goodness it was my burden alone to sort it all out, since she had other tasks to do.

  Settling in at a huge desk with my envelopes at my side, and my partner’s blessing, I popped a holder open with my letter opener and saw that the first card was ten dollars. Matching it to a ten dollar recipient, I then pulled another card from the same rubber banded stack, and opened it to find a fifty dollar card. So not only were all the holders sealed shut, but nothing was sorted.

  My afternoon was spent slicing open several dozen gift card holders and trying to match them up to recipients. Sometimes I went through several ten dollar cards to find one of the rarer hundreds when a winner popped up. Sorting piles helped, and in the end I did not have any odd cards out, which is statistically a miracle.

  Mind you, there are a few more days of this to come, taking apart somebody else’s fruitless labor and adding to ours. At least the task was done by day’s end. And I got out of the house and went out. And saw another person. And did a project. It’s normalcy and craziness rolled into one. And it felt kind of good.

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• Oh Mother!

  Posted at 4:59 pm by kayewer, on May 8, 2021

  

  Mother’s Day, for good or bad, is a recognition of the fact that we all have one. Many of us have a mother whom we fondly remember, and others would simply rather forget. Still, one had to exist for us to be here.

  This year countless people will spend their first year without a mother to celebrate or forget. A certain disease took many away, while others passed from other ailments, accidents, intentional deprivation or simply the end of life’s internal clock.

  For those of us who remember our mothers, we may look back to times when we received good advice and followed it, or hated ourselves for not taking it. If we had an epiphany in which we chose not to take any advice from our mothers, at least we did experience psychological growth and the ability to make a choice. If it wasn’t a good choice, we still got advice and learned from what we decided to do with it. It takes our mothers to move us forward, however we do so.

  We live our lives without instructions written down on what to expect or how to proceed. Much of what we do is based either upon immediacy (do something/anything), or following a prior example (choose this idea or that). Traditional ways to raise children often come from prior examples, and sometimes we continue good and bad things we learned by what was done to us by our mothers. When we choose not to follow a tradition, we form a new one or break a cycle. The results of the decisions we make growing up or raising children who grow up under our care lead us to days like Mother’s Day, when we stop to reflect on how it worked or how we did.

  I have nearly all good memories of how my mother raised me. I also came to the realization that, being human, we often don’t do a one hundred percent perfect good job. When we enter our adult lives we can choose to adore our mothers for the good they did and decide how we handle any less savory past actions. Having discussed good and bad mothers with others, there are plenty of stories out there, and some who tell these stories either do or don’t forgive. That can make a day like Mother’s Day rankle rather than soothe our childhood memories.

  Forgiving is said to be a healing gesture for ourselves if not for those who need forgiving. If it’s hard to forgive, acknowledging can be a step in the right direction. Who knows how many people lost mothers this past year who will have a new way to look at the holiday this time. However we choose to think about the parent who bore us, taking the time to focus on what life has given us can help us make new decisions and decide what the next day will be like.

  So here’s to all mothers. You brought us into the world, and we’re here because of you.

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• A Great Generation

  Posted at 5:00 pm by kayewer, on May 1, 2021

  

  Our senior citizens from the outgoing generation (those born near the first major disease outbreak or Spanish Flu era through around the 1930s) are disappearing in large numbers now. As of 2018, the last year in which data was collected, men and women over age 85 died at the rate of roughly 15,000 and 13,000 people per 100,000 in the population, respectively, according to Statista.com.

  These are the men who defeated the Nazis in World War II and the women who worked by their sides, whether it was active duty military, working as substitutes in the civilian workforce or maintaining the home. Their social media was the local bar or pool hall, the fraternal clubhouse, round robin phone calls, the white picket fence, or the weekly card game. Bands played brass instruments, not electric guitars, and wore suits. Women wore dresses. Speech was educated and tempered by decorum, and manners were the norm. When they dwindle to their last, we will have lost possibly the last reminders of what our country was like before we advanced beyond restraint and began to lose our sense of place.

  I was reminded of this when a good friend of my mother’s became lost to me this past week. I had called her on Easter and learned from her that she was soon leaving, though to where exactly (likely a senior retirement facility) was unknown at the time. Her remaining family were beginning to see, as I was, that her advancing age was putting her at a disadvantage living as a widow in a small apartment in isolation. They decided to uproot her and bring her home to Pennsylvania.

  The process was amazingly swift. So much so that I had no time to say goodbye. My attempt to phone her was met with a recording stating the phone was no longer in service. Her family probably wanted to yank off the emotional band-aid and get the inevitable over with, which is understandable. Such decisions never are easy or enjoyable to execute. I quickly wrote out a card and put it in the mail, hoping it will be forwarded and we can stay in touch.

  Her departure means I have no more Thanksgiving or Christmas meal planning to do this year; I may never have a turkey breast, pork or eye roast again, which may be good for my weight but not for my emotional balance. Before her and my mother’s circles of acquaintances began disappearing, we made it a point to visit each other for holidays, so I invited her over for both holidays last year (and took New Year’s off) because her living quarters had shrunk from a roomy and sunny full kitchen in her former house to a circle of appliances one had to turn in by degrees to use. Even with a difference in our ages of three decades, her presence in my life was special to me.

  So many of our elderly are walking their last miles feeling disassociated or totally alone. It is not how anybody should live their final days. When I see a senior, I always try to acknowledge them; they are the last of a great era and embody everything we’ve forgotten about what a simpler, happier life was like.

  We should have been learning from them all this time, for soon they will all be gone.

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