Where’s My Purple Sweater?

Like many people my age, I’ve started to half joke, half worry, about getting Alzheimer’s Disease. Like the other day, I was looking for my purple sweater, just to kinda have it handy for chilly mornings. I never found it, but I ended up in totally different location before I realized I hadn’t found it. So, I’m reviewing my process to see where I went off the rails. Where’s my purple sweater? Let’s see, it was a Christmas gift. I was going to wear it around Easter, but I couldn’t find it at Easter. I must have packed it with the unwanted gifts I got last year that I plan to regift this year. So that means it’s in the back of the guest bedroom closet. I’m in the guest bedroom, wow, I haven’t seen this room in the morning light in awhile. The paint has really faded and I haven’t changed a thing in here in years. I saw something in the last Town & Country magazine that might work here. Where’s that magazine? In the basket next to my chair. I went to the chair in the living room and saw ants crawling all over my coffee cup. I thought I walked that to the kitchen last night, but obviously not, so I did that right away. Alright, now I’m in the kitchen and I might as well do the dishes and think about what’s for dinner. Okay, I’ve got a frozen chicken breast, I took that out and put it on the counter. I’ve got potatoes, I just need some veggies. I can zip to IGA this afternoon. I need toilet paper too, and something else, what was it.... I really need it. Well, it will come to me. I better start a little list. I need paper and pen. I can use the back of this LIPA envelop on the counter. Better open it first and take a peek - AAAGGHHHH! What!?! This can’t be right. I called LIPA right away and randomly pushed buttons and shouted, “I want to speak to a human!” into the phone and finally, a person came on. My last payment didn’t make it to this statement and something was averaged in to account for a recent sun flare, and the new carpeting in the downtown office, offset by the spikes in usage caused by people watching Dancing with the Stars and a surtax for living on Shelter Island. Why is there a surtax for living on the Island? Because the cables have to run underwater to get the electric here and the repairmen have to take a ferry every time they come here and why should other people on Long Island pay for ferry fees? And by the way, if I say, “f------g LIPA” one more time, there will be a “f---------g penalty for insubordination fee.” Now I need some coffee to calm down from that fiasco. Coffee filters! That’s the other thing I need. I can’t make coffee now...damn. I better go shopping this morning. Coffee filters, toilet paper, oh no... what was the first thing I needed? It will come to me. And Lysol spray. I noticed my phone is looking a little smudgy, so Lysol, TP, filters, and the other thing. I better get dressed. Where’s my good bra? The dryer - dryer sheets, I need dryer sheets! Okay, got the bra, clothes on, birks on. I’ll stop at Ace and get some paint samples for the guest bedroom. Why was I in the guest bedroom? Oh yea, I was going to redecorate it. Something I saw in Home & Garden. Where’s that magazine? In the car, I was reading it in the ferry line. Okay, now, I’m parked at that IGA. Where’s my list? Did I make a list? Well, I’ll have to go on memory. What do I need? Milk, eggs, bread, I always need that. What else? It’ll come to me when I see it in the store. And yarn. I have to stop and get yarn so I can knit a simple sweater for fall. I think she has purple yarn at the video store, I love purple. I’m so glad I was blessed with a mind for organization and details. Everybody else my age is losing theirs....

Back to Skool

I remember when I was still in Junior High and High school, the anticipation I always felt just before the first day of school. As a girl it was absolutely critical you had a new outfit. Even if the look you were going for was the “I am too cool to care how I look” look , you had to get it just right especially for the first day back to school. That first day back set the tone for your year. First, since you only hung with a few select friends through the summer, you didn’t see most of your classmates until school started, and boy, what a difference the summer vacation could make. Girls came back with boobs, boys came back with fuzzy upper lips and height! I was always one of the tallest kids in the class until Sophomore year when the boys finally got taller. I remember feeling so relieved about that. From age 13 on, I was 5’10” in bare feet, 5’12” in heels. No, I was never 6 feet tall, that’s way too tall for a girl, I refused to be taller than 5’12”. Boys began talking to us without feeling the need to shove us or knock books out of our hands. And some of them began to understand the concept of personal hygiene and were even experimenting with deodorant and toothpaste. It was an amazing transformation. But even so, they were careful to look like they didn’t care how they looked. Between the sprouting facial hair and acne, the boys looked like the early stages of plague victims. For girls, none of us could ever imagine that we were remotely attractive. We were all always dieting and fretting over our complexions and mentally magnifying the most minute flaw, convinced that it was the first thing everyone saw when they looked at us. But there’s not a women alive today who wouldn’t give anything to look as horribly fat and ugly as she thought she looked in high school. Early attempts at courtship were so awkward. All the girls tried writing meaningful poetry to read to the boys so they’d know we thought they were special. We spent hours analyzing everything they said to us and everything they did for it’s true meaning. I laugh now when I think of how many meanings we could extrapolate out of a simple “Good Morning”, or even cooler, if they looked at you and just said, “Hey,”. “Hey” could mean “I’m checking you out and might even ask you out later.” “Hey” could mean “I think you’re cool, I’m going to sit next to you at lunch in front of the whole school.” If a boy made a point of sitting next to you at lunch, that was commitment. If he bought your lunch, you’d sit in class later practicing writing your new last name. If he walked you home and carried your books, you could start picking out curtains. Guys will never know how much mileage a woman can get out of a simple, “Hey”. And as teen girls, we were always thinking that they were thinking and analyzing whatever we said as much as we dissected whatever they said. It isn’t till way, way, later that we finally accept that when a man says he isn’t thinking anything, what he really means is, “I’m not thinking anything.” I believe I was well into my forties when I realized they had been telling the truth for years.