The Fabulous Geezersisters’ Weblog

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Here’s an audio version of my husband’s and my chaotic traveling style:  Taking the Easy Road

Happy Fourth of July!

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Tags: flaneurs, marriage, travel

Thirteen years ago, when I was going through chemo for breast cancer, I used to go shopping the day before my every-three-weeks treatments.  Retail therapy, cancer survivors call it.

I laughed with the saleswomen and took some clothes to try on into the fitting room.  There, I watched myself carefully as I undressed.  I was seeing my “true” self, I thought, with the fresh red scars slashed across my chest.  Every night, when I pulled off my wig, I saw that person, too, the way she really looked — bald and pasty-faced: a typical cancer patient.

I spent a few seconds congratulating myself on how well I pulled it off — my semi-public persona, I mean.  The saleswomen had no idea what I really looked like or how scared I was.  They couldn’t see my new scars.  They couldn’t read my chaotic, troubled mind.

That was when it hit me, finally — that real moment of truth.  The rest of the world, I realized suddenly, was doing the same thing.   We all tried to keep our scars private, to compensate as mightily as we could by being upbeat, appearing untroubled, pasting on that wig, that grin, cracking those jokes.  Nobody could see us sweat.  God forbid.

I learned the same lesson of how little we know of others’ lives and struggles when I began to go to survivors’ support groups.  How many times did it have to happen to me before I learned it?  Almost invariably, the one woman in the group I’d surreptitiously picked out as fortunate and enviable — you know, the pretty one who was well-dressed and self-confident — turned out to be the sickest in the group, with a prognosis that would be fatal.  I knew nothing, saw only the unblemished surface.

I don’t know if that’s good or not — these successful lives of compensation all around us.  I know others with a dramatically different take on life, who corner you and overwhelm you with the grim and grisly details of their lives till you feel like a toxic-waste dump.  You know them, too:  9/11 happened only to them.  Life deals them one vicious blow after another.  They can never catch a break.

After a while, you learn to avoid these people and their constant, unending tales of woe.  It’s called self-preservation.

But most people I know aren’t like that.  Instead, they surprise and shock me with the problems and concerns they bear privately.  The friend who struggles with depression — a young, beautiful, smart, successful woman you’d never dream has a care.  Another whose child is an unending cause for concern.  Another who’s struggling with the aftermath of cancer treatment, a time that can be enormously difficult, when all the world moves on, convinced you’re fortunate and whole when, in fact, you’re scared to death and shaken to the very depths of your being.

How many times do I have to learn and re-learn that same lesson I thought I’d mastered in the dressing room 13 years ago?

You say the world has no heroes?  I say they’re everywhere, living among us, bearing burdens we can’t fathom.  It’s just that the rest of us are too focused on our own scars, sure we’re the only ones who struggle, overlooking the heroes who surround us, quietly doing their best and persevering.

(Copyright 2009 by Ruth Pennebaker)

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Tags: cancer, compassion, depression, heroism, illness, problems

No begging, pleading or guilt trips this year.  But if you’d like to vote for this blog as best local blog, please go to the media heading at:
austinchronicle.com

I’d also suggest you vote for the wonderful Eileen Smith at Inthepinktexas for best political blog (under Politics and Personalities).

Many thanks, Ruth

P.S. I also think I deserve your vote since I finally learned how to make a hot link.  I am now exhausted by the effort.

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Tags: austin chronicle, blog, contest, writing

I am getting a little tired of the machines in my life constantly squawking and bossing me around.  I would ask who owns whom, but am scared of the reply I’d get.

Day after day, my computer makes dippy little noises and posits repeated suggestions about updates, even though I am not in the mood for updates.  This is because I am never in the mood for updates.  I’m perfectly happy with my old programs or whatever you call them and particularly dislike having to re-boot my computer when there is no good reason.

As I write this, the coffeemaker is beeping, just to let me know it’s turning off.  I don’t care about that, either, even though my husband pointed out it was a good quality in a coffeemaker and will keep it from burning the house down.  So, I’m not supposed to listen for the beep; I’m supposed to listen for the non-beep.  I have far, far better things to do, even though it escapes me what, exactly, they are.

Since my husband is out of town, I’m driving his car, because it takes less gas and, unlike my car, has a current inspection sticker.  I know hybrids are supposed to be eerily silent and all that, but this one started making a racket on the way back from the grocery store yesterday.  Finally, I stopped the car and noticed the seatbelt sign was buzzing and screeching and lighting up.  Evidently, the car had taken the weight of a bottle of vinegar to be a passenger in the front seat.  So, it was either put up with the indignant screeching or put a seatbelt around the vinegar, both of which struck me as extreme.  Instead, I “chose” to drive with the jumbo bottle of vinegar between my legs; believe me, this is not the glamorous image of myself I planned for when I was younger.

All was well in my life till two guys delivered our new washing machine, which is snazzy and platinum and whose controls resemble the cockpit of a 747.  I tried to read the instruction manual, but became overcome with fatigue and had to take a nap.  This worked till the woman who kind of cleans our house showed up this morning (I say “kind of,” because she seems to have absolutely no enthusiasm for cleaning and doesn’t do too much — but she’s a very nice person; since I can thoroughly relate to having no enthusiasm for housecleaning, I am too sympathetic to fire her).  Anyway, she and I stood in front of the machine and I poked a few buttons and it seemed to work.  But, like the Prius, it was eerily quiet.  Our old washing machine danced around the floor, bashing the wall and calling attention to its efforts.  How do we know the new machine’s cleaning our clothes if it doesn’t make a lot of racket?

Our housecleaner and I smiled at each other.  I would have translated my chaotic, anti-high-tech thoughts into conversation, but, given my Spanish, it would have taken hours.  So, I just handed her the manual for the washing machine and pointed out the Spanish section.  “El libro,” I said, holding out the manual, acting as if it were the answer to all our problems.

(Copyright 2009 by Ruth Pennebaker)

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Tags: appliances, coffeemaker, Prius, technology, washing machine

When Henry James said “summer afternoon” were two of the most beautiful words in the English language, you knew he had never visited Austin or Houston or Dallas in August.  He was probably shivering in some damp, frigid garden in London, trying to get warm and dry so his fingers would thaw out and he could write another 1,000-page novel that hordes of people would rave about and pretend they’d read cover-to-cover without going into a drooling coma.

It’s different when you live in Texas.  “Summer afternoon” presents two of the most horrible words in the English language.  But part of living here is being tough and uncomplaining about it.

Every year, when summer blazes its way to your world and settles in with relentless fury, you don’t complain.  You live in Texas and it’s summer and it’s unbearable.  Big deal.  What did you expect?  Shut up about it.  Or move to Canada.

It’s kind of like eating raw jalapenoes or stepping on red ants with your bare feet: You just do it.  (About the ants: You have to do it very quickly and I haven’t tried it since I was a kid, but it’s still a Texas rite of passage.)

In fact, not only are you supposed to be stoic about the heat — you also kind of enjoy seeing the rest of the world staggered by weather that resembles placing your head and the rest of your body in a pre-heated oven and just staying there till the sun goes down and the temperature plummets into the 90s.  Over the years, we’ve hosted visitors from Japan and Germany during the summer, and I was really pretty sure we were going to lose the German to heatstroke.  Similarly, the only thing I enjoyed about the recent Bush administration was seeing mobs of reporters getting the vapors following W around his Crawford “ranch,” somehow convinced that moving brush in the withering August heat was something normal people did.

Having said that, I have to immediately recant and admit that our current heat wave is killing me and everybody else I know.  We can’t talk about anything else.  That’s because this is June — understand?  July and August and September, well, of course, they are blast furnaces, relentless and overwhelming.  But June has always been fairly mild and forgiving, warm, but not blistering.  In June, you can pretend it’s not going to be so bad, that summer can be borne.

Not this year, with its burning, unbroken string of triple-digit assaults.  Thursday night, I went to meet a friend downtown at 8 p.m.  8 p.m. — and it was still 102, according to the dash of the car.  I cautiously got out of the car and felt something stirring.  It was a wind that I believe resembled the blast-furnaces of hell, scorching everything in its wake.  Isn’t wind supposed to be cooling and refreshing?

So, here I am, reduced to this: constant complaints about the heat, the heat, the heat.  It’s become my enduring excuse for not doing things.  Sure, I’ve noticed, finally, that the inspection sticker on my car expired in April, but there’s nothing I can do about it, because there’s no way I can expose myself to walking a few blocks from the filling station.  If I get caught, I will throw my feverish, sweaty body at the mercy of the court, I will bleat pathetic excuses about sunstroke and triple-digit dementia, I will refuse to leave the air-conditioned courtroom.

Excuse me.  I am now going to open the freezer door and stand there for several minutes.

(Copyright 2009 by Ruth Pennebaker)

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Tags: heat, summer, texas