Aging!
They call us senior citizens and talk about the “Golden Years”. This is a bunch of hooey originating from some advertising agency in New York City. Take it from someone who knows, it’s really the “Challenging Years”! You can remember the stupidest things, like what your mother served you for breakfast on your thirteenth birthday, but what eludes you is where you put the item you had in your hand five minutes ago. I have decided that one way to deal with this problem is to have a place for everything and put everything in it’s place, which is of course easier said than done.
Organization
What is that saying? “Show me someone with a clean desk and I will show you someone who doesn’t do anything.” Never one to get discouraged when I had set my mind to something, I purchased a label maker, file folders and two rolling carts: one for my writing and the other for my genealogy. Recently, I have developed an interest in finding my family roots and thought the cart, with three shallow drawers and two file drawers, would be perfect for this project. I would have everything in one place, now all I had to do was figure out what I was doing!
You’re Organized, it’s all on that Damn Cart, now Why Can’t You Find It???
I put the results of my and my brother’s DNA tests in a notebook and placed it in the top drawer of my cart. Everything else was stored below, all neatly organized. Someone then asked me a question and naturally I can’t remember the answer, but it should be in a three ring binder in the top drawer of my genealogy cart… except it isn’t. I searched the cart, twice, before searching the house, yet still no notebook. This is why I got the cart and I can’t understand why my system has failed. I am getting frustrated and saying some not so nice words when I remember, a few days before I had loaned the book to my daughter.
Conclusion: Aging is a Challenge.
I have decided that there is no magic formula to aging, but there is an alternative; we should all take a leaf out of Auntie Mame’s book and have fun! ( Note: if you don’t know who Auntie Mame is, you should really look her up.) On second thought, maybe I will watch Forest Gump one more time. “Life is like a box of chocolates!” Now I can get behind that!
Happy reading, Linda
There is nothing like spring; the sun shining on the new green leaves, the flowers poking their head through the dirt, it somehow makes the world look fresher and brighter. I opened the patio doors and walked outside to enjoy the day, but as I turned to go inside something darted in ahead of me: the first fly of the year. This guy was large and the fact that he had been hibernating recently didn’t seem to be slowing him down one bit. When I said he was big, I mean he was huge, like the size of a WWII bomber. I grabbed the spray and chased him around the house, wondering which of us was going to have a heart attack first. Finally, he darted into the bathroom and I slammed the door on him before heading to the laundry room where the fly-swat was hanging in a small broom closet.
He was just a little boy, but even at three years old he hated his size. Most of the time it didn’t bother him that he was taller than the other children. What he hated most was going into the grocery store with his mother and having to ride in the cart. If Mom was in a hurry putting him in the seat, sometimes he would bump his knees on the wire and that really hurt. When Mom measured him on the picture of the giraffe that hung on the closet door and was made to keep up with children’s height, she would smile and say how wonderful it was that he would be tall like his dad and grandpa. Of course it wasn’t her that was too tall to fit in that basket on wheels, but what could a boy do? Would he stop growing if she didn’t measure him on the giraffe anymore? He would have to think about that.