Waiting

A good deal of life is spent waiting. When we’re young, everything seems to take forever. Christmas is eons away. So is our next birthday. Sitting in the classroom, we’re certain that summer will never come. We can’t wait to be a teenager. We can’t wait for the first date, the first kiss. We can’t wait to drive. We can’t wait until we’re old enough to leave home.  

But wait we must. It’s all good practice for when we grow up.

We wait in line at the post office, the movies, the grocery store, the bank. We wait to hear about the job, the apartment, the house. We wait for our first child to be born. We wait for someone we love to come home from vacation, from school, from war. We wait in traffic, in the airport and at the train station. 

Some of the most irritating waiting is being on hold on the telephone. 

It might be said that some of the most stressful waiting is waiting in the wee hours of the morning for an errant spouse.

We wait for someone to die, which is the hardest wait of all when we love that someone but know their time is near.

In the midst of all this waiting, there are things that must be done. Money must be made, meals prepared, chores accomplished. Although these activities can be unpleasant, boring or frustrating at times, at least they take us away from that ever-present waiting.

How do we do it? We do it by telling ourselves that someday, we’ll tell off the boss. Someday we’ll go on that European/South American/Far East/tropical isle vacation.  In the future everything will be rosy because we’ll be doing and not waiting. 

Sometimes, even often, the things we tell ourselves we’re going to do, we actually do. And it feels so good, so fulfilling. It gives us the strength to go on waiting because they’ve always told us “Good things come to those who wait.” And we know from experience that this is true. 

Waiting isn’t easy. It’s an art that some do well, some resist and others never learn. For the latter two, it’s a rough road. Usually the people who have the most trouble waiting are the people with the larger ambitions, those for whom no matter what they have, the thing around the corner is always just a little bit better. The whole Grass is Greener Syndrome. That generally requires some heavy-duty waiting.  The bigger the dream, the harder the wait. Those who are content don’t mind the waiting. Or at least they don’t mind it as much. For if one is content, then there is no carrot on a stick always dangling just out of reach, that thing they told us about – that good thing that comes to those who wait. Content people feel they already have their good things and they’re happy with them.

As we get older, it gets easier to wait, if only because things seem to speed up. It still sucks to wait in line at the bank but those Christmases and birthdays come and go at blinding velocity.

If we live long enough, we start waiting for the day we die. In fact, sometimes, if we’re really old, we can’t wait to die because we’ve been there, done that and now it’s time to move on. 

But move on to what? Is it oblivion? Is it heaven? Hell? Will we be reincarnated back into another, different person? And if that’s the case, will we be required to do the whole waiting thing all over again? For that matter, if there is something on the other side of death, is that a place where we have to wait as well? Do we line up at the gates of heaven? Is there some sort of celestial waiting room where we wait to be assigned our next life? Odds are if we’re assigned to the hot place, the wait won’t be long. Maybe there won’t be one at all and those who are destined for hell will at least have the mercy of not having to wait. Of course, if there’s nothing once we close our eyes for the last time, then all of our waiting will be over.

But we wonder and there’s a part of us that can’t wait to see what’s on the other side of this thing we call life.

Figures.

Thoughts on the State of the Country

Sometimes I wish I could be one of those people who bury their heads in the sand and remain blissfully unaware that the world is falling apart around them. I mean, once the shit really hits the fan, maybe they’ll get a clue. But then again, maybe not. They’ll just point the finger of blame at someone else and conveniently forget that they stood idly by while we were all being mugged.

I find it disturbing that there are people in our government who are signing right wing pledges. What is that all about? I thought when one was elected to higher office, the point was to serve the people of your state or district or country—maybe all three—and not some crackpot person or group with an agenda. Apparently I was mistaken because we have an entire party in Congress that has signed a pledge to Grover Norquist. Is that like the Pledge of Allegiance? Is that like taking the Oath of Office? Looks to me like it supercedes both. And how about the pledge signed by Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum to outlaw being gay and says that black children were better off in slavery? WTF? Do these people believe this crap? Oh wait, Bachmann backtracked and said she didn’t know what she was signing and that she didn’t sign on for everything that was in that racist, bigoted pledge that festered and then poured out of the minds of some off the wall group of Iowans. I mean no disrespect to the people of Iowa. I am confident that there are Iowans who cringed just like the rest of us when they heard about it. Every state and every country has its share of crackpots and I won’t use a broad brush when a fine tipped pen will do. But back to Bachmann. So she’s saying that she just signed it without reading it because… Because why? She wants the Iowa caucuses to elect her in the primary. Therefore, she will throw citizens of this country under the bus in her effort to pander to the lowest of the low. That’s what I want in a president! Doesn’t everyone?

Every day I see the news and every day it gets worse. I keep on waiting for the people who represent us to stand up and do something but all they do is argue and point fingers and nothing gets done. Well, actually something is being done. Our country is being dismantled systematically. Just look at the ridiculous spectacle we recently bore witness to. All that crap about the debt ceiling. So it was finally raised and the result? Our credit rating was lowered anyway. Because our president let the terms of the debate be dictated by a bunch of crazy people who know nothing about governing and everything about fear mongering, we are now in an even weaker position. But John Boehner got 98% of what he wanted. Makes you wonder what 100% would have looked like.

So here’s the truth. We have succumbed to exactly what Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about in his presidential farewell address. The Military Industrial Complex is here and it is chewing us up and spitting us out. We are being bankrupted but make no mistake, the Koch Brothers and the Bushes of the world are making money hand over fist and they will continue to do so. Wealth doesn’t just dry up—it is sucked up and concentrated into the pockets of greedy, amoral thugs dressed up in five thousand dollar suits. With that wealth they buy our lawmakers and dictate policies to suit their own agendas. We are in a fight for our very way of life and people like the Koch Brothers are trying to take EVERYTHING away from us. The Supreme Court has been subverted. The Congress has been subverted. And those Tea Party schmucks are supporting policies that are detrimental to them. They’re just too scared, too angry, too bigoted and too dim to realize that they being manipulated by people who would step over their dying bodies on the way to dinner at the Four Seasons.

I’ll end with a true story from my own life.

When I was a little girl in the first and second grade, I was routinely terrorized by the school bully. The incident that stands out most clearly took place on a winter day. I was walking home from school and he swooped down on me like a bird of prey. I was wearing a stocking cap—one of those long, woolly things that tied under the chin and had a long tail that one could wrap around the neck like a scarf. He tore the cap from my head and threw it up into a tree and then he grabbed my schoolbooks and threw them down the sewer. He laughed in my face and ran away as I stood there crying.

In the middle of my third grade year my family moved. You can imagine my horror when I learned we moved next door to my nemesis. I did my best to avoid him and sometimes it worked. Other times it didn’t. During the summer when I was ten years old, I emerged from the basement of my house with a plastic pail and shovel and was heading towards the sandbox in my backyard. I was going to practice making sand castles in preparation for the family vacation in Ocean. City. As I walked along the side of my house, Bobby the Bully appeared with his cadre of friends. Bobby was fourteen and quite a bit bigger than I was. He grabbed the pail, spun me around and kicked me in the rear end and started chanting “Kick the baby in the hinee, kick the baby in the hinee.” All of his friends stood there laughing and jeering, expecting me to cry like the little girl that I was. It was the last straw. I went berserk. I grabbed him and tore into him: kicking, scratching, biting, screaming. His friends freaked and went running. Bobby couldn’t get away from me. He was wearing a brand new white T-shirt and, in his quest to escape me, he pulled away with such force that the shirt was actually torn from his body. He went screaming home to his mother. He never bothered me again.

I think that’s what we progressives need to do. The Tea Party can dish it out but can they take it? I don’t think so. I think they’re just a bunch of bullies and the only power they have is the power we give to them. I’m not advocating violence, mind you, but I think it’s time we figuratively kicked their ass. And while we’re at it, we need to let our president know that it’s time to get his ass in gear and be the president we elected him to be. We all like that he’s an intellectual but we’d also like to see a little John Shaft. At least I would. How about you?

The Ramifications of the Placement of a Comma

I have always loved to read. From the moment I picked up my first grade primer and read about David and Ann and their dog Spot I was hooked. I couldn’t wait until I could read real books and once I started, it became a lifelong love affair.

My love of reading led me to want to be able to express myself on the page as well as my beloved authors, who are too numerous to list. I loved doing English projects for school. It wasn’t homework to me. It was fun. The teacher would ask for a paper and I would come back with an illustrated pamphlet. I can’t draw worth a damn but I would always manage to find an artist willing to pitch in the art if I included a credit and I happily complied. I never failed to get an A.

Out in the work world I worked a time or two as a secretary. I hated it but I did like refining the business letters my bosses would write and ask me to type. I found that most people really couldn’t write a very cogent letter and I would rewrite what was given me and present it for a signature. The men who were my bosses, to their credit, didn’t get upset or chastise me. On the contrary, they appreciated it and it got to the point where I would be called in to the office and told what the gist of the letter should be and then I’d go write it. I wrote some great letters and made my bosses look good. Never did get a promotion out of it but that might be because I never stuck around long enough. I just didn’t like working in an office.

To me the written word is almost like a religion. To make the most of it, there are rules to make reading easier. Those rules are not only grammatical but also include punctuation. Which leads me to the main purpose of this little peek into my psyche. (I know, that’s a fragment and I should consider revising.)

I worked for a short time as a temp at the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles. It was a mind numbing job but it paid the bills until I could find something permanent. There’s a lot I could tell you about the MWD but I won’t. Suffice it to say that it was one of the most inefficient places I’ve ever encountered and I considered most of the people to be grossly overpaid for what they did.

My job with the MWD entailed a lot of typing and in those days, there were no computers or even word processors. I was fortunate to have an electric typewriter. I’ve never been a fast typist, nor have I ever been a particularly accurate typist. The people who made Whiteout had me in mind when they came up with that product. One afternoon I was given something to type and it had to be perfect: no mistakes corrected by the use of Whiteout. Not surprisingly, this was a daunting task and I had to type extremely slowly to make certain I didn’t make any mistakes but even so I did and had to start again. It took me several tries before I produced that perfect document.

About an hour after I’d sent the document downstairs, it came back to me with instructions to retype it because there was a mistake in it. I looked at the document but found no mistake so I called downstairs to ask what it was. I can’t remember what the sentence was but it was a listing of several things, those things being separated by commas. For example, I’d typed something along these lines: The dresses are available in blue, green, red, yellow and pink. My mistake was not having placed a comma after the word yellow. I informed the faceless woman on the phone in the bowels of the MWD that there was no mistake, that the word and negated the need for a comma. I was very polite about it but she wasn’t. She told me that it didn’t matter, there was a rulebook for the MWD and that rulebook stated that I had to insert a comma there, so that was what I was going to do! I told her no, I would not, the rulebook was wrong and should be corrected. She got nasty with me and I hung up on her. Then I called the temp agency and told them they’d have to find someone else for the job because I couldn’t work in an atmosphere where English wasn’t taken seriously. Then I left and enjoyed the rest of the afternoon.

I’ve wondered from time to time if they ever did get that document retyped.

Not All Men Are Dogs....

Not All Men Are Dogs....

This is a great book for any woman who wonders "What a man feels like in a breakup". It's very interesting and captivating. I purchased this for My Brother whom is going through a bad break up and the book helped him. He understood he wasn't alone.

EnnaT Amazon

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Once started reading this, I literally could not stop. As a woman, I have made certain assumptions about men. They tell you so little. The candor and honesty was not only touching but I look at men a little differently now. The men who gave their stories really opened up and let us in.

MLK2010 Amazon

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Ain't No Sunshine is a compilation of true stories about heartbreaks. The authors requested the help of men to answer some questions. The answers, written in a form of essay, were anonymous so the men weren't ashamed to write down their true feelings. Ain't No Sunshine helps us understand what really goes on inside a man's head. Whether it's from a divorce or death, men struggle from a broken heart. They have some of the same emotions and feelings as women. They have to deal with pain and often, depression. Some admitted they considered suicide while others needed therapy. A few men mentioned not being able to talk about their feelings with their friends because in our society, men are simply not allowed to. Society portrays men as being tough and having no feelings. Women think they have it easy when it comes to breaking up in a relationship but from reading Ain't No Sunshine, this is not the case.

Melanie's Book Addiction

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Ain't No Sunshine: Men Reveal The Pain Of Heartbreak

On Being Single

I come from a long line of single women. My mother wasn’t single. She was married to my dad for twenty-seven years and would have been married to him for much longer had he not died at way too young an age. She was widowed at age forty-nine and never remarried. She was ninety-two when she passed, so she was single longer than she had been married. My great aunts, who raised my father and his sister, were what was referred to back in the day as “Old Maids.” My maternal grandmother was widowed before I was born and never remarried. My father’s sister was widowed once and divorced once and decided twice was enough – or perhaps too much. I’ve been married once but that was so long ago it feels more like some guy I went steady with in high school. Except that we had a daughter together. My daughter is – what else? Single.

A lot of the women I know are single as well. Some have been married a time or two and there are a few who never took the plunge. The reasons are varied and I think the women who were never married sometimes feel they’ve missed something. I and my divorced counterparts could tell them they didn’t miss much, unless one wants to miss waiting for an errant husband to come home in the wee hours of the morning. That’s an experience I would gladly have missed.

It’s harder financially when you’re a single woman and there are some who would marry just to shore up their bank accounts. I’ve had the opportunity to be a kept woman. That was a long time ago, when I was young and still fairly nubile. I passed. He was an old guy and had bleeding gums. There wasn’t enough money in the world… Now? The offers aren’t exactly pouring in. You get to be my age and you tend to become invisible, at least in the dating world. 

I suppose I could go looking online. Actually I have. There are plenty of age appropriate men looking for a woman like me. Except not really. I think I’m a little too much for most men. I piss them off because I have a lot to say and I say it, whether they like it or not. But mostly, I just don’t have the time. I never have. There have always been things I wanted to do that got in the way of finding someone who would then want me to do what they wanted me to do instead of what I wanted to do. And I don’t want to do that.

I am reminded of my Great Aunt Annie – my namesake. She lived to be 103 years old and was never married. On her hundredth birthday, the local paper interviewed her and asked the secret of her longevity. She answered that having never been married was the reason she’d reached the century mark. The reporter then asked if she liked men. I suppose that would raise quite an outcry in today’s world. But she just smiled and said, yes, of course she liked men. In their place.

I like men too. I just don’t need one. Maybe, if I met the right man, I would want him but he’s never presented himself to me and the truth is, after being single for nearly all of my life, having to share a space with a man would be very difficult. Of course, if we lived in a mansion…

Missing Annland

I miss writing. I have so much on my plate that I don’t have the time to do the one thing that makes me happy. By day I’m the Wine Diva. I come home and I’m the Editor – somebody’s got to do the scut work when you’re working on a shoestring. By the time I’m done, the day is eaten up and I fall into bed so I can get up and do it all again.

Ahhh, but the payoff! The payoff is that I know Ark Stories will be a success and all those novels I wrote when I actually had the time to write – back before the economy crashed and I enjoyed an early retirement – will now be published by my own company. Now ain’t THAT a kick!

And I must admit, collecting stories from people all over the country – maybe from around the world (Who knows? We don’t ask for location) – has been such an adventure and one that I don’t think I’d want to give up any time soon. I sometimes have a tendency to look at humanity with a jaundiced eye and the stories sent from strangers who have taken the time to sit down and give us their stories truly does have a renewing effect in my oft damaged faith in humanity.

It’s very cool working with my daughter. We’ve both been surprised to learn that we can actually work together without being moved to mayhem! Not only that, each of us inspires the other to come up with concepts that never would have been possible without this wonderful collaboration.

So I’ll do a bit more editing this evening and then the Wine Diva will go and have some dinner accompanied by a great glass (or two) of wine – one of the perks – and then I’ll go to bed and get up and do it all again. Until the day I am free to start my new novel and of course, I have a HUGE packet of ideas just waiting for me to give them life. I will then once again be off and running in that special place I like to call Annland.

Lessons Learned

Back in 1983 I got a job selling Lincolns in Beverly Hills. I knew nothing about cars but managed to parlay my sparkling personality and previous sales experience into a shot at a new career. I’ve had many but that’s a topic for another time. Soon after I started, I, along with several other people on the sales force, was told to attend Ford Motor Company’s unveiling of the 1984 lineup. It was to be held at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim and started at 9AM sharp, breakfast included. I was partnered with a salesman named Dale and we decided to meet at the dealership at 7:30 and drive to the event. We would take my car.

I was uncharacteristically on time and we set off. Everything was going swimmingly until I saw the signs alerting us that Marina del Rey was coming up. It was then I realized that I had taken the freeway west instead of east and we were headed in the wrong direction. 

For those unfamiliar with the Los Angeles morning rush hour, there is only one word to describe it: horrific. By this time, it was nearing 8 AM, Anaheim was over forty miles away and traffic was crawling along at a snail’s pace.

I immediately went into panic mode.

Dale, on the other hand, remained serene. I found out that morning that he was a recovering alcoholic who had been sober for several years. He attempted (unsuccessfully) to calm me down by relating the techniques he’d learned in AA. It was like trying to hold back the tide. My fingers thrummed on the steering wheel, my entire body was rigid with rage – at the traffic, at myself for going the wrong way, at Dale for not noticing. Through it all, Dale remained calm, cool and collected.

We arrived in Anaheim at about 10:15 and I was in full meltdown mode, freaking out because we were so late. Dale spied a Winchell’s Donut Shop and told me to pull in there. I couldn’t believe him! We were so late and he wanted to stop for donuts? He merely smiled at me and said that by now, breakfast had been consumed, there probably wasn’t even any coffee left, he hadn’t eaten breakfast and was hungry. Had I stopped to eat that morning, because if not, I needed to get some food into me. I figured, oh, what the hell. We were already so late and I was hungry, so we pulled in, got some food and ate on the way to the hotel. I of course, was hyperventilating the entire time.

We finally arrived at the hotel just before 11. I dragged him in my wake as I rushed from the car to the concierge, desperately asked where the Ford Motor Company function was taking place, then ran to the auditorium and prayed that we could slip in unnoticed.

We opened the door to a darkened room. There was a movie playing – one of those rah-rah things they show at sales meetings, in this case, a movie touting the beauty and power of the 1984 Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models. Dale took my hand and whispered “Come on!” We stepped into the crowded audience and Dale pulled me along behind him as he headed for the front row. I followed along, still hyperventilating, stepping on various feet and wincing at surprised grunts of pain from those who had been impaled by my high heels.

I’ll never know how he did it but Dale found two empty seats in the center front row and just as we sat down, the movie ended, the lights went up and the flash of a camera caught us laughing. We had just been photographed for the cover of The Ford Times. And the meeting was over.

I will never forget Dale or that day and the lesson I learned. Don’t sweat the small stuff! And always be ready for a photo op!