WALKIN', WRITIN', WIT & WHIMSY

Best way to run the car, pick up some groceries, and energize the body on a 25-degree morning with a wind chill of 18 degrees?  Go to Meijer.  I did eight laps around the store, and two around the parking lot and got ‘er done in one fell swoop.‎

April Fool’s Day 2013, and no, unfortunately this thirty degrees with a “real feel” of 20 degrees weather this a.m., was not a cruel joke.  The collective weathermen were threatening snow flurries last night which I don’t think happened, but once again, a sharp wind and cold temps have returned.  Sigh.  Although, I’m no big sports fan, I know enough that March Madness pertains to basketball playoffs, but I think it more accurately describes our erratic March weather.  March went out like a lion with a big roar.  Brrrrrrrr…my teeth are still chattering from this morning’s petite promenade. 

I kind of eased into my Easter Sunday morning.  The weather forecasters had predicted a very early rain which would sog up sunrise services and cast a drizzly pall on the morn so I didn’t set my alarm.  However, I woke up right at 6:00 a.m. and donned my radio headphones to catch the Warren Pierce Show which was chock- full of Easter tidbits, including Irving Berlin’s “Easter Bonnet Song” and a treasure trove of historical facts and figures about Easter and Passover.   I languished in bed the full two hours of the show, before getting up.  Still no rain so I chastised myself for not getting up earlier to get a good walk in, but so be it.  I got suited up and got about a mile done before it started to drizzle, and of course, being made of sugar, like most of the Easter candy, I beat a hasty reTREAT home.  I just got into the house and it started to pour.  So, let’s blame the weathermen who laid a collective egg and put a damper on Easter Sunday; I am not blaming their superior for this less-than EGGS-ellent weather.  Enough of the puns.  Unfortunately, the rain probably prohibited people from hiding their treats and trinkets on the ground, (which surely doesn’t look like Easter grass), or in their usual hidey-holes. Thankfully, Easter Sunday will be April 20^th next year and hopefully warmer and sunnier for sure.  Sigh. If the weather could be picture-perfect for just a handful of holidays, I’d hope it would be warm and sunny for a glorious Easter Sunday, clear and hopefully bright and not humid (ugh) on the 4th of July for the many parades and picnic activities.  We can only hope for  clear and dry, albeit cold climes, on Thanksgiving for safe travelling weather so all family members may gather and rejoice in the ambiance on this holiday.  Finally, how about just enough snow to make it a white Christmas?   Meanwhile, out of the corner of my eye while writing this passage, I am glancing at the only Easter decoration I put out this year,  a very old Whitman’s chocolate plastic egg with Snoopy the Easter Beagle climbing out of the top, his head crowned with Easter grass.  My mom bought me this Easter treat decades ago and I deemed it too cute to open.  It makes me grin.  She quit buying me chocolate bunnies as I hated to break them and would put them in the fridge for months for safekeeping.  Sometimes she would accidentally, on purpose, drop it on the floor thus proclaiming it was now time to devour the chocolate bunny which had shattered within its gaily-wrapped and beribboned wrapper.  It is good to have warm holiday memories.

Easter Saturday is a day that lives forever in my mind, no matter what the calendar date might be.  Easter Saturday was the day my life changed forever, as did that of my mom.  Our day began like many Saturdays – a trip to Dr. Kaplan, the podiatrist, then a few errands around town, then back home.  Except, that day we didn’t quite get all the errands done.  I dropped my mom off at home, then went out to the bank and to the police station to echo my neighbor Marge’s complaints about the neighbor’s pit bull and his incessant barking.  We’d make several phone complaints but I wanted to put in an appearance at the police station.  I wasn’t gone but one hour but returned home to find my mom in the kitchen complaining of dizziness and saying she didn’t feel well.  She said she wanted to go lie down and held onto my arm with a death grip as we slowly walked to her bedroom.  She got into bed, face down, and never moved for hours.  I was petrified and kept waking her up and she got angry with me.  She slept through the evening, then overnight and didn’t awaken until mid-day Easter Sunday.  We spoke a little and she went back to sleep.  When I finally convinced her to go to the E.R. on Monday afternoon, after nine hours of tests to determine the cause of her dizziness, the doctors proclaimed my mom was merely dehydrated…I’ve never accepted this diagnosis and do not to this day.  Sadly, Easter Saturday and the dizziness that overtook my mom that day was just the beginning of a decline in her health and took us through nearly a year of ups and downs and seemingly new medical maladies before her passing on January 31, 2010.  So Easter Saturday – April 11, 2009 – will live in my mind always and will taint the Easter holiday for me forevermore.  I thought about the day and its aftermath as I walked this morning and that day’s events, forever playing in my mind, tainted the beauty of this pretty Spring day.  I also reflected on other deaths that occurred during the Easter holiday, thinking that although the calendar date is not the same, the Easter holiday will forever bring back the sad event to these respective families.  Although I was not close to my grandfather, he died on Easter weekend 1969.  The law firm where I worked lost a senior partner, Steve Fleming, to suicide in 1998.  He was despondent over an impending divorce and had just returned from taking his two children on a ski vacation.  He dropped his kids at his former home and went to his apartment and hung himself.  His funeral was on Easter Saturday, a gloriously beautiful, bright and sunny day where the entire office personnel gathered, still in disbelief, to “send him off”.  My neighbor Marge lost her son Keith Aubin suddenly two years ago on Good Friday.  My co-worker Dan Helton lost his father on Maundy Thursday and the funeral was on Easter Monday last year.  A high school chum, who is now a priest at St. Joseph’s parish in Trenton, lost his mom this past Wednesday.   The 13-year-old boy, Tyler Nichols, who took his own life barely a week ago has been in my thoughts since the tragic event.  I went onto the funeral home’s website to see a picture of this young boy after watching a tribute video created by his peers called “Fly High Ty” on the local newspaper’s website.  The video was very moving as was the slideshow created by the funeral home.  It showed a smiling and very happy child from birth to his pre-teen years.  What went so horribly wrong?  Perhaps I’ve dwelled on Tyler Nichol’s death because the morning that he chose to end his young life, I happened to be in Southgate near the school.  Out of nowhere came a series of screeching sirens, … then a helicopter, all indicating to me a nearby police presence.  I clicked on the radio to check the news as I travelled through the city of Southgate to hear the horrible breaking story.  Perhaps I am affected by Tyler’s suicide by shooting himself in the head because, sadly, over Easter break in my senior year, I lost a classmate, Tom Mlosek, to suicide.  Tom also committed suicide by putting a gun to his head.  Forty years ago, teenage suicide was unheard of.  Tom was only eighteen years old.  I still recall our teacher telling us what happened on our first day back to school after the Easter holiday.  She broke down twice and we all were openly crying.  I had Tom in several of my classes, including homeroom, where we sat at round tables in the cafeteria.  I sat across from him every school day and we laughed and joked and who would have known such dark thoughts were lurking in his head?  I was devastated.  I still remember Tom to this day forty years later.  Alas, reflections and yes, a few pensive pauses, on this day are okay to do now and then.  They make you stronger.  Blessings to everyone ~~~ to those who are living and those who are gone from us, often too soon.

No, not THAT Twitter®, but instead the twitter of songbirds who have seemingly come out of hiding to serenade me as I strolled along during a two-mile walk on this peaceful Good Friday morning.  Due to the holiday, there were not many people out and about and the route was serene and quiet but for the “tweets” and “twittering” of birds from their perches in still-bare trees.  What a treat for the ears of this Winter-weary soul!  The weather was delightful this morning.  Gone were the blustery winds and stinging cold I encountered earlier this week.  Query:  could Spring have finally arrived?  “No” says the robin who responds to the question in my unspoken thought.  He is wearing his perpetual scowl and hopping to and fro, trying to drill his bright-yellow beak into a still-frozen front lawn in a feeble attempt to find worms .  I told Mr. Robin it was an admirable effort but to try again in a few weeks.

Made today an off-day for my two-mile walk opting instead to take the buggy for a brief spin to Meijer. Last year I was walking the three-mile round trip to Meijer no problem, but today the car needs the jaunt more than me…feeling a little creaky today and just a tad stiff last night from the last pair of two-mile walks. No problem…I cut back today and just did a couple of laps around Meijer’s perimeter, so I’m not a total slouch. I am surprised to see those laps tallied up to nearly one and one-half miles on the pedometer, plus got a few groceries as well.

Still getting into the swing of things and up and at it early enough to get out for my walk as soon as the sensor light in the front yard goes off.  The long and drawn-out Winter weather made me want to hibernate like a bear.  If anything ever endeared me to the Winter months, it was a chance to forsake yard work and instead hunker down in the warm house for several months of catching up on reading and the luxury of sleeping in.  One of my mom’s favorite expressions was that “they should have made a monument to the man who invented the bed” and I agree with that for sure.  Snuggling down under the covers, in your warm pjs and rolling over and hitting the snooze again (and again).  For years and years I got up at the crack of dawn for work.  When I worked at the diner throughout college, my hours were 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. and I was really required to “be on the floor and available” at 6:45 a.m.  When I started working downtown in 1978 the buses were plentiful and dependable.  Through the years, the SMART bus system got worse as more buses were cut or didn’t show up.  When I moved with my boss out of the downtown Detroit business district, it required taking two buses each way to work…dumb move on my part as I did that for two years while at Wayne State University and swore I’d never do it again.   Through the years I started leaving the house earlier and earlier as the buses were infrequent and pretty soon I was leaving the house at 6:50 a.m. for an office job!  In the Summer I did my watering before I left for work and got up at 4:00 a.m. if not earlier.  In the Winter, I used to shovel snow before I left so the alarm went off at a similar time.  Since working at home, I don’t have the commuting issue and it makes all the difference in the world…it does, however, require one to keep to a regimen, unless there is some wiggle room; I catch a break if Robb is out in the morning and reserve those days for errands if the weather is nice.  Through this past Winter often my only trip outside was to run the car and retrieve the mail, which got me lazy.  I was riding my bike early in the Winter to keep exercising, but many of those bitter cold mornings, the thought of climbing out of my warm bed and donning my shorts and sleeveless shirt to go downstairs on the exercise bike was not too enticing.  So I’d roll over.  I have to get back into a regimen – before you know it, I’ll be out watering the flowers, taking care of the yard and complaining about the heat.  We are never satisfied are we?

I’ve really had it with this cold and blustery weather.  By the time I returned from my walk today,  my nose was running like a sieve and my eyes were watering from the stinging cold.  Suffice it to say that today’s trip was not a leisurely stroll but two feet travelling at a very brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrisk pace.  I had to chuckle to myself while walking past a house on Ferris where today is garbage day; a half-full plastic container of sidewalk salt was sticking almost defiantly out of a garbage can.  I couldn’t help but contrast the adage of glass half-full versus glass half-empty to the salt container – these folks obviously think warmer days are ahead so they chucked the salt.  WJR and WWJ meteorologists are predicting a warm-up to the 50s for Easter weekend  Yippee!!  I’ve made progress since I started walking in 2013:  I’ve made it to two miles today so full speed ahead.  I was cautious after walking to Outer Drive, which is a four-mile round trip and paying the price with shin splints and ankle pain for weeks afterward…so taking it slow and easy and easing into the longer walks. 

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind? – Percy Bysshe Shelley

Today is Palm Sunday.  I hate when Easter comes this early in the year.  On my walk today I observed that very few people have decorated their homes for Easter.  I’m guessing they are just burnt out from the long Winter and no Spring feeling is in the air…no feelings of new beginnings.  I saw that surly-looking robin again today.  I passed Christ the Good Shepherd Church as people were pouring out, clutching their palms; some used their palms as makeshift Bible bookmarks.  Through the years we would get a piece of palm from Mrs. Elmore and then Marge and tuck the fresh one in a picture frame.  It all seems so long ago.  There is a brittle palm on my mom’s high boy which must be fifteen years old.  Today Holy Week starts and we have a new Pope … and … hope.  Yesterday, oh to be a fly on the wall when the two Popes broke bread together.  I wonder what they spoke about?  A former Pope and current Pope meeting one another is an event that has not transpired in over 1,600 years!  I was deep in thought about their tete-a-tete when two squirrels chasing each other, and quite oblivious to my presence, nearly ran me over.  Then they saw me and panicked and I held my breath that they wouldn’t dash into the street.   I couldn’t look.   Then I heard nails clicking as they scampered past me and clambered up the nearest tree.  I let out my breath again.  I saw some more tulips pushing through the still, snow-covered earth while on today’s stroll.  Hope springs eternal.  Better enjoy today’s walk since the weatherman says we are getting one or two inches of snow tonight.  It will be a snowy Passover tomorrow.  I’ll channel some positive thoughts: 

Life is a very narrow bridge between two eternities. Be not afraid.–Rabbi Nachman of Braslav

It is March 23, 2013 and I’m finally landing here nearly two months after creating this blog about walking; in hindsight I guess I should have entitled it as a writing blog instead. I have not enjoyed this Winter weather at all. It has been Spring since Wednesday and quite honestly who can have a SPRING in their step when it is cold, dark and dreary and it seems that snow flurries and blustery winds are the norm in our daily forecast? I did see a robin today and even he was wearing a scowl (and a muffler). So, I entitled today’s entry “piddling” because that’s about all I’ve done insofar as getting back into my walking regimen that I enjoyed so much last year. Well, … I’ve done a petite promenade here, there and everywhere, but not enough to do much more than clear out the mental cobwebs. It seems like every day it was nice enough to take a walk, I felt I should get the car out for a little run since last year I had to replace the battery because they said I simply didn’t use the car enough … the odometer just turned over to 2,300 miles this past week and it is 3/12 years old! Grrrrrrrr at the two groundhogs, those miserable rodents who predicted that Spring was on the way – I’m glad that Ohio attorney intends to prosecute them for misinformation. So, alas, I managed to get in about 1/12 miles this morning and it was bright and clear when I ventured out. I didn’t want to walk in snow and ice and the sun was coming up earlier and earlier and then we did the time change and it was back to dark in the early a.m. so getting a substantial walk in before I get back home and Buddy up and sitting down at my computer to start my work day is hard to do. I’ve tried to get in a few laps at Meijer when I take the car for a spin and to pick up a few items – well, at least it is warm and dry inside as I pass the pet food, round the corner of the produce department and head way down to the greeting cards and garden supplies. The garden gloves and yard knick knacks seemed a trifle early, but being a Michigander, you could be shoveling snow one day and the next week mowing the lawn. This time last year we were in the 80s. That was too extreme for me. I saw a few tulip leaves poking bravely through the snow so that looks promising. For now I’ll leave the Winter background on my blog’but I’ll be optimistic and close today’s post with a favorite quote:

“One must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter” -Henry David Thoreau