WALKIN', WRITIN', WIT & WHIMSY

DQ, a/k/a Dairy Queen, has a marquis touting their new Orange Julius flavors.  I’m thinking that a Blizzard might be the better beverage for DQ to crow about given the temps this morning.  Another brisk and blustery two-mile walk, as I pulled my scarf higher on my neck and huddled down into my coat; when I departed this morning it was barely about freezing.  As to DQ, despite the cute curl on the top, DQ was never my go-to place for an ice cream cone.  It never beckoned me like Bob Jo’s Frozen Custard in Wyandotte or Calder Dairy here in Lincoln Park, both which never failed to disappoint.  The first trip of the season to Bob Jo’s to savor the luxuriously smooth and silky custard was one of the annual rites of Spring for my mom and me.  Whatever was our first work day off after they opened, usually Easter Monday, we would go to  Bob Jo’s; any other time – evening, weekend, it was crowded in their small parking lot.  My mom was a purist and nothing but vanilla custard on a plain cone ever touched her lips.  Yours truly usually only opted for chocolate on a sugar cone, occasionally straying to the dark side and having a chocolate/vanilla twist…but NEVER rolled in sprinkles or coconut.  We only went about once a month, but it was well worth the trip.  While I don’t eat ice cream anymore, I could conjure up some wonderful memories of frequent jaunts to the delightful Calder Dairy.  Calder’s rich and creamy ice cream is made at their farm in Carleton and always a delicious treat.  A Calder’s ice cream cone, while kind of pricey, was essentially massive mounds of ice cream that nearly toppled out of its base and the varieties offered rivaled Baskin & Robbins’ famous 31 flavors.  People packed the place, lined out the door and snaked through the parking lot on a hot Summer night or a weekend.  A high school friend worked at Calder Dairy during the Summer while attending college.   She would pack a generous cone whenever she was working and we stopped by.  Once my grandmother was visiting from Toronto, and, if I shut my eyes now, I can still see her face when I handed her a triple-scoop peach ice cream cone.  It was a look of awe and she was still eating it nearly an hour later.  And, by the way, when did the Dairy Queen become “DQ”?  I know Kentucky Fried Chicken became “KFC” so the word “fried” was not in their trademark name, but I must’ve missed when Dairy Queen took on the moniker “DQ”.  I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!

Yup, I have to say I couldn’t resist doing a hop, step and jump on a sidewalk during my walk today.  It seems alot of Easter chalk found its way into Easter baskets because I’ve seen rainbow-colored scribbles and scrawls on quite a few sidewalks.  While most of the chalk artists drew flowers and some lopsided-looking rabbits, someone (probably a parent) had drawn a hopscotch diagram…well, I couldn’t resist!  Afterward, I chuckled to myself when I remembered a neighbor about ten years ago who had her little boy lay spread-eagle on the sidewalk and she drew an outline around him.  I watched out of the corner of my eye, while he did likewise for her.  She was a little large for such an exercise and I thought he’d run out of chalk before the outline was completed.  Their sidewalk looked like a police crime scene for days until the rain came and washed it all away.

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public. – Bryan White

Today is National Walking Day, a relatively new commemoration of this great activity. Before I laced up my walking shoes I heard the radio announcer proclaiming that a mere one hour of brisk walking will increase your life by two hours. Well, that’s a great ratio and it’s a great pastime. Your only cost is a good pair of walking shoes, and maybe some type of vessel to tote some cool water as it gets warmer. The pedometer is not really necessary because you can just as easily map out your route on Google maps, but it is fun to know just how many miles you can rack up during a morning of running errands and just even walking around the house. You can strive to stride the 10,000 steps per day that Michelle Obama encourages, but that many steps is a whopping five miles! Feet, don’t fail me now!

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?