Time in a bottle

I'm sure he meant well.

After all, he was only trying to save me some money. Still, when the teenage boy at the checkout counter offers you the senior discount, "if you happen to be 55 or older, ma'am," well, it can really ruin a 42-year-old's day.

Granted, the roots have been looking a little gray lately. My kind husband was thoughtful enough to point that out recently, at which point I was thoughtful enough to point out to him that the reason I hadn't visited the salon was to save money. And this was BEFORE he managed to smash his car into not one, but TWO stationary objects in the span of one week.

I briefly considered actually having the damage repaired. Then I found out that said repairs would cost at least $2,000. Our insurance deductible is $500, and who knows what a claim would do to our premiums? Getting the gray out of those roots is a bit over $100, including the haircut. A bargain by comparison.

So guess who has to keep driving around in a banged-up car? Hint: Not me.

So now the gray has been brought under control, but I'm still stewing a bit over that checkout-line conversation.

Granted, there was more going on than the gray hair. It was past midnight, for one thing, and I was exhausted from a long night at work. So there was that dark-circles-under-the-eyes thing going on.

Plus, I was limping, as I have been for months now because of a knee injury I got by taking classes I wasn't in shape for at our nearby Very Large Upscale Health Club. Memberships there are not cheap -- and neither is the physical therapy and medical treatment I started getting for that knee, once I finally admitted that it wasn't going to heal on its own and perhaps needed professional attention.

That brought on yet another age-related comment that I could have done without. One of the physicians, at the end of my fourth visit for evaluation of this problem, informed me that 10 years ago, she would have simply recommended a program of specific exercises to strengthen the supporting muscles of me knee. But now, injections were the first line of treatment.

I took this to mean that a miracle drug had developed in the past 10 years, which would now work in tandem with physical therapy to speed healing. Then she added, "after all, this knee is now 42, not 32."

Oh.

I really don't know why such things annoy me so much. You'd think I'd have started getting used to this soon after Elijah's birth. He was just a few months old, and I was still having residual ligament pain from his birth, the first time someone asked Jeff and I if we were "the proud parents or the proud grandparents."

Ouch. There's a new kind of pain!

I eventually was able to laugh that one off, since I had been with Jeff at the time. And he is -- let's just be blunt here -- a baby boomer. Obviously, there are no spring chickens left among THAT demographic.

But the next time it happened, it was just me with Elijah, in a checkout line (what IS it about checkout people? Aren't they taught MANNERS?).

"Your grandson is such a cutie!" the store employee beamed. Elijah wasn't even a year old at that point, which means I was still 37. I told myself that Mr. Overly Friendly Checkout Guy must have thought I was one of those REALLY young grandparents. Yes, that's it! Like on "Oprah," where I once saw a show featuring a woman who became a grandmother at the ripe old age of 28. (No, that's not a typo.)

But then I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass of a display case, and I must admit, I could have done better that day. The baggy clothes, the hair, the aforementioned dark circles under the sleep-deprived eyes -- everything about me screamed "old."

Even more frightening, I was on my way to drop Elijah off with Jeff and head downtown to work, looking like something out of Night of the Living Dead. Real professional.

So, now that I might actually have to face being in the job market again (I'm still employed, but it's a tenuous employment at best), I have resolved to somehow look younger. Got the hair thing taken care of. I could stand to lose a few pounds, and I perhaps should try to project a little more pep.

Pep is really not my thing, but I'm determined to give it a try. Maybe I can buy it in a bottle.

I'll use my senior discount.

Death by a thousand cuts

Anybody need a copy editor?

You're probably shaking your head right now, thinking, What exactly is a copy editor, and why would I need one? I have spellcheck!

Well, if you're one of the countless people who, as you are placing the order for your Christmas cards this year, find yourself merrily typing an apostrophe in your surname, as in "Happy Holidays from the Smith's," then you indeed need a copy editor. I'm not even going to get into the geeky grammatical explanation of why that apostrophe is Just. Plain. Wrong. You'll have to trust me on this one.

The reason I'm wondering whether anyone needs a copy editor is simple: Today is yet another Layoff Day at my newspaper. (Layoff days, in my world, are sort of like wars. Once they become a recurring event, they get uppercase, proper noun treatment.)

So here I sit, wondering whether I have dodged the ax yet again. (This would be the fourth time this year, for those of you keeping track at home.) I'm cautiously optimistic, based on the fact that the e-mail announcing this round of bloodshed was sent at 12:32 p.m. and stated that nearly all affected employees already had been informed. It is now 3:50 p.m. -- no one has called, and an e-mail exchange with my immediate supervisor (who may or may not actually know) seems to indicate that I am safe once again.

As usual, the best source of information is the blogosphere (now THERE'S a sentence I never thought I'd write!). Local media gossip blogs, which have been amazingly accurate through round after round of these layoffs, have posted a list of those who have been let go. Some of the names were expected, some are stunning, some are sad (Would YOU lay off an employee who had worked nights, weekends and holidays for you for several decades and whose wife has recently been diagnosed with cancer? Well, then, you are not cut out for management!).

So here I sit, waiting and wondering and possibly sealing my eventual fate with sentences like those at the end of the paragraph above. If you're one of my bosses, trust me when I say that I'm NOT talking about you personally. I'm talking about the whole corporate machinery that builds up people and products and services, then cannibalizes itself in a desperate attempt to undo the damage wrought by macroeconomic forces and its own bad decisions.

Then gives its top executives multimillion-dollar golden parachutes.

You and I are both victims. But at least for now (4 p.m. Central, and the phone is still silent!), my name is not on the list. I hope yours isn't, either.

.....and Through it All, He Did it His Way.......

As we've mentioned in previous posts, Elijah is quite an artist. His teachers often praise his ability to draw and his fine motor skills. When he is coloring one of his beloved butterfly outlines he is meticulous to make sure nothing is outside the lines and each color combination is either new or has a meaning. (He used red, blue and yellow to represent Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum from Alice in Wonderland).

This is an example of Elijah's work when he had free time at school. His "Shapes" has become one of his favorites, being dragged from room to room in our house.

His fascination with street signs is evident through our home, but this group includes, on the bottom right hand sign, a "no parking" attachment done freehand that I couldn't recreate even with a stencil.

But unfortunately along with his artistic ability comes an artistic temperament. Like any great artist, Elijah wants to create, not be TOLD what to draw. At a recent parent-teacher conference we were shown a variety of projects Elijah had done in school. Below is a sample of an art project he had no interest in, coloring in pumpkins. (There were a couple of these "efforts" shared with us.)

I'd much rather have this response from our little artist when things don't go right than taking a knife to his ear!

The dangling conversation

I never thought of eavesdropping as a sport. Then I met Jeff.

Those of you who know my dear husband know that he has an almost obsessive interest in human nature. He is a devoted people-watcher, which means that public settings of all kinds fascinate him. Within minutes of arriving at any location that involves a crowd, he zeros in on whomever he has determined has the most drama-filled life.

How does he know, you ask? He doesn't, of course, but that doesn't stop him from concocting a story, right on the spot. All it takes is a few snippets of conversation and a quick analysis of clothing, hairstyle, makeup and the telltale signs of cosmetic "enhancement," and he's off and running.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting there with my nose stuck in a book, magazine or newspaper, trying to ignore his obvious breach of public etiquette. I've always thought it terribly rude to people-watch, and ruder still to listen in on the conversations of strangers.

But one day recently, I found myself listening to half of a cell phone conversation. All I can say is ...... I've been missing a lot of drama in life!

I was at the park with Elijah because, knowing that winter will descend upon us soon, we simply couldn't stay inside on a beautiful 70-degree late-October day. (The trees have just recently turned the most brilliant shades of orange, red, purple and yellow that I've ever seen, and the sheer beauty of all that color against a deep blue sky is enough to draw even a die-hard indoors person like me out into the fresh air.)

So there we were, Elijah scrambling over the play equipment and me sitting on a bench cursing the fact that I had forgotten to bring a book, when I happened to overhear a thirtysomething woman on the phone. She was talking to a relative, apparently a sibling, about arranging a family Thanksgiving get-together in Chicago. Then she let it slip:

"All I can say is, with the economy the way it is, thank God that Mom pays for the airline tickets."

This was followed by a long silence. Then.... "Well, uh, yeah. Ever since college."

A really long silence...... "Are you still there?"

At that point she was moving away from me, and I missed out on the next few minutes of conversation -- making me understand for the first time the frustration that Jeff gets when a juicy discussion moves out of hearing range. She stayed on the phone, though, and by the time she circled back around to where I was sitting, the topic had moved on. But there was an unmistakable tenseness in her words, and she laughed just a little too loudly at several points. By the time the conversation ended, she was clearly feeling uncomfortable, and I can't blame her. So was I!

So, Jeff, next time we're out in public and you're spying while I'm reading, clue me in! Eavesdropping just might turn out to be the one sport I'm good at.