April 12, 2016 · 2:18 am

Wide Awake

The thing I miss the most about being a toddler is nap time. I have looked back across the vista of my life at the number of times I had the opportunity to nap or go to bed early and I wonder why I fought it so much.

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Today, half my time is spent in finding ways to sleep anywhere and at any time. The rest of my time is pretty much wasted.
I had a particularly intense session in sleep techniques this weekend. Whenever I have a weekend tournament with my oral interp students, it is a tough weekend for everyone. They, because they must perform and me, because I must stay awake.
I started it out as usual by being unable to get my wake mechanism to shut down the night before. That is a new and clever way I have devised to say that I didn’t get any sleep the night before. I’m always paranoid that I will miss the alarm or get a flat tire, be late in some way. So, I spend the night waiting for the time to get up and go, counting on the chance to get in a nap on the bus on the way.
I rousted the kids out at 6:15 and they showed up…all of them. Most were still in their pajamas and had pillows and blankets, so they were planning on sleeping too. Trouble is, tired as I was, sleeping on that bus was impossible. I don’t know how many of you have tried riding a school bus lately, but the best of them ride so roughly that I would have better luck falling asleep on a pogo stick!
So, I spent the day sitting in a chair at an oral interp meet trying to sleep without appearing  to be asleep. All of the children leave their valuables with me as they go into rounds, so I always try to find ways to protect them. I sit at the table and wind bags around my wrists and ankles. This isn’t totally comfortable, but I do this on the assumption that if someone tried to take something, I would wake up. I’ve never had it tested out, at least I’m pretty sure no one’s attempted to steal and the students never complain about missing anything.
There are only three positions a person can assume when attempting to sleep at an oral interp meet. My favorite is the upright, head back. This involves finding a brick wall and putting your chair against it. I have slept with my head propped against a rough bit of brick many times and it is not too bad until you really fall asleep and your head slips to the side. That leaves some nasty examples of brick burn.
Then there is the straight chair position with head down. I don’t like this position because in the first place, it’s really hard on the neck to hang your head down and secondly, it can be misleading. I once woke from sleeping in this position to a student tapping me gently on the shoulder and saying, “Excuse me, Mrs. Fauth, I hate to disturb you while you’re praying, but I need to look at the schedule again.”
The final position is my least favorite, but the most effective. That’s the full-out, take off your glasses, cross your arms on the table and sleep with your head down. While I get the best sleep in this position, it’s also the one for which there is no faking that you were doing anything but sleeping on the job.
The interp meet was successful and the students were well-satisfied with their work. We went back home on the same rough bus, so I was awake the whole way. However, when I got home, my husband said to me, “What should we do tonight?” My answer? I gave him no answer. I had already slipped into bed and was completely unconscious. Now THAT was the greatest possible way to sleep…and I didn’t have five bags wrapped around my arms and legs, either. See you in the morning!

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April 4, 2016 · 6:15 pm

And that ends today’s exercise program…

Every once in a while, I get the feeling that I should exercise more. Mostly I get this feeling when I step on a scale (usually by accident) or put on my favorite clothes…which refuse to close. It’s then I get the exercise bug. Not just the “go on a few more walks, big girl” kind of bug. I mean the “get out the mat and start sweatin’ you oldie!” kind of bug.

Well, last week, my favorite pair of navy pants expressed its displeasure with my weight gain by popping the waistband button and shooting it across the room. Very well, I can take a hint. I looked up some exercises on the Internet. “Tighter abs, smaller waist and hips in just 7 minutes a day.” What a great title and it didn’t sound too difficult.

First, I turned off every electronic device in the house. There is no way I want someone to hack into my account, film me wallowing around on the floor like a beached whale and put it on You Tube or something. It wouldn’t go viral, I’m sure, but it would probably be recommended viewing for anyone wishing to lose their appetite!

I unburied my exercise mat in the bottom of the closet. As I rolled it out, I know it said, “Oh seriously, lady, not again!” I got down on the floor and that only took three minutes. Imagine my outrage when I realized that those three minutes don’t count in the seven minutes of the workout! Certainly I raised a sweat getting down there!

First, I had to bend my knees and touch my ankles from either side. This one wasn’t too bad, except I didn’t make it quite to my ankles. Okay, to tell the truth I had a little trouble bending my knees, but I waved at my ankles from either side and began to “feel the burn” as they say.

I had been somewhat worried about the dog bothering me during this process. I shouldn’t have concerned myself. She disappeared into the basement the minute she heard me grunting and groaning, no doubt supposing that I was dying slowly and painfully from something she didn’t want to catch!

Next were two exercises requiring me to connect opposite ends of my body. I must make my right elbow touch my left knee. Well, I’ve already explained about the knee-bending thing, but the elbow was much more cooperative. I managed to get my bent elbows almost over my bosom and my knees ended up somewhere in the region of my hips. I’ll get better as time goes on, I suppose, but somehow, I am not expecting a knee-elbow reunion anytime soon.

From there it just gets worse. The next exercise wanted me to bend my knees again (they were obsessive about bent knees) and then sit up and stick my hands as far as I could between my thighs. Now I had some problems with this. First, there was the problem of being able to sit up far enough to do this and then, when I could, it looked like I was performing some weird, sexual ritual. Definitely don’t want to do that one around anyone else!

The final torture…I mean, requirement was to do something called a plank. This is where you get up on your toes and your forearms and hold your body in a straight line—the plank. I had just done ankle touches, elbow and knee bends and another exercise I don’t like to talk about. Nonetheless, I decided to do the plank. I got up on my forearms and my toes. Unfortunately, I had slipped down on the mat, so that my toes hit the linoleum instead of the mat. I pushed up into the plank and observing myself in the glass of the door, I could see that I resembled a camel with my butt as the large hump in the middle; it didn’t look very much like a plank. As I began to count, my toes slipped on the linoleum and I fell on my face.

And that wraps up this session of my exercise program. Any bets as to how long I can keep this up?

© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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March 28, 2016 · 3:53 pm

It’s Finally Happening…

 

Before I say anything on this subject, let me assure you that I know what Easter is truly about. I know it’s not about the Easter bunny or who wore what to church or anything like that. I know Easter is the celebration of the fact that my Redeemer lives. Having said that, I have a few more comments on the holiday.

As a child growing up, Easter was always the time of year when we got new clothes—something fancy for Easter, because my mother insisted that new clothes on Easter Sunday was an important tradition.

For me, it was more often the cramming of my body into clothing that was stiff and new and most definitely not of my choosing. There are pictures of me as a child in little green sailor dresses and pastel plaid skirts with pleats and little headbands full of flowers, etc., you get the picture.

Worst of all, believe it or not, were the shoes and stockings. We couldn’t just wear regular ones—it was either socks with stiff decorations on them that made my ankles itch, or even worse, white panty-hose stockings that made my legs itch all over and which invariably had a large blot of mud on them somewhere that I got by climbing carelessly out of a farm vehicle. The shoes were no better, white patent leather, black patent leather, it didn’t matter. They were stiff, uncomfortable and frequently made my stockings snag.

My mother dressed me up in these outfits in the name of “Easter Sunday Fashion.” She couldn’t help it; it’s what her mother did to her and probably what Grandmother’s mother did to her. It was a family tradition of misery that went way back, and while we celebrated the Risen Lord, we itched, scratched, tugged and stained our way through that fateful day.

We usually went to some family dinner or another after church, which meant we had to keep those miniature torture chambers on and try not to get our ham dinner on them—for me an impossible task. We were allowed to change into more comfortable clothes after dinner, but usually I was too stubborn for that. I continued to wear the dress-up clothes and sat tugging at my collar and itching my legs while everyone else ran around and had fun in their old jeans.

When my own girls were growing up, I tried once or twice to go the dress up dollies route, but it seemed I was either too broke or too busy to get the job done right. I was pleased with myself. I hadn’t forced my girls to wear silly headbands or gender-defining tights (at least, not very often.) By the time they could voice a real opinion, they thought that if the jeans were Silver Jeans, that was dress-up enough. As for flowery headbands—forget it. I once used ribbon and a headband base to make them fancy, braided, elegant headbands with elaborate bows on the ends. Those little engineers were far more interested in how they had been made than how they would look in their hair. It took little time for them to deconstruct them, discard the headband base and use the ribbon for something more fun—like, decorating the dog!

No, I was not like my mother. I was not going to force my daughters to dress up as I had to. I was feeling pretty smug about this until today. Today, I was sent a picture of my grandsons, enjoying the Easter holiday. And what were they wearing? Little suit outfits I had sent them crowned by the bunny ears headbands I had put in their Easter baskets.

Hear that splash? That’s the dam breaking as my mother starts to leak through!

© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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March 14, 2016 · 2:55 pm

Flying—need I say more?

There are a few things I do because they are necessary and inescapable. Physical exams, root canals on my teeth and flying…don’t forget that. If I had a choice of flying or being run over by a fast cyclist, I believe I’d take getting run over!

Unfortunately, getting run over by a cyclist will not get me rapidly from one place to another, so I must fly. I know I should have paid more attention in science class and if necessary, I’ll take a make-up exam now if it will help, but so far, no one has been able to tell me to my satisfaction how that giant, heavy machine can stay in the air like that. A balloon, maybe, but not a plane.

In spite of all my misgivings, getting to a family wedding this week made it necessary for me to get on not one, but two planes. There were some handicaps involved in this enterprise, the main one being my tendency to make wrong choices, and the other being that I was wearing glasses that were ten years old. Why, you might ask, was I not wearing my current prescription which would have allowed me to properly read airport signs? Well, because this last week I made a wrong choice in laying my good glasses down and the dog made an even worse choice in eating them!12514086_1035695299802233_1135785988926585391_o

With this handicap, I spent a lot of time peering through these old glasses and asking random people, “Is that Gate T17 down there?  Do you see any bathrooms listed down there? Is the Sioux Falls flight on this baggage carousel?” Not the best way to make friends and influence people, I assure you!

Once I actually got a ticket and checked my bag, I had the joy of security, but there, surprisingly, I generally have pretty good luck. They take one look at me with my hair hanging in my face, my handbag slung around my neck and my boarding pass in my mouth and they decide that I’m probably not a threat—a terrorist threat anyway. This time, however, they ran my hand luggage through their scanner and decided it needed a further check. What red-flagged it? The fact that I had the papers I was correcting for school all neatly paper clipped—with those giant, oversized clips—a lot of them.

After deciding that my research papers on the Grapes of Wrath were probably not a threat to national security, they sent me on my way. The next step is always the hardest because I like to be there early. What do I do with all that time on my hands? Sometimes I read, sometimes I write and sometimes I just watch the people coming over to join my flight group, trying to determine what a terrorist would look like and making bets with myself about how close to me the couple with the fussy baby will be sitting; ordinarily, it’s somewhere within a row of me!

This particular time, I got a ticket for a middle seat. For a woman of my size, a middle seat is a torture test, not just for me, but for the poor passengers on either side of me. I found my seat in row 25, seat B (the middle seat). I sat on the woman in seat 25A, tried to grab her seatbelt to fasten and wedged my heavy bag under the seat in front of me. No way was that thing going to budge during flight!stm51658b789b9f520130410

I apologized to the poor woman I had sat on and then settled back. Glancing to my right, I got a look at the seat row on the overhead compartment: Row 26. It was necessary for me to grope the woman beside me again to undo my seat belt and then I spent several minutes huffing and puffing as I un-wedged my bag again. I crawled over the lap of the disgruntled man in the aisle seat in row 26 and crawled over the lap of the disgruntled man in row 25, sat on the disgruntled man on the other side of me and groped him as I found my seat belt. I spent another few breathless minutes as I again wedged my bag under the seat.

Now, you might think I would re-check the row number one more time, just to make sure, but you would be wrong. I sat in that seat which I believed to be Seat 25B and never looked to the right the entire way to Chicago. If I was still in the wrong row, I just didn’t want to know about it!

Flying is definitely for the birds!

 

 

 

© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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March 1, 2016 · 12:32 am

Slipping through my fingers

I always have the television on when I am home, mostly for the background noise. I was working this morning and the movie, Mamma Mia! came on. Most people won’t admit it, but I for one, kind of like this loosely-woven story wound around some good songs—mostly ABBA. My favorite song in that movie is one I can’t identify by title, however. It’s the song Meryl Streep sings as she’s helping her daughter get dressed for her wedding, contemplating the rapid passing of time.

“School bag in hand, she waves goodbye with an absent-minded smile,” go the words, ending with, “Slippin’ through my fingers all the time.” Sentimental thoughts, but for nearly every parent alive, so true. We get so lost in the day to day tasks of being a parent, that we forget the fact that our children grow more each day into the human beings they are going to become.

I remember worrying about my daughters getting good grades, making friends so they would be happy and achieving things, the evidence of which I could hang on the wall and claim bragging rights. I look back now and realize that sometimes I lost the valuable moments in a flurry of worry about things that in the long run don’t matter. Their grades will be what they want, friends can sometimes be more of a burden than a joy and all those accomplishments are intended to shape their character, not inflate mine.

What I remember best, though, are the times I sat deliberately alone in the bedroom, because I knew one or both of them would show up. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we read books, sometimes we just sat together. I took them out to breakfast on Saturdays, because I liked doing that, and I think at times it made them uneasy, but I remember some real conversations there, too. And how fast it went; those fleeting years when they still believed I knew what I was talking about. And there was me, forgetting that it was ‘slippin’ through my fingers.

Young mothers, frazzled, worried, harried, are told over and over, “Enjoy them, because it goes fast.” Most times they look up from whatever childish disaster they are fielding and nod, but it frequently doesn’t sink in until that child is wearing a mortarboard and gown, or perhaps wedding clothes. Sometimes it’s just when the child heads out on their first adventures alone.

Perhaps that’s why grandparents indulge their grandchildren. They get a second chance to pour too much ketchup into the plate if the child wants it or serve morning Fruit Loops on an upturned laundry basket, because the child wants to watch cartoons in the living room with breakfast. Personally, I send boxes of treats to my grandchildren, not because they need anything, but because I remember being that age and loving to get a package of anything in the mail.

For the most part, children turn out the way they are supposed to, perhaps in spite of us as parents. As parents, however, we have a duty to ourselves to appreciate every moment, when they are small, when they are growing and when they establish lives of their own. I love that song, even if it’s part of a not-so-great movie, because it reminds me that no matter the age, we must not let the time go “slippin’ through our fingers” without savoring the moment. “School bag in hand, she waves goodbye with an absent-minded smile….” Yes, I love that song and I love that thought.

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February 22, 2016 · 3:41 pm

A word about a body’s shape…

When I was in the fifth grade, the school systems were still doing public measuring and weighing. I suppose they did it other years too, but I remember fifth grade, because I stepped on the scale, the dial spun around, and it was official! I weighed 105 pounds and the people doing the measuring identified me as the heaviest student in the class.

Before that, I didn’t think about body shape or size and after that, I spent a lot of time wishing I could be the size of the smallest girl in my class. It wasn’t until a long time after that when I finally realized that the smallest girl in my class, wished her body was bigger and stronger.

I was raised in an era when body shaming was done to make us strive for a more healthy body. “You shouldn’t eat so many potatoes, you will end up with a larger waistline.” I still remember the gym teacher who told me that at lunch one day. I still have to resist the urge to take my potatoes to the closet and eat them in the dark.

For years, I dieted and ate and dieted and ate, and dieted and ate. After it all, I ended up with the body I was going to have anyway…the body all the women in my family seem to attain. And in the end, I finally realized I am okay with that.

I don’t think that body shaming is going anyplace very soon, though. Any day you are on the Internet you can see “25 celebrity body blunders.” Or, even better would be, “Analyze your body shape to learn to disguise your body flaws.”

I applaud the women who were presented in this year’s Sports Illustrated this year who did not have the traditional model body, but modeled swimsuits with grace and elegance. I have come to accept my body, but I don’t think I’ll take the acceptance that far. I don’t think I would be easy modeling bathing suits, no matter what, because I not a bathing suit person.

I wear bright colors, snug-fitting clothes, and items that are not in keeping with my size and age. I keep in mind that the frame of my body is not what should define me, and I would love it if I could encourage other people to feel the same. Remember, pretty much every one believes that another body shape would look better on them, but we need to come to peace with our own bodies—while keeping them as healthy as we can.

When I think of body worship in the world, I always think of what my grandmother used to say about the human body. “I don’t want to see anyone else’s body, no matter what it looks like. If I want to see my body, I’ll look in the mirror—there won’t be any shocks when I see it and it won’t cost me anything.” I going to go with that, for now. And just maybe, I’m going to take a little pride in being the biggest girl in the fifth grade class!

© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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February 16, 2016 · 1:47 am

You are there, but where is there, and can you call?

When she ate my socks, I just thought she was expressing the thought that my feet were so beautiful, they didn’t need cover. When she ate the letter I had ready to send to a book agent, I thought maybe she was expressing a literary critique on my work. When she ate the Christmas presents, I assured myself it was simply her silent protest to the commercialism of the holiday.

But when the dog ate my address book,  the fun was over. She ate it in pieces; I had plenty of warning. She started on the leather cover and chewed out a couple of addresses for people I didn’t contact anymore anyway. But I was careless once more and left the battered book where my intrepid billy goat dog could, by stretching herself up onto the desk, retrieve it, and my communication notes became her endive salad!

It was so angering—all my addresses, telephone numbers, important dates—gone in a flurry of ripping teeth. I banished the dog to the basement, but that did not recover my address book. And for a woman with the memory of a kitchen sieve, this became a real crisis.

I knew from the start that it was serious. Not only is my memory notoriously unreliable, but I have a real mental block when it comes to numbers. It’s true; you can ask my high school math teacher—oh wait, his telephone number was in my address book. Well, take my word for it. Although I might remember that my daughter lives on Green Street, even though I’ve been there, I have trouble conjuring up the  house number.  I don’t remember zip codes, and as for street, avenue, drive, boulevard, etc. and S, E, NW, SE, forget it!

Telephone numbers are even worse. I didn’t realize just how much I relied on the address book to call people. Since the dog’s impromptu banquet,  I have  had occasion to need to call my sister, and I had several short and apologetic conversations with the people I called before I finally hit on her telephone number. My children’s numbers are all in my husband’s cell phone, but I’ll have to wait until he has more time to assist, so I can retrieve them. By then, I’ll have acquired them some other way—perhaps I’ll write and ask them…no, that’s not going to work is it?

The author of all this misery, is of course, living at my house so I don’t have to call her or remember her address. She’s clever enough to know when I’m thinking about that lost address book, because as soon as I start squinting at the ceiling with the phone in my hand, muttering, “That’s 857…or is it 587..or, oh, I don’t know,” she puts her tail between her legs and slinks down to the basement.

Eventually, I’ll get my address book back together and this time the pages will be stainless steel with a lead lock. In the meantime, I’m going to do a lot of driving around, trying to use the GPS I call a memory to find the people whose addresses are presently in the digestive system of a dog who seriously did not get any nutritive value out of my records!

 

© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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February 8, 2016 · 3:06 pm

I’m just gonna walk my paint cans now…

Some people go skiing in the mountains on the weekends. Some people enter marathons and walk and run their way through days at a time. I envy these people because they have normal, ordinary activities—things people would understand and often, things that they admire.

That’s right, I’m about to tell one of those whiny tales about how all the bad stuff happens to me. If you don’t want to read that, stop here. But I warn you, you’ll miss a pretty good story. The things that happen to me aren’t necessarily normal, but they are entertaining!

The storeroom needed cleaning and I decided that definitely, this was the weekend. And what’s more, all that stuff I didn’t need was finally going. I sorted the paint cans and put everything that I couldn’t identify (and that was too many of them) on the track of the exercise walker that has been serving as a laundry hanger because it hasn’t worked right in a year. All of that was going.

I surprised the cat, who has apparently been taking afternoon naps on the Easter decorations and while I was stopping the rain of plastic eggs, gaily-decorated baskets and multi-colored Easter  eggs from hitting the floor, the cat chose that moment to walk across my arms, over my head and then cast herself off my shoulders onto the freezer, from where she could get to the floor.

While digging the Easter decorations that I couldn’t catch out from behind the freezer, I encountered an empty beer can. Aside from wishing at that moment that it had been full and cold, I was left to wonder how it got there—Roy drinks beer, but not usually behind the freezer.

The next order of business was cleaning the shelves because the dust had me sneezing so much, I was bumping my head on walls, shelving and the window. I pulled an old hand vac out and plugged it in as best I could behind the freezer.

Except I didn’t plug in the vacuum, I plugged in the mal-functioning exercise walker. Guess what? It wasn’t malfunctioning right then, it was ON. Paint cans began shooting off the sides and the end like a mortar attack in a war zone. Once they were done and I had cleaned up the damage, I tried to look on the bright side: at least the walker was working. Except it wasn’t. I discovered with some experimenting that if you unplugged it and then plugged it back in, it would run for approximately a half a minute…or about the amount of time it takes to walk about 10 paint cans at a sharp jog.

It was getting  to be too much. I was contemplating a break when the dog decided to aid me. She found some Christmas wrapping paper where I had put it in the hallway outside the door. I was alerted to that fact when I heard paper ripping. I looked out to see her joyously dismantling  a half-used roll of paper. As I was cleaning that up, she nosed her way in, trying to get some of the bigger pieces and that’s when I noticed that her head was extremely damp-looking.

I was busy; I didn’t ask questions, but I should have investigated. When I finally dashed upstairs to get more garbage bags from the kitchen, I did some unexpected cross-country skiing across a very slippery kitchen floor. When I slammed into the stove, I discovered that the dog had washed her paws in a skillet full of frying grease that I had left out to cool off. She had distributed it over every counter and surface and turned the floor into a pre-greased skating rink.

By the time I had cleaned up the paint mess, the shredded Christmas paper mess and the greased kitchen mess, it was time to call the weekend to a close. So, although I didn’t go skiing in the mountains or run a marathon, I skied through my kitchen and I definitely walked those paint cans at a brisk pace! However, I don’t think anyone’s going to admire me for it!

 

 

 

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February 2, 2016 · 1:04 am

Five Seconds of Terror…

Within the last week, I was riveted by a television show’s story line. I love those cop-murder-mystery kinds of series and this week, there was an especially gruesome one. It seems a woman got into her car late one night and there was someone in the back seat who promptly slipped a plastic bag over her head and suffocated her.

I tell you this before I tell you my most recent event because it will tell you what my frame of mind was. I have always feared the “killer in the backseat with the knife” scenario and this week, I faced my own nightmare…but don’t worry; as you should already have guessed, I survived!

I was on the road late at night. I had been driving for about 20 miles on some very slippery roads after running some errands in a nearby city. It was icy, I was tense and my hands actually ached from clutching the wheel so tightly. There was no one else to drive, though, so it was up to me to be a big girl and get through.

Just as I was congratulating myself for being so courageous, a light from a car coming up behind me shone in the back of my car and outlined the head of a person, sitting behind me in the back seat. I now know the meaning of the phrase, “heart jumped into my throat,” because mine did.

Almost gagging from fear, I tried to appear cool as I slowly skidded the car over to the side of the road. I thought frantically about what there was in the front seat that I could use as a weapon, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to stab anybody to death with the straw in my drink.

My second thought was to slow down enough to throw myself out of the car. I was trying to remember the stories people told about jumping from a moving car and surviving. Was the car going 30 miles an hour? 20? Would I be able to do it without splatting myself on the highway and breaking bones? Even if I could get out, what would I do then? The person in the back seat could just run after me. What to do? What to do?

I was just at the point of emitting  a hair-raising shriek (this is not strategy, it was just panic setting in), when another car came up from behind and I could once again observe the person in the back seat. Except that the person in the back seat was not a person.

My last errand had been at a costume shop where I had secured a large horse costume which was presently residing in the back seat…right behind my seat…sticking up far enough to catch the light of the cars behind me.

My five seconds of terror were over, but now chagrin set in. After turning around and swinging my very heavy purse into every corner of the back seat to make sure the bogus horse was my only passenger, I put the car in gear and continued the nerve-wracking ride home. I did make it home, by the way and without being knifed or suffocated by any backseat murderers.

The thing causing me the chagrin, however, remains. I keep asking myself, what if I had gotten the car slowed down enough and had the nerve to pitch myself out? Even if a passing car didn’t turn me into pavement wax, I was bound to break something. So how would I explain to the emergency personnel assigned to scrape me off the highway that I broke my hip, leg, shoulder,head, etc., jumping out of my car to escape a homicidal horse costume???$_3

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January 18, 2016 · 5:02 pm

Picture not so perfect…

I watched a woman today trying as hard as she could to avoid having her picture taken. Why, you might ask, would she avoid it? She was a nice looking woman, but she didn’t feel properly dressed, her hair wasn’t done the way she wanted, and on and on went her excuses until I was pretty proud of her.

I have played the “please don’t take my picture” game my entire life. I think it stemmed from the day I was five and my mother dressed me in an emerald green dress, combed out my hair and took me to the photographer. I refused to smile, but this was not that photographer’s first rodeo. He said, “You’re so pretty with that red hair and freckles, I’ll bet you have lots of boyfriends. How many are there?” I smiled in a goony fashion and said, “Five.”

I still say I was not confessing to being a kindergarten slut, I was telling him my age, but the story has stuck–along with the goofy expression on my face which he forever immortalized. Ever since then, pictures have become an ordeal.12002417_10100595093730356_8133938329551253802_o

If you relent and allow your picture to be taken, it always comes out with your finger in the vicinity of your nose or your mouth open, revealing an unobstructed view of your tonsils—not your best feature. However, if you refuse to have your picture taken—you are expected to have a reason why not, as in: “You can’t take my picture. Why? Because I’m in the witness protection program and I would be killed if my picture comes out.” “Because I’m sensitive about the skin disease I have that whenever my picture is taken, dirty words appear in my rash.” “Because if you take my picture when I said no, I’m going to stick that camera in a convenient place.” You name the excuse for not having a picture taken, I’ve used it.

I used to think it had to do with looks, but since I was never model-beautiful, I can’t imagine that I would be that vain. I think it has more to do with privacy. I object to being assaulted at any random moment. I have seen pictures of myself with my mouth wide open, about to devour a hamburger. I have seen myself, with my “best side up” about to pick something up from the floor. I’ve seen pictures where my hair ran a close second for worst style against Nick Nolte’s arrest photo. I simply do not take pictures well and they are the kind of memories I’d rather not save!

I truly think there should be a law about pictures. Everybody with a smartphone today can snap a picture, but what if we listed cameras of any kind as weapons? When we take large group pictures, that would make the phones or cameras weapons of mass destruction. Someone takes my picture in some unflattering moment…pretty much any moment would qualify…and I could have them arrested for assault with intent to display!

I’ve heard that computers are now equipped with cameras which could be hacked. That means the camera could get me walking into the kitchen with my night hair and ragged nightie. Or worse still, coming out of the shower wrapped in a towel which doesn’t have the yardage to cover the important stuff. This thought has given me nightmares and caused me  to regard my computer with hostility and suspicion.

I know that camera control  will never happen and I’ll spend the rest of my life hiding behind some convenient (but never big enough) fellow picture subject, when the cameras come out. I’ll try to bear it by thinking of it as a nice, benevolent execution—they line you up on the wall and shoot you. But, instead of it being all over when they are done shooting, you have the even worse ordeal of having to look at the picture…forever…in the most inconvenient of places. Smile, everyone, we’re on Candid Camera!

 

© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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