The Giraffe

By Marc Leavitt of Marc Leavitt's Blog

Sometimes I smile and almost laugh,
When contemplating the giraffe.
The giant, peaceful herbivore’s,
Polite, and disinclined to roar
(Though he might give out a bellow
If he meets a nasty fellow).

He likes acacia leaves to munch,
And cranes his neck to reach a bunch.
(Higher leaves are best, the upper,
Which he chomps on for his supper.
The giraffe’s taste in food is fine,
But not how we would choose to dine.)

No animal is quite as tall,
In height, he stands above us all.
A grown giraffe commands first place;
You’d need stilts to see his face.

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Mama the Little Hobo

By Deb who blogs at Simple Not Easy

Mama was little, never bigger than a 12-year-old kid, and her younger sister Eva, who we called Pete, wasn't much bigger. The Halloween my twin brothers were 15, they blackened their faces and went out “slamming gates,” i.e. begging at doors for Halloween candy.

It was 1944 and wartime. Everything was rationed and pickings were slim. Mama ran out of treats early. Pete was visiting and Dad was working "evening tower" which meant he wouldn't be home 'til 1AM so Mama and Pete decided to dress up like hobos and go out slamming gates themselves.

They blackened their faces and stuffed their hair under slouch caps, pulled some threadbare work clothes out of the rag-bag and laced Dad's old boots over their own shoes. They looked pretty good, like a couple of half-grown boys, totally unrecognizable.

They walked a few blocks over to a row of houses where Mama didn't know the neighbours and hit a rich vein. It wasn't long before their sacks started filling up. They were feeling pretty good when a familiar voice hailed them from behind. "Hey! What you fellers doing in our territory?"

They turned around to face a gang of 15-16 year-old boys including both of my brothers and several of their friends. But they didn't look friendly. One of the twins was swinging a sock with a fist-sized load of marbles tied in the end of it.

"Gimme that sack, kid,” he said to Mama, “or else I'm giving you a thump on the head with these marbles."

Mama narrowed her eyes and steam just about came out of her ears but she didn't dare speak. She handed over her sack.

"And you too," he said, pointing at Pete. Pete reluctantly handed over her sack. "Now git!" he said and he hauled off and thumped Mama one with the marbles on the side of the head, catching her just above the eye.

Mama reeled from the blow, then she and Pete broke and ran for home, scrambling and stumbling in their too-big boots, mocking laughter following them.

Now Mama had an Irish temper on her that was scarce contained on a good day and this was not a good day.

As soon as she and Pete got home, she clomped down to the basement and sawed the last two-and-a-half feet off an old broomstick. Then she stomped upstairs, took two aspirin, wrapped a big chip of ice from the ice box in a wash rag, put it on the lump above her eyebrow and sat down at the kitchen table to wait for the twins. Her blackened face was not as black as her mood.

It was a school night and it wasn't long before the twins came through the door laughing and hooting, carrying several sacks of loot. They roared into the kitchen and came to a screeching halt when they saw Mama and Pete in the guise of the two hobos they had robbed - and assaulted - an hour before.

Mama pulled the washcloth away from her brow to expose the purple goose egg there and the dried rivulet of blood.

She stood up, broomstick in hand. "Boys, it's like this. You give me your sacks and the satisfaction of beating you with this broomstick until you holler uncle, and I'm willing to tell your daddy that I ran into the doorjamb in the basement in the dark. Or, you keep your candy and I tell him what really happened. It's your choice."

Well, Mama and Pete got their candy back plus some and she bruised the twins up pretty good with that broomstick because they were too proud, and too stubborn, to holler uncle. She finally just wore herself out.

I'll bet she told me that story me a dozen times when I was growing up, usually as we suited up for Halloween. Maybe that's what made me think of it now, as Halloween approaches.

I wasn't even born when it happened and now I'm old and all of them are gone and being a sentimental old fool, it makes me cry to think I'll never see, or hug, or kiss, or fight with any of them again.

But as the old Russian proverb says, “Our ancestors live, as long as they are remembered.”

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Sleep

By Henry Lowenstern

Theere is nothing like a night of sleep
it's restful and it's often deep,
relaxing your body and your brain
and sometimes, even relieving you pain.
In any case, it's yours to keep.

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The Day I Passed Garbo

By Arlene Corwin of Arlene Corwin Poetry

Blasé New Yorkers are blasé goal walkers,
Harboring no other thoughts than achieving.
Seeing not, hearing not, smelling not, yet,
On a wet, windy day,
Making way upwards West 57th,
Shoes coming toward me,
Brown, flat, longish coat, aging face, hat or kerchief,
(Or am I imagining) rather dark glasses.
As New Yorkers do,
Fobbing off glance or gawk,
I walked.
It was Garbo, of course.
Our paths never crossed.
Never turning my neck,
Never swerving the gait,
Lacking nerve to slow down,
I continued my goal-walking moment to class
Cool, detached, saying nothing to anyone.
I, Arlene Corwin had passed Great Garbo
That sixty some years ago,
Only to mention it now.

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Auntie Gloria’s Hand-Me-Downs

By Anne Mary Lancellotti

“Gloria was always the most beautiful one in the family,” my mother often said without obvious jealousy. “And the most glamorous.” This she offered with eyebrows raised in awe.

To us, her young nieces, Auntie Gloria was like a movie star – elegant but also distant. She was my godmother. I felt we should be close. However, she never made overtures to spend time with me alone.

Rosemary, the youngest of the four sisters, was the aunt who engaged me in drawing or took me on shopping expeditions but I always pined a little for Gloria’s attention.

Gloria’s career trajectory was legendary in the family. At 16, she quit school to work in Gladdings – a high-end department store. Soon, she rose to a managerial position. Before she was 30, she was promoted to buyer of women’s clothing.

She celebrated by purchasing a mink stole which she modeled for her parents, eight siblings and two nieces at a Sunday family supper. I remember sitting at that long dining room table, interested in nothing but the light brown pelt draped over Gloria’s shoulders.

The family was murmuring with excitement. Between their oo’s and ah’s, I heard “New York City,” “Every week.” Auntie really would be like a movie star, I thought.

Now, she was even more elegant. In fact she had, as my mother pronounced, “great style.” Her weekly travels to NYC’s fashion district demanded an au courant wardrobe. She owned tailored suits and puckered shirts and fitted dresses with jackets. Every year, she replaced them with a more current line. With that pattern established, so was a ritual.

When Gloria’s bundle of yesterday’s clothes was ready to exit her closet, she brought them to my mother. Anna was a working mother with little disposable income. She had her own solid sense of style but neither the time nor funds to match Gloria’s wardrobe.

When my aunt breezed through our door, arms burdened with a year’s worth of clothing, my mother, sister Lynda and I would take a collective deep breath, laden with excitement. I was around 11 years old, Lynda about eight.

We would sit in rapt attention as our mother disappeared, then reappeared dressed like the celebrity our aunt had been the year before. Delighted with her stash, she would parade and giggle like a teenager in her first prom dress.

When I grew into my teen years, Gloria offered some of her discards to me. The joy of this gesture soon wore thin as I unsuccessfully tried to don her clothing. My aunt was five feet four and thin. By age 13, I was five feet six or seven with an ample figure. Gloria’s size 10 dresses were not compatible with my size 14 frame.

My mother, an excellent seamstress, would calculate loosening a tuck here, adding an extra panel there. There was no way, however, that her skills could transform her dejected daughter into Cinderella. The best we could do was find a blouse I could wear under one of my own sweaters.

As often happens in the random dispersal of family genes, adult Lynda strongly resembles our aunt in looks and size. She has the same wide eyes and well defined facial structure that classify her as a beauty. And she has Gloria’s style.

Whether it’s a well-placed scarf or the just-right shade of red shoes, her dress catches the eye. As a school principal, she developed an enviable wardrobe – up to date, yet appropriate.

I, however, have a less rewarding closet. Thirty years as a physical therapist have left me with a wardrobe heavily weighted towards the casual and mundane. But several years ago, Lynda helped lift my line of clothing out of the doldrums.

After a thorough clearing of her own closet, she appeared with bags of dresses, jackets, pants – all with labels reading J. Jill, Nordstom and better. “I don’t wear these anymore,” she said, looking remarkably like Gloria. “Try them on. If they fit, take them.”

I reached for one particularly beautiful dress – a long, printed silk shift. It fit perfectly. So did a linen jacket and a pair of capri pants. The years had whittled my frame well below a size 14. I could wear Lynda’s clothes.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll take them.” Thus began a ritual similar to that which animated our lives 60years ago. Through Lynda, I’m finally close to Gloria.

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The Grasshopper and the Ant

By Marc Leavitt of Marc Leavitt's Blog

(A translation from the French of Jean de la Fontaine)

Grasshopper was a happy girl,
Whose summer passed by in a swirl,
But summer fun quite soon would end,
With winter’s cares around the bend.

She knew the frost would soon arrive,
Her shelves were bare; could she survive?
“Aha!” she thought, “I’ll visit Ant,
She’ll help fix things; I know I can’t!”

Grasshopper went to beg a loan
Of wheat, from seeds that Ant had sown.
Hard-working Ant had food in store
For winter’s needs, but nothing more.

She bragged to Ant, that “Every day,
“I sang, and danced my time away.”
Said Ant, “And now you’ll have a chance
To feed yourself; Can you still dance?”

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[INVITATION: All elders, 50 and older, are welcome to submit stories for this blog. They can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir, etc. Please read instructions for submitting.]

I Lost My Shoes Yesterday

By Clifford Rothband

This getting old stuff is getting the best of me. There exists the power of suggestion upsetting or clouding my thought process, like watching a TV commercial for a new car. Five of them in a row.

How many cars can I afford? A better car with more gadgets to break. The value of piece of junk in five years, metal and plastic for the now reduced price of 30 grand with no interest for seven years, or $299.99 a month, Oh, they forgot to put in the add 75 hundred dollars down. Such a bargain.

Real leather seats as my grandson would say as he rubs his cheek on the cushion. Kiddo, we live in Florida where leather seats get so hot as to make sores appear on my bum?

Or those heated or air conditioned cushions. Last year we went to a wedding in New Jersey, rented a brand new car. We had frozen butts for the first few hours until we stopped to eat.

Instead of normal twist or flip buttons on the dash there was a pair of multi-lingual, universal, incredible, computerized touch screens, algorithms necessary - a language format that these 70-year-olds could not figure out.

Press the obvious fan area and the fan increases to Northwest Passage, gale-storm weather.

Then touch the adjoining area and heat, enough to boil my butt. It took an 11-year-old kid at a rest stop to shut the seat temperatures off.

The next problem - no keys or keyholes - put this thing in your pocket. And so I get out and rush for a urinal before my wife got out. Lock down! She can't even get out.

Shoot, it seems like I complain about everything. We watch a TV movie, the music over rides the conversation. Put on the closed caption doodad and who can read so fast, or even see the small words. Then every seven minutes another commercial, pizza, four or five different brands in a row.

We watch another criminal act or a wild, abandoned, clothed sex scene and the next commercials start up. Seventy percent off off is all I hear, plus S&P. Is that like the old shipping and handling? Hey, can I just buy a universal 70 or 84 percent off?

And those buy one get the second for free, money back if not satisfied, just pay an extraordinary amount of S&P both ways.

Then seven minutes later, new ads: male enhancement pills, adult diapers, "That time of the month” whatever and the pills that I can't spell for a disease that I never heard of.

Or lawyers asking you to join a class action suit. Guaranteed payout to each contributor and three million dollars to each attorney in fees.

My only conclusion is that we are living in an incredibly absurd world. Worst of all, raising a next generation who never saw a dial phone, a superman pay phone booth with a change pocket on the lower right and quarter, dime and nickel holes on top.

My grandkids don't even know what a Princess or brick phone was. Nor a flip phone for that matter. What is this world coming to?

Besides the recorded scam calls, then I get a live call from Romania, India or China. Amazing. I say that I don't understand what's being said, your accent. “What accent?” is the usual reply.

Now when I was younger, my wife would yell at me because I left the light on. Sorry, honey, I forgot when I had to rush for the phone ringing in the kitchen. (By the way, never call another lady honey; it's a reason to be slapped by either one.)

Now, how I lost my shoes. As a kid, I had one pair of multi-purpose, $3 dollar leather shoes, a hole in the sole, easy fix, a cardboard insert. Then high top sneakers and U.S. Keds came out. So maybe three pairs of footwear. And galoshes.

Nowadays, through advanced marketing like BOGO [buy one, get one free], what if I only want one pair? Why it is not half price?

Losing my reduced, sale-priced, $65 walking shoes was not like walking into a room and forgetting why I entered it or losing the car in a multi-acre, multi-story parking garage. These shoes with $300 orthopedic inserts not recommended for runners or basketball, nor grass walking. Lately I've even read about weightless feeling spring loaded soles.

Back to my lost shoes. It seems the wife let the robot vacuum go. The grandson picked up my shoes and put them inside the TV cabinet and closed the doors. He absent-mindedly told no one and the 12-year-old didn't remember either!

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[INVITATION: All elders, 50 and older, are welcome to submit stories for this blog. They can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir, etc. Please read instructions for submitting.]

Christmas Moose

By Fran Sunderland

"We're all going to the community Christmas party today."

I had brought my husband, plus my daughter with her husband and infant son, to Scotland to spend the holidays. It was a rather dark and dreary place to visit at that time of year but my son, his wife and their four children were living in a cottage on an estate near Inverness and this was to be a family affair.

On the afternoon in question we all squeezed into two cars and set off for the estate's community hall. There we found a couple of dozen more children with attendant adults milling about.

The laird of the estate, who provided this annual shindig for his tenant families, was obviously enjoying his role as genial host and emcee. He was kept busy announcing winners of the games and attempting to keep at least minimal order.

I had been introduced to another American and we sat down together to observe the festivities. At meal time, there was something described as pizza. We two agreed it wasn't anything we'd call pizza but at lease it wasn't haggis. And if you don't know what haggis is, it's just as well.

By then I had learned to say "laird" for "lord," still I thought pizza was a bit of a stretch. Anyway, when that was finished, the laird got back on the loudspeaker and announced dessert. "Will the adults please wait until all the children have their dessert before coming forward."

When the ensuing scramble for ice cream cups died down a bit, the laird picked up the microphone again. The guy from New Jersey and I heard him ask: "Does every child have a MOOSE?"

We two stared at each other for a beat, as images of a parade of children leading a string of Rudolphs went through our heads. Then we laughed as the mental translator kicked in and we realized that what we call a Dixie Cup, the Scots call a "MOUSSE."

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I Still Don’t Understand Women

By Mickey Rogers of This, That and the Other

It didn’t take too many years on this planet for me to realize that in at least certain situations women and men do not act in similar ways. For example, by the age of three, I clearly understood that a man does not invite another man to go with him to the bathroom unless, of course, he enjoys getting a fat lip.

After all these years, I’m still baffled by the opposite sex. For the life of me I don’t understand why my wife Bev has to show her friends every new piece of furniture, every new appliance and even every recently-purchased dress or blouse.

There must be some truth to that Mars versus Venus thing for I know for a fact that guys, at least the ones I hang with, wouldn’t be caught dead doing any of this.

A few weeks ago, within minutes after setting up our new bed, Bev was on the phone to tell a friend all the gory details: “Hello, Leah? You’ll never guess! No, I didn’t get rid of his golf clubs, at least not yet! No, my mother isn’t coming for a visit! Give up? I’ve got the new bed! It’s a dark reddish brown with a beautiful headboard and it’s lower than the old bed. You will have to see it! How about coming over tomorrow about two o’clock? Great! Bring your camera.”

For the next hour or so she called numerous close friends, acquaintances and even near-strangers to spread the good news and set up visiting times. If I expected any privacy for the next two weeks I would have to battle bees, mosquitoes, ants and other various critters while taking my afternoon naps on the back deck.

A few months ago, our ancient stove bit the dust so there was no choice but to purchase a new one. Within two minutes after the plumber had installed the gas line, Bev was on the phone describing her newest possession: “Let me tell you, Gertrude, I didn’t really want a black range but it has sort of grown on me! Of course, it clashes with the yellow refrigerator so I hope it dies soon so we can get a black one! When can you come over to see it? Let me check my planning book. Yeah, two-fifteen will work. Bye.”

Even clothing purchases become a big deal: “Karen, you’ve got to see my new blouse. It’s a cream color and has the cutest little kitten on the front!”

Can you imagine a real man like John Wayne acting like this? “Hey, is this Roy Rogers? It’s John. You just have to come over to the stable and see my new saddle. It’s cream-colored and has a drawing of the cutest little kitty on it. Of course, it clashes with my black horse so hopefully he’ll die soon so I can get a palomino. Two-thirty? Sorry, Roy; I’ll be fighting in the Alamo. How about tomorrow at three? Okay, see you then, Pilgrim.”

More often than not when looking at Bev’s new dress or new blouse, the visitor has to try it on. I guarantee you that John Wayne and Roy Rogers never tried on each other’s outfits (perhaps Hopalong Cassidy and Johnny Cash did; both wore black).

My friends down at the local bar had a good laugh at all this and even shared similar stories about their own spouses. We agreed that having a friend over to see your new bed, oven or clothing is rather ridiculous.

On the other hand, we men only invite our buddies over to see the really important new stuff, things like barbeque grills, golf clubs, lawn mowers and of course, automobiles.

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[INVITATION: All elders, 50 and older, are welcome to submit stories for this blog. They can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir, etc. Please read instructions for submitting.]

Columbus Day

By Henry Lowenstern

Christopher Columbus traveled west
confident that route was best
to reach India.
When he found Virginia
he was somewhat distressed.

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[INVITATION: All elders, 50 and older, are welcome to submit stories for this blog. They can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir, etc. Please read instructions for submitting.]