Succinctly Yours Week 229: A Simple Mistake

Many thanks to Grandma of Grandma’s Goulash for hosting Succinctly Yours. Participants are invited to pick a story of 140 words or 140 characters or fewer based on the photo. This week’s bonus word was “zit.”

The volcano was called Mount Acme, but Mrs. Bly and Mrs. Snow misunderstood. Every day they met to discuss whether Mt. Acne—they’d nicknamed it The Zit—might pop.  136

While writing this, I kept getting distracted thinking of words my son came up with when he was a toddler. Sometimes his interpretation made more sense than the real word. Two that come to mind offhand are animals he renamed “honey-bird” and “poke-you-pine.” Can you think of any mistaken words that make more sense than the real thing? Have a great week!

Aquaintance about finding me a boyfriend at my age: “Don’t worry—we’ll find you someone who’s extinguished.” (What I thought but didn’t say: That’s what I’m afraid of....)

Succinctly Yours #181: Up the Road a Piece

Thank you to Grandma’s Goulash for hosting Succinctly Yours! The idea of this meme is to use the picture to build a story under 140 words or 140 characters. The bonus word this week was “panel.” I struggled a bit this week, but at least I came up with quantity:

When a panel of kings was surveyed, four out of five said they wanted to live on the edge of the world.  81

It took a panel of Realtors to deal with the castle fixer-upper. It was remote, drafty, high-maintenance, and a little too edgy for most buyers. Or was that, “ledgy?”  137

It took a panel of real estate agents to deal with the property on Edge of the Earth Road on the Haunted Forest Mountain Top. Nice view, but daunting location.  130

If we shadows have offended

Think but this, and all is mended.

That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear. ~William Shakespeare

Totally Random Tuesday: Put Downs

Carving the people around you into canyons doesn’t make you into a mountain by comparison. It just makes you dirty and low.

Downer Hill Skiing

I recently visited the website of sillyswedishskier who sounded eerily like a younger version of me…I, too, like to peel things! And I am compelled to peek behind shower curtains at parties!

Except that she calls herself a skier. That’s where we part ways. Dramatically. In fact, just the word brings back traumatically suppressed memories….

Warning. This is long.

I’ve snow skied twice in my life. Once was in Nebraska, where I’m from, so it probably only counts as half. In Nebraska, you basically ski down into a giant hole. Since I didn’t have the slightest idea how to ski, I snapped on those contraptions and just went, thinking it would somehow come naturally. It didn’t. My legs were locked perfectly straight with fear, which makes you go really fast. I managed to stay upright due to the same force that kept my legs so rigid—sheer terror of falling. I had no idea how to stop, but the good thing about skiing into a big hole is that you automatically stop when you start to go up the other side.

So I had done that once in my early 20s and thought it was a good beginning.

Then in my late 20s, I moved to Denver for about three years. During that time I only skied once. It was enough. I went to Breckenridge with my friend Deb, who is also from Nebraska, but Deb had truly lost her ski virginity due to having skied on an actual mountain before. Whereas I had maybe only been felt up by one. Deb and I both got instructors, but hers was more advanced than mine.

In hindsight, I should have known that things were not going to go well when Deb got Jean-Claude as her instructor and I got Bob. (Note: These are actual, non-made-up names.)

Bob was proud of the fact that he could teach any beginner to ski. He kept telling me his statistic: “I’ve never been unsuccessful in teaching someone to ski!” I have to hand it to Bob, he stuck with me for a long time—even after he had to take away my poles because I narrowly missed impaling him—long, long after I begged him to stop. But even Bob eventually gave up and left me in a snow bank along with his former record and the shame of being the one person who had broken it.

The rest is sort of hazy because it was so traumatic that my brain actually blocked it out. I believe nuns were involved, or maybe that was my mind playing tricks on me, but I don’t think so, because my mind was too exhausted to actually make things worse. I do distinctly remember these smiley older women zipping past me, and when I would fall and flail about in the snow like a stranded June bug, they would stop long enough to help me up. That’s when I’m sure one of them told me that she and a few of the other sisters were on vacation from some convent in Iowa. But I also think she told me it was their first time skiing…and then she zipped off again. She was about 60.

The EVENT happened, I think, when I was getting off the lift. Or maybe trying to get on. The memory is gooey from the horror of it. I just remember not jumping at the correct time and getting stuck, and then getting tangled maybe, and somehow dropping like a lead weight. I do know that I landed on people. I also know that a little girl was one of the people I landed on, but I also know everyone assured me she was just fine and that there were no serious injuries! Really!—and I know for a fact no ambulances were called—but I also remember that it was scary for a while when they shut down the entire ski lift and had to untangle the big pile of people. Oh, the screams, the horror, the pandemonium.

Because of me.

So nuns were involved in the story, but not in the actual mayhem. I’m almost 100% sure they weren’t using the lift then because I don’t remember their smiley nun faces. Unless they were buried under the pile of human rubble. So at least 60% positive for sure.

But that’s really all I remember, other than searching for someplace that sold alcoholic beverages after that. I do know I never found a toasty ski lodge with a fireplace and cute guys in casts sipping hot buttered rum like you see on TV. I seem to remember a picnic bench, and beer. And I discovered that you can cry pretty effectively behind sunglasses as long as you wipe the tears when they escape from underneath and also if you are careful not to sob much.

What I remember most is vowing NEVER to ski again. My guess is the nuns prayed on it as well.

“In the foster home, my hair was my room.” ~Erin in “The Office”

Ode to a Zit

I can think of lots of good things about aging. Really, I can. Like, there’s a certain power in calling young men “Young Man.” Those are magic words, I’ve found, like a password into the netherworld between Momdom and Scary-older-woman-land. I find they usually look a little bit terrified of me and do exactly as I say.

But anyway, one of the best things about aging is no longer breaking out. Unless you’re me, of course! If you’re me, you get a zit erupting on your chin which is so huge, if the world floods, Noah will at least have a place to land the ark, ar ar.

But want to know what the final cruelty is about having a zit when you’re old and wrinkled? It doesn’t look like a zit. It looks more like a wart, or maybe one of those mysterious facial things that old people seem to get sometimes. Just…a facial protuberance.

Years ago, my sister accidentally jabbed herself with cuticle scissors. The resulting scab looked enough like a picked pimple that she felt compelled to explain to people that it WASN’T A ZIT. REALLY.

Now I’m debating whether I should tell people that IT’S JUST A ZIT. REALLY.

Aging really does change one’s priorities, doesn’t it?

Acquaintance about finding me an older boyfriend: “Don’t worry—we’ll find you someone who’s extinguished.”

Here's What Makes Meme Happiest; How 'Bout You'm?

The other day, my friend Becky printed a “meme” that she found on another blog, offering it for others to take and do with what they chose. I’d never heard the word “meme,” so I looked it up. Here’s one definition from Dictionary.com:

meme- n. A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

Hmm.  Anyway, the meme was simply to list 10 things that make you happy. Fun game. My problem was that there was no way I could keep it to ten. So I cheated and condensed them so much that they got ridiculous. 

So finally I gave up and started listing specific times I remember being overwhelmingly happy, and it was such a nice exercise that I invite you to do your own. What I discovered was that my happiest moments seem rare and precious and have a transcendent quality that leaves me feeling as if I’ve been touched by the divine.

For example, when I lived in Denver I’d occasionally drive up the mountains alone to a spot in Estes Park that was on the very edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. I’d throw a jacket on and change my summer shorts and hike up to the top of a mountain, just beyond the snow line, and look down. That echo of infinite blue mountains and unmelting snow and endless beauty was so completely untouched by humanity that it caught the air in my throat and brought tears to my eyes, and I would find myself standing as still as I could and holding my breath because I was an outsider in a holy place too sacred for something as unworthy as my breathing, even. It was like being allowed to glimpse the face of God. There is always something ironic to me in being so small and humbled as to slip into a spiritual wormhole and become a part of something huge. That's when the human spirit truly takes wing.

And when I felt filled up and grounded again, I would carefully tiptoe back through my own footprints to leave the snow as untouched as possible so as not to sully it with my graceless humanity, and drive home, feeling at once lightened and enlightened.

There is such a thing as perfection...and our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth....Each of us is in truth an unlimited idea of freedom. Everything that limits us we have to put aside. ~Richard Bach