Rush Hour

Today, as I was driving (or not driving) in rush-hour traffic, I thought, Dang! It's going to take me 45 minutes to get from point A to point B. That's awful. I was driving through an area of suburbia which until recently has been rural and is still peppered with wooded lots and pastures, and lots of narrow two-lane tree-lined roads. The commuters wending their way home through the gloam made a caravan of headlights more than a mile long. Something about it didn't just slow down the cars but seemed to have a calming effect on the drivers as well.

I thought of how one hundred years ago, most folks wouldn't dream of traveling from my point A to my point B in just one day, especially because the area was thickly wooded, with small homesteads carved out of the forest, with dirt roads often up to the axles in mud, especially at this time of year. Even fifty years ago, such a trek would have taken several hours, not 45 minutes. What was I complaining about?

Growing Old Gracefully??

There was a time (a week or two ago) when I had little patience for the whole anti-aging industry.  I reveled the irony of the same women who are so proud of their bra-burning days are now visiting their pricey 'colorist' every six weeks to cover their gray and getting face lifts and breast implants—fueling a billion-dollar beauty industry as they battle against the creep of years.  Talk about a defense budget.

"Women should grow old gracefully," I would say.  "Wrinkles are a sign of hard-won wisdom and a life of trials overcome and joys embraced.  They should be proud of their battle scars."  Anti-aging creams and serums?  Pah!  Age-defying cosmetics?  Overblown.  Skin peeling, collagen injections, eyeliner tattoos?  Puh-lease!

It's a Pleasure to Be of Use

I try to get up to The Woodlands at least every couple of days to visit with my elderly friend.  She is currently in a skilled nursing facility recovering from a broken patella, and the subsequent surgery to repair it.  We (me, Marjorie, and Leslie, her roommate) visit, I jabber mindlessly hoping that they may find something I say mildly entertaining.  I ask them how they're doing and about their physical therapy.  Marjorie tells me if she needs anything, like her clothes collected and laundered. Then, I break out a book and read.  Currently, we are reading Marjorie's Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes, and book of Leslie's called Visions in the Night, which is about messages God sends to us.  Dallas goes with me more often than not, we usually stay at least an hour (if not two) and we come away feeling like we did something worthwhile that day.

Today, after I got home from work, I decided that I really needed to go and see Marjorie because, due to my starting my new job and a trip up to College Station for Lynda's baby shower, it had been the better part of a week since we had last visited her.  Today being Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Dallas was off work, so we gave in to my niggling conscience and headed out to see Marjorie.  We didn't get very far.