Boomer Chick Musings

It's been nearly nine year s since my husband passed on very unexpectedly.  And for a number of those years  friends have encouraged me to 'get out there.'  That's not that easy to do when I know how good I had it for 28 years.  At this (st)age of life....it seems more than daunting.  It seems ridiculous! But the stars aligned and I had a bit of a mind shift.  I tried to figure out what exactly shifted.  It seemed a bit weird out there. What was I emitting that seemed to attract men who had no income, didn't own a home (really not a requirement),  had lost a home, had multiple marriages under their belts (three seemed a very popular number), were struggling with work (yeah, I get that one, I really do), had wheels but they looked like they wouldn't keep spinning too much longer, and if they golfed they got all weirded out on the course (jeez just relax and the club will hit the ball). The fact is, I have to admit I'm the problem.  Can't blame what&#

I'm not talking about the 'talk' about where babies come from.  I'm talking about the spoiling of the Santa myth. 1960.  My oldest of two younger brothers (at that time) and I were playing baseball with kids from the block.  We took over a vacant lot near our house in southern California.  Dusk was upon us. Apparently the neighborhood bully had decided it was his personal mission in life to tell every kid that Santa didn't exist.  And he did.  I acted like, well, yeah, I know that.  But like, no, I was shocked.  Dismayed. Amazed.  And you mean our parents just lie to us about that?  What's next, the tooth ferry?  Hhmmm, that would be right.  Reminded me of my '67 Balboa Blue bug - bought it at the local hardware store! 2010.  It's two days before Christmas.  At this stage in my life the commercial/hubbub of the holidays is not one 'of my favorite things'.  My solution is to escape from it all sometime between Thanksgiving and the week

I know next to nothing about them.  But they gather religiously nearly every weekday.  They are retired.  But they aren't in church.  They are at a local coffee shop, shooting the breeze, sharing a tons of smiles and some heated conversation.  Of course there are big guffaws over the bad (and probably oft-repeated) jokes. What I like so much about this locale is that it's noisy enough to keep conversations private.  There is a bit of an echo due to the high ceilings.  It's bright with a lovely hand-painted mural.  The room is long and narrow towards the back, not conducive to more than two per table so groups are in the front of the store.  If anybody wants liquor, they need to go elsewhere.   One day I came up with a name for them.  The Men Hens. Some time later I was in line at the shop behind one of the men.  We've recognized each other for a long time.  The gang was there.  I smiled and asked how he was.  He's always upbeat.  I told him I had named their gr

I'm not referring to the Maxine cartoon character , although I totally love those cartoons! This is about the neighbor lady across the street when we moved to Fullerton when I was 5 years old.  It was my folks first owned-home, a newer small rancher in a tract development, with untouched orange groves at the end of the block.  Maxine was her name.  She was a wonder to me.  She was everything my mom wasn't.  She had short jet-back hair.  She was always super tan.  Her finger nails and toe nails were always painted a bright fire engine red.  She wore stylish pedal-pushers.  I thought she must have been a model.  She was old.  I figured she was in her 20's. AND....she always wore thongs.  No, I don't a thing about her undies....I just know that's what we called those flat rubber-sandal shoes, that everybody else has since called flip-flops for decades.  (Of course the word flip-flop is also used as a political term .)  I also remember calling them go-aheads. 

A TRUE CHRISTMAS STORY...   T'was several days before Christmas when the invitation came. Come to a party all looking the same (kind of). The assignment was easy...just look at your folks and wear a Christmas sweater of which people made jokes. The 20-somethings searched and searched all around.  Christmas sweaters were in demand.  None could be found. Couldn't borrow mom's she wore her seasonal covering a lot.  She even forced dad to wear the Santa sweatshirt she'd bought. The Goodwill and Salvation Army Stores might have something they could wear with pride.  But alas all were gone.  They nearly broke down and cried. To the festive department stores they reluctantly turned hoping whatever they found there would not leave them financially burned.  They looked for Christmas-themed sweater treasures high and low, on shelves, on floors, this was amazingly slow. Suddenly much to their delighted surprise, wedged between shirts something ugly caught t

I believe I saw the white linen platform shoes   I wore in my wedding, walking around Oakland Airport the other day.  Really.  They are 37 years old.  How could that be?  Fast forward: The answer came a short time later while I was in the 'resting room' of a lovely spa, waiting, I mean resting, to make fine use of a gift certificate given by Evan (son) and Erin (his wife).  I picked up the least intimidating magazine on a table. I know who Marie Osmond is (singer with a big family) and Marie Callendar (restaurants and frozen food). I've never seen Marie Claire .  I still don't know who she is.  But she's got a magazine named after her.  She must be very well known, maybe like Oprah.  I have heard her name on one of my favorite TV reality shows, Project Runway.  One of the judges for that show does something for that magazine. As I flipped the pages of Marie Claire's magazine, the ad-itorial probably exceeded the editorial by 20:1.  I believe that makes

By nature I'm not a gambler.   But as my late husband and I agreed upon before we were married, less-than- mediocre is better than mediocre.  And I believe I've maintained that attitude.  When our daughter was but a year old and I was teaching glider flying I found myself putting on a parachute as a prerequisite to flying high performance sailplanes.  And in some instances helping students put them on.  Trouble is, teaching what one doesn't know is not very effective.  So a group of us decided we needed to make a jump. And we did. The kicker was we took the training one day, it got too windy, they sent us home and then two weeks later we showed up again.  They outfitted us, loaded up the plane, and OMG - bombs away, not to mention the breath I didn't even catch until long after being back on terra firma again.   Thus the title of this post....my husband, Carl ,  shook his head ( he was a private pilot in single engine planes and gliders who got me into aviation t