{"id":1185,"date":"2016-05-13T06:06:41","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T13:06:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2016-05-12T21:32:55","modified_gmt":"2016-05-13T04:32:55","slug":"that-never-happened-to-me-before-in-my-whole-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2016\/05\/13\/that-never-happened-to-me-before-in-my-whole-life\/","title":{"rendered":"That Never Happened to Me Before in My Whole Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

By the mid-seventies, although my divorce was still several years in the future, I had two kids under the age of five and was embarking on my new life as a single mother. \u00a0I was living in Arizona. \u00a0I had managed to pay cash for a used 14 X 70 mobile home which was parked on what we called my parents\u2019 \u201cback forty\u201d on Border Road in Bisbee Junction. \u00a0(Border Road was a much safer place back then than it is now, but that\u2019s a whole other story.)<\/span><\/p>\n

I had a job selling life insurance under the best possible circumstances\u2014my immediate supervisor, my District Manager, was two hundred miles away in Phoenix. \u00a0Through a set of circumstances that still seem miraculous to me, I had a wonderful babysitter\u2014Dolores Decker. \u00a0I would stay home doing paperwork in the mornings, looking after the kids while I did so. \u00a0Then, after meeting up with my parents for forenoon coffee at the Doughnut Shop, I\u2019d hand the kids off to Dolores and go to work. \u00a0I had both my parents and Dolores as backup. ( How my daughter has done everything on her own is something that I marvel at every day.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The mines had already shut down by then, so my clients weren\u2019t in Bisbee so much as they were scattered all over Cochise County. \u00a0If you\u2019ve read my Joanna Brady books, you know it\u2019s a big place\u201480 miles square. \u00a0If I had evening appointments in Willcox or Sierra Vista or Benson or Douglas, I\u2019d have to drive home once the appointment ended, all of which made for my getting home late at night. \u00a0Once I did, it would take a while to unwind before I could go to sleep.<\/span><\/p>\n

My kids\u2014who went to bed at a reasonable hour\u2014were early risers. \u00a0I was not. \u00a0It pains me to admit that I often left them under the watchful eye of Captain Kangaroo for half an hour or so while I got myself work wise. \u00a0(My daughter, who always gives me high marks on the quality of my mothering skills when she was little, has obviously forgotten the Captain Kangaroo era!)<\/span><\/p>\n

One evening when I came home, Dolores reported that earlier in the afternoon when she put the kids down for naps, she found my daughter playing nurse with her younger brother and handing out baby vitamins. \u00a0As a reasonably responsible mother, I kept the medications on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet\u2014well out of the children\u2019s reach, or so I thought. \u00a0What I neglected to realize was that, with the help of a handy kitchen stool, my daughter could clamber up onto the kitchen counter and from there, reaching the vitamins was a snap.<\/span><\/p>\n

What to do? \u00a0I didn\u2019t want to endanger my kids, but I still wanted to get my beauty sleep. \u00a0I went to bed and thought about it for a while. \u00a0Then I got back up and went back to the kitchen. \u00a0There I located a light-weight metal pot lid and put that inside the kitchen cabinet in question with the lid leaning against the inside of the door. \u00a0The next morning, I was dead to the world when the pot lid clattered into the kitchen sink. \u00a0By the time I stormed out of the bedroom, demanding to know what was going on, my daughter was out of the kitchen entirely. \u00a0I found her huddling in a corner of the living room saying the words, \u201cThat never happened to me before in my whole life.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And it never happened to her again, either. \u00a0I kept the pot lid there for weeks, and it caught me unawares more than once, but my daughter was permanently cured.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing this in Coos Bay, Oregon, where I\u2019m doing a series of four library presentations for local Friends of the Library groups. \u00a0It\u2019s a six and a half hour drive from Seattle to Coos Bay. \u00a0On the way down we stopped off at the Thirsty Lion Pub in Portland to have a bite of lunch. \u00a0I ordered an appetizer of Tahini meatballs and an order of roasted Brussels sprouts. \u00a0My mother would have been astonished at the very idea! \u00a0She was never able to get me to eat a Brussels sprout on a bet, but then she never cooked them the way I like them\u2014with a good char all around.<\/span><\/p>\n

For dinner, once we arrived here, I ordered the prime rib. \u00a0Let me tell you, I was lusting after that \u201cfully loaded\u201d baked potato. \u00a0Dan, our trainer, says no matter how much you exercise you \u201ccan\u2019t outrun your fork.\u201d \u00a0What I\u2019m trying to do is teach my fork to make better choices. \u00a0Instead of the potato, I ordered saut\u00e9ed spinach with slivered almonds, and I left the restaurant feeling like I\u2019d done a good job.<\/span><\/p>\n

While we\u2019re in Coos Bay, we\u2019re staying at the Mill Hotel and Casino. \u00a0On the backside of the building is a long boardwalk\u2014part board and part pavers. A \u00a0round trip from one end of the boardwalk to the other with an additional circle in the far parking lot adds up to a 1400 step lap. \u00a0It\u2019s cool and overcast today. \u00a0\u00a0Yesterday it was clear and sunny. \u00a0When I went out to walk, I wore a bright red shell and an equally bright red visor that my daughter and granddaughters gave me for Mother\u2019s Day the year we all went to Europe. \u00a0(I confess, the visor had languished for a couple of years in an unopened compartment in an under-used piece of Roll-Aboard luggage, and I only found it when we were packing to come here.)<\/span><\/p>\n

As I went striding up and down the boardwalk two different people, complete strangers, told me how terrific I looked. \u00a0I was thunderstruck. \u00a0As a kid I was always the Ugly Duckling. \u00a0I was the tall, gawky girl in pig-tails who wore thick glasses and who couldn\u2019t catch a ball of any kind. \u00a0Ever.<\/span><\/p>\n

To have two complete strangers tell me that on the same day when I\u2019m verging on age 72? \u00a0Well, to quote my daughter, \u201cThat never happened to me before in my whole life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, and before I sat down to write this blog, I finished today’s ten thousand steps.<\/span><\/p>\n

Walk on!! \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By the mid-seventies, although my divorce was still several years in the future, I had two kids under the age of five and was embarking on my new life as a single mother. \u00a0I was living in Arizona. \u00a0I had managed to pay cash for a used 14 X 70 mobile home which was parked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-j7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1185"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1188,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions\/1188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}