{"id":2508,"date":"2022-02-04T06:00:20","date_gmt":"2022-02-04T14:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=2508"},"modified":"2022-02-03T10:05:40","modified_gmt":"2022-02-03T18:05:40","slug":"pete-pearsons-eyebrows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2022\/02\/04\/pete-pearsons-eyebrows\/","title":{"rendered":"Pete Pearson’s Eyebrows"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I\u2019ve heard from several PORs (Pre-Order Readers.). They were concerned because they had received notices from Amazon saying that the pub date for Collateral Damage <\/em>has been moved\u2014to 2045! \u00a0I may still be around in 2045, but there’s a good possibility that I won\u2019t be. \u00a0So yes, that book\u2019s pub date is being pushed back for a couple of months, but hopefully not by 23 years! \u00a0Writing this one has been a real challenge for me, so be patient, folks, I\u2019m doing the best I can.<\/p>\n

Other than that, when it came time to write the blog this morning, I noticed that the pump on the blog well was dry and in need of priming. \u00a0Unsurprisingly, dealing with the problem brought me back to my mother. \u00a0Whenever there was a lag in the conversation, Evie Busk would always say, \u201cWe could always talk about Pete Pearson\u2019s eyebrows.\u201d<\/p>\n

The interesting thing is, after dropping that line, nobody ever actually TALKED about Pete Pearson or his eyebrows. \u00a0Instead, they found some other topic of discussion, but I was always left wondering: \u00a0Who exactly was Pete Pearson? \u00a0To my knowledge, I never met the man. \u00a0And why were his eyebrows so interesting and memorable? \u00a0I\u2019ve always imagined they had to be very bushy, and probably either black or gun-metal gray. \u00a0Maybe they resembled Groucho Marx\u2019s eyebrows which were indeed bushy.<\/p>\n

But thinking about Groucho Marx (Was he grouchy?) brings me straight back to Evie, too. \u00a0My mother washed on Monday and ironed on Tuesday\u2014every single week. \u00a0She never had a clothes dryer. \u00a0Her washed clothes went on a clothes line. \u00a0With a family of seven kids, that amounted to a lot of time spent outside hanging clothes under southern Arizona\u2019s bright and sometimes blazingly hot sun.<\/p>\n

Evie and her forebears were all of Swedish descent which is to say fair-haired and fair-skinned. \u00a0Unsurprisingly, after all those years of hanging clothing in the sun, by the early 1970s, she began developing bits of skin cancer on her face, and most especially on her nose. The doctor told her she needed to stay out of the sun, but with washing to be done every week that wasn\u2019t an option. \u00a0Sun block may have been available back then, but I\u2019m not personally aware of it, and she wasn\u2019t much into wearing caps or hats. \u00a0So what did Evie do? \u00a0She bought herself a Groucho Marx rubber face mask. \u00a0The fake frames on the mask\u2019s glasses fit perfectly over her real ones, so she could see just fine, and her nose was no longer in the sun. \u00a0From then on, that\u2019s what she wore whenever she went outside to hang clothes.<\/p>\n

One day, after the folks had moved from town to Bisbee Junction, my younger brother Jim stopped by to visit, bringing along one of his buddies. It was a Monday, so naturally my mother was out at the clothes line when they came around to the back of the house. \u00a0My brother started to introduce his friend by saying, \u201cThis is my mother,\u2019 but just then Groucho Marx emerged from behind a bed sheet, and \u201cThis is my mother,\u201d turned into, \u201cThis is my … mother?”<\/p>\n

I doubt either Jim or his buddy ever forgot about that encounter, and I haven\u2019t, either. \u00a0And now you know how my having nothing to write about today inevitably led me to my mother and Groucho Marx.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still laughing about that, and I hope you are, too.<\/p>\n

Have a great week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week I\u2019ve heard from several PORs (Pre-Order Readers.). They were concerned because they had received notices from Amazon saying that the pub date for Collateral Damage has been moved\u2014to 2045! \u00a0I may still be around in 2045, but there’s a good possibility that I won\u2019t be. \u00a0So yes, that book\u2019s pub date is being […]<\/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":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Es","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2508","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=2508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2509,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2508\/revisions\/2509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}