Prostate Wine

You might look at the words, “Prostate Wine,” and think:  “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to drink that.” Completely understandable!  But be assured, dear reader:  this is not some far more gross version of Swamp Butt, or even anything remotely distasteful.

            Actually, it’s a wonderful thing.  A celebration.  A bright, unexpected spark after a dark time.  Let me tell you how this came to be:

            Nearly three years ago, my husband, Mark, was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which I’ve written about here, and a lot on my men’s health website, vitaljake.com.  Long story short, his dad died of it, and that started my career writing about prostate cancer, including several books with Johns Hopkins urologist Patrick Walsh.  My dad had it, but Pat Walsh removed his prostate, cured his cancer, and he lived two more decades.  Good years, too!  Both Mark and I lost grandfathers to complications from prostate cancer treatment they probably didn’t even need.  Needless to say, prostate cancer has been on my radar for 30 years, we were watching Mark like a hawk, and when his PSA went up, we got him an MRI, a biopsy, cancer was found, and we spent Christmas 2019 in a hotel in Baltimore near Johns Hopkins Hospital, where Mark had his prostate removed by an excellent Walsh-trained urologist, Mo Allaf.  Mark is cancer-free today, thank God!

            We charged the operation on our Costco card.  If you have a Costco card, you know that every spring, you get a dividend, based on how much you spent the previous year.

            Well, we spent quite a bit.  We put the airfare to Baltimore on there, too, and the hotel where we stayed, and all our meals, including room service twice on Christmas day.  And tips!  A few months later, we got our Costco reward.

We bought wine with it.  Almost all reds: Cabernet, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Zinfandel, Syrah (as in, “Que, Syrah, Syrah”), Sangiovese.  A couple Rosés.

            Prostate wine, and a fine tradition was born!

            We now do this every year.  In fact, we made that annual wine-forward trip to Costco last weekend.  Mark has an app called Vivino on his phone.  You take a picture of the label on the bottle, and the app gives you reviews and those ratings numbers like 4.2 that mean something to schmancy wine people.  He buys some really good bottles, and he also buys some bottles that are kind of middle-priced, which he lets age in our wine cellar (which is basically just some Ikea shelving down under the house, but he’s really proud of it).  A few cheaper bottles, good for the ride home – kidding!  They go in the wine cellar, too.

As we push that flatbed – kidding again, it’s a cart!  a big, wine-laden Costco cart – if anybody asks us if we’re having a party, or shows any interest at all, or maybe even looks in our direction, we tell them our story.  It’s prostate wine!  We’re just so glad that we are here to drink it together.  Thank you, God!

When my mom died, as I’ve written about here, my dad and I were making that bleak trip to the funeral home to pick out a casket, arrange the visitation, and all that horrible stuff nobody ever wants to do.  I happened to look up, and right there in the sky, over our car, was a micro-rainbow with a lot of green in it.  It looked a lot like the green in my mom’s eyes.  We took it as a gift – a literal spot of beauty and joy on an otherwise dismal day.

  Recently, Mark and I joined Prescott Christian Church and were re-baptized – not just a genteel bit of water, either, but the full-on dunk.  I was lowered in the water, facing up and my eyes were shut, but I saw the sky above me.  A blue sky, with white clouds.  This was inside a large auditorium with no windows, and certainly no skylight.  But I saw it.  What a gift!

            That’s what prostate wine is.  It’s bright moments of joy, little gifts you didn’t expect at all.  You’ve seen the motivational posters, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”  I guess you could say, if life gives you a bad prostate… no, wait, I don’t think that will work for a greeting card.  Never mind!  You know what I’m trying to say here!  Go, find your own prostate wine!  It’s out there, closer than you think.

© Janet Farrar Worthington

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I Miss the Mall!

I miss the mall.  So much.  Not our current mall, limping along with its few stores, just hanging on by a thread and devastated by yet another blow, aka global pandemic.  No, I miss the mall from back in the day.

I miss the mall packed with people, no stores boarded up, where if you lucked into a good parking spot, it just made the whole trip even better!

I miss the food court.

I miss Orange Julius.

I miss Boardwalk Fries at Towson Town Center, with malt vinegar.

I miss going to Auntie Anne’s for a pretzel, and wondering if I will get it with cheese dipping sauce again, or if I will ever branch out and try something else.  Spoiler: I never branch out.  It’s always the cheese sauce!

I miss smelling Chick-Fil-A all over the mall and wondering if it’s lunchtime yet.

Speaking of Chick Fil-A, I miss getting up at 4:30 on Black Friday to go with my sister-in-law, Carole, for the Doorbusters, with our coupons we’ve cut from the Thanksgiving newspaper, armed with a long list and fueled on Chick-Fil-A breakfast Chick-n-Minis and a Chick-Fil-A Arnold Palmer: tea with lemonade.

I miss seeing the mall go all-out on decorations for every possible season, especially Christmas.  I miss the mall Santa and his North Pole scene.  I even miss the cheesy bubble-gum Christmas music that starts playing the day after Halloween.  Yes, I’ve got mall nostalgia.  I’ve got it bad.

I miss going to Ann Taylor and Brooks Brothers, not being able to afford anything, then going to the Ann Taylor and Brooks Brothers outlets and buying some crap that looks like what they are selling for many more dollars but is actually not the same quality at all, and regretting it.

I miss Pier One.

I miss looking at formal dresses for prom with my daughter, Blair, at the Jessica McClintock store at Tyson’s Corner in Virginia.

I miss B. Dalton and Walden’s, back in the 1980s, when they actually had depth of selection and before they started selling the same five books.  Even then, I supported them!

I miss Barnes & Noble.  I miss it so much.  I miss how it smelled, with the coffee shop in there.  I miss going into the children’s book section, ostensibly to look for books with my kids, but also looking for books I loved as a kid.   For that matter, I miss great bookstores I have known over the years, such as the Little Professor bookstore in Lexington, Kentucky, Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville, and Borders Books in Towson, Maryland.

I miss Sears.  Don’t laugh.  Back in the day, before some genius decided they should offer shopping carts and before they fired most of their staff, back when they had actual salespeople who worked there for years and really knew their products, and were proud of them, Sears was a great store.  Don’t even get me started on the Wish Book.  I eagerly awaited that thing and spent hours lying on my stomach on the living room rug, studying this prized document and dog-earing many pages.  Their Kenmore appliances were as good as anybody’s, better than most, and their Craftsman tools were built to last, with their lifetime warranty.  You could count on them.

I miss Penney’s.  My mom used to say any mall with a Sears and a Penney’s was one she could work with, especially for buying kids’ clothes.  My brother wore out many a pair of Toughskins from Sears, with the reinforced knees for active kids.

I miss shopping at The Gap, and Gap Kids, and Baby Gap, where the kids’ clothes were expensive, but so cute.  Oddly, I don’t actually miss Toys R Us.  They had a lot of stuff and decent prices, but they sabotaged themselves by only having one or two lanes open, so no matter how happy you were when you went in there, by the time you waited for 15 minutes in dead silence to pay for your stuff, you were just done with it.  At least I was.

I miss going to the Sunglass Hut, looking at frames that are too expensive, and thinking about someday when I can walk in and buy any frames I want.

I miss Tiffany’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, with their psychological warfare of making you open the glass door first and walk in – like you might not even be welcome – and looking at things I could never possibly afford.  Confession: at Saks, I never even shopped, but I used their bathrooms, which were pristine.  Pristine!

Speaking of snooty, from more recent days I miss the salespeople at Mac and Sephora, of every possible gender, all dressed in black, heavily made up, acting like they were doing you the biggest favor in the world – until you talked to them a little, showed you were nice, and then they mostly ended up being pretty nice, too.

I miss the kiosk for Rosetta Stone.  I just liked thinking about all those languages.

I miss the old Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch, when they were super-cool travel stores with 40s music playing, impractical leather luggage, and tropical décor like you could step out on safari at any moment.

I miss going into Victoria’s Secret and feeling like it was like this secret cool girls’ club.

I miss Yankee Candle, especially around Halloween.

I miss Macy’s.  I miss going into Macy’s, Dillard’s, Belk, or some great department stores that don’t exist anymore, like McAlpin’s, Stewart’s, Shillito’s, Tapp’s, White’s, Goldwater’s, Hecht’s and Hutzler’s, and spraying myself with so many perfume samples that I become one giant detonated floral bomb.

I miss Nina Ricci’s “L’Air du Temps.”  I miss “Lauren,” by Ralph Lauren.  I miss “White Shoulders.”  Funny story: once on my break from working at Fayette Mall Cinemas in Lexington, Ky., I scampered to Shillito’s to spray myself with “Lauren,” which I couldn’t afford, and it was the exact same bottle but it was lotion!  I sprayed it all over my neck, then instantly ducked in shame because, of course, as a teenager you think everyone is watching you.

I miss the snotty Clinique ladies in their white coats, and waiting until they do me the favor of noticing that I’m standing there at the counter.

Again, speaking of snotty, I even miss Blockbuster Video.  They were so nasty about fining you if you didn’t rewind!  They had lots of fines, were arrogant and deserved their comeuppance, and I was glad when some competition like Hollywood Video came on the scene, but still.  On a Friday night for a while there, Blockbuster’s was the place to be.  There was a great video/DVD store in Charlottesville called Sneak Reviews.  It had a terrific foreign section, and lots of classic movies.  It was fun to just go to a video store and look at the world of possibilities!

I miss shopping for shoes and actually trying them on, instead of looking at Zappo’s and hoping for the best.

I miss making an effort before I went to the mall, because you never knew who else might be there.  I know, it sounds kind of like the lady I read about on the internet who likes the Dollar Store, because “you don’t have to get all dressed up like you do for Walmart,” but back in the day, the mall was the place to be seen!

Now, before you gently remind me that malls killed Main Street, just as video killed the radio star, let me say that I was a kid of the suburbs.  I could ride my bike to the mall.  Downtown Lexington was too far away, and my mom wouldn’t have wanted me going down there by myself, but the mall was safe.  And except for the Lansdowne Shoppes, an upscale-ish strip mall down the hill from our street, that was pretty much all we had nearby.

I miss going to the mall bathrooms and thinking how clean they were, especially compared to my dorm bathrooms.

I miss looking at furniture!  Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, This End Up, and even Macy’s, which had surprisingly good prices because volume, volume, volume.  I miss looking through the stacks of Karastan rugs.

I miss studying real Sterling silver patterns, and looking at crystal and china and everyday ironstone and the bridal registries, and thinking about someday.

I miss going into Williams-Sonoma and wondering how anybody could ever afford to pay $300 for a skillet.

In Lexington, way back in the day, near the entrance to Fayette Mall there was this store that was a bit of Old Black Forest Germany, with cuckoo clocks, and these wooden Christmas decorations where you light a candle and they spin round and round.   I don’t even know what they were called, and the store is long gone, but if you owned that store and on the slim chance you are reading this:  I remember your store.  I loved it.

In Columbia, S.C., at Columbia Mall there used to be this German deli, with big old barrel pickles and incredible German potato salad.

I miss Pappagallo stores, and Aigner purses, and Izod sweaters, and real Tretorns, not the fake ones they have now under the same brand name.  I miss walking in the jewelry store and looking at Add-a-Beads, real gold ones, with real 24k gold chains, and thinking they were so expensive, how could anybody afford a whole necklace all at once.

I miss walking into Bath & Body Works and smelling every single thing in the store.

I miss seeing oldsters and moms with strollers doing laps from one end of the mall to the other.

I think it’s fair to say that during the lockdown, I have helped contribute to Jeff Bezos’s net worth, which is now something like 1 percent of the U.S. GDP.   It’s pretty amazing, you can order anything in the world on Amazon, not have to leave your home, and get it in two days.

We have gained a lot.  But man, have we lost a lot, too.

© Janet Farrar Worthington

 

 

 

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Just Some Random Questions

Why would anyone write a song that features these lyrics: “Crimson and clover, over and over.”  And then say them… over and over.  And then, why would someone feel the need to remake that song?  Who knew that was an unmet need?

Go ahead and click it. You know you want to hear it.

When you’re in an elevator or standing in line at the grocery store, and someone who’s standing right next to you starts coughing and sounds like a TB ward, and you step back to get as far away from it as you can, does it do any good at all? 

Why, when you can buy Jet Dry in big economy bottles, does the actual container for the “rinse agent” in the dishwasher door only hold about a tablespoon?  Why isn’t there just a giant reservoir in there so you don’t have to fill it up every few washes?  Instead, you pour it in and it instantly overflows and spills everywhere, and the dishwasher is happy and content for maybe four or five washes, then the annoying little light comes back on and you have to refill it again.  Who designed this system?  I know, this is a First World problem.  A lot of people in Third World countries don’t use a rinse agent.  Kidding! I know that a lot of people in Third World countries do not actually have a dishwasher.  But still…

toilet paper on a holderMy God in Heaven, how hard is it to change a roll of toilet paper?  Come on, people!

I saw some bikers riding their Harleys with matching jackets.  The name of their club is “Loners.”  By definition, doesn’t that mean they are clubs of one?  If they form a group, wouldn’t they be “Former Loners,” or maybe “Conflicted Loners?”

Why do men spit?  I just saw a guy happily walking down the sidewalk. He’s just pleasantly strolling, then he spontaneously hawks one on the grass.   It would never occur to me to spit in public.  And yet over the course of my lifetime, I’ve seen men of all ages, not just on the baseball field, minding their own business, and then all of a sudden just spit.  Why?

Why is it so hard to find anything in a Safeway store?  Maybe it’s just me, but the Safeway stores I’ve been in, in Maryland and Arizona, are wired differently from, say, Fry’s, Whole Foods, or Wal-Mart.  Produce is not where you expect, the deli is not where you expect, and the aisles are in some weird order that makes no sense to me.  Even if I’m there on a theoretically short, focused mission, I just wander around in there.  Also, a little background music would not come amiss.  It’s silent as a tomb in there, at least at the one near me. 

Cutout sugar cookies with sprinkles on a baking sheetWhy do we only have two working baking sheets in our kitchen?  This is a trick question because I already know the answer.   The other four baking pans are filled with LEGO works in progress, courtesy of my sons.

Why hasn’t the person who invented string cheese been given some major award, like one of those MacArthur genius fellowships or something?  This is the kind of innovation the world needs!

Why does the icemaker in my refrigerator make a sound that is identical to the one you hear in the movies, right after the previews and just before the movie starts, where they do the little ad for Dolby Digital Surround?  Every time I hear that noise from the freezer, I whisper, “All…around…you.” 

And finally, why do pinky toenails assume the shape of a ski jump if you don’t keep them trimmed?  What the heck?!

©Janet Farrar Worthington

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The Dip Machine

There is a machine in the weight room at the YMCA in Prescott.  I’m not sure of its proper name, but it’s something like the Dip Machine.  You stand on this platform, and you can lower yourself down and then push yourself back up; you can also do pull-ups on it.  One day, feeling ambitious at the end of my regular workout, I did a few dips.  I couldn’t do very many.  It was really hard.

I got in the car.  About halfway home, I suddenly began to feel very uncomfortable.  I think I said something repeatedly, along the lines of, “Oh, God, ohGodohGodohGod.”  I had the most unwelcome simultaneous thoughts that, one, I really needed a bathroom and two, I wasn’t going to make it. Yes, apparently on the Dip Machine I had pushed hard enough to activate the entire contents of my colon.  The motto of the University of Arizona Wildcats football team is, “Bear Down.”  They should reconsider this.  Bearing down doesn’t always produce a harmonious outcome.

My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but I did acutely remember an unfortunate moment from fifth grade.  We had an “open concept” school building, with classes separated by portable dividers all facing a central open space.  Now, this open concept – so desirable on every single HGTV show – offers zero privacy. The restroom doors were on view from every classroom.  In this particular flashback, I was running for my life, trying hard not to throw up.  All I could see was the big, dark gray, metal wastebasket propping open the girls’ bathroom door.  I didn’t even think about making it inside the actual bathroom; all of my concentration, my focus, my life force – my chi, perhaps, maybe my chakras – zeroed in on that metal wastebasket.  I telescoped.  I was in a Hitchcock movie, maybe “Vertigo,” running down a long hall that kept getting longer; at the end, glowing like the Holy Grail, was this trashcan.  I achieved my goal, puked my guts out, and only afterward realized, to my horror, that everyone in our whole side of the school had seen me do it.  The shame!

Flash forward to that white-knuckle trip home from the YMCA: I’m simultaneously pressing the accelerator in my car and the brakes in my lower digestive system, doing every possible Kegel exercise I could remember from after childbirth.  I telescoped: this time, it wasn’t a glowing wastebasket, but a blindingly alabaster, porcelain toilet at the end of that long, dark hall; maybe angels were singing “Hallelujah” above its radiance.  Thank God, I made it, and thereby spared the possibly leather interior of my Honda Pilot from enduring a supreme violation.  All was well.

But here’s the thing:  actually, if the worst had happened, all would have been well, too, eventually. Crises like this are bumps in the road, and I’m of the opinion that obstacles and bumps are supposed to come along every now and then.  (Note: I’m not talking about serious illness here, or trying to trivialize human suffering in any way. Those are completely different subjects from the speed bumps mentioned above.)   

A woman blowdrys her hairThe human body is the great leveler.  I’m writing about this now because as our country seems so polarized, maybe we should all take a minute to remember that we’re all in the same boat.  Well, the same basic frame. 

We’ve all stubbed our toe, dinged our knee, and had bad hair days (or years).  Who hasn’t desperately needed a Kleenex when there wasn’t one and just had to sniff mightily?  Who hasn’t checked the mirror and noticed a fragment of spinach or broccoli right there on a front tooth, and wondered two things: how long THAT has been there, and why didn’t anybody tell you?   

The human body keeps us humble.  Sure, some of us are better preserved than others, some of us have let ourselves go more than others, some of us have paid for some upgrades, and some of us can afford really high maintenance.  For example: Today’s news featured the hard-hitting story that Leonardo DiCaprio flew an Australian “eyebrow-artist to the stars” to Los Angeles right before the Oscars.  This artist’s services, according to her website, include: “… any tints, stains, or lightening required in conjunction with your full expert shaping.  Included is an eyelash tint as well as a glycolic infused collagen eye treatment plus a full heated paraffin hand treatment followed by a light eye makeup application.”

looking goodNo wonder these people look good!  And far be it from me to judge anyone for anything he or she does to enhance his or her appearance; you do you, I say.  At the same time, this shows how dumb it is to measure ourselves by how models or movie stars look.  It’s not real, people!   Even if it’s not airbrushed, it’s tinted and shaped!

Inside, they’re just as messed up as everybody else, maybe even more so.  Because, again:  deep down, we’re all the same.  I’m pretty sure we were designed to be that way, so that when we hear about someone experiencing a migraine, or indigestion, or hemorrhoids, or a broken hip, or something a lot worse – a heart attack, cancer, or pneumonia – we can empathize and maybe even reach out to that person.  Maybe we’ve been there, too.

Whatever our differences are, we’re all stuck in the same fragile, time-stamped, unpredictable, basic model of a human body.

Which brings us to Proverbs.  The same day I read the eyebrow artist story, I read Proverbs for the day; it was the 27th, so I read Chapter 27, and two verses caught my eye.  The first: “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.”  The second:  “Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds, for riches do not last forever; and does a crown endure to all generations?”

Those spoke to me for some reason, and I think it’s just to remind me not to get caught up in the sound and fury of noise, politics, and drummed-up agitation because really, it doesn’t matter a bit in the long run.  We need more flock-tending and more compassion for each other.

Also, avoid the Dip Machine, I’m just saying.

©Janet Farrar Worthington

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I am a Scofflaw

I am not in compliance.  Yes, I admit it freely, I am a scofflaw, a reckless disregarder of arbitrary, mandatory, policy.

My crime?  I have not completed mandatory training.

For the PTA.  And, because I’m an officer of the PTA, the secretary, I need to complete not only the “Basic” PTA course, but the Local Secretary course, too.  I have tried; my computer won’t play the course.  I installed Silverlight, whatever that is.  I have disabled my ad blocker.  Still, the mandatory video has only sound and no picture.  There is a test at the end, and I won’t be able to see the questions to answer them.  I spent the better part of an hour trying to get this thing to work, downloading it repeatedly.  What a waste of time.

Let’s just think about this for a minute: Our PTA is lucky to reach double digits when we have our meetings, which are the first Wednesday of the month.  It’s just a few moms.  We’re all busy, but we show up because we care about the school. 

In return, the Arizona PTA has told us that we must complete mandatory training, or we will not be in compliance, and somehow this means they can take our money. 

Lawyers and insurance companies rule the word.

Think of “Jurassic Park,” at the end, when the T-Rex has just kicked serious velociraptor butt, howling or screeching – or whatever it is that genetically engineered Tyrannosaurus Rexes hatched in an incubator with amphibian DNA added to whatever was trapped in the mosquito embedded in the amber do – in triumph, as the tattered banner falls from the ceiling like giant confetti.  The banner reads:  “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.” 

Now, picture some room full of pasty lawyers. They have just decided that a bunch of mom volunteers need to complete video training courses and take a test.

Why? 

It doesn’t matter, we said so. 

What if they don’t do it? 

lawyers and moneyWe’ll punish them.  We’ll say they’re not in compliance, and then we’ll seize their treasury. 

Won’t that hurt the schools – aren’t they just trying to raise money for the school to buy things for the students, like that locking skateboard rack?  (This is true; we the PTA at Prescott Mile High Middle School just purchased a locking skateboard rack so kids who skateboard to school will have a safe place to stow their boards.)

They’re the ones who are hurting the school!  By not being in compliance!

Guess what?  These mandatory videos are the new big thing.  All the insurance companies must have gotten together and decided that this is the key to not getting sued.  My husband is a doctor.  He had to watch a series of mandatory videos about safety rules and regulations.  Again, there was the threat:  The hospital would hound doctors until they did it, and punish them if they didn’t. 

My mother-in-law is a hospital chaplain.  She is nearly 80.  She is very part-time, makes hardly any money doing the job, but does it because she wants to help people and serve the Lord.  Guess what she had to do?  Watch mandatory safety videos.  Otherwise, she wouldn’t be in compliance.

These videos are a joke.  They are timed, so you can’t speed through them.  All you do is stare at them and then click the “Next” button – when you’re allowed to.

I am tired of bullying. 

I’m tired of my phone and computer forcing me to install things and update things, or else.  My son, Andy, is in college.  He paid his tuition, then signed up for a meal plan.  The meal plan appeared in his shopping cart.  He came home to get a check and found that he had been bumped from all his classes because the computer decided he had not paid his tuition.  This is not new; years ago, I received a notice from Vanderbilt University that I would not be allowed to graduate if I did not pay my library fine, which I didn’t realize I had.  I raced down to the library and paid it.  How much was it, you may be wondering?  Hundreds?  Thousands?  It was forty cents.  Pay up or else.

I’m tired of “or else.”

Somewhere out there, some lawyers are standing on a table and howling in victory.  The complacency and arrogance – that by forcing other people to do what they decide needs to happen, and punishing them if they don’t, they are actually doing something virtuous – is so thick, you could cut it with a knife. 

lawyers and t-rexI sigh and think instead of what the T-Rex did to the weaselly lawyer in Jurassic Park.

It’s not mandatory videos.  It’s this feeling that we are supposed to be sheep, herded along for our own good by those who know better.

Blair, my daughter, just got married, and then had to go to the courthouse to register the marriage license and the Social Security office to change her last name.  I think you may see where this is going.  She is her mother’s daughter.

I received this text from the courthouse:

“I don’t understand why the government needs to track me like cattle.  We are like one step away from an ear tag with a number on it.”

And this one:

“Why does the government need to give me approval and take my money in order for me to get married?  Why do I have to report a change of address within 10 days?  Why do their long, creepy fingers have to be involved in every step I take?”

She was not in the best frame of mind, then, to move on to the Social Security office.

This one is my personal favorite:  “Why do government offices always smell like cat pee and disappointment?”

And then: 

jurassic-world-14-xlarge“I had to enter my SSN when I came in here, and yet they are calling people by numbers and not their names.  What kind of bland, Orwellian BS is that???”

“I’m A52.”

I texted back: “No, you are not.  You are Blair.”

“Am I?!?!?!”

“Yes, and you are an artist and wonderful, funny person who will not be defined by a number.”

“Thank you, Mom.”

“Off with their heads!” I texted back.  “Vive la revolution!”

There was no revolution, but we felt better.

And I can think fondly of the T-Rex. 

That is, if that kind of thinking is still allowed.

©Janet Farrar Worthington

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I’d Rather Laugh

Thank God for funny people.  I’m blessed with them:  friends and family who make me laugh, and whom I love to make laugh.  Laughter is what keeps us sane, I think.  Furthermore, I think we were made that way:  God has a sense of humor.  Just look at the platypus!

Humor is the vitamin that gets me through the day.  For example:

My friend, Karen, posted on Facebook that her son was holding a glass up to the icemaker on the door of the freezer.  Cube, cube, cube – and then a lone chicken nugget!  It must have fallen out of the open bag and into the ice bin, and then… freedom!     

My younger son, Josh, has an iPad.  You know how you can scan your fingerprint for a security code?  He scanned his big toe!

Josh loves Siri.  He loves making nonsense statements, and then getting her to read them back.  I heard him saying a bunch of random syllables, and then when she assigned words to them, he loved one particular phrase she came up with.  He loved it so much that, a couple days later, I heard him say, “Siri, what’s my name?”  “Your name is Josh,” she said in her quasi-robotic voice, “but I can call you Chunk God.” 

My son, Chunk God.

My older son, Andy, was at the dentist’s, and I was sitting in the waiting room.  He texted me from the chair:  “There’s a woman in the chair next to me who really needs to undershare.”

“Oh, no!” I texted back. 

“Talking about her laser hair removal, and how she’s not used to her husband coming into the bathroom and dropping a bomb while she’s in there getting dressed.”

Well, that would put a damper on my day, as well, so I couldn’t really think of anything to say.  Apparently, she kept right on talking, because Andy he sent another text that sounded so resigned, I just cracked up.

“This is my life now.”

Sometimes, moments of grace happen when something might not be that great, but you can find a little bit of the absurd.Cloud

I try to take pictures, too:  Here’s one of a cloud.  Mark and I were driving, and I said, “That cloud looks like it’s flipping us off.”  Mark looked at it and said, “Yeah, it really does!”  We thought it was funny, and he slowed down so I could get the picture. 

Here’s another picture, of our dog, Molly, actively sulking.  My daughter, Blair, does hilarious impressions of the dogs, and she can do a great one of Molly being dramatic.  We have three dogs on three different foods with three sets of dietary issues.  Molly felt ripped off and basically said, “Oh hell, no!” when presented with her food.  I posted the picture on Facebook, and a friend said, “Are you Molly the dogsure she’s not sick?”  I said, “Completely, since right after I took that picture and left the room briefly, she ate Stanley’s entire bowl of food.”  So much attitude, so little time… we could get mad, or laugh, and I’d rather laugh because I think it’s pretty funny.

Last week was a long week.  I had a lot of work to do, and worked right up until suppertime.  My husband, Mark, came home, finally done after being on call for several days at the hospital.  I looked at him and said, “Where’s the wine?”

From across the kitchen, Josh piped up, “A memoir.”

© Janet Farrar Worthington

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May the Fourth

It makes perfect sense that May 4 is a big calendar day for Star Wars fans.  Except, “May the Fourth be with you” sounds like it should be from the movie, “Thtar Warth,” with Printheth Leia and Luke Thkywalker.

And of course, that makes me think of the priest performing the wedding in another favorite movie, “The Princess Bride,” who spoke the immortal line, “Mawwiage…” Tho Fantathtic!

But seriously, folks, I love Star Wars.   I’ve loved it since 1977, when my dad took my brother and me to see the first one (called Episode 4 – we didn’t understand) the way it should be seen, in the movie theater.  I had never experienced anything like it, and even my dad, not a huge Sci Fi fan, cheered when R2D2 was okay at the end after getting blasted.  I remember cranking up the AM radio in the car when either the main theme by John Williams, or the Mos Eisley Cantina song came on.  (Anybody remember a couple years earlier, when the “Jaws” theme was so big, they played that on the radio, too?)

300_200_storm_trooper_death_starIt took forever for “The Empire Strikes Back” to be released, and yes, I should have seen it coming, but as a teenager I was stunned when Darth Vader turned out to be Luke’s father.  And Leia his sister!  I loved Han and Chewie.  I instantly recognized that Yoda was played by Miss Piggy, but I didn’t care.   “Return of the Jedi,” like “Return of the King,” in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is probably my favorite, but that may well be because of the moon of Endor and the Ewoks.  And the mystical Muir Woods (in beauty, not unlike Tolkien’s Lothlórien) was the moon!

Later on, when our original videotapes got worn out and we got DVDs, we saw that George Lucas had added some scenes to flesh out the original movies.  That was mostly okay, although I didn’t like to see that one of the three Jedi ghosts at the end, Anakin – in his pasty, bald, scarred glory – had been replaced by the ghost of Hayden Christensen.   That’s probably because I didn’t like episodes 1, 2, and 3 nearly as well.  Although I liked Ewan McGregor and of course, anything with Christopher Lee playing a bad guy like the evil Count Dooku is delightful (another LOTR tie-in, of course, is that he was Saruman, so that just adds to the gloriousness of it all).   With my sons, I have watched the entire cartoon series, “The Clone Wars.”  (Those voice-over actors were better than almost all of the actual actors in the episodes 1-3, in my opinion.)

So we’ve combined Star Wars with the Princess Bride, Jaws, Lord of the Rings, and the Muppet Show. 

I have also found that, with a little determination, you can take just about any Dad joke – I call them Mom jokes, but no one else apparently does – and make it work for Star Wars.  For example:

Why is Yoda such a good gardener?  Because he’s got a green thumb.

Wow, Jabba the Hut is fat.  How fat is he?  Obi Wan looked at him and said, “That’s no moon.”  Rim shot!

How do you get down from a Tauntaun?  You don’t – you get down from a duck!

Why doesn’t Yoda pay his bills on time?  He’s always a little short.

An Ewok walks into a bar.  “I’ll have a gin and …. tonic.”  The bartender says, “Okay, but why the little pause?”  The Ewok says, “I don’t know.  I’ve always had them!”

The Star Wars opening credits walk into a bar.  The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve your type here.”

A Clone trooper walks into a bar.  “Hey, mate, have you seen my brother?”

The bartender says, “I don’t know, what’s he look like?”   darth vader clonesThis is funny, because they all look exactly alike…because they’re CLONES! Who can tell them apart?  Only their mother knows for … never mind. 

And finally:  Luke, Leia, and Han go to a Chinese restaurant.   Han and Leia are almost done, but Luke has eaten only a few grains of rice.  Finally, the ghost of Obi Wan appears and whispers, “Luke!  Use the fork!”

For one last bit of cultural fusion, I’d like to add the United Methodist Church to the celebration:

May the Fourth be with you. “And also with you.”

My son, Andy, just read this and had one more thing to add:  What thinks the unthinkable?  An itheburg!

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