WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT?

I woke up a month or so ago and took a good look at my thinning hair and its effect on the wrinkles on my face. It was clearly a cry for help; namely another wig/hairpiece/style. There seems to be some sort of stigma attached to the wearing of a wig, so we will refer to it as a “style”. I have no idea why this disturbs some people. Celebrities obviously would never be caught dead in their own scraggly locks. Watching an old Lucille Ball show, Dr. Advice chirped “There! You can see she isn’t wearing a wig!” Really?! I don’t think his poor old eyes were twirling in the right direction. Not only is she wearing a wig, it isn’t even the right shade of red.

Anyway, I ordered one from a reputable place in whom I placed great trust that they would choose a complimentary shade of grey from their 50 choices. Wen it came, I thought it must be wrong, because my hair is blonde-ish, not silver. Well, Dr. A. liked it anyway, so I wore it to Seattle, and first cracker out of the barrel—my daughter did not. I hung it over a door knob during my visit and vowed to try again.

This time I bought from a catalogue with a picture of my hair color. The trick to ordering from the catalogue is to cover up the faces because they use adorable young women as models, who probably don’t need a wig anyway. You have to imagine yourself wearing it and flipping it about as you would something actually attached to your head. You don’t want it to scream “WIG” do you?

I loved it immediately and plopped it on my head to show Dr. A. I got a thumbs up, so I wore it to Southern California to visit my other daughter. She loved it too, so we went out to lunch at a favorite Mexican place in Camarillo, which is conveniently next door to a wig shoppe. ( I spell it that old fashioned way because it is just on the verge of being posh.) We had with us that day our eight year old great granddaughter Savanna, who flipped out when she saw all the plastic heads staring at us from the window dressed in varying lengths and shades of blonde, brown, black and even one with purple strands throughout, (it was Halloween). Naturally we went in, and since I was wearing the new style, I asked the lady behind the desk if she thought it could use some touches. She played around with it, gave it a spritz of hair spray and off I went, pleased as a puppy with a new bone.

That evening my friend Greg said he wouldn’t have known it was a ‘you-know-what’ and I choose to believe him. Now it sits alongside all my other hair styles, some of which really are not my color anymore; there may even be a strawberry blonde one because I always wanted to be a redhead. They probably have more fun than blondes. Vanity, thy name is woman. (I read that somewhere years ago when I was first married. It obviously made no impression.) This will now give Savanna something more to dwell on along with what she calls my fake teeth and fake shoulder. The rest of her family is perking along on all fours.

Forgive the idiocy, I simply had to tell you.

BARN DRAMA

MY BEAU” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

In a sport equated with beauty, ugliness often rears its head. In an ideal barn, owners must be “laid-back, happy and drama-free.” Horse people are sometimes a different breed of person however. Their horses on the other hand, are usually “laid-back, happy and drama-free”.

About 40% of the country’s 1.8 million horse owners keep their horses in group barns, where inappropriate behavior is common. “Barn Drama” is a catch–all phrase for all manner of unpleasantness. The sharing of facilities, both grooming areas and riding arenas, as well as the ‘borrowing” of other people’s stuff, can quickly escalate from petty back-biting to screaming matches. Riding, a solo activity, doesn’t attract team players as a rule.

At the barn where my daughter boards her horse, there are 128 horses managed by a competent and caring crew. It is situated in a lovely valley in Southern California and surrounded by mature pepper trees which rustle softly in the late afternoon breeze emitting a wonderful fragrance. It is a quiet and peaceful setting with an occasional whinny heard from a stall containing a horse telling someone he wants to get up and gallop.

The owner, a writer, keeps two horses there, but never rides them. She has taken over a small shack at the side of an arena, where she simply comes and watches her horses as they are turned out. She comes alone, sits on a small chair on the porch of the shack, and spends a peaceful afternoon reading, writing and watching her two horses.

Another young woman was given a horse by her father after begging for some time, and assuring him that it would be her pleasure to care for it. But after the “newness” wore off, she decided to forget the poor animal. She discovered that it is a labor of love to care for a horse. Her grandfather, a 91 year young non-rider, began coming to the barn daily where he made use of the arena for his daily walk. Riders became used to seeing an elderly gentleman in a checkered cap making his way around the track. One day he was seen taking the granddaughter’s mount out of his stall and taking him along on his walk. This continued for a month or two, and one day he approached the manager for a riding lesson. He had never been atop anything but a hobby-horse before. Now he is a familiar sight astride a happy and grateful horse sharing a lazy afternoon trot together. Horse lovers come in all sizes and in all ages.

RULE NUMBER ONE

“Mrs. Lauderback at the Opera” Terra Cotta sculpture by KSR

It’s a fact that we grow older every day. I have had a great ambition not to be a cranky old battle-axe, but then I never wanted to be boring either. I’m trying to make a bigtime play at being old and interesting. If you’re going to be halfway interesting you can’t go around moaning abut your aches and pains. Do you think that’s easy?

You might tell yourself defensively that you aren’t boring you’re just focused. Pain can do that to you. When you develop a body part which doesn’t seem to work properly, it becomes the most interesting and important thing in the universe. Sort of like potty training when your kids were babies and it’s all you could talk about. I do understand that, we all did it.

Pain is different though. You begin listening to people discussing their aches and pains, and you think “Gosh, I have that too. What’s the big deal?” Do they think everyone wants to listen to that? On the other hand shared pain is a conversation starter. You meet all kinds of interesting people and begin to acquire illnesses you never heard of.

But there’s no denying that the discussion of pain is a real downer, and it’s contagious. You begin by feeling sorry for the other person, and end up feeling sorry for yourself. It leads to making excuses for poor performance.

On the other hand, it does absolutely no good for someone who feels like they’re ready to run a marathon to try to pep up the situation. In fact, it may lead to the end of a perfect friendship. Sometimes it feels good to just wallow in your own miserablness, but be forewarned—don’t do it.

Years ago my daughter was caught in a storm which ripped out the road in front of her mountain home. To get out, she had to scramble down a ravine with her two small boys before she could get to relative safety at our home. I was in bed with flu at the time, feeling like death warmed over, but my ever-cheerful husband took me in hand and told me not to make them feel any worse than they do. “No one wants to see your pitiful face.” And you know, he was right. They appeared at our door muddy and disheveled and hungry, and in trying to remedy their situation, I found that I forgot about the flu bug.

On another occasion when I was down with another flu bug, a second daughter in her “previous” life announced that she wanted to get married in a month.

At home.

That may be the fastest I ever jumped out of bed in my life. But again, thinking of someone else instead of yourself was the cure. There’s only so much room in your brain, and it’s truly uncreative to fill it with yourself.

Every month or so I have lunch with a group of my high school friends, all of whom claim to be 86 years old. There are a few canes in evidence, but they all live alone and drive to where we have decided to eat. I am the youngest by a year, and I am the only one fortunate to still have a husband. These are vibrant, interesting women with varied interests. We have made it a rule to begin each meeting by asking if there are any new health problems they need to discuss. If not, the rule is to forget them all for the duration of the lunch. It’s a good rule because everyone has something.

THE STRANGE POWER OF DREAMS

We all dream, whether we remember them or not. Most are pleasant, others sometimes not so pleasant. Some dreams remain with us for years, still with the power to please or to frighten. But what triggers dreams?

A true nightmare sometimes causes us to cry aloud, and prevent resuming a quiet night’s rest. A sexual dream can be disappointing if, upon awakening, the dream prince or princess is not a reality.
But what triggers a dream? There have been numerous studies made of our nightime experiences, but it’s still a mystery.

I can still remember a dream I had when I was 11 years old, which encouraged me to jump off the roof with the expectation of flight. Flight dreams are really pretty common, and given our prehistoric beginnings when we either fought or fled, are understandable, but disturbing in a child for obvious reasons.

A long-standing dream of mine which I file under the title “Dog Dreams” in my memory file, was one where I had been kidnapped, and actually turned into a dog who bit my kidnapper, complete with snarling et al. I had this same dream repeatedly for several years. I’m not proud of it, but that’s the way it is.

In a too-vivid dream I had when my youngest daughter was a toddler, she climbed up onto the railing of a bridge in Ireland, and tumbled off before I could catch and save her. At that time, we had never been to Ireland, with no expectation of ever going there. When we eventually did go, I found myself on the very same bridge I had dreamed. It was a terrifying deja vu moment, though my daughter at that time was grown and married.

Another vivid dream which turned out to be delusory, involved two paintings of mine which I hung on someone’s wall, I don’t know whose. I felt they were some of my best work. I actually searched for those two paintings for days before I was convinced that they had merely been a colorful dream. I sometimes think I may find them again.

Are our dreams just the result of a vivid imagination? I doubt that the mystery will ever be solved, but in the meantime, “pleasant dreams”.