Monday Morning Musings

Posted on November 19, 2018 under Monday Morning Musings with one comment

A mountain of dishes

So many mysteries with no solutions.

Let’s start with Tupperware. As some point in life’s journey most of us has bought Tupperware.They’re convenient, great for storing leftovers and they come in all kinds of convenient shapes and sizes. They also come with lids, one per container – at least that’s what we think. After about a month, something very odd happens. It’s like the play I saw on the weekend called “Metamorphoses”.  Something changes. All of a sudden, you can’t locate the lid for one of the containers. You wash them after every use and put them in the same drawer so that they’re easy to find. Where in the hell do those lids go?

Something similar happens with the laundry. You buy a new batch of socks… different colors. You wear them, they become soiled, and you put them in the laundry hamper. After a week, it’s time to do the laundry. You empty the contents of the hamper, place everything in the wash machine followed by the dryer. You empty the dryer and go to your bedroom to fold and sort things when they’re still warm. I usually leave the socks to the last. Invariably, there’s one sock missing or even worse, one of each color gone awry. Even Jessica Fletcher and Sherlock Holmes together can’t solve this one.

Which leads me to the picture of the dishes stacked up in the dish drainer shown above. When our four children were all still at home, we had a dishwasher. There were mountains of dishes which is not hard to comprehend. But it didn’t take any time to make them disappear into the confines of the dishwasher. But every so often, this kitchen aid would go on the fritz and our kitchen counters would be piled sky high until they were dispatched the old fashioned way – by hand.

These days, we occupy a small apartment and there’s just the two of us – three when our granddaughter visits, usually on the weekend. But during the week, my wife works and doesn’t come home at lunch hour. I don’t sit around all day and eat, if that’s what you’re thinking. But really, how can a couple manage to amass this many dishes in just one day? They just seem to have a way to multiply. I am befuddled but that’s nothing new.

Tupperware lids, matching socks and mountains of dishes – three of life’s great mysteries.

My fourth book, “Chaos and Wonder: Six Months in India” is on its way to the printers. I will have hard copies for sale locally in Antigonish by mid- December and for those of you out of town, pretty well everywhere in the universe. You’ll be able to order the book on line though Amazon and have it delivered to your door. I’ll let you know when that’s up and running.

Last week, I was having coffee with a friend, literally an hour after submitting the final manuscript for my book. I was mentally beat and just about ready to throw the entire 173 pages into the Brierly Brook praying it would get passed along quickly to the harbour and eventually out to the ocean. I have spoken with other authors who have also experienced this feeling of loathing at the end of the writing and editing process. So when my friend suggested an idea for my next book, I recoiled. That would be like passing a bottle of tequila to someone the morning after doing 20 shots of this Mexican rocket fuel  with lemon and salt.

After absorbing the initial blow, I listened as she told me her idea: write a book about growing up in the sixties and break the book up into neighborhoods. Now obviously, this book would have limited appeal to anyone outside Antigonish but when you look at the large families from that era, it could be a best seller. But sales would not be the motivation. The idea would be to gather stories from people who lived a shared experience in different parts of the town and county. You could have stories from the Hawthorne/Heights crew; Hillcrest Street; Highland Drive, Brookland and the interval, Greenwold etc. And of course, the same thing would be done in the county gathering tales from Pomquet, Arisaig, James River, Pinevale etc.

It seems to a lot of us that neighborhoods today are nothing like those in the sixties. Part of that is sheer numbers. We spent a lot of time outdoors after school and in the summer because there wasn’t enough room indoors! This book would really be more about capturing a moment in time that we could share with our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. I mean, don’t you think they’d like to hear how we gathered in the field behind  Lane Hall (before it was Lane hall) at the end of the school year to burn all our scribblers, projects and the odd book?

What do you think? Would you contribute stories? You could get together with some of your old neighborhood friends and share stories and the odd lie.

I have received the first submission for a story for a new column called “Guest of Honour”. In case you missed it, I’m asking YOU to be a guest writer on my website. Send me a funny story (around 500 words) and I’ll publish it.

Excuse me. I have a pile of dishes to wash.

Have a great week.

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