HomeSpunHealers

Skyler, Rita’s four year old grand daughter,  was the flower girl in a wedding recently . Skyler so enjoyed dressing up and all the festitives afterward that she decided that wanted her Mama to “start over” and get married again.  She told her mom while they were looking at the wedding photos, “Mom, you need to start over. You can marry Michael (her mom’s brother). He’s cute! And then we can have a party.” Skyler’s daddy was feeling a bit miffed that his little girl was trying to marry her mother off to someone else. He told her, “Well, what about me, Skyler?”  She told him, “You can stay here, Daddy.  Mama can start over.” He told her mother couldn’t marry her own brother.  She told him,”It’s ok, Daddy, we are just going to have a big party, but maybe Mama can marry Chris Daughtry. He is her man.”  So to Skyler, weddings are just all about dressing up in fancy clothes and having a big party.  And you can “start over” as many times as you like. I guess that’s why bride dolls have always been so popular.

On my cruise to Mexico, I found my biggest language barrier to be not with the Mexicans in Mexico (they all spoke very good English) but with the cruise ship employees.  They were from all sorts of different countries, and some of them did not speak English very well at all.  On my very first afternoon on the ship, I was sitting on the deck, and waiters were walking around with yummy looking mixed drinks full of skewers of fruit and little paper parasols.  The drinks were kind of expensive, 6.99 apiece, but I was on vacation, so why not have one?  A nice young man carrying a tray of these beverages came up to me as I sat at a table waiting for my husband to join me.  He held out the tray and said something to me in a questioning tone.  I had no idea what he said, but I figured he was asking me if I wanted a drink.  I asked him if I could charge the drink to my account, and I don’t think he understood me either.  Some people do think that Southerners speak a foreign language!  Again, he asked me something which I couldn’t understand, and I told him I’d like one of the specials.  He then continued talking to me, and I didn’t understand a single word.  I just nodded “yes.”  He stood there grinning at me, and I pulled out my ship card.  He quickly took it and wrote down my cabin number and handed me a receipt to sign.  I signed it, and he quickly walked off without giving me a drink from his tray.  I was shocked.  I looked at the receipt to make sure we had been talking about a drink, and I saw that I had been charged $19.00!  In the meantime, my husband came up and sat down, and I told him my sad story of spending $19.00 and getting nothing in return.  He just went off to the bar to get me a drink.  While he was gone, the waiter came back and plopped a bucket of ice holding 4 bottled beers down on my table, smiled, and hurried off.  So that’s what I had nodded “yes” to!  When my husband came back with my drink, he saw the beers and asked a guy at the table next to us if he was interested in buying some beers at a reduced price.  He explained that I had bought them because I couldn’t understand my waiter, and apparently my waiter couldn’t understand me.  So, he sold them to the group next to us for $10.00.  They were happy to get the reduced price (they had several buckets on their table already) and I was relieved to recover $10.00 of the $19.00 that I had wasted by ordering something neither of us would drink.  The epilogue to the story is that I came back out on the deck to read a book two days later, and the same group of drinkers were sitting in exactly the same place!  And they still had several of those buckets of beers!

Wednesday night, my husband and I took two teenaged girls to the Jonas Brothers concert.  We were surrounded by thousands of screaming, jumping girls (and a few boys) from six year olds to teens.  The reaction of the crowd to these young boys was amazing.  I probably won’t get my total hearing back for a few more days at least.  One of the funniest moments of the night, though, was the conversation between some girls, probably around 9 years old, who were standing right behind us, after a video explaining Nick Jonas’ battle with diabetes.  In the eyes of these little girls, these boys are flawless, and I think it was a little overwhelming to them to hear him talk so openly about how devastated he was when he was diagnosed.  So, here is their conversation as nearly as I can remember it:

Girl A:  It’s okay.  It’s not really like a  disease or anything.

Girl B:  But he’s crying.  He’s actually crying.

Girl C:  Do you even know what diabetes are?

Girl A:  Yes.  It’s like when you have trouble with sugar.

Girl B: Well, I just want to know one thing!  Can he eat sugar or can’t he eat sugar?

Girl A:  He can’t eat sugar.  If he does, he will get sick.  He can’t eat anything that has sugar in it, like candy or cake or pie or ice cream.

Girl C:  Not ice cream!  Ice cream is not sugar!  It’s a dairy product!

Girl B:  (after a close up on the video showing his insulin pump)  They showed his back!  His beautiful back!

Girl C:  What is that thing (referring to the insulin pump) ?

Girl A:  It’s like a metal thing.  They have to take a piece of his skin out and then they plug it in.  He has to unplug it when he takes a bath.

Girl B:  Somebody help me.  I think I’m going to faint!

My husband and I both teach English, so we both teach persuasive writing.  Invariably, some student will insist on writing against same sex marriages, and more often than not, one reason they give for being against this type of union is that if we allow it, it will open the door for all sorts of depravity, such as bestiality.  Well, in case you don’t know, bestiality is sexual union with animals.  It’s not a very good argument against marriage between humans of the same sex, but if you’re going to use that as a reason in the first place, then you aren’t going to be convinced that it’s not a valid argument.  So, to assuage the despair of seeing such poor persuasive skills, we started to make up love song lyrics for those who might be so enamored of their sheep that they would want a marriage with them.  My favorite was “I’ve grown accustomed to her fleece.  She almost makes the day baaa-gin.  I’ve grown accustomed to the tune that she bleats night and noon, her softly wooly ways.  I’ve grown accustomed to her fleece.”  (My apologies to whoever wrote the song that Henry Higgins sings about his fair lady.)  It had us laughing outloud.

My children have grown up in a world of high technology.  Things always appeared easy to them as they were growing up because all they witnessed was always extremely convenient.  Very often, because I was pressed for time, and because it was just easier for me, I would drive by the bank’s ATM, lean out the window and get some cash, and then we’d head to a fast food place to again sweep through the drive-thru as dinner magically was served to us through the car window.  I hadn’t ever been asked about how the ATM worked or how the money got in there.  I guess my children just thought that was where all money came from.  I realized they had no idea that I had to work in order to get a paycheck, which was deposited in the bank, and as long as I had money in my account, the bank would allow me the convenience of driving by and having a serving of it from the comfort of my car.  I learned this one day when my son David asked me if I would buy him a fairly expensive toy.  I told him that I didn’t have the money to buy it, and that if he wanted something like that, he would need to ask Santa to bring it for Christmas.  It wasn’t the kind of toy one got just on any old day.  He just looked at me with confusion and told me, “Mommy, you don’t have any money in your pocketbook, but we can go beep some up!”