In Which She Demonstrates the Courage of her Convictions

No secret that I have a favorite blog: the first one I go to every day is Ronni Bennett's Time Goes By. She very carefully selects "elder" as being the best and most appropriate word for people of our generation. Besides very well researched posts on Social Security, the Affordable Care Act and matters like Sequestration, she deals with more "social" matters. If you go to her blog and search on "elders and", you will find entries on "elders and loneliness", "elders and loss", "elders and voter suppression" and many other similar topics. Try it. This week she dealt with the paucity of well designed clothes for elder women. You may be interested in The Media's Take on Elders, which is a prelude to a number of later entries where Jay Leno and other comedians knock the older generation of geezers.

This is where I come in. Sort of. Grosse Pointe has few places to buy a decent birthday card. There used to be a couple of stores with Caspari cards, which I loved, but they are gone. The grocery store and the drug store don't work. Believe it or not, there were attractive and thoughtful cards in the Hardware store, but it too has taken off. Of late cards have been on offer in the corner of the second hand Treasure Trove, next to the post office sub-station. So that is where I went. And what did I find? The majority of cards had images of elderly men in shorts with knobbly knees and wearing sleeveless undershirts. The women all looked like Maxine, wrinkles galore and everything sagging south.

I just couldn't buy them, so I thought of Ronni, approached the young man who obviously sold second hand diamonds and asked for the card buyer. As usual in these situations, he was at lunch. I expressed my unhappiness and with the unctuousness they teach at second hand diamond selling school, he suggested we look at the selection of cards. He pointed out the card with the glittery flower—about the only semi-decent card—and I gave him my lecture about elders and image, bought the card and left.

I can't help feeling Ronni would have organized a march on the Better Business Bureau with a sit-in outside this store. Maybe next time.

And just in case . . .

. . . you wonder where I have been since that last post, take a look at this.

One group left, another group came. Just enough time to get clean sheets on the bed and take another trip or two to the grocery store. And then one more wonderful week of swimming and picnics and barbecues and fire pits and sleep overs (thanks to Kate who seems to be able to handle anything).

Al and three boys left this morning and I just had enough strength to upload some photos. This one needs to be re-cropped—Patrick on the right is losing his head—but I am going to bed. Eleanor, the adorable one on the left, is coming for a couple of days, but I think she is actually going to take care of me instead of vice versa.

I declare the summer over.

Just in case . . .

. . .  anyone has been wondering where I have been, this will give you some idea.

Andrew, son number 2, together with his wife and six children, came to visit. So nine of the  cousins in the neighborhood came swarming, along with their parents. There was swimming, food (lots of food), a party to celebrate Josephine's fourth birthday, more swimming, and more food. So many thanks to the eight parents for their help.

Andrew and Marcie left at 7 a.m. this morning, and there is no way I am going to get caught up on this blog—son number 1 is arriving on Monday with his four boys and we will start all over again.

I'll fill in the gaps later.

Kate is 45

Kate and family are up in Che-boygan, returning tomorrow. So let me say "Happy Birthday" to a gracious, kind and talented woman.

And just in case Patrick, Charlie, Daniel and Eleanor want to know something about the day their mother was born, it was while we were still living in our little duplex on Marlborough in Detroit. Al, who was 13 months, slept in one of the bedrooms and Ernie had appropriated the other for a study—shade of things to come—so we were sleeping on a rollaway in the living room. I was a little smarter than the last time, and I woke up knowing we should get to the hospital right away. Ernie was teaching summer school and the time for handing in grades had come and gone. He was, I am afraid, notorious for being late with grades and he was determined to get this set in before I was allowed to have a baby. Fortunately his chair lived a mile or so away and would be able to take care of the problem, but Ernie was (and is) the kind of person who needed to shave, put on a clean shirt etc. before dealing with an emergency. Unlike Kate, I was not too gracious. Time was running out, We made it, although I cannot for the love of me remember what we did with Al.

And that evening, my parents, who had never met Ernie, landed at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, in the midst of a mid-western heatwave.

In Which She Muses about Mewses

I spent my undergraduate years in this Hall of Residence. Lindsell Hall was located in Swiss Cottage and there is some pretty spectacular architecture in that borough and the neighboring St. John's Wood and Hampstead. Obviously Lindsell is not a shining example. The bay window on the top floor with two heads in the window shows how the large rooms were divided to make two smaller rooms—the heads are in different rooms. It was in those rooms that little groups of us gathered late at night to drink coffee and to plan our future lives.

My little clique included Jane King (Chemistry), Audrey Ashworth (Classics, and that's her head in the middle row), Sylvia Smith and Jackie Walker (Geography), and Gillian Levesque (Biology).  There must have been more and if I could only find a photo I have of one of our gatherings, I could come up with more names. One of our plans, influenced I am sure by the local real estate, was to graduate and move into a cozy mews. I suspect a Mr. Rochester look-alike with a nice income came into it somewhere, and for some reason we thought married life included dinners of duck a l'orange.

The graduation part came and went and some of us stayed in London. No mews for me, but a share in a shabby apartment across the street from the former residence of Dr. Crippen. We kept in touch in various ways with some of our late night coffee drinking friends and I knew Gillian married her long-time boyfriend, Colin, right after graduation. I also knew Colin was working as a teacher and I think Gill was too. One day I and probably Sylvia, though I can't remember, received an invitation to dinner with Gill and Colin. They were living in a lovely little mews cottage and—you guessed it—we had duck a l'orange for dinner.

I have tried frequently to get in touch with Gill and she came back to mind a couple of weeks ago.  I love the Friday Arena section of the Wall Street Journal where they describe real estate both in the States and all over the world. I have read avidly about luxury developments in Hong Kong and New York, condos in Miami, stark residences in San Francisco and cozy cottages in New Hampshire. The editors are very fond of writing about London and the expensive developments with floors excavated below ground, and the other week the subject was mews. A mews, two mews ? Two mewses?

Can you read that? $10.49 million. Gill and Colin were such modest people and I do wonder what happened to them.

Gill Levesque, where are you?

Hold on Tight

The birth of this child has received huge coverage in the States. I must admit I peeked in once the Duchess was in labor. I love listening to reporter  Jonathan Hunt, an import from England, but please don't make me explain Anthony Wiener. I did, however, miss the original video of the Duke and Duchess appearing on the hospital steps with the baby, but I saw it several times on the news.

I was aghast. I am not used to this—a woman one day after giving birth, trotting down steps with the future king of England in her arms, rather like a football. Let me explain. In this country a new mother who is being discharged from hospital is required to wait in the room until an orderly comes with a wheel chair and pushes her all the way to the waiting car, where she is assisted into her seat. In the footage I saw, I missed the pedestrian sight of the Duke of Cambridge putting the baby into the baby seat. In this country the seat is inspected for safely and the parents are instructed in all the necessary procedures. I believe they are even provided with a child seat if they do not have one. The video with the Jonathan Hunt footage shows the Duke of Cambridge swinging the seat in rather a cavalier manner, and while I can see the point of the Duchess standing with the baby in her arms and walking unaided down the steps, it scares me. Here she is looking up at the photographers and not down at the steps. And I think she was even wearing heels.

Is there a doctor or a nurse in the house? Any comments?

Addendum to Yesterday

Somehow I forgot (how could I?) to add two things that made July 19 memorable. The first is recorded here. I took it at about 4:30, and though it is not the hottest I have recorded on my iPhone, it is bad enough. The little rainy, cloudy icon means they expected it to rain, and boy, did it. Everything in the garden is flat, but the wet, accompanied by a certain degree of heat, is way too tropical to get out there and check for damage.

The second is that I was so enervated that I sat with he-who-shares-the -house and watched the British Open. (Usually I find golf the most boring thing on the face of the earth.) I would have appreciated some of that wind. What time do they start televising it today?