Silent

Silent

Sometimes I feel like an appliance. Invisible and silent from everyday familiarity. Invisible to unseeing eyes.
Silent to deaf ears.
Expected to be efficient.
The refrigerator is anything but invisible.
It is big but who looks at it?
It hums constantly and loudly plops ice into the bin, but who hears it?
It efficiently keeps the milk and juices and cheeses and fruits and salad stuff cold.
The white wine cools on it’s side ready to be decanted into delicate crystal.
The ice pops through the opening in the door into the waiting glass.
Filtered water drowns the cubes and it’s on its way to consumption.
The ice cream is always frozen.
All is so ordinary.
Everyday ordinary.
No one notices the ordinary.
Just like me, it’s doing what is expected.
Maybe not always seen - maybe not always heard - maybe taken for granted.
Until it breaks down.
The milk curdles.
The ice cream puddles.
The droning stops.
It becomes deadly silent - but not invisible.
Who will clean the mess?
Who will call the repairman?
Who will restock the food?
Who is so efficient - like a working refrigerator?

Addictions

Addictions
I started sneaking cigarettes when I was a teen. My adored older sister smoked and she looked so sophisticated. My father and mother puffed like the movie stars they were imitating. George Raft, Cary Grant, Marlena Deitrich, Joan Crawford...were all so glamorous. I was probably hooked on second hand smoke even before I lit my first.

I lit that first cigarette hidden by the sand dunes near Lake Michigan with the other teens hanging out at the beach all summer. I smoked in high school, sneaking out of the lunch room when the urge for nicotine became unbearable. I smoked in college...but then everyone did. At that point, I even smoked in front of my parents. I smoked at my wedding. Cigars with fake wedding bands, beautiful match books that were printed with our names and containers of cigarettes were at each table.

The only time I didn’t smoke as an adult was when I got pregnant...Thank God! , it made me sick and gave me heartburn. But right after giving birth, I lit up and threw away the Tums and my husband passed out pink cellophane wrapped cigars at the office. Our children were exposed to second hand smoke.

I tried to quit time after time...once even succeeding for a couple of years. I took one puff - - - just to test myself, hoping it would taste terrible- - - with a drink- - -at a party - - - and I was right back to the half a pack a day.

Smoking became more and more taboo. Former smokers would sneer at me. "Quitters!", I called them, jealously. I had to leave stores, movies, restaurants, parties, even our own children’s weddings- - - just to have a couple of puffs to satisfy my addiction. My daughters had already quit and I couldn’t smoke around them or my grandchildren. I was polluting the world!

When my husband was diagnosed with lung cancer - - - I QUIT! I needed patches and noshing and I gained weight, but I did it. Now, when I walk by someone smoking outside, rain, sleet or snow, I say, "Ha. I don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t need the nicotine fix. I am master of my soul!" After five years, I’m still repeating that mantra because the smoke smells good and I take a deep breath, inhale it, and keep walking.

We all know that there are many mistakes made in the medical field. The Food and Drug Administration approves and then recalls. Doctors, themselves, refer to their vocation as a "practice". Besides proscribing the wrong medications, mis-diagnosing, amputating the wrong limb, spreading fatal germs in the hospital, those humans that we have put on pedestals expound on the findings of new studies. "Coffee is bad for you. It will stunt your growth and make your heart beat too fast. Chocolate will give you pimples. Eggs raise your cholesterol. Hormones are good for you - - - they keep you young, prevent heart attacks. Wine will ruin your liver." On and on the warnings go. And then "they" say, "Oops, we made a mistake. Coffee wards off Alzheimers and Parkinsons, and dark chocolates are full of good stuff called antioxidants and eggs once in a while are fine and hormones give you cancer and red wine is the new health food." So, if the time ever comes, and the experts say, "Oops, we made a mistake. Cigarettes are good for you!" - - - I’ll be first in line at the convenience store to buy a pack.

An Ordinary Life

An Ordinary Life
I’m not now, nor have I been in the past, nor will I be in the future a famous person. If you google me, you’ll find many Judiths and Lyons, none of which are me. My maiden name, Eisenstaedt brings up the famous photograher, Alfred. No relation. My parents weren’t famous or extremely rich or extremely poor or dope addicts or alcoholics or abusive. They weren’t Okies, movie stars or famous authors or artists. There were no diplomats who worked for world peace. There were no scientists who found cures for terrible illnesses. I don’t think we have a notorious murderer, thief or celebrity in the bunch. I haven’t done anything extraordinary. I have an ordinary life. So why, one may ask, do I presume to write my memoirs?

I don’t even like memoirs of others. If they’re at all readable, they’re about lives that are beyond my boring realm. Movie stars’ confessions of sexual mis-behavior, addictions, horrible child-hoods and worse adult-hoods make wonderfully interesting reading. Jailhouse confessioners and people who have broken every commandment have really good stories. I stole a coral colored Tangee lipstick from the five and dime eons ago, on a dare from one of my teenage friends. It was so ugly I threw it away. I snuck cigarets as a child and became horribly addicted to them for many years. Even now, I must have that chocolate fix every day. But as far as I know, cigarets and chocolate are not yet illegal.

I tried marijuana once. We had no paper so we emptied a Marlboro and stuffed in the grass and puffed right through the filter. It made me giggily and stupid and very hungry and I wanted even more chocolate. I haven’t murdered, maimed or defrauded anyone or committed adultery....yet. Not that I’m so angelic. I’m basically honest but also a coward afraid of getting caught. I haven’t done anything special or awful enough to write a memoir worth publishing. Who would be interested?

All I have are my mundane stories and experiences that have brought me to where I am now. I wrote all my memories and life lessons for my progeny. My children can be googled. They’ve done famous things already. They tell me they admire me. They tell me they love me. They tell me I’ve inspired them. That’s enough for me. Maybe one of them will appreciate the history even though it’s ordinary.

An Ordinary Life

I'm not now, nor have I been in the past, nor will I be in the future a famous person. If you google me

Falling in Marriage

We were friends long before we fell into marriage. We attended different high schools, but we met on the summer camp train from Chicago to Eagle River, Wisconsin. We were going to be counselors at two of the many camps in the north woods.

A few years later, we attended the same University and had a mutual circle of acquaintances. I dated his friends and he dated mine. We spent hours on the phone gossiping about them and commiserating and advising about the problems of young adult dating.

If we didn’t have other plans on a weekend, we would hang out together. We both liked classical and jazz music and movies. I tolerated his shoot-em-ups and he reciprocated with my foreign films. We would go to the hamburger joint where we always bumped into people from my sorority and his fraternity. Sometimes, we shared a table at the library during final week. I would study and he would rustle through a newspaper, loudly. “Let’s go to the movies. Enough with the books!” Grades seemed more important to me and I chided him on his just passing is good enough mentality.

When we first realized a romantic bond, it was convenient but awkward that we were also friends and confidants. Who spoke first? How did we decide on the next step?

We were attending a wedding of one of the couples we both knew. It seemed every week was another. Weddings always made me teary and thoughtful. Here I was, 22 and single. Almost all my sorority sisters abandoned school and were choosing gowns and china and silverware and crystal. My diploma was more important to me than any of the boys I had dated and I was finishing college. I was student teaching and singing with a dance band on the weekends.

A waiter grabbed me off the dance floor in the midst of the hora, circling the bride and groom squealing in raised chairs. “You have a phone call, miss. Sounds urgent.” What could it be? No one in the family was sick.

“Hey!”, said my vocal coach, excitedly. “You got the job. Christmas in Korea with the Bob Hope USO show. It’s a great beginning for a new career.”

Oh, my God. I had to tell my parents, but first I had to tell Loren. He’ll be excited for me. He’s been chauffeuring me home from the ballroom every weekend.

I found him on the dance floor where I had left him. “Don’t go.”, he blurted without even thinking. “Let’s get married!” And we did.