If I don’t like it, I can walk away!

The story begins with a check we received in the mail.  A $15 check from a hospital that The Man was in over a year ago.  Just a check; nothing else.  It wasn’t worth trying to find out the source or the reason, so I stuck it in my purse to cash it for a little pocket change.  Of course, I forgot about it and got a bit panicky when I thought about it and realized it had been a couple of months since I received it.  Fearing there was some sort of expiration date, I whipped into the bank’s drive thru when, in the little town 13 miles from home, I was picking up The Man’s prescriptions.  I don’t use the bank much; I said I was going to close the account when my favorite officer retired, but as usual I had procrastinated.   Hurrying to the drive-in window, I stopped, turned he check over and signed my name to the back.  The  bank teller asked me for the last four of my Social saying, “Ms. McCoy I don’t think I’ve ever seen you here before.”  (I have only banked there since 1980.) After what I believed to be somewhat of a wait to cash a $15 check, she returned to the window to tell me that they were unable to cash the check because it was made out to The Man, yet I had signed it.  I protested, “We both sign on the account.”  “Sorry, Ms. McCoy, it’s policy.”  Of course, it was too late to just pull out of sight and sign The Man’s name, and I should have just looked at the front before I arrived.  I always sign his name anyway; he never wants to.  (So arrest me;  I don’t think he will testify.) I took the check back out of the little moving box and tore it into approximately 100 pieces and put it back in the little moving box and thanked them for the experience, telling them I completely understood policy and respected their need to follow it.

I pulled around to the front, went in and saw them all huddled together presumably talking about the crazy lady that just came through the drive thru.  Picture this scene:  the entire staff of women were in those Friday football jerseys for the local team – some pink, some gray, some green.  The only person in an office was browsing through a yearbook.  Saying, “You can stop talking about me now; I’m here”, I proceeded to the only teller that appeared to have that color thing worked out (She was in a gray spirit shirt.) and told her I wanted to close the account.  I explained that I had really intended to close the account anyway when my favorite bank officer had retired, so now was as good a time as any.  I could tell they had been well-trained in customer service when she told me that they could reassemble the check (I should have let them do that and then closed the account, but the old brain just doesn’t always think too swift.), deposit it in my account, then I could write a $15 check and get the money that way.  Clever, but too late at that point.  The teller than proceeded to tell me that I should really take that money in the form of a cashier’s check instead of cash. (She should never leave an opening like that.)  I explained that I had already had trouble cashing one check at their bank, so I really didn’t want to take any chances on another check.  Just cash please.

I hope I just made their day more interesting with something more to talk about instead of looking at yearbooks and worrying about the spirit shirt color for Friday night lights. Aww, you’re right; spirit shirt colors are more important.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=siW8MkUSo1s

Whoops! A red light

Dear People, (City of Fort Worth, Automated Red Light Enforcement)

It is plain to see that I ran that red light.  The worst part of the whole ordeal is that my granddaughter was in the car.  We had spent the day shopping for material to make doll clothes and she had said, “Oh Grannie, that light was red.”  Of course, it was too late.  I had desperately tried to get over, but being unfamiliar with the new roads, waited too long.  (No one was being too friendly.)

I do want to say this, ” I was sure the intersection was clear, but could not get even one more look up to check the light.”

So, to sum it all up – I am really sorry for breaking the red light rule.  Here is my punishment along with sending you the knowledge that my granddaughter (who was in a very tragic accident when a drunk driver hit her mother) will probably only remember that her Grannie Pam ran a red light and that, my friends, is a far worse punishment than the fine!

Love to All

Title IX and the athletes left behind

 

 

 

Not feeling very motivated to write lately, this one has caught me by the heart.  I am 58 years old.  In 1972 President Richard Nixon signed the Title IX legislation that made it illegal to discriminate against women in sports.  I graduated in 1971.

I was a tomboy from birth I guess.  I had little toy guns on my diaper pins.  My daddy was a baseball playing fool, and I benefited from that with many evenings of catch in the backyard.  Fortunately for me, my dad did not believe in cutting any slack to anyone (not even a girl) and I learned to catch a hot pepper just as well as any boy.  It was that or get hit with the ball and catching it was much less painful.  At the age of 12 we moved to a small town that had girls’ basketball, and even though it was three on three, I loved it.  By the time I was a freshman, the game had changed to the boys’ version of five on five, and I existed for sports.  The by-product of that was my coach made sure we kept our grades up, and I excelled on both the field and in the classroom.

By the end of 1968 our school board in Everman, Texas had decided that they could no longer afford to fund five  basketball teams.  At that time there was a varsity girls and boys team and a junior varsity girls and boys team and a boys freshman team.  That board, made up of entirely men, decided it could only fund three teams.  I imagine you can see where I’m going.  So behind the cloak of secrecy, it put in a girls’ coach with instructions to let the program go as far downhill as possible.  She held not one practice the final year we played.  Imagine – a team that did not practice one time.  We even went so far as to go to the gym on our own until we were barred for lack of supervision at which time our parents began coming with us.  We were then banned completely without a coach and our coach would not come – I imagine for fear of her job.  We got a petition up with many, many community signatures that was presented to the Board.  They thanked us.  That was all they did.  We lost miserably.  I had already had college coaches talk to me about playing for them, but with our program completely deleted when I was a sophomore that went down the drain as did my will to continue.

I lost the thing I loved and that motivate me the most.  I quit caring about school;  I experimented with things better left alone and who’s to say that wouldn’t have happened anyway, but I don’t believe it would have.  You SOB  bigoted all male school board took the very thing I was the best at and loved the most at that time because you were making decisions for women without any regard for women’s’ feelings.  I will always resent that and will never forget it.

Kind of reminds you of today doesn’t it? Leave my vagina alone and guys — give up trying to make decisions for women.  We are quite capable.  I hope the young women and their parents of today are stronger than we were.

How many stories are there like this?

http://www.wnba.com/titleix/powerofnine_060812.html

 

Although it’s not my state, it is my country

I really did not know much about Wisconsin before I encountered a professor in college that had graduated from the University of Wisconsin and then moved to small town Texas to begin her college teaching profession.  She was an excellent teacher and tried to begin an AIDS outreach program in the small college town much like the one she had volunteered at while she was in college.  She never saw it as anything to do with sexual preference, but you guessed it, the rest of the town did.  She was the first person I saw with the bright pink hair, and I was just so glad to breathe some of that fresh air on occasion.

Then, my son moved to Wisconsin and the schools were so much more progressive with so many more options than we had here in Texas.  I am a retired Texas educator, and I know backwards when I experience it.  So, it does concern me than my admiration for the state of Wisconsin is under siege by money.

Please check out this blog from a person in Michigan that follows politics in that area closely.  I think we all need to take this as our fight.  It’s not just Wisconsin.  Texas has fallen. Virginia has fallen.  Michigan is on the way.  The technique is simple.  The far right gave up trying to get the highest offices and began to work on the small ones (school boards, county commissioners, county clerks, etc.) and conquered them one at a time until they reached that one more person that made them the majority.  Then, one step at a time, they dismantled what did not suit them, and that could mean anything with any diversity or innovation.

So, although it’s not my state, it is my country.

http://eclectablog.com/2012/05/why-you-need-to-defeat-scott-walker.html

My mother my friend

My mother constantly worries about her mothering skills.  Things like did she do it right, why aren’t her children more appreciative, why didn’t it work like Leave It To Beaver.  Things like that still trouble her.  I wish I could ease her mind.  Maybe I can.

My earliest recollections are of my mother doing things with me, but more for me.  She was very careful to see that I was clean, dressed properly for any occasion, hair well taken care of.  She was also very careful to see that I had a room that was perfect for a little girl, always much nicer than the room she shared with my dad.  I think I always had more clothes, way too many toys, probably to the point of making them work extra hard to pay for the things they gave to me.  She was not the classic homemaker.  She never liked to clean house although she did and she wasn’t all that keen on cooking although she did that too.  But what she did do was sing and kept a  mostly constant  sunny disposition.  She constantly sang musicals around our house, and to this day I can sing the words to many musicals that others my age don’t even know exist.  She had/has a beautiful voice, something I wish I had inherited.  She always had many friends, and we moved many times, but that didn’t  keep her from making more wherever we went.  She made a home out of many places that we moved.  Some more difficult than others.

She didn’t always have a “regular” job, but was constantly doing things to help with the income.  She sold jewelry and called people to sell pictures at Olin Mills.  She kept 11 kids at one time.  I remember at nap time we were everywhere, but by golly we all lay down to rest.  She loved her dog and still does although the dog has changed.

My father was a very hard man to live with and yet I saw her rub his neck countless evenings when he came in with headaches.  Even though he was not easy to live with they had one thing they could do better than anyone else and that was dance.  I can still see them dancing, so flawlessly, so easily, so beautifully.  It was a sight to behold.  I miss the beauty in that movement of the two of them as one.

She did everything for me.  I was her job and her joy.  She made my favorite lunches, tuna fish sandwiches with ice tea in my thermos.  She attended every school function that required a parent.  She drove a million miles to every little hick town when I first began to play basketball.  She dressed me for school while I was still asleep until I was way too big for that and would be embarrassed to tell you how old. 

She is still here for me, and I marvel that we are able to talk for hours on end and still have things we forgot to tell each other.  On the other hand, I know we tell each other things many times over.  We share a love of classic movies, historical drama and ancestry.    I hope to have her with me for many more Mother’s Days.

You know your getting old when….

I was reading a cute blog called 365 till 30 about a 29 year old that was taking the entire year before turning 30 to take care of some things she wanted to accomplish in life.  As I perused the site looking for background information to fill in the questions I always have like, “Why would someone do that?” and “Is she independently wealthy?” Anyway, in reading the sidebar about her must reads, I noticed one called Hipparis.(http://hipparis.com/)

I thought it was about hip replacement surgeries!!  Not so.  I am getting old, but at least I have begun to plan my list of things I will probably have to do.

You need a rooster at your place?

After relocating to the thriving metropolis in Central Texas some 30 years ago, I decided to really immerse myself into the culture.  The first immersion was really just fortuitous.  Having to use the windmill for water, the need to learn simple repairs led me to try to purchase the “rubbers” for my windmill, when actually I needed “leathers.”  That’s an earlier blog.

Having met my closest neighbor, a lovely hard-working woman who had raised four children on her own after her husband had been accidentally killed by an electric shock.  They had a dairy, so she was left to run the dairy and raise the small children.  This she managed to do, and by the time I met her she was remarried to an old high school friend that had returned to the area from Dallas (a bit better off as the head of an electrical company) and made her life much more comfortable.

Neighbor lady had a relative that worked at a local college that experimented on animals to create hybrids.  They had developed a hybrid chicken that matured in four weeks to be able to butcher in a relative short period of time.  After they had completed their experimentation, they had these leftover chicks and she had access to them.  She asked me if I wanted any.

Well, since I had become such a great little farm lady, I quickly said sure (not realizing exactly what that meant).  The next morning, I found a box with 25 day old chicks on my front porch.  They were making an awful lot of noise cheep, cheep, cheeping and desperate to get out of that box.

I brought them in and sat they on a table.  The middle child was just toddling around and as I tried to figure what I was supposed to do next, he abruptly reached in the box and grabbed a handful, in both little chubby hands, of baby chicks.  Only two were squished before I was able to pry them out of his fat little fingers, and I quickly got them to the barn, got them enclosed, and got a light on them.  Adding the food and water made me think I had pretty much taken care of the baby chicks.

Well, all went well for several days, then as baby chicks tend to do, they began to grow.  Now remember, these were a hybrid that had been genetically altered to mature in four weeks and ready for butcher.

Four weeks came and each hen (and they were all hens) had begun laying eggs.  By this time, I had just turned them loose, and they had a chicken house for the laying and roosting.  Now of course, not all hens lay every day, but out of 24 it was not uncommon to have days with 17 to 20 eggs.  It began to become a bit of a problem what to do with that many eggs.  Remember, this was daily.  We ate eggs, the dogs, cats, and pigs ate eggs, and I began to wonder what my next step should be.  This is where having an experienced neighbor is so valuable.  Her question was, “Why don’t you just put some in the freezer?”  After receiving instructions (before google), I went home to prepare for the butchering.

I was a city kid.  They closest I had been to butchering any animal was purchasing the meat already packed in the grocery store.  Occasionally, I would see some large cuts of meat being whittled down in the back of the store, but certainly not enough to get the butchering certificate.

Now, elderly neighbor suggested wringing the neck or chopping it off, followed by plucking by hand as many feathers as possible, followed by dunking now dead chicken in boiling water in order to get he remainder of the pin feathers (very small feathers that are very gross if you see them or eat them after cooking chicken).  You can then freeze the entire chicken or cut it up before freezing.  Sounds simple enough doesn’t it?  These elderly farm people did it all the time for Sunday dinner, remember?  I don’t either.

Out I go to the barn.  I decided that I was incapable of wringing anything’s neck, so armed with an axe I set out to kill me some chickens.  I killed a couple, but no one told me that they kept running around after they had no heads, and to say the least this really spooked me.  I was convinced I was being chase, punished, or haunted by chicken spirits from millions of years past.  My other thoughts were that these hybrids were some sort of bionic, nuclear, radioactive, killer chickens.  Not a pleasant thought.

They finally went down, and I went about following the remainder of the instructions.  I managed to sort of complete four chickens.  There seemed to be a lot of leftover feathers.  I was covered in wet, stinking feathers and the barnyard resembled the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  This would not work.

After traumatizing the remaining 20 hens and having 4 pitiful looking dead chickens, I decided I would just go to the store to get my chicken.  It was a family tradition, but I still had a bunch of chickens, laying a bunch of eggs.

The next plan of attack was to allow the hens to set some of the eggs and hatch some babies.  (Wait for it.)  I was relaying my plan to the elderly neighbor when her obvious shock showed in the tone of her question, “You got a rooster out there?”  “Why no,” I replied, at which point the obvious dawned on me.  “Oh my gosh,” I stammered, turning beet red – no redder.  “Please, don’t tell anyone that I said that, ” I pleaded.  I knew what kind of idiot they would all thing I was.  Remember, I was the one that asked for the rubbers for the windmill.  “Well honey,” she slowly drawled, “You can let them hens set all they want, but without a rooster you won’t ever get any babies.”  She probably got her chuckle for the year or lifetime out of that one.

I know she got on that party line the minute I left her house.  It really was too good a story not to tell.

I pulled up to the little store in the little town several days later.  I was what was referred to as a “grass widow” (divorced) in their neck of the woods, and there was always lots of speculation about what I might be up to out in the country.  I saw as I put the car in park several of the old men in town, one of the old bachelors, standing on the porch.  When I was fully out of the car I heard the comment I had been dreading, “Hey, Mrs. I hear you need a rooster out at your place.”  I just ducked and plowed ahead.  After all, I was fast becoming the entertainment in a town with not much entertainment.

One of those on the porch was the Mr.

Mitt, Newt, Rick……….

It really bothers me to hear people disrespect the President by calling him Obama.  You should not call your teacher Jones or Smith or whatever.  You should not call your mother’s friends by their last name, “Hey, McCoy, can little Johnny come over to play.”  It just sounds slightly irreverent and mean.  Even if you  can’t refer to him as President Obama, then call him Mr. Obama.  Please, people let’s get back in the game with some sort of decorum.

And how about those names for the Republican candidates.  I am enjoying their names before the election.  Mitt, Newt, Rick…sounds like a frat house.  Short, easy to spell to fit the brain size, and cutesy for their momma to embarrass them with.

Just think of some of the nicknames from the past and present.  I know there are many more.

Buzz, Scooter, Butch, Buster, Skeeter, Goober, Mick, Mitt, Rick, Newt,  Corkey, Whitey, Slim, Chub.  See how they just fit right in with the tennis club?

I guess we must of been the lower class since we called my brother Bozo!!

The Mr. was very sick today.  I hope tomorrow is better.  He is a perfect example of nicknames gone crazy.  Named, what he though was Sidney McCoy Jr. at birth, for some reason when the doctor registered his birth at the courthouse he put on the birth certificate – Sid McCoy Jr.  Now there can be no Sid McCoy Jr. because there is no Sid McCoy Sr.  His dad is Ruben Sidney.  Anyway the Jr. stuck and to this day we use Sid for most things, but Sidney Jr. for income tax.  Then when he was a baby he earned the nickname of Chub (I know why this happened.) and then the nickname Chief.  He liked that one.  When he was playing baseball, they began to call him Rod and that stuck as well, so depending on who you are talking to you could call him one of several names.

He is weakening daily, and he hates that, and as a matter of fact so do I.  It’s hard to watch.  He’s sleeping next to me now and snoring away so I assume he’s resting comfortably.

Sexual Peak

This is the parental control warning:  If you do not wish to read about sex, or lack thereof, or stupid ideas that teenagers have about sex, then this post is not for you.  I know this will embarrass my first-born.  Maybe he is either too old to be truly scarred or his anonymity is still mostly intact.

Our first-born son was a beautiful baby.  People called him a girl all the time.  He has beautiful dark brown eyes that the pupils get lost in and the best head of hair on any male in the world.  When we were leaving the hospital, and he was all decked out in blue, a lady stopped me and told me how pretty that little girl was.  Seriously, who takes their newborn baby girl home in blue?  Later on, we were at a restaurant having dinner, and he had on his cowboy hat, boots, jeans, and belt with his name on it, and still an older couple came and told us how pretty that little girl was.

Anyway, as he became a teen, the girls liked him.  He was preppy in a small town with mostly cowboys.  I guess it was something different, because they just loved him, and he tried to love all of them back.

One homecoming when he was a freshman in high school,  a girl older than he (I believe she was a junior so we were looking at 14-year-old and 17-year-old.) asked him to homecoming.  They were to double date with another couple since he couldn’t even drive.  He was very excited, but I’m telling you the girl looked 25 years old.

Of course, the Mr. was secretly proud while I said absolutely not gonna happen.  He begged and pleaded until finally the Mr. decided to take up his cause.  I finally agreed with the condition we sit down and have a “talk” with him before he went.

I hope you are ready for this.  Stop reading here if you are of the faint of heart.  We told him that he must sit down with us and “talk” before he could go.  He reluctantly agreed, but was willing to sacrifice an appendage to go.

We began to have a pleasant conversation about how to treat your date and what we expected of him as a grown man around women.  We finally got to some very deep discussions that began with me asking, “What are you going to do if you two are in the backseat, and she says yes?”  He replied in a very serious tone, “Mom, I’m going to say yes.”  Trying not to panic and wanting to handle this in my most sophisticated manner, I quizzed him further.  “What will you use for protection if that happens?”  And then the answer that would make any mother secure in letting her child go out into the world.  “I”ll take a towel.”  “A towel?” I asked.  “What the hell will a towel do?”  I just couldn’t make the connection.  After looking at me like I was so stupid he answered, “A towel so I can pull it out early.”  I turned to the Mr. and said, “Lock the door;  this boy is not going anywhere.”

This was a smart, mature kid and yet this is the kind of misinformation that he had been fed.  Of course, I gave him my best horror stories about disease, etc. and the Mr. helped with a story that involved swelling and a rubber mallet in the doctor’s office to put the final touch on our informational sex education talk. 

He went.  I don’t know what happened, but he lived to grow up and have a nice wife and three kids, so I guess he wasn’t scarred too bad.

Sorry, first-born.  It was just too good a story not to tell.

Rough day

 

It was a rough one.  The Mr. in a lot of pain, and I feel rotten.  It’s hard when I can’t muster the energy to help his mood.  Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.  I turned on the tube and saw John Lennon (one of my heroes) singing Give Peace A Chance.  It was a concert in 1972 at Madison Square Garden.  It depressed me more to think that we are still fighting stupid wars.  I feel a revolution, or maybe I just need one.