So happy I took photos at my childhood home before it got cleaned out.
In this photo, I see walls, but I hear voices. I see appliances, but I smell really good meals. I see empty chairs, but I see my family in them. I see that wine glass cabinet, I can hear the cork being taken from another bottle (or cap). I see a sink, but I hear the water running off the last of the holiday dishes. I see the bird clock, I hear the bird chirp on the hour. I see the tea kettle, I hear it whistling from the other room. Tea with Mom. Tea with Mom.
I am welled up with tears, choked up by my own memories. I don’t like change but I have no choice. It’s part of the cycle, I get that. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, I will accept it.
I see a closed door. I see a new hand on the knob, opening it to discover their hopes and dreams that await them. I hope they have many good memories someday too.
A peek 👀 into what I’ll be up to the next 3 days while I’ll be on a mini break from my full time job.
Early morning & evening walks, bike rides and some relaxing pool time are in the line up, as well as:
1. Reading – I’ve heard a lot about this book, “Real Americans” by Rachel Khong. I’ve received it recently from my Book of the Month Club. I’ll be diving into it a bit this weekend.
2. Alternating between my 2 favorite craft hobbies…Paint Gems, these small canvas projects I can finish in about 2 hours and are so relaxing (pictured here is the Doors edition, but the Summer kit should arrive today)! Great for me when I just want to play some 80s background music and dot for a bit. My 2nd craft hobby will be the new latch hook pillow with a pretty flower 🪻 design, great to work on while;
3. Watching 👀 “FEUD: Capote vs. The Swans 🦢 — 2 seasons, 16 episodes on Hulu 📺, as well as while…
4. Listening 🎧 to some episodes I still haven’t listened to of my favorite podcast, The Pop Culture Preservation Society! 🧡🌼
I’ve always wanted to do one of these, reading, doing, watching, listening things, for anyone out there who was just dying to know, now you know!
It’s 6 am, I’m in a half sleep, half awake state of mind. I guess I drift off.
(Dream starts here).
Now I’m in a house, looks a lot like mine but different. My husband is in the main room. I say, “I can’t believe we did it, bought this house, sight unseen.” He says, “yeah, crazy.” So, “did you look in the closets?” “Yes, they left a bunch of old clothes behind in this one”, he says. “Really?, Ugh, OK, I’ll start bagging them up and take them to Goodwill, I guess. What about the 2nd room?” “I don’t know he says, I haven’t looked in there.”
I go in the second room, it’s still set up like a child’s bedroom, very old bedding, smells musty, there’s a desk and the drawers are full of papers, toys – like someone left in a hurry. I slide open the closet doors, cobwebs, dusty. I scan from one side to the next, top to bottom. Old GI Joe’s lined up neatly on a shoe rack, old pillow people, worn, tattered, dusty. Hmmm. I close the closet doors and walk out. I can see I have my work cut out for me.
I sit with my husband in the living room. Now I hear a whimpering sound coming from that 2nd room. Very matter of fact, I walk back in there and there’s a small girl, maybe 10 or so on the bed now, dark hair, pale. I pick her up and take her to the living room. I hold her, I tell everything will be ok. I put her back in her bed, tuck her in and head out. Tell my husband, “how strange is that? There’s a ghost child in our house.” He says, “oh wow, really.”
We go out to the store for a few things, now it gets even stranger. I’m walking around and all of a sudden I have thorns, the thorniest thorns I’ve ever seen growing out of my fingernails. My husband starts uncontrollably doing some odd dance, he can’t stop. People are staring at us. Wouldn’t you? We hear murmuring, we hear “that’s the couple that bought that house”, “The haunted house?”, “Yes, they didn’t research it before they got it, they just dropped all their money on it.”
Research, ok, let me research it – come to find out it’s at the highest most point on the street. If you put a dot right at where the house is and draw 2 diagonal lines, then 2 straight lines to the bottom of the road, it’s clear as day that it sits in the danger zone, the haunted zone, it’s creepy, I’m scared. I don’t know what we are going to do, our life savings. A demon child lives in the house. I tell my husband. He says, “oh wow, really, we can make that work”, and we did. The 3 of them live happily ever after.
I’m sitting here trying to come up with something profound, unique and witty to write about and what pops in my head, why fondue of course!
Then I start thinking about life and how it relates to fondue. I never said this blog would be sensible, I actually never said what this blog would be as I’m still figuring it out as I go!
Looking at this pic I snapped in 2021 while resurrecting the fondue experience at my parents house one cold February afternoon somehow reminded me of aging! One day you feel like a cube of day old bread and one day you feel amazing when you get dipped in hot melted cheese!
Being the day old cubed bread ain’t so bad, people kind of leave you alone, you become indifferent to things that used to worry you, you can sit as quiet and unassuming as you’d like and that’s a good thing, at least I think. But, watch out, because somedays you just want that skinny fork to take you out of your bowl and plunge you into delicious, hot melted cheese, swirl you around and tell the world, guess what, here I am! I’m doing great, I’m happy, I’m vibrant and full of life.
Aging is inevitable.
Stale bread days are just as good as melted cheese days!
In a generation, far, far away, full of bright neon colors & really big hair…lived your grandma & grandpa!
It was a time that doesn’t exist anymore, but it was the best! I’m “Gen X” & your grandpa is a “baby boomer”…basically what that means is we were young & cool once, well, or “like, totally awesome”! (Popular GenX speak).
The internet did not exist. We could not google anything. We only saw a new movie in a movie theatre after finding out where & when it was playing from a newspaper (your Dad will probably still read these). We had telephones in our houses attached to the wall tethered by a cord. We went to McDonalds on dates and walked up to a counter, placed an order with an actual person, not a kiosk.
I am writing this now, so when you are old enough to read it, you can tell Generation Alpha (your generation) all about us. We rode the wave of technology, some of us fared better than others, but we are survivors from a different era. We can now ask “Alexa” for recipes & things, but we do kind of yell a little too loudly at “her”.
I’m here to tell you to have fun, don’t blink because it goes by fast, enjoy the ride and save pictures and memories from all your years ahead. Those never go out of style from one generation to the next. When you look back someday I know you’ll have as many great memories as I’ve been lucky to have! The memories are the glue that holds me together, makes me whole. I cherish them.
Love,
Me from the past (23 years old in the photo below)
Me from the present (58 at the time of this post), and;
Me from the future, who is looking forward to seeing many years through your eyes & making more memories to last the rest of my lifetime!
I’m 21 years old. I have a job at a soundproof room (anechoic chamber) company in Connecticut and they are bidding on a government contract to make soundproof rooms for General Dynamics and the Rancho Cucamonga, CA office needed me to operate the CPT word processor for the proposal. Hell yeah! They sent me on a business trip there.
Maybe that was a big deal, I had no clue. However, I’m in LA Airport flying back to JFK, in the giftshop these 2 “rock stars” walk in & say “damn, something smells good in here”, me & my red & white Hawaiian jumpsuit & white high heel pumps from Thom McAnn, said “oh, I bet that’s me”…I had on Confession (fake Obsession by Calvin Klein)! 🔥 “Damn”, the one, well they both had long hair, said.
I board the flight. They board the flight. They go to the back, the smoking section.
A few hours later we are in New York. I see them at baggage claim. My boyfriend is picking me up. I say “these guys, I think they think they are rock stars, one is even wearing a vest that says Poison on the back, seriously”. Well, my boyfriend (now husband) knows a bit about music, he’s a drummer himself. He recognizes the cases of equipment they are traveling with & he says, “um, yeah, so that’s Rikki Rockett & Bret Michaels from Poison, definitely”.
Well, I’ll be darned, how about that, and now I must go say hi. We chat about which luggage carousel our flights luggage is coming in from (duh, I’m making up conversation here). I get their autographs in my odd little notebook that I would always have with me. They couldn’t have been any nicer. They showed us their itinerary and then they head to MTV to be guest VJs & I head back to Norwalk to keep pushing out anechoic chamber proposals.
I was curious how many signed, not personalized, first edition books I had in my book collection. I have this many (pictured below).
Goldie Hawn, Carol Burnett, Buzz Aldrin, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Julie Andrews, to name drop a few!
I’m at a point in my life where I’m considering selling these. Need to research their value. Some may be worth something, some maybe not so much. The Keith Hernandez book was a gift to my Dad & still has his bookmark in it where he left off, that one remains priceless to me & I will not part with it.
This was a hobby of sorts for me at a different time in life. I had fun going to these book signings. I see hours of long lines, train rides to NYC, drives to NJ, pizza, coffee, sometimes wine! Conversations with these iconic individuals, handshakes, some would do talks & Q&A’s, a lot of memories and now a lot of books on my shelves! No Shakespeare or Mark Twain or Steven King (would’ve loved a signed Steven King but those are hard to get), but a pretty cool collection of a time in my life when I did this a lot.
My mom is 90. I just called her. I’m lucky. I told her, “hey, guess what?”, she said, “what, ugh, this phone, can I turn the sound up?” Anyways, I said, “you know, you were 58 when you had your first grandchild, I’ll be 58 when I have my first”. She said, “wow, isn’t that interesting”. Then she said, “this world today, I don’t know” and “I messed up that word thing (Wordle), again”.
I told her “I want to do a blog post about you for Mother’s Day”. She said, “a what?”. I asked, “before you met Dad, what did you do?”. Mom said, “I worked in New York (for CBS), but the days were long and I just wanted to get home and go to bed, I learned quickly it wasn’t for me”.
Oh and hey, I said, “I was 27 when I had my first child, and you were 27 when you had your first child”. She said, “wow, this is funny how this could go on & on”. Yeah, it’s pretty neat. Then my other line rang & she said “ok bye then”.
I was first introduced to the material girl in 1983 when her album was laying on the floor in my parents living room. My sister had bought it. We didn’t have a way to pre listen to music. I just found music on the living room floor. I was 18.
While Madonna got busy ruling the world in 1984, I got busy at community College getting an Associates degree in Secretarial Science, but we would continue to grow together.
We desperately seeked Susan while getting into the groove in the mid 80s. Eventually by 1989 we expressed ourselves when I decided I’d start wearing pants to work to get more in touch with my masculine side.
While she justified her love in 1992, I was up with my newborn son, Mike, watching her on MTV going deeper & deeper into the wee hours of the morning. Those were some wild times we shared!
Fast forward us to 1996, now we are both Mom’s, me with my 2nd, her with her first, Lourdes. My son AJ & Lourdes basically grew up together. The Evita soundtrack got me through some late nights at that time. I vaguely remember some sort of little bo beep phase, Chanel vamp nail polish & her reading a children’s book, Little Miss Spider, while promoting Bedtime Stories during this time period.
In 2004 she became Esther & had embraced Jewish mysticism, I found my way to bikram yoga & ordered myself a red string bracelet for good luck. I drank yerba mate tea & American Life became one of my favorite albums (still remains my favorite to this day). “I do yoga & pilates, in a room full of hotties so I’m checking out the bodies & you know I’m satisfied” are some favorite lyrics of mine.
I came to see her in concert later in life. Finally seeing her at Yankee Stadium with my sister & her wife for her MDNA tour. I’ll never forget our very flamboyant NYC subway ride to the venue, I honestly had no idea of this following she had. I lived in the Connecticut suburbs, my eyes had been opened. Then, a second show with my son at Madison Square Garden in 2015 for her Rebel Heart tour. Two very memorable concerts. Watching her take the stage both times bought tears to my eyes. Seeing her with my son meant so much to me. She spans generations. She represents so much of my life to me. My growing up years, my mom years, my years of trying to be confident & strong.
Life has gone on, she’s still selling out stadiums, I’m in Florida listening to her latest on Spotify, hoping I’ll see her again someday. Often thinking back to the day we first met, on that record album on my parents living room floor. Borderline will forever hold a special place in this forever fans heart.
We still have our later years to go, me & Madonna will see our 70s, 80s & God willing our 90s and we will keep dancing and singing together! Everybody, come on!
Rebel Heart Tour (2015) Madison Square Garden, NYC
Right now I’m pre-tired, as in I’m basically tired all the time…so, then, what exactly is retired? “Re” means again, at least I was taught that in elementary school. So does retired mean tired again?
I’m hoping it means something different when the time does come, give or take 10 years for me personally. However, as tired as I am lately by the monotonous daily grind, I am aiming to have more energy when I finally enter the great unknown that is retirement.
I started working in 1979 when I was 14 so by 2034 I’ll have worked the better part of 55 years of my life. I can maybe slow down. Somehow I don’t think I’ll ever truly stop working in some capacity. Perhaps I’ll call my next chapter my “I’m still here but I just want to sleep until 7:30 am, slow down a bit and rest but still do stuff” years or maybe “un-tirement”. Be less tired.
Actually, that’s sounding really good and I hope to have many good years of that part of my life to enjoy!
Sheils Writes 