Life Is Good anyway

From across the room this morning, "What kind of shoes do you put on your red shoe polish?"

It's all legitimate words, not gibberish, but it makes no sense. I know it's me, though, not her, because it's early and I don't have on my earphones, my hearing aids. See, the brain does its best to sort sounds into comprehensible words and sentences. I've been here with this before, haven't I? and yes, I have.

But I seldom don my ears until after my shower, because they're easy to forget, and once or twice in the past nearly twenty years that I've been blessed to have them, I've gotten into the shower wearing them. With the first pair, I once got in the swimming pool with them, and with hearing aids, that's bad news. The gardenia little darlings are sensitive, they're delicate and they're expensive.

VA furnished my first pair about 2001 or 2003 (I remember, because I was driving our new red Tahoe at the time and I thought how quiet unto absolutely silent the car was until I wore the new hearing aids driving home from the clinic and heard all kinds of squeaks and rattles and outside noises), and VA furnished my new 2020 pair; the other two sets I bought myself because the local VA audio clinic closed about ten years ago.

No doubt you were fascinated with that elderly discussion of hearing aids. What else would you like to hear about the idiosyncrasies of extreme old age that never even crossed your mind and might make you decide never to go there? Getting up in the night maybe? Standing up dizzy? Not hearing the telephone ring? Noticing at the end of the day that you wore brown socks with black shoes and thinking "O what the hell, who gives a rat's axe"?

Trying to sort "What kind of shoes do you put on your red shoe polish?" into something that you know she would ask, while keeping an insipid smile on your face hoping she won't realize you didn't understand and that you can figure it out without asking her to repeat?

Well, for starters, you pick out the words that don't seem to fit: shoes, red, & shoe polish, and you keep smiling and looking at her while you think and she waits for your answer.

Obviously, it's hurricane season here on the Florida Gulf Coast. "Isaias" is the name that king Henry VIII called the book and prophet we know today as "Isaiah". August 1, we're two months into it, with four months to go and all manner of frightful possibilities. Is it time to pray or time to curse the sky? I'm not a televangelist, so I have no sense of being able to pray a hurricane away from us, but I can abide in prayer that I'll have the sense to be alert and prepared if we have to leave all of a sudden. There's a hurricane package in Linda's car, and a ton of stuff to move inside from both porches, grab my toothbrush.

I'm still so thankful that we had sense enough to move everything inside before leaving for Pensacola on Monday, October 8th, 2018 even though TS Andrew was only going to be a tropical storm or maybe a category one when it breezed through, if it even came our way at all. The tears and anger unto raging fury all come flooding back if I let my mind go that way, and even now nearly two years on, we're still not fully recovered from. Don't go there, lest the cursing start up again.

Don't go there. Okay, I have to ask. The question has to do with the fact that we're having cold cuts for lunch today. So, "What kind of cheese do you put on your roast beef sandwich?"

Jeepers.

RSF&PTL anyway