I picked up the remote control and pressed the off button on our TV.
The model we have makes a little sound when the TV is turned off. In seconds,
the dogs had run in from the living room, where they were sleeping. Was it time for
us all to go to sleep now?
I turned off the lights while Sheila pranced around, eyeing me
expectantly. Our little herd of 2 and 4-legged beings walked down the hall. I
went into the bathroom, and the dogs gathered around the door, waiting. When I came
out and went on into the living room, Polly jumped up on the couch, and then on the table
behind it, while Sheila and Lizzie stood behind and waited while I arranged my pillow and
blanket and got myself settled. Polly jumped onto my back and settled herself in her
"pickle" position of our nightly doggie sandwich, while Lizzie leaped up on the
table and settled down, and Sheila stood next to me to get her nightly pats and hugs and
then also settled down along the couch and went to sleep.
We are such creatures of habit.
"Habit" was interrupted a bit while Jeri was here.
Jeri is not a TV person, so I don't usually turn the TV on when she is here, recording the
shows that I normally watch to watch after she leaves. So it was nice to reconnect
with The Daily Show last night, and watch Stewart's previous night's tirade
against gun violence and gun control (he pointed out that years ago one guy threw a rock
off and overpass and now all overpasses look like habitrails. One guy tried to sneak
a bomb on a plane in his shoe and now millions of passengers must remove their shoes
before passing through airport security, but somehow we can't even contemplate
changes to sacrosanct gun laws).
Earlier in the evening I had watched the People's Choice Awards.
I don't know why I watch this show each year. I guess because it's an awards
show and I usually watch awards shows, but this is always the dumbest, and the one that
reminds me how out of touch I am with most of the entertainment world the older I get.
Most of the celebreties are people I have never heard of, and if I've heard of
them, I definitely would not recognize them.
Still it was nice that Big Bang Theory won for best comedy
because that is one show I do watch and love. I think it has the best
comedy writing around, and I just love those geeks.
After the People's Choice Awards I watched the latest
episode of Top Chef. This season's show is set in Seattle and it made me
all nostalgic, missing my friend Diane, who died of a heart attack in 2010.
Diane
and I had a serendipitous meeting, when she came to Davis to visit her friend, who was my
boss at The Typing Company. She was here to help out with typing during our heavy
season. She and I hit it off right away and long after her friendship with my boss
had ended, she and I remained friends.
I visited her several times in Seattle, once even taking the train up
(which was such great fun). She could be exasperating on those trips because in our
e-mails before my arrival, she would be bursting with ideas for things we would do, and
when I arrived she seemed to have made no plans, nor have any notion of what we could do
to fill the time.
But we laughed a lot and usually ate too much. We both knew we
needed to watch our weight, but somehow we threw caution to the wind when we were
together.
My favorite trip to visit her was when Peggy was here and we spent
about a week at Diane's. She and Diane got along famously and the whole time up
there was just so much fun...and that time she had planned, so we did a lot of
traveling around and saw a lot of things.
Peggy cut Diane off too, after she returned to Australia. They
continued to e-mail back and forth but Peggy sent her something that she didn't feel Diane
had acknowledged and she decided to end the friendship. Diane was very hurt.
(I should have seen that as a warning, I guess.)
Diane became a grandmother about 2 years before I did.
She fell in love with her new little grandson and was a devoted
grandmother, fortunately living nearby and able to be with her daughter almost daily, to
help with the baby. Especially when the twins were born a couple of years later.
She was so excited when Brianna was born and thought she was such a
beautiful baby. It was fun having someone my age being a new grandmother with me,
since most of my friends' grandchidren were already quite grown up, going to school, some
to high school already. They had all gone through the baby years and had moved on,
but Diane and I were enjoying being new grandmothers together.
It still makes me very sad that her grandchildren, whom she
worshipped, are growing up without the opportunity to know the love of this woman, for
whom they had become her whole life.
No comments:
Post a Comment