Asteroids in My Brain

  Sometimes there are just random thoughts that drift through my mind….not enough “stuff” for a story but noteworthy enough to not let slip back into the abyss of forgetfulness.

Makes me think of The Asteroid Belt…there’s chunks of stuff there but not enough to make a planet.

Old Lady Perfume

  

  I was going through the radio station emails and came across one from corporate.

  “Mrs. Polenta is flying in this Friday for her quarterly visit.  Please make proper arrangements.”

  “Oh jeez,” I said as I hit the print button.  Emails from corporate generally went to Jack the general manager.

  Mrs. Polenta was the owner.

  There was long hair and a pair of eyes looking at me from the doorway.

  It was Duanita.  That’s NOT Duanita like “Juanita.”  Duanita was named after her daddy Duane so her name was pronounced “Dwayne-neeta.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Whaddarya sayin’ ‘Oh jeez’ for?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Polenta is coming to visit Friday, once she gets here I gotta make myself scarce.”

  “I kinda notice when she comes here you’re kinda gone right after she gets here,” said Duanita, still just eyes and hair peeking around the door frame.

  “It’s her perfume,” I said.  “It gives me a splitting headache, I mean like if someone took an axe and split my head wide open.  It’s the only perfume, cologne, toilet water that I’ve known to give me a headache.”

  “She gets it at the Old Lady Store,” said Duanita.

  “There’s an Old Lady Store?” I said.

  It was still just Duanita’s eyes and hair peeking around the door frame.

  “Old lady perfume from the Old Lady Store,” Duanita started laughing.

  Then she was gone.

  I still heard her laughing.

  “Where’s this Old Lady Store?” I yelled.

  Duanita kept laughing.

Slow to Modernize

   

  My mp3 player died the other day.

  It was 9 years old, truly a surprise gift from The Lady of the House.  In essence she introduced me to the world of mp3s.

  I don’t think I would have gotten there on my own.

  When it comes to music I’ve often been slow to modernize.

  I can remember when vinyl was on the way out, making way for compact discs or CDs.  I suppose I couldn’t imagine a world without record albums, and would it mean I’d have to replace all my vinyl.

  I kept my vinyl well into the time that record companies were cutting back on coming out with records.  I found myself buying cassettes because there was no vinyl release, just cassettes and CDs, record companies even put an extra song on the CDs and not the cassettes to entice people to buy the CDs.

  Then came that fateful day in the early 90’s when Don the Engineer at the radio station in Roswell pulled out the record turntables in the radio studio and replaced them with CD players.

  “Nooooooo,” I yelled.

  And not long later I bought my first CD player.

  It was 1991.

  Then I started buying CDs.

  It was 2008 when The Lady of the House gave me my Christmas present.

  Then my daughter gave me her old IPod.

  Not long after that The Lady of the House gave me the gift of a new IPod.

  Here in 2017 it has 19,240 songs on it.

  I reckon I’m “all in” on this new technology.

  But I still have about 600 vinyl albums.

  And about 200 cassettes.

  I just can’t bear to part with ‘em.

There’s a Story Here

  I was at Thing Land the other day.

  Thing Land is what I call Walmart.  I call it that because you can buy all kinds of things there.

  I was looking at some canned beans when I overheard words, words of one woman talking to another.

  “She drives me crazy,” said one woman’s voice, “She smells like old clothes, cat piss and liquor.”

  I stopped looking at the beans and pondered.

  There’s a story there…. “old clothes, cat piss and liquor”….I just haven’t figured out what it is yet.

The Death of Mr. Romance

  I saw a big ol’ boy walking down the aisle of the dollar store the other day.

  “Big ol’ boy” is generally a “polite” Southernism for a guy who is waaaay overweight.  The young gentleman was as wide as the aisle.  Rolls of fat were crawling up the back of his neck and on top of his head.

  There was a big part of me that wanted to take the guy aside and say, “Son, you’ve REALLY got to do something about your weight.  It’ll kill you.  Maybe from a heart attack, maybe from congestive heart failure, maybe from complications from the diabetes you’ll probably get and may already have, maybe from kidney failure from the diabetes.  It’ll cut your life in half.”

  I didn’t do that though.

  Folks seldom take kindly or even listen to the advice of a total stranger.  The reaction can be one of anger to just nodding to saying phrases of total denial like “it’s a hormone problem, I can’t do anything about it.”

  I know what being overweight does to a body, it happened to me, cost me my health.  But that’s another story for another time.

  So as I stepped into a side aisle to let the young man pass I remembered an old co-worker who had a similar physique.

  Mr. Romance.

  His name was “Wooly” but I called him Mr. Romance because even though he was a “big ol’ boy” with a big set of “table muscles.”  Wooly probably weighed about 400 pounds.  He seemed to be right proud of himself, his weight didn’t seem to bother him.

  Interestingly enough, Wooly was always in the company of much younger women, driving them around town in his 1976 Corvette convertible that had seen better days.

  Wooly and I worked together at a radio station in the southern mountains.  Wooly worked middays and did sports, I did the morning show and sold advertising.

  One day Wooly and I were kicking back.  He was on the air and I’d come back to the station with some contracts to file.  The boss wasn’t around so we weren’t under any kind of “watchful eye.”

  “So what’s with all these different girls you hang around with?” I asked.

  “Jealous much?” asked Wooly, then he cut loose with a laugh.

  “Not my style,” I said. “I tried dating multiple girls at the same time one spring at college, it got messy.”

  “Listening.  Give women your ear, they’ll give you much in return,” he said smiling and wiggling his eyebrows.  “Don’t talk about yourself so much.  Let them talk.  Look them in the eyes while they’re talking.”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “And remember,” said Wooly, “What matters when the lights go out is who washed last.”

  “Advice from Mr. Romance,” I said.

  “Bank on it,” said Wooly.

  I lost track of Wooly over the years.

  But I found him recently with the help of The Great and Powerful Internet.

  Too late.

  Wooly died last year.

  Wooly was just 50 years old, died at a convalescent home back in the mountains.  From what I could put together from tidbits of info it looks like he had some sort of major health failure like a heart attack, stroke or something and was put in the home.

  Wooly had actually settled down and married someone.  They had three daughters.

  And judging by his obituary picture he was still a big ol’ boy when he “went on to Glory.”

  “So long, Mr. Romance,” I said to the computer screen.