Life, Love and Laughter

I am in Youth, Part II. In other words, I’ve been ‘round the bend a few times, have heard every expletive known to man, and an expert in the how’s and why’s of wifeology and motherhood. I can look at my four adult children and think, ”how in the world did I grow these people and why am I not in the nut house?” I can look at my husband of some 49 years and think, “and the reason I married you was?” But I look back and think of the life, love and laughter that has followed me into my golden years, and I am glad I stayed the course.

Life is a bowl of spilled milk on your freshly mopped floor. Life is “growing up” your children and struggling to grow with them. Life is wrapping your arms around your husband when he becomes unlikable. Life is hurting for your children when they’re disappointed. Life is holding back tears and smiling when you’re down. Life is not looking down at someone else when you’re up. Life is waking up to a brand new day and living that day to it’s fullest – hoping for a tomorrow – but living it in such a way as to not be quite sure it will appear. Life is good.
Love is cleaning up the spilled milk and holding your temper. Love is understanding and patience with your children’s growing pains. Love is often laughing and crying at the same time. Love heals little boys skinned knees and teenage daughters broken hearts. Love is a friend who knows all your faults and still loves you. Love is a gift to be received and an even better present to give others. Love is good.

On Sisters

When I was small, there were three older, bigger girls who lived with us. I wasn’t particularly interested in them until they did something I liked, like singing. The three of them gathered in the living room around the piano played by a man with red kinky hair and a bulbous nose. Liz sang tenor, Midge sang alto, while Frankie belted out lead in a strong, husky voice. Harmony was not something I understood; how three voices can make three different sounds that mesh into a beautiful melody. I tried all harmony parts – tenor, alto and lead – too high, too low, too off-key. Their singing could bring me inside from playing hopscotch, which was my forte.

Midge, tall, blonde and willowy, closed her eyes when she sang. Liz, petite with hennaed hair, leaned into Frankie when she sang, irritating her, causing her short, black hair to bounce back and forth in a “no” gesture, or maybe it was only her way of keeping time to the music.

“You’re listening to WNOX, Knoxville, Tennessee,” came out of the radio each Wednesday, and with it came the voices of my three sisters. Songs such as Tuxedo Junction, Sentimental Journey, and Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me,” were sung in perfect harmony. I listened, undoubtedly smiling, although it wasn’t something I remember as being impressive, simply those three girls who lived with us singing on the radio.

To say I idolized my three sisters, looking up to them, would be a misnomer. At that time in my life they were only older people who often told me to get lost. Being eight years younger than Liz, the youngest one, I looked at them with unseeing eyes.

When I was a teenager, they became an extension of my mother, often telling me what to do, when to do it, but mostly not to do it. They were bossy. After each of them acquired a husband and children, I became a babysitter for them, one they would or wouldn’t have to pay. I learned that people who came home happy from parties paid better.

Then I became twenty. Suddenly the three older but no longer bigger girls became my sisters. They looked at me differently, or was it I who looked at them differently? They still sang and, at last, I joined Frankie with my off-key lead voice. We laughed together at me.

Just when I began enjoying their company and the feeling became mutual, I married and followed my husband to another city. I missed them. We talked on the phone, wrote letters, and visited from time to time, but I longed to be nearer to them. I came to know and cherish the bond we had finally formed as sisters.
I became older; they became older, and all too quickly, one by one, they died. The older, bigger girls who lived at our house, who fused harmony into melodious music, who bossed me and underpaid me for babysitting, who were there for me with an understanding heart, are gone. Their voices continue to carry a sweet memory, but it has left my life off-key.

The Kitchen Table

There is such magic in a kitchen table. I have often thought if mine could talk how much it would reveal. It collects such things as tears, coffee, spilled milk, smeared jelly, goodbye kisses and school books. If the top of it became transparent, it would reveal grocery lists, notes to and from the children, poetry, and scores of secret daydreams and fantasies quickly written and thrown away.

If my kitchen table had feelings, it too would reveal a warmth in tousled-haired little boy smiles in the morning, hurt for the teenaged daughter problems, and would wrap its arms around my friend who feels she is growing old. Sometimes, I wonder if it cringes when harsh words are spoken over it and feels the pain of not being able to take them back.

The square of wood in my kitchen holds many memories, as well as reams of paper n which I reflect the woes of wife and motherhood; the love, life and laughter of a once six-placement family that, somehow, too quickly, dwindled to two.

On Being Happy

I once wrote a song
that no one sang,
I once wrote a poem
that no one read,
I once painted a picture
that no one saw

and I wondered...
Why did I do these things?

Then one day
I sang my song
I read my poem
I saw my picture

and I knew why...
I was happy.

On Love

Sometimes we get so bogged down with the complexities of life, we fail to see, hear, smell, touch or feel the warm fuzzies surrounding us. We forget love has its very own sight, sound, smell, touch and feeling.

There is magic in the sight of a son's first solo flight on his bike. There's such joy in seeing his eyes light up when he sights a lightening bug turn on its beam. To watch him grow and become a man; to share his pipedreams, his failures, his real dreams and his success, is love folded over a million times.

To hear a little girl's laughter and know it is an echo of your own, is the sound warmth makes. Listening to her talking to her doll and knowing it is an echo of your own voice is the sound a smile makes. Striving to let her grow into her own being, and knowing she will probably always carry a whispered echo of you with her, is the sound unbounded love makes.

To look in the eyes and faces of your children or your grandchildren is God's love shining through - and what more of a warm fuzzy could you possibly want?

The Dip

I cannot go yet…for I have not sat at a sidewalk café in Paris, sipped wine and watched the beautiful people stroll by. Wait…it is not time…for I have not stood at the rail of the ferryboat and looked up at the Statue of Liberty. There is still time…time to ease back in the lushness of the limousine seat, anticipating the curtain rising on a Broadway play.

I cannot go yet…I have not listened to God enough, nor prayed enough. Give me more time…time to hug my children fiercely to my heart and promise my love forever.

If I must go soon, let me watch the geese in strict formation heading south once again. Let me soak up once more the colors in God’s crayon box in the leaves of fall. I will not be ready until I touch the hands of my friends

I cannot go yet…for I have not finished the last verse of the song…the last chapter of the book…the punch line of the joke…the last stanza of my poem. I am not finished with the dance…my heart still full of the music. Let me dance to the end of the pavilion, circling, swaying, in love with love. Wait…I cannot go until the music ends and I’ve been dipped.

About Me

I've discovered Blogger! I am older than God...but decided in my "Youth, Part II," to become a writer, and will soon exchange the word "writer" for "author." Let me explain....When I was ten years old, I received a book, entitled, Pollyanna, for Christmas. Way back "then," at least in our family, we received one gift and an orange or apple. I was absolutely delighted with a book of my very own. I smelled it, I held it to my heart...and then, I read it, over and over and over. At that time, I declared I was going to be a writer. I grew up, married, had a family, and had very little time to write, if you don't count the creative excuses I wrote for my children when they were absent from school. "Please, Mom," they would beg, "just say I was sick; don't write a two-page summary about my throwing up six times." When at last they were all in school, I struck out to the local newspaper with articles entitled, Life, Love and Laughter. Erma Bombeck beat me to the top, but my children supplied the fodder to my long-running column in several newspapers.

Over the years, I carried the story of "Annie" around in my head. In 2003, I bought my first computer. After learning to turn it on, and convincing myself there was not a little man behind the glass censoring every key I hit, I began writing my book, The Story of Annie Chase. "Now, I'll have it published," I said naively to myself. After many rejection slips, I almost gave Annie to the garbage heap. One last try brought success (you see, you should never stop trying). It will now be published sometime next year. Please read about it at www.behlerpublications.com/authors. It will be under Author Titles, scroll down - down a little more - there, there it is! It's a book about friendship, loyalty, a secret and Washington, D.C. Thanks!

"Hi, Pretty Lady"

By Aileen Ridings Bennett

A yellow sticky-note stays on the dashboard of my car. “Hi, Pretty Lady!” is printed on it, put there by my older son on his last visit home from up North. It makes me smile each time I get into the car.

The expression, Hi, Pretty Lady” is a family joke. My four kids, mimicking my Southern accent, refer to it as Mama’s Southern thang. Since the saying came to me from a long-time Southern friend, perhaps it is a Southern thang.

It was one of those days when your kidneys are right behind your eyelids and you find yourself bawling like a newborn calf at the slightest thing. A black cloud hovers over you, and all you want to do is wrap up in a quilt, head and all, and disappear. I finally answered the persistent ringing of the phone to hear my friend’s cheery voice asking me to go shopping. “No way,” was my immediate reply, “I don’t like people today and they sure wouldn’t like me.”

There was a long pause, and I thought she had blessedly hung up on my surly self. “I want you to go to a mirror right now, any mirror will do, look at yourself dead in the face, and repeat these words: “Hi, Pretty Lady.” I thought surely she had been into the sherry cabinet. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” I replied. “I mean it,” she said. “Go to the mirror, look at yourself, and say Hi, Pretty Lady. Call me back when you feel better, and I can assure you it will make you feel better.”

Pulling the quilt more tightly over my head, I kept my pity-party going until a will stronger than my own pushed me into the bathroom. Glancing into the mirror, an unkempt, down-in-the-mouth face stared back at me. Tentatively, I whispered the words, Hi, Pretty Lady. One side of the mouth in the mirror curled up. In a somewhat louder whisper, I repeated the phrase and both sides of the mouth curled up. Dropping the quilt, I brazenly stared at the face and, with more conviction, said, “Hi, Pretty Lady!” I began laughing, and the more I repeated the inane phrase, the more I laughed and the better I felt. While the simple words didn’t turn me into a vision of beauty, the spirit-lift they gave me quickly replaced the black cloud I was carrying around with me.

My son says it evokes an even bigger laugh when he says it to his reflection in the mirror. “It’s a Southern thang,” I say to him, “but it could work for men and Yankees as well.”