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That Damn Jennifer

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My "friend" Jennifer has been around since I was a young girl.  She was everything that I wasn't.  Her hair was curly, sometimes long and sometimes short and wavy.  She was tall and slender and had matching sweater sets and cool shoes.   Her bedroom was pink and she had a bed with a canopy over it and a pink princess phone.   In high school she was a cheerleader and the prom queen.  She could do the splits and oddly I envied that most since it was the one thing that kept me from being a cheerleader  Jennifer took advantage of my lack of confidence especially with "the popular girls".  She made me feel that I was not good enough.  I didn't measure up to their standards.  Or hers. Jennifer was my imaginary friend and biggest critic.  Sometimes I let her into my head too much and she would try to run my life. Jennifer is the woman that we all  try to be or at least that society tells us we should be.  She is the young girl in the commercials for wrinkle reducin

November 2021

  It seemed ironic that the Christmas before, I bought him a cookbook titled “How not to die”.  I thought about this as we drove to Ogden after my daughter had just called us and said simply “He’s dead”.  Buying gifts for E was not easy.  My daughter’s boyfriend of several years loved to cook and to read.  He loved dogs and had two of them that he pampered.  He related better to dogs than people but then dogs don’t judge or make demands.   He was a guy of plaid shirts with understated colors and jeans which endeared him to me as that is how my people in northern Michigan dressed.  He was originally from Wisconsin but he didn’t like cheese except when it was on pizza,  which I could never understand. He always wore comfortable but expensive looking shoes.   He was picky about all of his clothes and I knew it was a mistake when I knitted him a pair of socks for one birthday in a muted color that I thought would be acceptable. I found out later that along with many other things,  he gave