We have not one, but two questions for Truthful Tuesday this week…
Do you enjoy taking part in other bloggers challenges? You know I do. About half of what I do on this blog are bloggers’ challenges:
Share Your World
Truthful Tuesday
Fandango’s Provocative Question
One-Liner Wednesday
Writer’s Workshop
Throwback Thursday
Flashback Friday
Stream of Consciousness Saturday
Song Lyric Sunday
Question Time Over Coffee
Simply Six Minutes (occasionally)
And of course
Just Jot It January (hey Linda, are we doing that this year?)
Blogging From A To Z April Challenge
I even tried my hand at one of my own, "Go Stand In The Corner!" It kind of fell over like a lead balloon, because I discovered that I couldn’t go through with it without becoming overtly political, and you know what happens when I do that…
Do you prefer a picture or word/sentence/question prompt? Definitely the word/sentence/question prompt. Pictures throw me for a loop. I do try sometimes. I might even do the one for this week, which involves toilet paper…
So there’s my totally truthful response to this week’s question(s).
Tally-ho and away we go! See you next week with a brand new show!
This week, Di has chosen methods of transportation for Truthful Tuesday:
How do you prefer to travel (plane, car, boat, bike, train, other)?
Well, lessee…
I didn’t drive until I was 28, which meant taking buses and light rail when I had to go somewhere, like school or work. I started taking the Chicago Transit Authority’s trains and buses as a freshman in high school, when I was at St. Ignatius College Prep. I would take the Englewood/Jackson Park-Howard line from Loyola Avenue to Roosevelt Road, then transfer to the #12 Roosevelt Road bus to school. It was later that I found out that, if you were to exit the campus through the rear fence and walk several blocks, you could catch the Congress/Douglas-Milwaukee train to Washington, then walk through a tunnel to the Howard train, and save 10 cents each way because you didn’t need a transfer between the train lines.
Riding public transit had its advantages (chiefly not having to find a place to park that didn’t cost an arm and a leg, no parking permits, etc.), but I was at the mercy of the schedules, and if I had to carry anything more than a briefcase or a book bag, it got very clumsy. Not to mention having to stand when the bus or train was crowded, sometimes for the entire trip. One interesting feature was what Bill Cosby called “A Nut In Every Car.” (Knowing Cosby has turned his name to mud over the last few years, I won’t embed the video. Trust me, though, when Cosby was funny, there were few people funnier.)
In my high school and college years, I frequently rode my bicycle (called a “push bike” in some parts of the world). I rode it to school every day when I was in high school that the weather permitted (i.e. whenever there wasn’t a foot of snow on the ground). When I was at Notthwestern, I would ride my bike there in the off-hours, when there was no bus to take me home.
When I did start driving, I bought a 1984 Chevy Cavalier, which was a good car at first, but I had a couple of accidents in it, and it developed transmission trouble twice, the second time so bad that I got it home, put it in the other half of our two-car garage, and called a friend to help me find a new car. The second car was a 1989 Dodge Omni, which, for all the bad things you might have heard about Dodges, was a decent car and one that I enjoyed driving. I traded that in for a 1992 Honda Accord, which we had for over 20 years and only got rid of (we donated it) when it was costing more than it was worth, and besides, I had stopped driving thanks to the stroke. In 2002 we bought a 2002 Honda Odyssey which is still our main form of transportation, after 20 years. We’re hoping to get a few more years out of it before the government orders us to buy an electric car.
I traveled by air frequently during my twenty years at the twenty-year job, and at the job I had up to when I had my stroke. That sounds glamorous until you do it for a while, and after a while the airlines did everything they could to make flying as uncomfortable and humiliating as possible. Without telling you what he really said, I heard someone compare it to riding in a cattle car. I thought for certain they’d have people hanging off straps in the aisles before long. And, despite the BS story that they tell about there being the same amount of room between you and the seat in front of you that there was in the 1980’s, there’s barely enough room to climb into your seat, and forget leaning the seat back if you value your life.
Anyway, I really enjoyed driving. The Accord made a few trips to Chicago, as did the Odyssey, which we bought because we were bringing things back from my in-laws’ building, which Mary inherited. Since the stroke, Mary does all the driving, meaning we don’t go outside of a radius of about five miles from home, and that suits me just fine. That’s my preferred method of travel at this point, riding shotgun with Mary driving, on those increasingly rare occasions that I leave the house.
Tally-ho and away we go! See you next week with a brand new show!
This week’s Truthful Tuesday question: If you could, would you like to hibernate during the winter months?
You know, we do this already. In fact, we do this all year. We’re not big on going out of the house. We’re not hermits, it’s just we really have no reason. We used to go out for coffee a couple of times a week, which was going somewhere besides home and sitting around drinking coffee. We don’t do that any more and we don’t miss it.
Tally-ho and away we go! See you next week with a brand new show!
There are things in this world that, even though they have a perfectly good, science-based explanation for why they happen, are still magic. Stick a kernel of corn in some dirt, water it and make sure it gets plenty of sunlight, and within a week or two it begins to sprout. Keep giving it water and sunlight, and by the end of the summer you might just have an ear or two of corn. There are perfectly good explanations, with roots in science, as to why it happens. And yet, there’s still something magical about that.
One summer, a black-and-yellow spider decided the front door (the part we rarely open) would be a great place to build a web. It was a real thing of beauty, absolutely perfect in its construction, perfectly suited to its purpose, to catch bugs for the spider to eat. One day, she was gone, leaving behind a small sac in which were developing spiders, who, very soon, would come to life and build webs of their own. Where do they learn how to do that? They just know. That’s magic.
We adopted a cat that we found running around outside. After she’d been with us a few days, we noticed Judy was pudging out a little. A trip to the vet told us that, we were right, she was with kittens. We had a box that we lined with towels and blankets, and when it was time she got into the box and had five kittens. We didn’t have to do anything: she knew just what she had to do, and did it. About four hours later I looked in on them. She was lying there with each kitten attached to a nipple and the most serene and proud look on her face. Look at what I did! It was magic.
There are thousands upon thousands of examples of things that just happen that are nevertheless magical. Science can explain why they happen, but watching the things happen is magical. True, it’s not the kind of magic they teach at Hogwarts…
But then, who’s to say that kind of magic isn’t possible?
Everything I know about opera and the closely-related operetta I learned from Bugs Bunny cartoons. I had a great-aunt Marie, who was a coloratura soprano and a member of the Illinois Opera Guild most of her adult life, but we never broached the subject of opera. I do remember her sitting with her as she watched The Pirates of Penzance on TV one Sunday afternoon, but that’s as far as it goes.
Kip tells me that, once the opera starts, no one can leave the theater until intermission. Definitely not the kind of show you can fully appreciate if you have a weak bladder or drank a Big Gulp (roughly 1 liter of your favorite carbonated beverage) before entering the theater.
In Atlanta, there’s Timothy Miller, an operatic tenor who sings with the Atlanta Opera and teaches at Morehouse College. Baseball fans around Atlanta know him as the guy who sings "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch at Sunday Braves home games.
Now, Broadway musicals are a little more my style…
Tally-ho and away we go! See you next week with a brand new show!
The Sound of One Hand Typing 