Confessions of a Mall Walker

First, I have to confess that I’m not sure that is an original title. It just popped into my head this morning while I was walking in the mall with the other early-morning-before-the-stores-open-walkers, contemplating the meaning of life. I may have read it somewhere, heard it somewhere, or maybe I just thought it before on an earlier walk.

Lest you be misled by the title, I’m only in my third day of Mall Walking -- this time. I’ve done it before. One winter I was a faithful daily mall walker. Other times, sporadic.

Then I have to confess that I hate walking. Today I hated walking. I hate getting out of bed and facing an hour of my time melting away doing something unproductive and somewhat uncomfortable. But, on the up side of that, I know that after I have a few more days under my belt I will actually look forward to walking. Not necessarily at the mall, but just walking because it will feel good. So I’ll drag myself out each morning and do it -- just because.

I confess: the mall is not my favorite place to walk. Obviously. Who would choose to walk in a mall if one could walk elsewhere. I’m not a shopper. I rarely read the shopping ads, and I never go to the mall just to browse. Never. My place of choice to walk is Provo Canyon. It’s just around the corner from where I live, and there is a nice paved trail which meanders along the river between the mountains on a reasonably level plane. Miles are marked off and the terrain has become so familiar that I know exactly where I am in the whole scheme of things, a rather comfortable feeling. At certain times of the year there are lots and lots of fellow walkers, runners, skaters, bicyclers, hikers, and long-boarders to share the experience. This time of the year, not so much, and that is a part of the reason I don’t walk there now. A few months ago a young woman disappeared from the nearby BYU campus, and there was much speculation whether she had fallen victim to a predator in Provo Canyon where she was known to ride her bike. Made me stop to think. (My grandmother always used to say, “They’d drop you under the first streetlight,” but that is little comfort in the daylight. ) As it turned out, the innocent coed was found at the foot of a high trail by Bridal Veil Falls where she had gotten too close to the edge. No foul play. But I still feel that it is wise not to walk unaccompanied in remote areas when you are not likely to see a fair number of other people along the way. So this time of the year, I resort to the mall. Though it seems a horrible incongruity to use the words “resort” and “mall” in the same sentence.

If you’ve never walked the mall before business hours, you might be surprised to learn how many people use the facilities. Many are senior citizens -- gray haired ladies in sweatpants and sweatshirts, balding men in plaid shirts partially covered by worn out sweaters, people inching their way along on metal walkers with wheels following doctors’ orders to “get some exercise”. There are new -- and not so new -- mothers recovering from pregnancy rushing behind strollers with tiny babies smothered in flannel blankets. There are the warm weather "athletes" with their expensive walking shoes and headbands, who have chosen the mall over the canyon trail. I see familiar faces almost every morning. Faye, my friend, neighbor, and writing group companion walks here regularly with her sister. A native American man with his long dark hair hanging down his back ambles along with less determination than most. A lady in her 30’s or 40’s shows up daily in a muu muu with her blond hair falling from its failing anchor on the top of her head. And there are the mall workers, the men who ride little yellow fork lifts or other interesting vehicles around replacing burnt out lights, hauling boxes of who-knows-what to who-knows-where. Store clerks arrive early letting themselves into their places of employment via roll-down metal gates which they quickly pull back down almost to the floor and relock in place, half inviting, half forbidding to outsiders. They are there to tidy shops, hang blouses, dresses and pants on racks or clothe naked mannequins, and count out the day‘s beginning till.

I have a brisk step and a long stride and it takes me about 17 minutes to make one round of the whole mall, including each and every little niche along the way. Right now I’m settled for two rounds, but will need to increase that soon or I’ll think myself lazy. And besides, 34 minutes isn’t really exercise, is it?

My mind wanders while I walk. Sometimes I look at the stuff in the windows and wonder how we’ve gotten to be such a consumer-oriented society. Usually, I just let thoughts float thru my mind at their leisure, like I’m supposed to be writing longhand on three pages of paper each morning. "Morning pages” are suggested by Julia Cameron in her book the Artist’s Way as a means of unblocking our creativity. Thinking the thoughts and letting them float isn’t the whole key. Writing them longhand seems to be. But I’m on a schedule here -- I can either exercise and let the thoughts just float around up there, or I can stay home and sit at my kitchen table spilling them out onto a lined tablet. For the time being, I’m opting for letting them float. I really need exercise more than I need to be “unblocked”.

Which brings me to my last “confession”. I hate being overweight. I could write a book about this, but it would be a very depressing book and I’m not into spreading my depression to others. I’m overweight more than the acceptable limit (in my own mind, and on the doctor’s Acceptable Weight charts). Maybe that’s part of the reason I hate to shop. I see cute clothes. But in my size, they cease to be “cute”. Being fat (ok, there, I said the word, fat), I still have trouble accepting that fat could possibly apply to me who was skinny most of my life. I grew up with parents worried that I was too thin. I was. My mom took me to the doctor to see if I was ok. I stood behind a funny x-ray type screen where he could look at my whole body in one glance, and he didn’t see anything unusual. He could just see my bones a little better with the x-ray vision than without. Although he could probably have counted many of my bones without the x-ray. I had a high metabolism and lots and lots of energy. I could eat anything I wanted, and as much as I wanted and never gained an ounce more than was necessary to support the added height of my years. Once a well-meaning family member paid me to sit still. A teen age neighbor boy nicknamed 7-year-old-me "Bones". All that movement kept me thin. I gained just enough through my teen years to lose the label “skinny”.

When I was 25 and married, I weighed 125 lbs (5’7”) before I became pregnant with my daughter. I gained the allowable 20 pounds with my pregnancy. The morning after she was born, I weighed 125 pounds again. I still needed to exercise to get things back in place, but I didn’t have to worry about losing pounds. When my daughter was two, I started losing weight again. I thought I was sick. I went to the doctor. I weighed 105 pounds. I wasn't sick, just stressed. I had to try to gain weight. (Oh, for those days!)

Now I have to get serious about losing lots of extra weight. I’m tired of hauling it around with me, and it slows me down, and even worse, it depresses me. So I will walk the mall (and in the spring, Provo Canyon) until I lose every single unwanted ugly ounce.

I confess, it won’t be easy.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Is everybody out shopping today?

I just got home. Fortunately I only have to fix a fruit salad for Thanksgiving, but I had to go to the market to get some of the ingredients. Normally I would probaby have gone to Day's, our little neighborhood market, or Harmon's up on 8th North because those are the closest grocery stores. Today was different.

A few weeks ago, a lady doing a survey called me to ask about my shopping experience at Macey's (grocery store) in Provo. Well, I had to be honest with her. I really don't shop there very often, but I'd be glad to answer the questions for what limited experience I had had there. I don't remember any of the questions. She was cordial but businesslike, and when the survey was finished, I hung up and immediately dismissed it from my mind.

A few evenings ago I was sitting here at my computer minding my own business when the phone rang. It was a guy named Steve who identified himself as the manager of the Macey's grocery store in Provo. He was just calling to say hi and to follow up on the survey. I told him that in general I love Macey's, but usually do my shopping at the one up on 8th North or the one in Pleasant Grove because what little shopping I do, I do on the fly (between our house and work) and his store is in the wrong direction. I extolled the virtues of Macey's in general to him. He was really a nice guy and in the end, suggested that when I shop at Macey's I should be sure to stop in and see the store manager (at whichever store I'm at) because they enjoy hearing from customers.

So today when I needed more than just a few items, I started out for the store. Because of the phone call made to me to just say hi and follow up on a simple survey, I decided to go to the Macey's in Provo -- a little further than my usual stores and definitely a higher traffic area .The first thing I did was go to the Service Desk and ask for the Store Manager. The girl paged him with a simple "Steve to the Service Desk. Steve to the Service Desk, please." A very few moments later I see a man approaching from the other end of the store. He is looking right at me, and has a big smile on his face. Remember, I hadn't told the girl at the Service Desk why I wanted to see him, and all she did was page him on the overhead speaker.

As he approached, I said, "I know you must be Steve because of your smile." I told him my name and that I was shopping in his store today because he took the time to call me. We had a brief chat, with him broadcasting a beaming smile the entire time. Then I went on to do my shopping. I was about halfway through when Steve approached me in the Dairy aisle with a young man by his side.

"This is Ryan," he said. "He's in charge of our fresh foods and meats, and if you need help in those areas, he's the one to look for. Of course, any of our people can help you, but I wanted you to meet Ryan." Another smiling guy. Genuine. He shook my hand and nodded. A few more words, then they were off.

Wow, is that service or what? You can bet that not only will I go back there, but I will tell all my friends about Steve & Ryan and the Macey's in Provo. They made my day! Service like this will make them the #1 Macey's store in Utah. And my #1 place to shop.

I Did it.

Just reporting back that I finally did finish my piece on Gem Beach for my Personal History Writer's Group this week. It was just the first part, but I'm patting myself on the back for getting anything written. I don't know why that is so hard, but it is. And, while I'm confessing, I'll tell you that I think blogging is hard work too. The real truth is that baring my soul to a bunch of strangers doesn't come that easy. If you were sitting in front of me, face to face, I'd happily tell you my life story -- probably way more than you would every want to know. But to sit here at the computer and just "put it out there" for the whole world to read....hmmm, not so much.

I love visiting your blogs -- have added links to some of my favorites over there on the right side of the page. There are more to add, so if yours isn't there yet, it probably will be soon. Lots and lots of great writers out there, and lots of interesting lives being lived. To somewhat anonymously peek into other people's lives has convinced me that we really all do have much in common, regardless of how different our situations are. We love our families. We're traipsing through life trying to be the best we can be. We all have our own personal "issues" and struggles. We all want to be loved and valued for who we are. We may never meet face to face, but I'm enjoying getting to know you through your blogs. Keep up the good work.

Seven Weird and Random Things

I have been tagged with this meme.
Here it goes….....First, the rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you, and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Ok, here goes:

1. Oh, yikes! Maria tagged me a few days ago (Oct 30) and I never got around to doing this. I'm sorry, Maria! I hope this will count for you, too, and I'm tagging you back :-)

2. Probably the most out-of-character thing I can think of about myself -- that is, if you met me, you would never guess -- is that I played drums in our high school band. I discovered in my 8th grade year that I wanted to be in the band in the very worst way and it was far to late to learn how to play a real instrument, so I took drum lessons because they needed drummers. I was not good, but I was a warm body. The other drummers were really great guys and they put up with me and helped me tremendously. Band was the very best part of high school.

3. I'm a cat person. That's not really a "weird" thing, but it is a part of who I am. I'm convinced I was born loving cats although my family didn't have one until we moved to the country when I was 9. Since then I have had too many to count. I like cats because they are genuine. You never have to wonder where you stand with them. We have three cats now, Daisy and Oreo, who I mentioned an earlier blog, and MamaCat who lives indoors because she only has three legs and wouldn't be safe outside. She is my very best (non-human) friend.

4. I don't lead a very exciting life. But that's ok with me. I'm pretty happy with keeping things low-key and safe. I'm not a risk taker, and my daughter (lovingly, I hope) calls me "Psafety Psycho".

5. My husband and I were both born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, and had no intention of ever leaving there. Fortunately (because of the way things turned out), he lost his job and after two years of being unemployed, he joined the Army. I went kicking and screaming to Killeen, Texas, and eventually learned to love our new way of life. Since then we have lived in Jacksonville, Florida; San Francisco, Maryland, and now Utah. I think Barbara Streisand had a song many years ago called, "Anywhere I Hang My Hat is Home". That's me. I've loved moving around and meeting so many wonderful people.

6. I only have one sibling, my sister Kathie. You will probably read about her much on my blog because she's a very important part of my life. Always has been. We live thousands of miles apart, but there are very few weeks that go by that we don't talk on the phone, and sometimes it's several times in one day.

7. I only have one child, my daughter Gayle. I probably won't write too much about her, to protect her privacy. She's the greatest and has brought more joy into my life than I could ever describe. She's the antithesis of an only child -- generous and outgoing, and definitely not spoiled. (....a little pampered, maybe, but definitely not spoiled)

Well, there you have it. Now I'll have to find someone to tag, and hope that I can figure out how to post links to their blogs.
I was tagged by Cathy

I have tagged Lynne, Maria, Heidi, Cindy. Aprilyn , Janet, and On the Edge

Procrastination

I fully intended to get my piece written before 10 p,m. on Sunday night for our 9:30 a.m. Personal History Writers' Group on Monday morning. Grandma Baker always said "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" and every week I have the best of intentions not to be up all night writing. But once again this week, I sat down in front of my computer at 7:00 p.m. on Sunday. At least this week I was armed with a topic and some ideas to develop. No sweat. I'll whip this thing out in no time.

The topic was the fun my sister, Kathie, and I had with friends for about four summers of our teen years at a Lake Erie "resort" called Gem Beach. The word "resort" is used loosely here, very loosely. Gem Beach was a community of beach cottages with amenities such as a dance hall, penny arcade, skating rink, and marina located on Catawba Island east of Port Clinton, Ohio, by maybe twenty miles. It was neither new nor fancy, but it was surely a great place to have fun. After our having spent all of our growing up vacations fishing in Canada, going to the beach for a week was like dying and going to heaven for teenage girls. Lots of sun, sand, and of course, boys.

I launched into my first paragraph, the topic sentence of which had been rolling around in my mind for a few weeks. Hmmmm. Didn't jump off the page like I had expected. A little flat, to say the least. No worries, I'll come up with something else as I spew the rest of the fun onto the computer screen.

Second paragraph. The old player piano that sat on the front jalousied porch -- we had some of the most fun with three or more of us squeezed onto the rickety piano bench, clinging tightly to the piano as we pumped the pedals and sang "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" and other old songs at the top of our lungs. As I started to write about the player piano, the names of a few of the old songs came back to me -- Walkin' My Baby Back Home, It Had to be You, Singin' in the Rain, and our all time favorite, The Ben Hur Chariot Race -- but there had been a whole closetful of piano rolls. What were the other songs we sang? Not that that was important to what I was writing, but it really bugged me that I couldn't think of more. So I automatically reached for my cell phone to call the other half of my collective memory, my sister Kathie, who lives two time zones to the east.

"Kathie, I'm writing my thing for tomorrow and I need your help. It's on Gem Beach and I'm trying to think of some of the other songs we played on the player piano. Which ones do you remember?"

Fortunately, she really is the other half of my brain, and the ones she came up with were totally different than the ones that I had thought of: Yes, We Have No Bananas, Red Wing, Carolina in the Morning, Bye Bye Blackbird. Great! Maybe a little brainstorming might help here with the rest of this story.

"Remember the year all the guys from school came up? That was your senior year."

"No it was my junior year because my senior year everyone had jobs."

"Kathie, I'm sure it was the year you graduated. That was the year that all the kids from Waite High School came up, too."

"Pam, the guys came up two years."

"Gee, Kathie, I don't remember that. They only rented that cottage down the road your senior year."

And so the conversation continued until we were both very confused about what happened when. Not that it was important, but golly, you think you'll never forget something so important and here you are many years later a little confused. A lot confused.

Suddenly I remembered a photo album -- the kind that has black pages and the photos are affixed by black photo corners -- buried in a box somewhere in the basement that had mostly the pictures of our Gem Beach adventures. Brilliant! That would solve the mystery. Carrying Kathie with me on the cell phone as I dug in the bowels of our storage shelves for the right box, I found the album. It was in the first box I opened.

I marveled that I had been so doggone smart to put these specific photos into an album, labeled with people's names and the dates of our weeks of vacation there, when I had been a mere babe and had no clue that many years down the road I would need this information. Feeling pretty smug gave way to humility when I realized my older sister had remembered the sequence of events those summers better than I had. I described the pictures to her and we chuckled together at some of the memories. I wished she could be browsing the album with me.

Almost an hour after our conversation began, it ended with me sitting at the computer, a paragraph and a half written. Heck, it was only 8 PM, I would scan a few of these pictures and email them to her. If I hurried, she could see them yet tonight -- remembering the two hour time difference. I was only going to scan a few of the better ones, but then I thought as long as I was scanning a few, I really ought to do them all in order.

Out came the pictures one by one, and placed on the scanner, scanned, cropped, adjusted, named and saved. There weren't really that many, maybe 35 or 36, but each step took a few minutes. And of course I got alittle off track when I remembered specifically two pictures taken at Gem Beach that weren't in the album. Hmmmm. Where were they?

Now you have to understand that I am a "family history packrat". I have filing cabinets full of "stuff" about our family -- birth and death certificates of long dead grandparents, aunts and uncles; locks of hair tied in faded ribbon; funeral record books, old drivers' licenses; pedigreee charts and family group sheets; cemetery maps and plot numbers; old letters; newspaper clippings, and oh, so much more. And then there are the pictures. I have a bookcase filled with photo albums. I have thousands more pictures in shoeboxes in chronological order (some of them anyway) that haven't yet gotten into albums. And I have other boxes of our older family photos. That may make it sound like I should be able to put my hands on any picture because I'm so organized. I'm not organized. It just sounds like it.

Fortunately, once again I lucked out and went right to a photo-organizer box that I had bought at Costco a year or so ago and within about 10 minutes I had found the two pictures I had been looking for, along with one that would make good blackmail material against Kathie. Well, not really. We didn't do anything that was that bad. But it was a photo of her wrestling with a guy that used to hang out at our house -- presumably because he liked our Mom, but really because he had a secret crush on Kathie. Anyway, they really were just horsing around.

Laughing, I quickly redialed Kathie to tell her about my "find". I asked her tauntingly if she wanted me to post the incriminating snapshot to our MyFamily.com website so she could see it or if she'd rather that I email it to her privately. A wicked-sister snicker erupted from my throat. She opted for the email. What else could she do? Her reputation was at stake.

I scanned, cropped, adjusted, named and saved the photo. Then emailed it to her with glee and a few more chuckles.

While I waited for her to call me back in hysteria, I continued to scan the Gem Beach pictures.
It was now after 9 PM. My story for Monday was hanging on the page at one and a half paragraphs. Bad paragraphs. Ones that most certainly had to be rewritten, fleshed out, plumped up and added to. Twenty minutes went by. No call back. Did she go to bed? Was she mad at me? Nah, she's never mad at me. But why didn't she call? Well, I'd just keep scanning until I heard from her. Ten more minutes. Finally the phone rang.

"Pam, aren't you going to send me that picture?"

"Kathie, I did. Didn't you get it?"

"No, it's not here."

"Uh-oh. I bet I sent it to the wrong email address."

"You better not have!"

"No, I didn't send it to anyone else, but I bet I mis-typed your email address."

I went to my email and sure enough, the email and infamous picture had bounced back to me. I re-sent. Ten minutes later, Kathie called again.

"Pam, that's not me. You can't see my face. It's not me!"

"Kathie, I remember taking that picture, and it is you!"

After a brief discussion, the "other half of my collective memory" dismissed me. It was not her, she insisted, and even if it was, she did not believe it because she didn't remember it and could not see her own face in the picture. Period. Discussion over. We laughed and called it a night. Past her bedtime for sure, and certainly creeping up on mine.

The first batch of Gem Beach pictures was scanned and saved to electronic media for our posterity. Not that they will care too much about the fun we had many years ago with people they will never know. Those two short paragraphs are still hanging on an otherwise blank page. The story that goes with the pictures is still floating around inside my head from which it has yet to escape in any meaningful way. I had nothing to read in our Writers' Group this morning. Maybe I can start now for next week's meeting...

Nah, it's too early.

Fall Cleanup

My least favorite outdoor job is done. Well, at least the front yard part. We enjoyed the flowers all summer -- poppies, Siberian iris, yarrow, lavender, daisies, amaryllis, black-eyed Susans, and others whose names I’ve forgotten. But other than one small stalk of dainty white amaryllis and a tiny determined black-eyed Susan, they have quit blooming and are succumbing to our periodic light frosts. It was time. So I went out this morning with my clippers and rake, and did the deed. So sad.

I was about three minutes into the job when who should show up but Daisy, one of our bookend cats. We have two, a brother and sister, who are both mostly white with ears, tails, and spots of a different color -- Daisy’s alternate color is yellow, and Oreo’s is black. They are outside cats now, since MamaCat came to live with us -- a story for another time -- and claim most of the neighborhood as their own. If my husband or I am outside, they seem to instinctively know, and come wandering home. Which Daisy did quickly this morning. She hung around supervising the job until it was time for the bagging and cleanup. A girl after my own heart, Daisy doesn’t like that part either. So she wandered over to inspect the bags of leaves that 80-something year old neighbor Bernice put out at the curb. She stayed away until the cleanup was done, then like a naughty 8 year old caught avoiding work, sheepishly wandered back. Daisy talks to me while I work. I say, “Daisy?” and she replies, “Meow.”

My friend, Lynne, was over a week or so ago and walked home. As she went around the corner from our house, she saw Daisy sitting on the steps of our neighbor’s house. Lynne asked her what she was doing there, and Daisy replied, “Meow.” Lynne spoke to her again, and Daisy responded appropriately. Lynne called me later to tell me of the conversation. A day or two later, I saw Daisy was walking home from the other side of our cul-de-sac past little Maia, a neighbor girl who was playing at the curb. Daisy paused, turned and looked at Maia and said, “Meow.” Then continued home.

Oreo doesn’t talk. He is the strong silent type, rubbing his white fur all over whatever dark pants you are wearing. If you sit down, he insists on being on your lap. If you push him off, he’ll wait a minute and try again, just to be sure the push wasn’t an accident. I don’t know where Oreo was this morning, but he didn’t join Daisy and me in our fall yard duties. He seems to prefer the winter snow-shoveling chores. He’s very easily “lost” in the snow, and sometimes I just see his black spots skipping across the latest shovel full of snow I’ve tossed. He chases it.

So the front flower bed is harvested of its dead debris. I’ll tackle the back yard part of the cleanup with a little more enthusiasm knowing that Daisy, and maybe even Oreo, will come around to supervise.