Oh, for crying out loud! Just do your job.

 I am having a very hard time believing that my life has completely changed and that Covid is to blame.  Prime example would be my trash service, or rather lack of it.  I got my bill.  I picked up the phone and called the office and paid my bill.  I know if I do not pay when I get the bill that I will do the procrastination thing and end up receiving a friendly reminder.  Most of my bills are on level pay with an automatic deduction from my bank account.  This one is one I need to pay every 3 months, so I paid it.

Next week I did not have much trash and so I am not sure if it was picked up or not.  Week 2 and no trash pickup.  So I called the office.  "Oh for sure!  So sorry!  Shall I send a special truck out?"  I did not think that was necessary.

Week three and the trash is now up over the top and the neighbor cats are having a field day!  So once more I called the woman  who is now my sounding board for frustrated old ladies who are spending a lot of time on the back burner!  

Of course she checked and they must have just missed me quite by  accident.  Could I just load it into the car and bring it out to the yard?  This struck me as rather ludicrous to say the very least!  I am 80 years old and drive a Honda Fit!  I am doing damn good to get a bag of groceries in it!  Trash is heavy and this is now beginning to smell like garbage.  I do not want to touch it, let alone load it in my car and haul it somewhere that I do not know where it is.  She assured me that this time my trash would be picked up next Thursday as scheduled.  Or Friday if it snowed, which of course it did.

By this time, the dumpster was overflowing, so I had wrapped it with a rubber rope and taken it to my back door to deter the 8 cats that live next door and love to forage.  So, I pulled it to the front yard for the trash man on Thursday.  It set on the front parking all Thursday night.  I did not untie the rope.  I thought I would run out when the man arrived.  

Friday morning dawned and my hopes soared.  Friday night I dejectedly drug that damn thing back to the back yard! Saturday we repeated the scenario.  Today is Sunday.  Tomorrow is Monday.  My trash day is Thursday.  I am beginning to see a pattern here.  Had I not paid my bill, they would tell me my trash would not be picked up because I did not pay.  So...... now what?

I will call out there tomorrow and she will tell me how sorry she is, but you know what?  Sorry doesn't cut it.  Society has rules and one of them is that we pay our bills on time.  I did that and here I set a month later with the same damn trash that I had when I paid my trash bill!  

So, do you have any idea how I can get all that trash in my car to haul it across town?  Will the secretary come to my car and unload it for me?  Or better yet maybe I can just take the tote up to South Road and leave it there.  Someone will see their name on the side and report it as abandoned.  Course that does not do anything about the 3 months of service that I have paid for, does it?

I will call the company Monday and the lady will be very sorry, but you know what, sister?  Sorry isn't going to cut it this time.  I am 80 years old and tired of being screwed with.  Every bill I have is on auto pay so I do not have to screw with people who do not give a damn about whether my trash gets hauled off or not!  You are not the only trash company in town so here is the deal....  I am going to send you a copy of this blog and then Monday morning I am going to call you, cancel by service and demand my money back.  Then I am going to call the Better Business Bureau and tout you as the worst trash service in town.

If you are so busy that you can not service your customers, you sure do not need any new ones!

In a perfect world.

I have a little grandson who is going to be 4 in February.  In a perfect world he would be my great grandson, but as you all know, this is not a perfect world.  He is very smart, or at least I think so.  My mind does not recall how old my oldest child was when I was divorced and began supporting myself by working 2 and 3 jobs.  The point here is that I never kept the baby books up to date.  I do not remember when any of them started walking, nor what their first words were.  I do not recall when they started stringing words into sentences, nor when they picked up a pencil and wrote.  In a perfect world, I would have done that, but in the reality that was my life, a roof over our heads and food in our tummies far outweighed the baby books.  We all survived.

I had 5 children,  8 grand children, and 11great grand children.  I now have 6 children, 7 grand children and 10 great grand children.  There have been no deaths, just a reshuffling of status.  Kenneth and I adopted one of the grand children, which makes him a child now instead of a grand child.  This also makes his son a grand child instead of a great grand child.  And that , my friends is how I now (at 78 years of age)  have a 3 year old grand son.  And this also brings me to the point of this story.

For privacy sake, I shall call him Little Boy.  Little Boy goes to pre school and is very smart.  My children went to Grandma Bensing who was paid to keep them alive for however many hours I was at work.  Little Boy is 3 1/2 years old and knows his alphabet, his numbers and speaks in sentences.  He spends 2 days and one night with me.  It seems to me, that every week he is growing and maturing into a little old man.  I do not remember how my kids grew.  It seems like they were little and then they were big and then they were gone and I never saw it happen.  I have their school pictures and I remember some of the things they said that surprised me, but I just do not know when it happened.

I remember once when Susie was tiny, they wanted to take her to school for show and tell.

I remember when we had a fluffy puppy and they gave it a bath and when the hair got wet it scared them because "Fluffy's bones are poking out!"

Debbie was always the little mother.  Came from being the oldest, I guess.  I sent her to Church group one Saturday.  It was on the river.  She left the group and walked up to my working place which was about a mile and a half up main street.  They could not find her when it was time to leave.  I received a frantic phone call wanting to know where she was.  At that time she was walking and no one knew where she was.  But I do not remember how old she was.  Probably 10 or so.

I remember Sam carrying on long conversations with the cat.  I remember being at the bank with him one day and he wanted something and I told him I did not have money.
He said "Why are we here?"
"This is where I bank."
"Get some money from here."
"There is no money in here."
"Well what kind of bank is it that has no money?"

Dona and Patty always slept together wrapped in each others arms.  Patty would fall asleep when I brushed her hair.

Sam had a speech impediment and could not make the "h" sound.  This made the teacher think that his father was a hard working man who should be providing for us better because he "did three jobs" instead of "Daddy does tree jobs."

I never missed a program at school, or a conference, or an outing, or a birthday.  I just did not write it down.

So now when Baby Boy does something, I am amazed.  He speaks in sentences.  Wednesday night he counted his toes.  Several times.  He had 10.  I have a pair of skeleton shoes which separates my toes into 4 compartments on each foot, the 2 small toes going in one slot.  He counted my toes.  I had 8.  He counted again and I still had 8.  He counted his.  He had 10.  I finally had to take the shoes off so he could get an accurate count.  Good memory and reasoning skills there.

He likes to eat Chinese so we stop and I order one meal with the fried rice in a separate bowl.  That is all he wants.  His dad is a meat eater; he could care less. My kids ate anything that did not eat them first.

He raked the yard yesterday with the mop.  His dad grew pot in the closet down stairs.

His dad took him fishing and he caught a cat fish.  When Bret asked him why he did not take the fish off the hook, he said, "Because I am too afraid."

It makes me very sad when I look back over my life and see what I missed raising my kids.  I should have had time to write things down, but the time did not come until later in life and now I have to rely on memories.  Most of my memories are shrouded in a cloak of sleep deprivation and running from one job to another.

I only wish I had taken the few moments it required to jot it down, but at that time other things took precedince.  Now it is too late, and when I die the memories will die with me.

And that makes me very sad.