FUDDY-DUDDYS UNITE – IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!
Are you “set in your ways?” Do you have rituals you just have to perform at certain times of the
day?
A novelist wrote of a character that “she sought the
consolation of underwear.” As for me, I
find my consolation in pink flannel pajamas with hearts printed all over them..
I cherish the cozy feel of the soft fabric, but getting into
them is just one of several steps in a bedtime ritual I choreograph as
carefully as I used to for my children.
MY PJs.
My back exercises.
Two minutes of tooth brushing.
Popping into bed (that delicious moment).
Pillow under knees, just so.
Radio tuned to my cheerful local
station.
My crossword (with a certain pencil).
My book.
No wonder going to bed leaves me totally exhausted!
What are the things that you just have
to do in a certain way?
When you are not only quirky but quirky alone, you can act
as oddly as you want (at least within the walls of your own house). I love to talk to myself.
When I used to goof up around the house (trip over a rug
because I’m reading a book, pour the orange juice in the coffee mug) I would
chide myself – “You idiot! What a klutz!”
Nowadays, I have knocked that yammering self-critic off my shoulder and reassure myself: “That’s what I love about you
— you are so funny!” When life deals another
random blow I say “There, there,
sweetheart, of course you are upset;
let’s sit down and talk it over.”
Sometimes I conduct whole
conversations.
“I’m so embarrassed.”
“If I were you, I’d be embarrassed too”
“But you
are me.”
I stick to rules
for these things. When a snatch of song comes to my head, I have to sing it out
loud, as much as I can remember. This works well with short ditties, like
Delicious
Nutritious
Makes
you feel ambitious!
A
giant of a cereal
Is Quaker Oats.
It gets
stickier when it’s a ballad with lots of verses, like “The Fox Went Out on a
Chilly Night,” leaving me frustrated when I can’t remember it all the way to “and
the little ones chewed on the bones, O!”
Poet Marie Howe says that the rituals of
ordinary time, like the water glass you’ve just rinsed and held up to the
light, are to be cherished. “Life is so
daily,” Virginia Woolf once exclaimed. I
find myself clinging more and more to the particulars of daily life. My pink pajamas, my bedtime quirks, my need to
stand under the flowering crabapple tree to gaze and gaze, are ways of slowing
things down as life streams by, faster and faster. Our fuddy duddy habits seem
so solid when, after all, we are passengers on the Titantic in dire need of something
to cling to as the deck tilts under our feet.
Fuddy-duddies,
unite! Send me some of your habits.
Although she grew up in New York City, Annis Pratt makes her home
in the Midwest, where she taught English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
for many years. In 1990 she threw her full professorship out the window
to move to Michigan, where she is engaged in community activism and novel writing
Passionate about the environment and an
enthusiastic sailor, canoeist and kayaker, she chose a genre where she
could create compelling fiction about ecological degradation.
At 75 years old, she feels like she is in the second out of her
ninth inning, having published the first volume of her historical fantasy
trilogy when she was 73.
Blub: The Marshlanders and Fly Out of the Darkness are
the first two volumes of The Marshlanders Trilogy, historical fantasies about
the conflict between self-sustaining Marshland communities and Merchant
Adventurers trying to drain their lands. These are page-turners about the
conflict between people who respect their environment and developers who see it
as a source of income.
links www.marshlanders.com , www.marshlanders.blogspot.com, and a humorous blog:
Novels may be purchased at www.amazon.com or www.barnesandnoble.com
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3 comments:
My quirk is I talk to my motorcycle. But she talks to me, too. And she's not too wild about my wife. Perhaps I should stop listening to the voices in my head. I guess not, the motorcycle just told me to keep listening to her.
KP
lol. I'm not alone, so I don't have the conversations, but I sure do have the rituals! Fun post.
I'm impressed by the premises of your fiction, shall look it up! And I really enjoyed your description of all those quirks, I sure can recognize them, I "suffer" (enjoy?) from them myself. Though I stay away from singing because I can never remember the words and I get so frustrated trying to remember that it's no fun at all...
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