I Am An Anachronism

A hundred years ago when I went to college, I majored in journalism because I wanted a practical, always-in-demand career and I didn't want to be a teacher or a nurse. Journalism was perfect because I liked to write and newspapers had been around for hundreds of years. This industry wasn't a flash-in-the-pan fad such as television or radio.

Fast-forward to when Boy#1 was deciding a college major. He was the best writer I knew (still is) but he wanted to major in political science because that was what he loved.

"Don't be silly," I told him. "Major in journalism, then cover politics. What in the world would you do with a major in political science?"

His college didn't have a journalism major, though, so he stuck with his choice of major and his political science degree was good preparation for law school. The advice I had been pushing so vigorously could not have been more wrong if I had been suggesting he become a veterinarian specializing in dinosaurs.

Today I heard that one of our public state universities will no longer publish a newspaper due to lack of funding and that made me feel as old as the hills. My professional training now seems quaint, as if I had set out to become a wheelwright or a telegraph operator.

It made me sad, too, because now students at that school are unlikely to learn the skills they would have learned by working on a newspaper: How to meet deadlines. The art of writing to fit a space, one that usually is either smaller or larger than what you had intended. That a story in which you have invested heart and soul can be bumped off the front page by a puppy stuck in a storm drain. That you can't make everyone happy, but you must be fair.

These students won't recognize the adrenaline rush that goes with getting a story just right and on time, or the satisfaction of knowing that they were a link in the chain of truth.

I know, I know. Today the internet fills any need for news we might have. Social media instantaneously tells us what happened (sometimes before it has finished happening), and the "slow" media is television. No one is going to miss newspapers in a few years, when there aren't any left.

But something important will be gone from our lives when the extinction of this dinosaur is complete, and I will miss it.

Only for Downton Abbey Fans

Image borrowed from Walking Primrose blog.

This post contains honkin' enormous spoilers from the Downton Abbey episode that aired Sunday night. If you still have that queued up on your DVR, close your eyes before you even finish this sentence. Really! Don't look! Also, what the heck are you doing with Downton Abbey still unwatched two whole days later? What are you, made of stone?

I'm scrolling down now, because I saw you peeking and I do not want to be the spoiler-person for this side of the Atlantic. (As a side note: Kudos to the Brits and Canadians who watched this season of the series months ago and did not leak the news that this was about to happen. Those stiff upper lips can really keep a secret.)


Scrolling down...


Scrolling...


Okay, let's talk. 

I was verklempt. I admit it--I teared up as the Crawley family stood around Lady Sybil's bed and watched her gasping her last. Those who loved her were helpless (but still beautiful--no sleeping in yoga pants in that family) in the face of childbirth complications.

And I'm sorry about that Facebook post that may have caused some stress among the non-DA-watchers among us. (Again, what are you? Made of stone, that you can resist this delicious soapy confection?) I did not stop to think that my knee-jerk post of "Noooooooooo!" may have caused concern to you who know me in real life but perhaps don't know that on Sunday evenings I live in Downton.

Really, I do. I haven't decided if I'm part of the haughty, intrigue-ridden folks who are in charge of the abbey or whether I'm a member of the Crawley family. Sometimes I'm Daisy the kitchen maid, all huffy about how hard she works and no one ever helps her and WHY DO I HAVE TO WEAR THE SAME DRESS EVERY DAY? Sometimes I'm Mrs. Hughes, thinking "I really should put on some make-up because I could look so much better, but...no, too much trouble."

Always, though, I'm one of the three sisters. They're by turns brilliant and idiots, they fight within the walls but stand in solidarity against the outside world, they boss each other around, they ignore each other. And now one of them has died.

As a veteran of preeclampsia myself, I knew what was about to happen as soon as I heard Lady Sybil mention off-handedly "my ankles are swollen." Noooooooooo!

So now we go on, having learned our lessons. Cherish those you love. Listen to your mother. Above all, don't trust a name-dropping doctor who wears a tuxedo to dinner because he's a big fat name-dropping IDIOT who wears a tuxedo to dinner.

Now if you'll excuse me, I believe I need to wipe away a tear with my tatted-edged hankie.

It's More Fun to Win. W-I-N. Win.

Want to know why I wrote the post I wrote on Friday? The one about my plans to compete in a  spelling bee? It's because I was afraid I would chicken out.

I was astonishingly nervous about this tiny little local competition in which I would get to do something I'm GOOD AT and that I ENJOY, so to help me ignore the fact that my heart rate sped up every time I thought about actually competing, I told the entire internet I had signed up. Can't chicken out of that one, Ms. McOversharer!

Then I spent the day coming up with legitimate excuses to not participate--I was tired from trustee meetings. My head was aching--was I coming down with a bug? But because I told you all I would be in the bee, I showed up at the coffee shop early enough to get REALLY shaky-handed.

By the time the actual bee started, I had lowered my goal from winning to just not being the first one out, because if I were the first one out it would mean I had lost to the second grader sitting behind me. Also, it would mean I had misspelled the word "cupcake," which was my first round word.

As it turns out, all those things I had told the Boys before their grade school spelling bees were actually true.

Spelling bees are essentially crapshoots: I would have misspelled the word that the lady next to me went out on, and would have spelled it exactly as she did, but because fate brought it to her instead of to me I stayed in and she heard the ominous "That is incorrect."

What comes out of your mouth is not always what is in your brain: The guy sitting down the row from me is a college professor, and has his Ph.D. in chemistry. He absolutely knows how to spell the word "tympanum" and will go to his grave believing he spelled it right. What came out of his mouth, though, was "t-y-p-a-n-u-m."

Being in the audience is not exactly a slab of chocolate cake, either: "It was just like being back at Small Town Grade School," Husband told me later. "You really hope the other people get the hard words." (Why, yes, the competitive spirit of our Boys comes from both tributaries to their gene pool.)

When we got back in the car to go home after the meet, I punched Husband in the shoulder of his padded coat. I had to confess what I had been denying to everyone, including myself, all day.

"I really wanted to win," I told him.

A gift certificate to the coffee shop. MUCH better than a trophy.

And I did! So thank you, Empty Nest readers, for not letting me chicken out.

What Do I Believe?

When you are a parent, you tell your children all kinds of things that you believe, in principle.

"You don't have to win every time--you need to do some things just because you enjoy doing them."

"It's good to challenge yourself!"

"It's better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all."

Oh, yes, I believe those things. In principle.

Last week a notice appeared in our institutional e-mail announcing a spelling bee at the local coffee shop. As I've mentioned here before, I LOVE spelling bees. I can tell you exactly which word I went out on every year of grade school, and one of my favorite community involvements is pronouncing words for the Small Town bee every spring.

Before I could think twice, I signed up. Almost immediately I regretted that decision.

What if I completely embarrass myself? I have trustee meetings all day today and even when I don't have that added stress my end-of-day brain is not as dynamic as my beginning-of-the-day brain. I often find myself fumbling for words--what if I get so nervous that I completely go blank on a word that is humiliatingly easy?

What if I am the first one to hear the pronouncer say "I'm sorry, that is incorrect."

Will I be gracious in defeat? Will I pout? Will I cry?

Do I really believe those things I told my kids about challenging themselves and doing things even though I'm not the best at them and trying? Or do I only believe them in principle?

Tonight I'll find out. 

Things We Tried On

So by popular demand, here are the Things We Tried On during our sisters' weekend.

1. Knitted slippers, as modeled above by Much Younger Sister and moi. These may not be the very height of fashion (or they might be, because what do I know?, considering that pantyhose are making a comeback) but they certainly were perfect for keeping our tootsies warm when we propped them up on the ottoman in the sitting room. Yes! We had a sitting room!

2. This adorable sweater/scarf combination Much Younger Sister scored at the local consignment shop for NEXT TO NOTHING. To be perfectly accurate "we" did not try this on. However, Much Older Sister and I have made a life work out of dressing our baby sister (who is the cutest grown woman I know) in clothing we ourselves cannot pull off. Or put on, as it were.

And finally,

3. This hat perched atop the mirror, which some may have considered part of the decor but which MOS and I considered it our bounden duty to put on as we practiced our round, plummy vowels. Because look! The very next night, my favorite person on television was wearing this hat's first cousin and saying the EXACT THING our mother used to tell us fairly often:

Oh, yeah, Violet, Countess of Grantham. Preach it.

The Best Thing About This Place

No one answered when I first knocked on the door of the Victory Inn, the bed-and-breakfast where Much Older Sister, Much Younger Sister, and I were to meet for our first-ever sisters' weekend. I knew it was the right place, because Much Older Sister had put together this shindig and she hoovered up all the organizational skills in the gene pool before MYS and I were even born.

It was dark, though, and after a few seconds I wondered if I had inadvertently rung the doorbell of some OTHER stately mansion in this small town. That's when the porch light flipped on and the door opened.

"Oh!" said the smiling, grey-haired woman who answered. "I expected you at the back door!"

The rest of her greeting was swallowed up in the shrieks and hugs of sisters who haven't seen each other for way too long (okay, it had only been two weeks) but later it struck me that this was the perfect characterization of the inn--it's the kind of place where you're back-door family from the minute you arrive.

I won't bore you with details of the how cleverly the rooms were themed or how gorgeous the antiques were because, well, they were and they were, and you can find pictures of those on the official website. However, I will add this picture which seems to be missing from the beauty shots the inn is using to try to entice you to visit:

Yes. I ate ALL of this for breakfast, carbs be damned. Plus coffee with cream and orange juice. The casserole tasted just like Much Older Sister's favorite meal from childhood and Margaret ran off copies of the recipe for us.

I could go on and on (and already have) about how wonderful this facility was but it strikes me that the thing I liked best about the Victory Inn was that it backed off and let us enjoy each other. We oooohed and aaaaahed over the cute little child's settee in the corner, and mentioned what a great space this would be for a family reunion, and when we needed something from our hosts ("Hey, could you take a picture of us?") they magically appeared. But what we wanted was time with each other.

The best part of the Victory Inn? It was this:

Never Had to Have a Chaperone, No Sir

I was four and Much Older Sister was five when our parents brought our Much Younger Sister home from the hospital. In the intervening half century we've all grown up, married, acquired possessions and professions (one of us is an honest-to-goodness doctor with prescribing privileges and everything), had children (almost a dozen of those, distributed among the three of us) and grandchildren (half a dozen, the market on which seems to have been selfishly cornered by only one of us, hrmph), and shared laughter and tears and hugs and fears.

This weekend we shared our very first sisters' weekend ever.

I'll probably be talking about it all week, but I'm still too delighted by the experience to pull a coherent theme out of the overnight trip.

Maybe the theme should be mattresses, which a night in a bed and breakfast convinced all of us need replacing in our own homes. Yes, we pulled the sheets off to check the brands of both the mattress and the bedding (oooh, so comfy) so we could try to duplicate the blissful rest in our respective homes.

Or maybe the theme should be good grief, what is up with the small town where this bed and breakfast is located? We're all Kansas girls, so we know that most small towns have a tinge of decay on the wind and to really enjoy them you have to acquire a selective blindness to empty storefronts and count your blessings if there is a greasy spoon open during the lunch hour. But in this town? We SHOPPED. And we ATE. And we SHOPPED SOME MORE. There were so many people downtown that we had to look for parking places. Also, according to the town's website, we could have gotten free dog registration in January, so there's that. This town is doing something right, is what I'm saying.

I could do a whole post on Things We Tried On, including antique hats and some really old-lady-ish beautiful knitted slippers Much Older Sister brought everyone as door prizes.

We talked, then we slept, then we ate, then we talked, then we shopped, then we talked some more, then we ate, and we talked, then we hugged each other fiercely, tightly, and promised we would do this again because we truly are the luckiest women in the world to have each other.

We said that the only thing that could have made the day better would have been to have our mother with us, too, and then we realized she'd been there the whole time.

Truly. The luckiest women in the world.