Three Thoughts for Thursday

February 1

~ I broke a yardstick the other day, one I’ve had for maybe twenty years. It belonged to my late husband’s mother who had it for probably decades. In both our families you didn’t throw things away, you used them up till they gave up the ghost, you used the parts that still worked in something else, and then at last, reluctantly, you threw it away. The yardstick was a giveaway from a store in Wolfeboro New Hampshire called Stinchfield’s. Don’t ask me how to pronounce it, it was a long running joke between my husband and me. I called it ‘stinkfields’ while he insisted it was ‘stinch-field.’ A reminder of a shared past, a shared laugh, a useful tool that finally wore out. I don’t know what to do with the two halves of a broken yardstick, one with sharp, splintery ends, so I guess it’s outlived its usefulness.

~ The word baklava came up in conversation a few days ago. When I was in high school, my best friend and I, for some reason, thought it was hilarious to call the similar sounding word – balaclava – by the pastry name. A balaclava is a hat that pulls down over your face except for your eyes, a ski mask maybe. Maybe someone in our school wore it and we thought it was goofy. God knows where or why we called it baklava but it still makes me laugh forty (good lord, almost fifty) years later. My brother and I have a couple from childhood – U.D. which is shorthand for our Uncle Doug, or the phrase ‘we were clean’ which was my mother’s constant banner of motherhood. They make us laugh even if no one else around knows what the hell we’re talking about. If I mention the words ‘Blue Cooler, Survivor edition’ within my old advertising community at a certain agency in Boston, visions of rugby injuries, beer and maybe, perhaps, a streaking incident will bring the same laughter. We all have words of phrases that are shorthand for a group that will instantly bring us back to a place and time that made us happy (we rarely bring up things that make us sad I think). These are a few of mine.

~ I’ll leave you with a question – if you were at the end of your days, what music (if any) would you listen to? Mine would be an instrumental from the Allman Brothers that used to be the last thing I listened to on my very long commute to Boston. It calmed me enough to face the craziness of life in an ad agency. It’s called ‘Little Martha.’ If you need some calm, give it a listen.