Keep the Coffee Comimg

If this were Ghana, I’d think we were in the middle of the rainy season. The sun hasn’t been around in a while. The air stays damp and the sky stays cloudy. Rain is predicted starting on Wednesday.

I was six when I learned to tie my shoes. My very patient mother taught me before I started school because other than my winter boots, all my shoes were tie shoes. I was learning an essential task. Tying the bow was easy. Tightening the loops was not.

I learned to tell time when I was seven. My first watch was a Cinderella watch my aunt gave me for my First Communion. Cinderella was wearing her blue gown.

I knew the value of a penny, and it had value when I was a kid, and I knew nickels and dimes. A dollar seemed like immense wealth. I learned to count money in the first grade. We had arithmetic work sheets with pictures of coins. We had to add and subtract the coins. I learned things like two dimes and a nickel equal a quarter.

I never saw a bike with training wheels. We all got two wheelers with backpedal brakes. Learning to balance was the key. On my first attempts, my bike would lean to one side or the other, but my mother was there to keep it and me from falling. She’d hold the bike and keep it straight. She’d tell me to pedal and keep pedaling. She didn’t let go until she was sure I’d gotten the whole balance thing. I remember how excited I was that I had learned to ride a bike.

When I was young, my mother or father cut my meat. I tried, but I couldn’t quite figure out the right way to hold the knife. The fork part was easy. My first few solo attempts resulted in shredded meat, but it still tasted the same, finely cut or shredded.

I think I learned to roller skate first before learning to ice skate. Four wheels were far easier than a single blade.

Being a kid was filled with learning new things, but learning doesn’t really ever stop. I still love to try new things. Look at me and my uke.

Today is warm but ugly. Yesterday’s rain left a damp, cloudy day. I’m going nowhere. Today is a good nap day. The dump can wait until Wednesday.

This is a quiet week for me. My dance card is pretty empty. I have my usual Tuesday and Wednesday uke practice and lesson, and I don’t have any concerts. The next one is at the mall on Sunday. We’re doing the Irish book. I will be clad accordingly.

I am a sloth today. I have no ambition. The dust balls can grow to huge proportions, black and white science fiction monster proportions. I’ll arm myself with my hand vacuum just in case!

When I was a kid, we had a TV console. It was big and wooden. The TV was hidden behind a couple of doors. Its screen was small. We always sat close risking permanent blindness.

The skates I had when I was a kid were one size fits all. You could pull the skate in the middle to fit your shoe length. A key tightened the grips on the top sides of the skates. I always kept my roller skate key on a string around my neck though sometimes I’d tie the ends of a shoelace together and use that to hold my key. Sneakers were never good for roller skating. I couldn’t tighten the grips enough. My skates had leather straps which went across the tops of my feet. They always held. The grips didn’t. Sometimes my foot would come loose, and the skate would dangle by the strap until I stopped to tighten the grip again. If you ever lost your skate key, it was the end of skating.

I loved the sound of the skates rolling on the sidewalks and the tingle on the bottom of my feet. One sidewalk beside my house was a hill which had road on one side and grass on the other. It was steep. It wasn’t for the fainthearted.