Author: Bev

Have you heard the saying, “no good deed goes unpunished?”  Or, “kindness brings its own punishment,” credited in 1927 to Marie Belloc Lowndes?  And in 1938 Leo Pavia gets credit for “Every good deed brings its own punishment.”  Well, however you say it, I have a case in point.

I was performing a good deed for a beloved family member.  It was my idea to clear her pine grove of long overgrown weeds, shrubs planted by squirrels or birds or the wind, and vines, some of which had grown up the pine trees, toward the light of day.  I aimed to have it looking “park-like” for her.

After one long day, and then another, before the sunset on day two, a familiar rash began to appear in earnest up my forearms and around my ankles, oh my!  Just the day before I said to my companion in crime, “Does this look like poison ivy to you?”  Don’t we have a way of dismissing some of those impressions that we kind of knew in the back of our minds, were relevant and that we should have heeded?

Have you ever done something dumb, foolish, or heedless, and said to yourself just after you did it, “I know better than that!”  Oh, to turn back the clock and listen to your own sense.

That’s me, and poison ivy.  We have a hate, hate relationship.  Why do I get it every year?  I know better than that.  Poison ivy, oak, or sumac are best prevented than treated.  I know that too.

I’m of a certain age, and I know better than this; and I’ve known it for quite some years.  I declare every year that I will wear long sleeves and long pants when excavating weeds and overgrown areas of our own property or that of family.  But when summer comes around and the temperature heads toward 90 degrees my plans seem to vanish into vapor, very warm vapor.

I like cleaning up those overgrown outdoor forgotten places.  It gives me a warm and cuddly sense of satisfaction.  But, thinking of “no good deed goes unpunished,” I got instead, a crawling, and oozing sense of foreboding around day three.

I’m aware that my skin is sensitive to plant oils, even green bean plants send me right to the shower or I feel eaten alive.  So, one could expect that exposure to known poisonous plant matter would inspire allergic fallout, right?

The ER doc said, “I’ll admit, you’ve got an impressive case.”  That was on day six, when after a cool bath in soothing soft soap, the oozing, blisters and spreading gunk had become too much for the buckets of calamine lotion, alcohol, and hydrocortisone cream to affect.  I even tried applying dastardly smelling cider vinegar, to no avail.  At wits end, and bordering on tears, I needed professional help; even if they could only say “there, there, you simpleton.”

Now, all you young kids out there, “do what I say, not what I do;” and know that “prevention is better than cure,” especially when it comes to poison ivy.  Even with the compassion and the medicines from medical professionals, it feels like forever to heal from a bad reaction to poisonous plants.  At least three weeks….

The 1959 Coasters song, Poison Ivy, compares its titled, itchy malady, to measles, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough, all of the diseases of the time yet to be vaccinated away, and the common cold.  “She comes on like a rose but everybody knows…She’s pretty as a daisy but look out man she’s crazy…Late at night while you’re sleepin’, Poison Ivy comes a creepin’ around…She’ll really do you in…You’re gonna need an ocean of calamine lotion…”

My case was the muscle car of cases that skipped the itch and went straight from touching the plant to a myriad of blisters that burst on their own, procreating in multiples, alongside indistinguishable clusters of sores.  A little itchy rash this was not.

You know, we often don’t appreciate those body parts that most of us possess until they’re inoperable for some reason.  Then wowzah, we value how much they do for us, in their covert mechanization’s.

I’m talking about my arms, specifically my forearms.  What to do with my arms?  Covered with blisters, I had held them, using my now quite muscled traps, in an inverted U, not a jazz dance move by the way, until a familiar burning sensation took over my shoulders and I had to find a new position.

There is an expanse of happy functioning skin on the top outside of each arm.  I’ve tried every possible use of that clean skin but those positions just don’t fit into my repertoire.

Years ago, I heard something quasi-medical that one shouldn’t sleep with one’s arms over your head, that it adds stress to the heart.  True or not, I trained myself to avoid that sleeping position.  So, now it’s hard to get comfortable like that.

So, wet/dry dressings helped post ER night one, but again I’m not so comfortable with wet, aside from showers, pools, and places where wet is a clear requirement.  From humidity, to rain, to being splashed, dunked, dampened, or squirted on, I’m not terribly keen.

My spouse happily banished me to the guest room to cope with what we’ve come to lovingly label “our very own Bev-Ebola.”  This is the closest thing we could think of to call the nasty blistery, red rash clusters, outside of a fictitious name from a movie, called Contagion, Outbreak, Pandemic or some-such horror film, by the way.

My next strategy for sleeping was to bathe in calamine lotion, let it dry well and slip into bed, or better described as a senior-leap as far to the middle of the bed with a soft mattress, as I could without the assist of arms.  If you’re laughing too hard right now, try scooching onto a soft mattress without the assist of your arms.  I wrapped a clean hand towel gently over my arms so as not to brush them accidentally.

Don’t get poison ivy, my friends. “Do as I say, not as I do.”    

 

In a 1639 book of English and Latin proverbs, John Clarke wrote, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”  As with all proverbs, they only tell part of the whole story.

There are always exceptions to correlations, such as those in this proverb.  For example, what about the night-owls who are healthy, wealthy, and wise; or the unhealthy, poor, and foolish people who get up at dawn and go to bed before sunset?

Don’t we all want to be beautiful, wealthy, healthy, know-it-all, famous, and slim?  In reality maybe we’ll be one or two of those things.

I can hear some of you exclaim, “speak for yourself, woman.  I’m all of those and more!”

If the facts be acknowledged, we don’t really want all of those things, exactly.  Maybe if we clearly possess one or two of them, let’s say, health and fitness, what we want is for our life to have purpose, and meaning; to be loved.

Wasn’t it the Dalai Lama who said, “if you find a meaningful job, you’ll never work a day in your life?”  I know it was he who said, “Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.”

How many times have you wanted something really badly, even desperately?  And, you were nearly devastated that it didn’t materialize for you.  Been there, done that!

Perhaps not getting that thing, situation, occasion, etc. was lucky, as the Dalai Lama said.  Or, maybe it was a blessing in disguise.  A step to the side of the path you were trodding, an alternative course may have been the divine plan all along, as opposed to your well-plotted course.

About that desire to be one of the beautiful people, let’s rethink that.  “Beautiful people,” in the popular sense, love to complain about their physical beauty getting in the way of their other attributes.  All they’re valued for is their obvious beauty, negating other perhaps more lofty traits.  What else, they ask?

Wealthy people live in some fear that they are valued only for their money.  “What if I lose all of this?” They are at constant risk of being taken advantage of, exploited, and live primarily in defense of what they “have.”

Slim people, fit people are, well sticks in the mud of a planet filled with frustrated and envious, not-so-slim beings trying with all their might and their money to be them.  If you want to be envied, being slim is one path to your goal.  However, slimness does not wholeness bring.

“Know-it-alls” are given that moniker of derision, because they’re disliked for their font of knowledge; something slightly different from wisdom.  In fact, “knowing it all” is an illusion.  Humility, a more beloved characteristic, is associated with the the best of knowledge, wisdom.

Fame, or to be known by multitudes.  Do you really want that?  What happens when you want just a moment of privacy but all of you, your time, and your space, is filled with those who want to see and know more and more of you?

Being known is ever so slightly different from being seen.  Being seen verges on the point I’m attempting to make, that living a life that has meaning, is the primary want of most human beings.  We want to be acknowledged, seen, valued just for being who we uniquely are; not for our beauty, fitness, wealth, knowledge, or build.

• I see you, my friends.

When jogging indoors to my thematic playlist, including a song titled, Breathe, another one titled, Mercy, and one of my favorites which I belt out in private, Kyrie Eleison, meaning, “Lord have mercy.” 

“Kyrie Eleison down the road that I must travel.”  God have mercy, and protect me from myself, my choices, my words….  The 1985 song performed by the band, Mr. Mister, includes the words mountainside, highway, road, sea, choose, heart, soul, body, among others, and references growing old.

“Have mercy!”  I grew up hearing this exclamation, or was it the extended version, “Good God, Have Mercy!”

Speaking of “the road that I must travel,” the song on my list, called Mercy, sung by Welsh artist, Duffy, is one with special significance to me because I first heard it while resting in a French hotel, at the end of a long day of travel. Duffy articulates the classic, man who done me wrong hook, which thankfully doesn’t speak to me, but the song’s title means something altogether different to my soul.

Have mercy as I go along my path, whether it’s rocky, sandy, through valleys, shadows, swamps, rivers, or mountain passes.  I’m reminded of the Scripture from Isaiah 52, “how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news of good things, who publishes peace.”  Having received mercy, my end-game is always to publish peace.

But, sometimes even those beautiful mountains pose a seemingly insurmountable challenge.  Thusly, we cry out with a prayerful plea along the lines of Kyrie Eleison. Or more colloquially, “give me a break!”

Duffy croons, “You’ve got me beggin you for mercy, why won’t you release me; My morals got me on my knees, won’t you please stop playing games….”.  I’m reminded when singing along with this song that one of the King James Bible phrases I recall from growing up is, “I beseech thee O Lord…”. 

Having grown up and learned a few things along the way, I’ve discerned that beseech means, to beg.  One form of prayer most of us are familiar with, is the begging prayer, beginning with the word please, usually in rapid succession, “please, please, please….”  In this prayer our hearts are crying out for mercy.

What is mercy?  A victim being tortured cries out for mercy.  Duffy begs for mercy from a vicious circle of game-playing and I don’t mean Monopoly, more like a manipulative and sinister game of cat and mouse, not fair-play.

Have you heard the saying, “there but by the grace of God, go I?”  This original saying is usually attributed to John Bradford, who said it when seeing criminals being led to their execution in 1553.  Ironically, his grace was limited to two years, as he was executed two years later for heresy, being a Protestant in Roman Catholic England.

Grace, meaning unmerited favor; and mercy being compassionate or kindly forbearance toward someone under a powerful other, points to the kind of begging prayer mentioned above, “Could the ‘powers that be,’ kindly give me a freaking break?!”

I had a vision of Scarlett O’Hara or some such southern belle gasping quietly in the summer heat, whispering, “Lord, have mercy,” as she fans her lightly perspiring face.  In my northern bluntness, I’m more likely to speak to the heat, while wiping my sweating face, “would you please cut me some slack, dude!” 

Even more popular than the begging prayer of desperation is the Lord’s Prayer, the pastoral poem of faith, Psalm 23, wherein we expect that “surely goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our life.”  The prophetic book of Micah suggests something even more socially equitable: that we refrain from staying angry forever, but delight to show mercy to others, having received mercy ourselves.

We all have our way of begging for mercy. 

Do names matter?  Can a name define us, at some core level?

Along with gender, the first thing everybody wants to know about a new baby is their name.  The gender thing is under fierce debate these days, but I think we’re all agreed that our children are still given a name, at or shortly after birth.

Don’t we consider, carefully the name we choose for our offspring?  We’re giving our children their first identity marker when we give to them their name.

Some children are named after a favorite aunt or uncle or a “family name.”  Other names are made-up names, pulling together parts of names or place-names, with some sort of significance to the parental units.  Yet other names are of ethnic origin and again hold some sort of meaning.

In terms of name-meanings, there are books and internet references dedicated to name-origins.  Some parents-to-be consult these resources in order to select a certain just-right cadence to the name and/or character traits they hope to see their offspring realize.  For example, my name derives from the very industrious, beaver.  And so, I am.

Hope was one of my chosen names, one of those teenage fantasy exercises engaged in by some of us.  Anne Shirley from “Anne of Green Gables,” my favorite book series, stipulated she preferred to be known as Anne with an E, because it was “so much more interesting.”

Tara, was another one.  I guess I was a “Gone with the Wind” fan at some point in my youth.  “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again,” said Scarlett O’Hara; and Rhett Butler’s famous line was, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  These industrious folks called their farm, Tara; probably after terra, for earth.

“Name that tune,” has been a game-show for eons.  I mean, what’s a song, without a name?  Name-dropping is key for some folks looking for a job.  It’s all about who you know.

What about name-calling?  When I was a kid, we learned to chant: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words (names) will never hurt me.”  If you’ve ever been bullied, you know this isn’t true.  These kinds of names, now called labels, hurt a good deal, sometimes for a lifetime.

Are you a name-brand kinda person?  From tea to jeans, consumer goods have names.  Designer names enjoy high status.  Generic names, usually unpronounceable, are inconsequential; it’s the item, not the name that sells.  Some people like a label blazoned across their bottoms and their handbags; others refuse to buy an item with a name on the outside.

Key to this column, is the name game.  Names are essential to our mind being able to describe, categorize or classify information. Names are therefore, not inherently good or bad.

Using language demands we name things.  But when we attribute meaning to names, we risk social or cultural misunderstanding.

As to nicknames, one name in particular that I and probably a good number of my generation, have had to uncomfortably revert back to its original, is Dick.  Until recent years, this was the casual name for Richard.  But this use has gone by the wayside and is now considered archaic.  Dick, was also in the olden days, short for detective.  But, today, the word is understood in popular culture as a pejorative for a stupid, mean, or contemptible person, especially a man.

Short for Beverly, my nickname is Bev.  This is my preferred moniker.  As with most children, who kinda know they’re in trouble when mom uses their full name; I think I’m being monitored by the government when someone calls me Beverly.  However, when talking on the telephone I usually say I’m Beverly because in that context, Bev is often misheard as Beth.

Beverly has archaically been gender-neutral.  There was George Beverly Shea, Canadian-American Gospel singer, famously known for “How Great Thou Art” and “Just as I Am.”  My surname, Barton has been, as a given name, attributed to a number of aristocratic English gentlemen, meaning “from the barley settlement.”  No wonder I’m a fan of Sting’s, “Fields of Gold;” all about loving sentiment and the Barley Field.

Just so you know, what does your name mean?  More specifically, what does your name mean to you? 

The title of this column mimics the title of a composition we publish in our business.  The content of that piece has nothing to do with dust or household cleaning, but it was on my mind, so here we go.

Rabbits and bunnies; it’s summer and these critters breed and inhabit our rural yards.  My husband has replanted beans thrice, now.  Next, its chicken wire, I guess.

Today, as I write this, it’s a welcome sunny day, after a long stretch of rain, clouds, and darkness.  I noticed in our kitchen, exposed to the morning sun, that dust bunnies have proliferated beyond my comprehension.

There are nooks and crannies from wall to rectangular wall in our kitchen.  Maybe they aren’t technically nooks, but I’ll bet you they could be called crannies.

From a lay person’s point of view, these spaces that collect dust in our kitchen are places where cabinets don’t quite meet the wall or appliances butt up against a cabinet.  It’s probably a finish carpenter’s bane.  At any rate, they exist and there is just enough space for dust, cobwebs, and cat fur to collect, and my ordinary cleaning tools don’t suffice to easily eradicate them.

To some people, dust bunnies are temporary visitors.  But they seem to be family pets in our house.  In fact, they had taken up residence on the dust mop, no less.

Dust on the dust mop seemed unreasonably cruel to me.  I almost cried, but decided to laugh instead.

I’m aware that some folks are in to cleaning in a way that I can’t fit into my list of priorities.  I have friends, acquaintances, neighbors and loved-ones who keep immaculately clean homes.  Kudos to you.

I keep a tidy house and I “clean it up” when messes are made.  I live with a man who spills, daily.  Don’t call the doctor, it’s not an illness; just an atavistic trait he seems to have inherited from his dad.  But I’m used to cleaning up.

Have you ever heard someone say, “you made the mess, you clean it up?”  It seems like a reasonable thing to expect.  But I am the delegated rescue-person, called to the crime-scene to “clean it up.”  If I don’t clean it up now, I’ll have to come back later and do it, when its effects might be worse.

Preemptive cleaning is okay.  I do it to keep things orderly and hygienic, yet don’t take it so seriously as to be considered fanatical.  Our house isn’t dirty, it’s lived-in.

In fact, I’m a tad uneasy around perfection. Show-homes are just that, for show.  One usually doesn’t feel welcome or at home in these places.  Everything is placed.  Nothing is real.  How do you unwind in a place that is so tightly wound?

Have you ever been the cause of a grocery-store announcement, “clean-up in aisle 9?”  I confess I have once or twice been the culprit; darn those flimsy blueberry cartons, or was it grape tomatoes?

So, I’m not always the cleaner.  But somebody must clean up after us in every aspect of life.  It’s as inevitable as death and taxes, as the saying goes.

To clean something up means essentially to free it from a whole bunch of unwanted stuff.  We can free ourselves from dirt, soil, stains, pollution, extraneous matter, marks, roughness, defects or flaws, encumbrances or obstructions.

So, clean it up and set yourself free, my friends.  If someone sets you free by cleaning it up for you, use your words and say please and thank you.  They’ll appreciate it.

 

Perceptions can be misleading, depending on what you want to see.  Ronald Reagan was known to have repeated the Russian proverb, “trust but verify.”

One of my husband’s socks had been missing for a while; one lone sock waiting on top of the clothes dryer for its mate.  It made me half-heartedly sad as if it were a dove or a cardinal, lost without their sidekick.

I looked behind the clothes washer, as on the rare occasion some item of clothing will end up in that Bermuda Triangle.  Ah-hah, I was sure I had found it.

I got my grabber from the pantry closet and tried to grab it from its dark abyss.  Unsuccessful, I brought a flashlight to the fight.

As it turns out, it wasn’t the dark, missing sock.  It was a black hose pipe.

This was not the first, nor will it be the last, time I’ve mistaken one thing for another.  My perceptions can be as inaccurate as the next guy’s.

I wanted to find that sock.  So, given the possibility that I had, hope and simple longing, made me see the missing sock.

I’ve always enjoyed seeing animals on my hikes, even ordinary deer, snakes, rabbits and squirrels, and I used to set out “looking” for them.  Many times, on these walks in or near the woods, I’ve seen animals from a distance; only, close-up to verify them as a leafy branch.  Or what looked like a giant weasel turned out to be a resting squirrel.

After several of these perceptual mistakes, I made a pact with God to stop looking for animals and just see what I see.  I utter an informal sort of prayer-declaration at the onset of each outing, “I’ll see what I’m supposed to see, today.”

My observations of flora and fauna have become more eventful since this altered expectation.  I’m surprised more often than I used to be, and see as many animals as I always had.

As to social perceptions, I’m thinking of one of those inspirational quotes shared on Facebook.  This one said in essence that everyone who sees us out in public, assigns to us a persona according to their seconds-long perception of us.

In other words, we can have thousands of personalities depending on the perception’s others have of us.  Some of those perceptions will be crisp and spot-on and others will depict us, colored by what they want to see, expect to see, when they see us, or what their tinted glasses affords them.

We serve others better by not relying on our perceptions and concocting a story in our heads about them.  There is a fifty-fifty chance we’re wrong. The best way, I’ve learned to gain perspective about someone, is to ask them. I can be blunt that way.

If we want to know something about someone, we should ask rather than guess; and rely on our ears rather than our inferences.  I’m aware that most of us are from small rural communities and we’re used to the old adage, “If you don’t know what you’re doing, somebody else does.”

In our small towns, people think they know us.  We trade stories about “my uncles best friend’s cousin,” and quite a few people know exactly who is being talked about.  I guess this isn’t all that far-fetched from many of our ancestors who had the same names generation after generation. Somehow, they knew which William they were referring to.

Genealogy can be tricky because of this naming quirk, and small-town life can be fraught with perception errors because of what we think we know about people.  The benefit of small-town “knowing” is that one is never left completely in the lurch.  Someone is always around to lend a hand.

The thing I would like to see heartily embraced by rural folks, however, is open communication.  Most of us don’t read minds.  In order to act on our perceptions, with an appropriate response, we need to know what the other person is thinking, “straight from the horse’s mouth.”

This last quote is another of my potential misconceptions.  It may have crossed my mind that the origins of the quote had something to do with the television show I grew up watching in the 50s-60s called, Mr. Ed, featuring a sarcastic, talking horse.

In reality, the saying comes from the idea behind having come directly from examining a horse’s teeth, to determine its age, and relaying that information to someone else.  So, rather than relying on conjecture, perception, or inference, we should go the route of the direct inquiry or research before deciding about a person or a matter.   

Please don’t make me guess!

Back to the heirloom comforter, part deux.  Last year, after I mended about a foot around the perimeter of that blanket, the mood went out the window.

“I’m just not in the mood for this.”  Have you ever said this, and then walked away from whatever task, argument, or entanglement triggered the statement?

I’m not so sure that being in the mood for something, or out of the mood for it, means you’re temperamental, touchy, or emotional.  It might just mean that you know your capabilities, and you know when it’s time to rest and when it’s time to put forth effort; when the effort is worthwhile and when it isn’t.

I don’t know what mood is required to finish mending that comforter, but simple math tells me I have twenty-three some feet to go.  I surmise that my tidiness quotient may be just the kick in the pants I need to get into the mood to finish mending that darn blanket.

These kinds of tasks for me, require a certain mood.  I don’t know if it’s “creative”-types who must be inspired to finish these kinds of projects or if it’s everybody.

This made me think about the concept of mood.  One can be in a good mood.  Or one can be in a bad mood.

Just ask your “mood ring.”  Fitness trackers from watches to rings, tell us about what the mood ring did in the 70s.  But the mood ring made us feel psychic, and thusly good about our powers of control.  Fitness trackers can make us feel guilty if we somehow don’t measure up.

On the other hand, do we really need a device to tell us to cut the attitude, when we’re in bad moods?  Or, that it’s okay to be elated at the report of good news?

Why is it that when we say someone is moody, we aren’t talking about their gaiety, delight, etc.?  “Moody” seems to refer to a bad mood.  Or does it describe volatility?

Isn’t everybody moody then, if it is a straightforward fluctuation of mood, related to circumstances?  If this logic stands, then I suppose someone living with challenging or downright awful circumstances might be vulnerable to the moody moniker.

Some of us call a bad mood, snarky.  My husband calls it crunchy.  That word puts me in a bad mood!  Snippy is another word I’ve heard to describe a bad mood.  Pissy, is another one; although not so delicate.

We in America say we’re “pissed off” when we’re angry.  I guess this is a useful connotation of the word given its origins as a release of waste to the outside of the body.

A mood, then, any mood is a release of emotion from the subconscious to the conscious mind.  I think it was Shrek, or was it Donkey, who said, “better out than in?”

The origin of the word, mood, that has stayed around since prehistoric times, is “frame of mind.”  A frame is what a picture is set into.  Have you heard, “my mind is set?”

I think we can have our minds set on positivity or negativity.  We can see a glass half full or half empty.  We can be pessimistic or optimistic.

We can figuratively get up on the wrong side of the bed and our mind is already set before planting our feet on the floor, that we’re in a bad mood.  I don’t know why this is, but I know some days are just that way.

I’ve learned that bad moods and good moods are temporary.  They each will pass.  And we should tread softly around them and let them be.

At any rate, what are you in the mood for today?