Thank heavens for the television this morning. We had eaten breakfast and were still without newspapers at 8:00, midmorning by our standards. Once I completed the border on an afghan I started crocheting in 2007, I was left with nothing to do at all.
On “Weekend Today,” Lester Holt pondered the reason boomers were all but storming tattoo parlors in search of the ultimate indelible ink. He interviewed the author of Why is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? And Other Questions I Wish I Never Had to Ask. I still cringe at the sleeves that ornament my son from wrist to collarbone and can’t imagine getting stuck with markings that won’t wash off. I figure it is just a belated expression of antiestablishment rebellion from my peers.
At the conclusion of the item, my Dear One turned to me and said, “I see your generation is descending further into Alzheimer’s.”
“We blew out most of our little gray cells in the sixties,” I answered. “There really isn’t much standing between us and dementia.”
The newspapers finally arrived at 8:30 although our delivery service replaced The New York Times with The Washington Post.
At 9:00 we moved on to “Sunday Morning,” by which time I had started on The New York Times crossword puzzle in The Baltimore Sun. The Times crossword outranks even coffee in my morning ritual. Without it there would be hardly any reason to maintain our subscription to this woefully diminished daily.
“Sunday Morning” was celebrating the number 30 in observation of their middling anniversary. Young men in fashionable clothes and expensively tousled hair commented on that milestone of maturity. One piece looked nostalgically to a past in which IBM Selectrics were advanced technology. A subsequent bit revisited old friends, only one of whom, Charles Kuralt, was thirty years old in the clip. Another subject was the beauty of pearls, the traditional gift from a husband to his wife after thirty years of wedded whatever.
I love pearls. I adore the triple-strand choker of faintly pink freshwater pearls my Dear One gave me some time ago for a Christmas I can’t quite place. I cherish the string of perfectly matched wild pearls I inherited from my mother, who inherited it from her mother, who received it from her husband as a gift on anniversary. Come to think of it, the pearls could well have been a thirtieth anniversary present. My degraded boomer memory wants to assign it to the fortieth anniversary, but as I have already pointed out, I’m not running a surplus of little gray cells.
Amidst all this attention to the number 30 I remembered something. “Did you realize our 25th anniversary is tomorrow?” I asked my Dear One.
Lacking a more formal event to acknowledge, I date our companionship to our first date, Labor Day 1984. We were neighbors in La Jolla, California, residents on the same block of La Jolla Hermosa Avenue. On that sunny holiday, we assembled a hedonistic picnic at The French Bakery in the Bird Rock neighborhood then found a spot on the Cliffside at The Cove. My son was two-and-a-half and still answered to the name “Jonah.” He nibbled and wandered and, when overcome by the need, dropped trou at the edge of the cliff and peed over the edge. Fortunately the breeze was gentle and not off-shore.
Yes, there are one or two little gray cells which I will forever guard.