Modern consumers pay good money for cold stuff.
Think Wells Blue Bunny ice cream
Think hockey tickets:
Photo Source
Think ice fishing:
Photo Source
Think Disney on Ice:
Photo Source
And yet this year, we’ve had an entire bonus month of cold stuff absolutely free of charge, thanks to the generosity of Mother Nature.
Think Spring on Ice
Photo Source: The rain bucket beside our garage on March 22, 2013 at 1:15 PM
The past week has been so hard on my perky, Pollyanna you’re-as-young-as-you-feel attitude, it left me thinking I’m plenty older than I feel.
The onslaught began last week with the birth of our first grandchild. Of course, that was a joyous occasion, and the man of steel and I are thrilled to be grandparents. But here’s what was the problem. When I tell people I’m a first time grandma, no one says, “Congratulations, but you don’t look old enough to be a grandma.” Rest assured, from now on, when people my age enter grandparenthood, those will be the first words out of my mouth.
Even if I have to lie through my teeth.
The next item to chip away at my inner Pollyanna was a picture in business section of the Sunday’s Des Moines Register. The photo was of Mike Wells, the CEO of Wells Blue Bunny Ice Cream, and it accompanied an article about the growth of the company. I read with interest because Wells Blue Bunny is located in my home town of Le Mars, Iowa. And I felt vaguely superior to the fit, grey-haired, and slightly balding CEO in the photo. Until I read the caption which said he was 53. So he was a measly high school freshman during my senior year at our mutual alma mater.
O-L-D neon lights started flashing in my brain.
The next blow was a Monday story on NPR about when senior drivers should give up their car keys. One expert advised adult children should initiate a conversation about the subject with their parents before those parents are 60 years old. That gives our kids only four years to screw up the courage to tell us we’re getting O-L-D.
No doubt, the person I cut off in traffic the other day agrees with the news story.
The final nail in Pollyanna’s coffin came this morning when the UPS man left a package, and I could not figure out how to open it. It was all rounded corners and tape. After cutting it open with a knife, I realized the box was a fold-over-and-insert-tab marvel of engineering, kind of like the houses we used to punch out of craft books and fold according to the directions to create a little village for paper dolls. Which made me feel even older because no one younger than me can envision those little villages or has any idea of what paper dolls are. Which leads to one final question: What good is it to be older than you feel, if no one notices you’re as young as you feel?
Please leave a comment, but only if it will put the perk back into this Pollyanna!
I spent a few days in my home town last week. As is the case whenever I visit, it seemed like nothing had changed – our old house, church, school and neighborhood were comfortingly the same. Then again, everything had changed. I can’t get used to the college being gone or the football stadium sporting red paint instead of black.
One of the best recent changes in Le Mars is a new coffee shop, Habitue. It meets trio of travel requirements: great coffee, relaxing atmosphere, and free Wi-Fi. Friday, I spent a comfortable and delicious morning at Habitue. When I left the shop after a couple hours of productive work, the building across the street caught my eye. In the olden days, it was the Spurgeon’s Department Store. For the past few years, it’s been an antique mall, but these days, the front and side walls are hard-pressed to remain upright.
“What happened?” I asked my cousin.
She explained that Wells Blue Bunny (yes, my home town is also home to Wells Blue Bunny Ice Cream) purchased the building to house an ice cream parlor and museum. “But when they gutted it,” she went on, “the roof and the back walls collapsed. Now they’re in litigation, trying to determine who’s at fault – the engineering firm that said the structure could safely be gutted, or the contractor for doing the work incorrectly.”
For some reason the building, propped up with the help of wooden braces and trees visible through the glassless second story windows made me happy. This evidence of man’s intentions gone wrong comforted me to no end.
See, lately my inadequacies have confronted me daily – even hourly. Book sales are dismal and nothing I do boosts them. That means the parents who need the encouragement the book gives aren’t being encouraged. They are struggling alone, which breaks my heart. I have failed to complete the work God gave me to do.
But the building says that I’m in good company. Wealthy men and women in charge of big companies, with access to large sums of money and the advice of experts fail, too. Their dreams collapse. Their best efforts aren’t good enough. The building, working so hard to stay upright on main street in my home town, reminds everyone who walks by that someone tried. Someone took a risk. Someone tried to effect change.
“And so did I.” I whisper while opening the car door and placing my computer bag on the passenger seat. “So did I.”
This morning, I had to unplug the computers because of a lightning storm. Weather like that is pretty unexpected, though not unheard of in Iowa. The storm passed through quickly and my computer’s running again, but the little event got me thinking.
I thought about being a little kid in the late 1950s and early 60s, growing up in a small town with my sister and brother. (By the way, I’m the one with the hood tied so tight, my double-chin doesn’t show. No wonder I like this picture.) I don’t know about my sibs, but all I expected back then was that the Well’s Blue Bunny milkman would put our dairy order in the milk box twice a week and that Captain Kangaroo would be on at 8:00 every morning for the rest of my life. Therefore, it’s not surprising that I’ve encountered a lot of unexpected events. Here are a few that came to mind. I didn’t expect to:
I’ll stop there. As I made the list, more and more good and unexpected things came to mind. And my mood is a lot better than when I started. Give it a try yourself. You could be pleasantly surprised, like I was. You might even start looking forward to the unexpected, something I’m still learning how to do.
There’s just one event I can’t accept. I can’t believe they took Captain Kangaroo off the air.
