A Nation of Whiners

Speaking of that last line of Mary Oliver's poem where she says "When it’s over, I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument," could we DO  any MORE whining in this season when the earth lies dormant?A shopkeeper I'm beginning to know tells me she is amazed at how much people complain about things. “It’s so cold!” they say the second they step into her shop. Or, “Where’s the SUN?!” Or, “Do you believe all this SNOW?!”I think we all do it: whine, I mean. I practically make a living doing it, right here on the blog.This past month I whined about it all:

• How my husband caught the flu because, unlike me, HE hadn’t had the sense to get a flu shot.
• How the awful cough he had caused him to lie beside me nights for two full weeks, spraying fountains of bacteria into the air with the regularity of Old Faithful.
• How I I then caught the cough and began sending similar germ-plumes into the air over our bed for the next two weeks.
• How I couldn’t get back from a recent trip away because of the blizzard Nemo, going on and on about how hard that was, even though I was in sunny Arizona.
• I whined about having to wait for 12 hours all alone in the airport before the two ‘red-eye’ flights I spent pinned against the wall of the cabin, first by a ponytailed giant whose wide-load of a belly pressed upon my arm for two hours; and then by a pair of men who slept like the dead for five-and-half of the six-hour flight while I could only fantasize about visits to the bathroom at the back of the plane.

When you start in whining it's hard to stop.Anyway when I got home after that week away and realized that I still felt crummy, I finally made an appointment at the Urgent Care clinic. The very first thing the professionals there did, after hearing my story? They slapped a facemask over my nose and mouth and told me to keep it on 'til I left the hospital.It was a facemask, yes, but I knew what else it was: It was a muzzle and by then it was just exactly what I needed.

A Whiner Whines

I feel grouchy. I just drove ANOTHER hundred miles to get back to my real house during this my vacation week because this dumb fancy phone of mine broke and they had a new one waiting for me - IF I came home to fetch it and I’m sorry I did - because the foolish NEW phone turned out to also be so defective I couldn’t even open the battery compartment and charge it up and had to spend 45 minutes on the line with some guy in Texas at midnight. And now here I am at the lake again forced to hang around the front door like some cocker spaniel all day so that when they DO go to deliver the thing they can get the signature which they absolutely require … And I wouldn’t mind but see the SUN just came out here and who wants to be inside  waiting for some dumb doorbell to ring under those circumstances? You want to be OUTSIDE and I don’t care what they say about sunhats and the bad moles and a bulging left-cheek gland due to right wing melanoma, when I’m here and it’s my vacation week and the sun is shining I’m like this little guy here; I want to be out there on the deck too, just CATCHIN’ THEM RAYS !