“The Dog” Journal
Welcome to the Dog Journal, a blog where I periodically share my best finds for taming those puppies that gnaw at your planner.
Could be a quick time management tip, a smell-the-flowers moment, a comment overheard on the elevator. Whatever the inspiration, I hope you’ll blog right along with me by commenting and sharing your tips and stories for taming an overbooked life.
Ramona Keeps Borders Spirit Alive
Call me sentimental, but each time a store I love closes in Columbus, OH, I hold on to some memento of its happier times. With Lazarus, it was a polka dot nightgown. With Big Bear, a glass measuring cup stamped with the signature red bear.
Until last night, the best of my store closing collection was the bright blue wool suit purchased during Jacobson’s shutdown in 2003. The shoulder pads are a little big, but I can’t part with this flawlessly sewn beauty or the memory of the clerk who insisted, just days away from unemployment, that she wrap it in white tissue before she entrusted it to me.
Last night, though, the blue suit was pre-empted when I finally ventured into the venerable Borders store on Kenny Road. Now wrapped in a yellow-and-black Store Closing banner as glaring as crime scene tape, Borders was not a place I wanted to scavenge. I love bookstores with library presence – the ones with nooks for reading, an occasional chair, a quiet feel as soft as the furred edges of an old book. Borders on Kenny was such a place. I did not want it to close.
Looking around at the emptying shelves, I searched for a memento to capture the ambience of the place. Certainly not a business book. Too ironic. And the still robust cookbook collection said little about Borders. And then I saw it: a “special read-aloud version” of Beverly Cleary’s s Ramona The Brave. It was not your usual paperback Ramona. It was a large hardback with a dust cover – complete with large print, off-white ages and hand-drawn illustrations of Ramona, her sister Beezus, and the entire Quimby family.
My granddaughter is only 20 months – way too young to appreciate the adventures of Ramona. But I can tell already that she will be drawn in by her imagination and sensitivity. So I walked out of Borders with Ramona in the white plastic sack. When Taylor is ready, I will be, too – for long afternoon reads and gasps and giggles from a book made of paper. And when we drive by the corner where Borders once stood – whether it has become a bank or a food store or a parking lot – I’ll say, “Once upon a time there was a wonderful bookstore there, and that’s where your Ramona came from.”
Holey Cow!
The black sweater was on the “reduced” rack at Nordstrom. Even so, I was sure the sales clerk would be grateful for my vigilance.
“There’s a hole in the front,” I whispered, holding the soft knit creature a few inches from her face. I figured she’d apologize, thank me for my trouble, and put it in some bin under the counter. Not so.
“It’s supposed to be that way,” she said, flipping it around to show two more holes with runs down the side, and hanging it back on the rack.
I’m well aware that faded, creased and occasionally knee-out jeans sometimes sell as new. But somehow a woman’s sweater with holes takes shabby chic to a whole new level. If the style is holey, then it seems the holier thing to do would be to buy these garments from the authentic poor who are actually wearing them and give them at least the price the designers – in this case, Elizabeth and James – are actually commanding. Here, the donation would be at least $154, after two reductions from a list price of $395.
The buyer would then have a real piece of shabby clothing. And the seller might get a much-needed week’s worth of groceries.
Florida Re-Frame Just In Time
There must be something better than eating blueberry pancakes on the beach at Pass-a-Grille, Fla., but I’m not sure what it is.
Maybe the walk down the beach to work them off, watching kids scoop out sand with two hands to make a castle, or breathing in warm salty air.
All I know is that a long-weekend escape here to visit a friend feels like it might just get me through another month of Ohio winter. Judging from the license plates along the waterfront, I’m not alone in my need for a Florida reframe.
Just in case I need a reminder that we’ll soon be living in the sunshine state, too, a beach view’s going up on my wall. And maybe some blueberry pancakes on the griddle. Spring can’t come soon enough.
Time Flies With Laughter Meditation
Every coach needs to be the client sometimes and feel that breath-sucking moment that comes from being challenged outside your comfort zone
I got to experience it last week when a seemingly innocent conversation with mine led to the astonishing agreement that I’d meditate 20 minutes each morning and 20 minutes each night. When I hung up the phone, I wish I’d countered with “How about TWO?”
Twenty minutes doesn’t seem like much EXCEPT during meditation. Then distracting thoughts bounce around like pellets in an ice storm.
Friday night, though, some friends and I beat the 20-minute discomfort by trying something new: laughter meditation, using a CD by laughter meditator extraordinaire, Sarito Sun.
For more than 35 minutes, broken by five minutes of silence, we laughed. We bent over laughing. We got on the floor and kicked our legs in the air. We danced around the room. We were a laughter choo-choo train.
Especially during the laughter but mostly during the silence, too – the ice pellets stopped bouncing. So little room for mental multi-tasking during laughter. So much room later for amazing deep sleep.
