Beech Tree News Network

At 9:20 a.m. on Saturday morning, I find myself still sitting in my favorite chair, drinking coffee.  It’s rainy and cool.  I’ve just finished a chapter from The Girl In the Spider’s Web, a follow-up to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy.  (For those of you who know Stieg Larson died shortly after finishing his masterpiece, this one is written by one of his protégés, and continues with the characters of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blonkvist.)
    My husband is hunting, my daughter and granddaughter are attending a festival, the cows are bawling in the nearby pasture, and from the sound of it, my beagle, Copper, is on the trail of a rabbit.  Everybody is doing something.  I, on the other hand, have just said to God, “Please don’t make me do stuff.”  The line is from SNL, a parody on George W. Bush while he was still president.  It fits my mood.
    I don’t want to do stuff, because I am overwhelmed.  I started back full-time last week at our shop, New Image Car Care Center.  Our office girl, Jackie, started a new job at the medical center.  (We are all very proud of her.)  The job I do isn’t difficult, but it’s a bit hard on the brain, especially if you’re not firing on all cylinders.
 I turned sixty in September, and I am a grandmother.  I am being pulled in several different directions.  My granddaughter goes to pre-school half-days Monday through Thursday, and the rest of the time, she is with me; which means she too is spending a lot of time at New Image Car Care Center.  I am also trying to finish up some bottle orders for my little bottle business, and there’s still dinner to cook and laundry to do.  And you know what?  There are millions of people just like me going through the same stuff or harder on a daily basis.
According to grandparents.com, there are 70 million grandparents in our nation.  Sixty percent of us have a full-time or part-time job.  Twenty-three percent of us have started our own businesses.  We spend 52 billion dollars on our grandchildren alone, and sixty-two percent of us have provided financial support to our adult children.  I’m tired just reading about it all
I know I have a lot to be thankful for, but sometimes, I want to be done with it all.  I want to knock on Charlie Sheen’s door and borrow that tee shirt he used to wear on Two-and-a-half men that read: GET OUT OF MY HOUSE.  I want the cows to stop bawling and the dog to stop barking and my granddaughter to stop whining and I just want everybody out, so I don’t have to do stuff.
That doesn’t happen on this particular Saturday.  I have a list, and a list waits for no one, so I begin.  I wash bottles and drill bottles and frost bottles then create custom decals for the order on the Post-it above my stove, the order with the three exclamation points at the end of the sentence that says: You Must Have The Brooks Order Ready For Delivery By Wednesday!!!  The three exclamation points are to remind me of the seriousness of the deadline.
The list also reminds me that all my work jeans need to be washed, my bathtub needs to be cleaned and the boxes of empty liquor bottles on my front porch need to be moved to the shop before the UPS guy reports me for bootlegging.  I have Amazon Prime, so I get a lot of stuff delivered to my house, and sometimes I wonder what the delivery guys think is going on with me.  Maybe, I should hang some of my flattened bottles out there by way of explanation, but that’s another Post-it for another day.
  Every day, I see grandmothers who are just like me.  They’re working a public job then coming home to a mound of laundry and a sink full of dishes.  They are cooking dinner and taking care of their grandchildren and, in some cases, taking care of their grown children, as well.  They are doing stuff.  Yes, it seems mundane and mind-numbing, but it is important to the continuity of life.   Maybe, I need to rethink that GET OUT OF MY HOUSE tee shirt.  Maybe it should read: I Have Stuff To Do… WORK WITH ME PEOPLE.