Footprints in the Jell-O

How can you tell if an elephant’s been in the refrigerator?  Footprints in the Jell-O. 

How can you tell if a friend’s been in your refrigerator?  The Jell-O’s gone, two bowls and spoons are washed and put away, and footprints are engraved in your memory forever.

This blog has drudged up and rekindled friendships for me too long neglected. I stopped by to see my daughters’ piano teacher.  Jane opened the door. “You look good,” she commented, as she grabbed me by the arm.

“Only because you can’t see her,” her husband of 67 years laughed.  Both Jane and Bill suffer from macular degeneration.  Unable to see as well as she once could has hampered her style only slightly.  She used to sit out in the backyard with a rifle and shoot bothersome gophers.  Now she just shoots looks and quips at her husband.

Barbara was another stop along the way.  We’d been roommates our freshman year in college.  I’d fixed her up on a blind date and they’d married eight months later.  To tell the truth, I don’t even remember where I got his name and phone number.  I’m almost positive it wasn’t from any bathroom graffiti.  With our age, it could have been from hieroglyphics on the outhouse.  They just celebrated forty years.  After she gave birth, we’d been close enough that she even showed me her stretch marks.  We don’t look any different except now our stretch marks have wandered to more conspicuous places. 

Then there is Bob and Violet.  Hadn’t seen them in twenty years until last week.  Violet is a beautiful (still looks the same) Aussie with a generous nature.  Bob, is a large man of German descent.  I did small computer jobs for his trucking company when I was a single mom with four little ones running around making messes.  Literally.  He’d come over unannounced in the middle of the day.  I stood at attention as he’d swaggered in.  His body reverberated with chills of horror.  He tossed his head back and lifted his large arms helplessly to the ceiling.  “I heard it on the radio this morning and, what do you know,” he bellowed, “an atomic bomb did explode in Whittier.”

I’d show him.  I shouldered my handy-dandy Wagner Power Roller (always an infomercial junkie), dripping Fingerprint White — the same dingy color found around light switches and doorknobs.  If I couldn’t fight the kids’ prints, I’d decorate around them.  Painting three rooms at once had sounded better than washing walls.

A few days later, a phone call from General Bob had announced, “I’m on my way over.”  I’d hastily changed clothes to fake “having it together,” greeted him in a stain-free outfit and the inerasable smile.

When he left, I’d strolled by a mirror.  My top was wrong side out and I’d forgotten to clean my glasses.  Speckled white paint adorned my lens.  I’d looked like the star of a “B” movie flick Little Orphan Annie Meets Minnie Pearl.

Am I the only one who thinks we haven’t changed?  Do you think it’s my vision?

Related posts:

1. List for the doctor
2. Family vacation nightmare
3. Sunday morning with kids
4. Long ago in the land of milk and cookies
5. The magic of youth