Journal of a Living Lady #394
Nancy White Kelly

It’s not fair. Buddy wakes up looking as good in the morning as when he went to bed. Not me. I deteriorate during the night. For the first two hours of the day I could be mistaken for the walking dead. With the help of Buddy-made coffee, I gradually morph from a silent, lethargic carcass to a reasonably pleasant human being.

During the olden days I was the one to open up the school at 7:00, dragging along sleepy-head youngsters who wished their mother wasn’t the principal. One of them is now a teacher himself. What goes around comes around. Tick tock. Tick tock. Before long, his two young boys will also begrudge having to be at school long before their classmates.

Being all grown up, and then some, I have so many unanswered questions, especially related to time. Like, why is the third hand on a watch called the second hand?
Who was the jerk who made us change our clocks twice a year? Why not leave time and seasons just like God planned it? That begs another question: Why do we say that it is “after dark” when it is really “after light”? And, do we really need a Time magazine?

Speaking of the written word, I detest the slang that invades our modern vocabulary. One example of this verbal butchery is the work “suck.” As a child, if I didn’t cry when I got a shot at the doctor’s office, I got a sucker. It was good until the very last suck. Now, if something sucks, that means it is bad. So why is it good that the vacuum cleaner sucks? Esfusication, pure and simple.

They say that love is blind. If so, why is Victoria’s Secret store so popular?

Men keep their last name for life. My surname changed April 24, 1965. Nancy Lee White became Nancy White Kelly. But at my age I am not complaining. It is spring, 2011, and Buddy loves me just as much in the morning as he does at night.

nancyk@windstream.net