More Uruapan

Fiction: It's Not the End of the World

Following is a fable written for the prompt, "It's not the end of the world..."

IT’S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

I checked in at the cardiologist’s office and filled out the usual paperwork, lying about the amount of wine I drink, my drug regimen, how much salt and fat I consume and how much I exercise. Without forewarning, the nurse handed me a neon-pink pill in a cup and told me to take it right away. “Contrast material,” she explained. “Lights you up for the magnetic echocardiogram.” I gulped it as she watched. She instructed me to sit down and wait.

Oh-oh! Medical stuff always makes me so nervous I can’t keep my lies straight. My churning stomach sucked up the pill and blasted it into my bloodstream. I was getting light-headed when I remembered a few drugs I omitted from the form. When I caught the nurse’s attention, I fessed up to my morning’s intake: Valium to calm me down, Elavil to pick me up, and a shot . . . okay, two shots of brandy. She patted my arm and said, “It’s not the end of the world, honey. Everything will be OK.”

As I got seated in the waiting area, my legs turned to rubber. Across the room, a woman was sleeping, her head thrown back and her mouth open, making wet snoring sounds. I hunkered in my seat fighting drowsiness.  “Came from Fallbrook did you?” a disembodied raspy voice asked from the chair next to me. “I drove in from Ramona.”  

An end table and a huge lamp separated us. The light was making me dizzy, so I looked at the floor on her side. A large greenish foot was sticking out from the hem of an avocado green mumu. While I watched, the foot flicked back under her dress, but I got a flash of three long toenails lacquered candy-apple red, like my ex-husband’s Corvette.

The mumu was printed with a corny 1976 Hawaiian motif. Black-haired brown girls, wearing grass skirts and half-coconut bras, were strumming ukuleles and wiggling all over the garment. You could tell they were doing the hula from those little parentheses beside each hip. A whiff of Amphibia, Kermit’s favorite scent, blew by my nose when she shifted in her chair. She held a copy of the National Geographic on her lap. Her long red fingernails matched the toes. Her skin looked greenish.

“Was it hot when you left home?” she croaked. “112℉ in my yard. I’m worried about my black walnut tree. You’re French-Canadian, eh? I can tell by your accent because I’m a frog too.” She leaned out and around the lamp to face me. A brownish-gray braid hung over one shoulder. A smile consumed the entire lower half of her pale green face. Her pillowy lips, like Angelina Jolie’s, were painted the same red color as her toes and fingernails. She gazed at me with the single eye on the right side of her face. Large and black, a thick fake eyelash fluttered above it. A friendly eye, if a bit too wet, I stared into it and saw my reflection, the red Pantera and my Filipina niece doing the hula.

On her left, the eyeless side, there was another fake eyelash stuck to a patch of scarified skin. Was she really a frog? The useless lash struggled to keep pace with its mate but it was a beat behind; the erratic fluttering made me dizzy. Head spinning, I struggled to process that my seatmate was a frog from Ramona with a walnut tree and one eye.          

“You all right?” the concerned Canadian frog asked. She hopped from the chair and the National Geographic slid to the floor, open to an article about scientific websites.  

Pulling herself up to her full four-foot height, she cupped her hands around her mouth and croaked for help.

“Nurse,” she called out. “This woman has a problem.”

xxx

Balloon Vendor Morelia Mexico

Balloon vendor in Morelia, Mexico. Lunapic fooling around—very early in the morning. 

More Avocado Society trip photos

California Avocado Society

What a great time we had on tour with the California Avocado Society in Uruapan, Morelia, Santa Clara del Cobre and Patzcuara Mexico!  I'd like to go back and do it again now that we know the lay of the land...using the CBX crossing, a Mexican airline and we have an overview of these wonderful places to visit. 

Our hotel.... 

 The Cathedral of Morelia.

 Street performers.

 Our guide told us the churches in town were all booked for weekend weddings—one after another. O

 Watched a kind of candy being made.

 Saw lots of folk art..

 There was a parade and a festival that night.

 Enjoyed a cocktail in the very elegant Hotel de Soledad.

 Drank wine from Baja for the first time.

Restaurant LU: Blackberries, cucumbers, crystallized hibiscus, parmesan crisps.

Sepia Saturday #387 - Travels with Google Plus

You may not realise it, but flying the Sepia Saturday is no easy task. There are dials to watch, levers to pull, switches to switch, and the co-pilot, Alan Burnett, to keep sober. You could be excused if you thought this was a picture of either Alan's or Marilyn's office desk; but in fact it is a photograph of the cockpit of a 1948 B-36 plane which appears on the Flickr Commons stream of the American Aviation Historical Society. 

Bereft of anything matching the prompt this week, I went to Google Plus Photos and searched my electronic stash using various words related to the complicated prompt scene. 

"Dials" yielded one of our avocados on a scale, which made me laugh because the scale we use is so uncomplicated.  When we pick the grove, we often "size pick" which means only the avocados over a certain weight are picked; the rest of them dangle until they achieve a market-ready size. The picking process all depends on weather and market price. Like all agriculture, it's a bit of a crapshoot. Should we keep the fruit on the trees to allow them to grow larger and yield a better price? If so, we risk losing fruit, as it gets heavier, to wind or a heat drop. My husband agonizes over the variables for every crop. When the picking crew size-picks, he prowls around the grove as they go, checking to make sure the fruit is the weight range he specifies. Because this fruit on the scale was a whopper he took its photo. 

And I sepia-toned it just for today.

Here's another photo Google found—the cockpit dials on a small plane we flew in over the "skeleton" coast in Namibia. 

And more dials—my husband fiddling with his various copy watches which look good, but never seem to "keep on ticking" like the old reliable Timex.

 Google couldn't ignore this huge clock dial in Tokyo.

 Or this complicated clock thing we saw in a shopping center in Dubai.

Like everyone today, I have thousands of photos in the cloud (mostly travel related) and we rarely sit down and look through them. A Google search is terrific fun when it pulls up photos from all over the place and then you start pulling up more and more.......

Find an uncomplicated route over to Sepia Saturday to read more stories. 

Window washing

Our theme image this week is from 1953 and shows a young Prince Charles looking out of the window of Buckingham Palace on the occasion of his mothers' Coronation. 

Winter was nearing. In this photo, we're washing the storm windows before they went back on the regular windows. They provided additional thermal protection during the cold Canadian winter. During the summer they were stored in the garage where they gathered dust and cobwebs. We cleaned them with Bon Ami and newspaper.

I was three years old and my sister Eilleen was nine in 1945. Dad may have already re-puttied the spots where the glass pulled away from the wooden frames. The smell of the putty (linseed oil and whiting) comes back to me vividly. Dad would give me a hunk to knead before he applied it to the windows.

My sister's eyes were closed as she looked through the hazy window. I imagine she was singing Rum and Coca-Cola* or AC-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive or Sentimental Journey, all tunes Mom liked. Eilleen liked to sing and play act that she was one of the Andrews Sisters and not one of the Killeen sisters.  I was a perfect audience at that age and applauded all her performances.

On Sundays, she'd create a movie theatre out of a cake box. She'd cut the comic strips out of the paper and glue them together end-to-end to creating one long strip that she'd roll onto pencils. A "movie" was created when she'd roll the strip, from one pencil to the other, past the cellophane window on the cake box.

A cakebox window my sister made into movie screens for the comics.

We loved L'il Abner and the inhabitants of Dog Patch, Al Capp's famous strip. One of our favorites was Joe Btfsplk—whose unpronounceable name was hilariously funny to me. Eilleen, who played all the parts in different voices, would pronounce it differently each time, getting a huge laugh from her rapt audience.

As adults, we invoked Joe's name when talking together about a bad luck situation. Since she died I have no one left in my life that speaks Al Capp.

 He’s well-meaning, but is the world’s worst jinx, bringing disastrous misfortune to everyone around him. A small, dark rain cloud perpetually hovers over his head to symbolize his bad luck. Hapless Btfsplk and his ever-present cloud became one of the most iconic images in Li’l Abner.
-From Wikipedia




Little Orphan Annie was another favorite strip Eilleen would act out for me. When I Googled the 40's strips, I found this one and many others with Win the War themes. My sister and I were too young to have felt the effects of war directly. Our lives in my memory were carefree and happy. Still, the best thing about my window photo is the timing, autumn 1945 (thanks Dad for your white pen). World War ll had officially ended on September 2nd. Happier times were ahead for our parents and the rest of the world. They couldn't have imagined what came next.

From the Little Orphan Annie home page. 

Visit Sepia Saturday to see what others saw in today's prompt photo. 

*Lyrics to Rum and Coca Cola

I read online a controversy about the meaning of the lyrics which some say refers to prostitution. I doubt my parents thought there was any hidden meaning in the song. 

If you ever go down Trinidad
They make you feel so very glad
Calypso sing and make up rhyme
Guarantee you one real good fine time

Drinkin' rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin' for the Yankee dollar

Oh, beat it man, beat it

Since the Yankee come to Trinidad
They got the young girls all goin' mad
Young girls say they treat 'em nice
Make Trinidad like paradise

Drinkin' rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin' for the Yankee dollar

Oh, you vex me, you vex me

From Chicachicaree to Mona's Isle
Native girls all dance and smile
Help soldier celebrate his leave
Make every day like New Year's Eve

Drinkin' rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin' for the Yankee dollar

It's a fact, man, it's a fact

In old Trinidad, I also fear
The situation is mighty queer
Like the Yankee girl, the native swoon
When she hear der Bingo croon

Drinkin' rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin' for the Yankee dollar

Out on Manzanella Beach
G.I. romance with native peach
All night long, make tropic love
Next day, sit in hot sun and cool off

Drinkin' rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin' for the Yankee dollar

It's a fact, man, it's a fact

Rum and Coca-Cola
Rum and Coca-Cola
Workin' for the Yankee dollar

Entered with a Smile

I've been writing with a great group for almost a year. We meet every Tuesday morning,  read our week's work or an excerpt, critique and encourage each other. Pat has been working on a collection of stories, Entered with a Smile, about her deceased son. She's almost finished and getting it ready for publication. We're so proud of her.