I used to hear old people say “Honey, if it isn’t one thing, it’s another.” I say, if it isn’t one thing, it’s ten – sometimes twelve things. Heck, I can deal with one thing or another. It is the ten or more things that all seemingly happen at the same time that I have problems with. 

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that we are in recession despite what the political pundits say. Folks are losing their homes and well as their livelihoods daily. Gas is so high that people are pumping as little gas as possible and running out on the freeways in 95 plus degree temperatures. Then, there was the day that I was at one of several Atlanta stores that sell gas, lottery and various 40 oz. beverages when a customer came in and bought a dollar’s worth of gas. Where was he going – next door? I wondered, because he wouldn’t get far.

Next, let’s talk about the aging process. A person whom people say look much younger than my actual age, I believed that saying that ‘age is nothing but a number.’ That is until one day I noticed that there was a gray hair in the middle of my right eyebrow that was not there the day before. I convinced myself that it was a cat hair, as just before that both my fluffy gray and white cat and the little orange tabby decided they’d sleep with me. I attempted to pull it out – it sprang back! It wasn’t a cat hair. I quickly plucked out the offending hair from my brow, only to notice that that one chin hair that I had repeatedly pulled out using industrial strength tweezers had begun to play hard ball by not only coming back, but had now come back gray.

I could go on and on. For example, instead of spending my vacation leave and money on some exotic location like Aruba or Cancun that I’d have the gutters replaced on my house. Alas, I’d long discovered that any honey-dos that you leave when you go on vacation still needed doing upon return. All things considered, it shouldn’t have been a surprise when the gutter repairmen were preparing to leave and the foreman knocked on the door to get his money, that he mentioned that I might want to consider having my roof replaced soon as he had noticed some ‘soft spots’ in several places. 

‘Soft spots’ I learned were places where weather, algae, etc. had caused the wood under the shingles to begin to rotten. Who knew? Foreman ‘Rudy’, whom seemed much too nice to be the bearer of such continuous bad news, added that I might already have water damage in the attic. I pictured the next torrential rain causing my husband and me to scurry around catching leaks in every solid vessel or bucket we owned. So what’s a person to do – except maybe cry – then purchase a new roof, and pray that nothing else increases in price, needs repairing or turns gray – anytime soon.