This is what I see when my eyes are open.
Click here to see what I see when my eyes are closed.
Same spot. Same Queen Anne’s Lace.
Just going through a little transition thingy.
Just like me, come to think of it.
I got my Medicare A and B card in the mail last week in anticipation of my 65th birthday in February.
I had gone to the mailbox head high, shoulders straight, expecting nothing out of the ordinary. I was looking like the summer Queen Anne’s Lace image for illustrative purposes.
I opened the envelope containing the card as I turned to walk back to my door. By the time I got to the door, I looked like this current December image of the Queen Anne’s Lace.
I remember these paper Medicare cards from my years of parental caregiving. Showing them at doctor’s offices and filling out forms.
They are thin cardboard cards that do not appear rugged enough to take us into our medical old age. They crinkle and wrinkle in your wallet. The ink fades and sometimes rubs off entirely. I should laminate it, I guess, but for right now, I am transitioning to the thought of being 65, of being on Medicare, saying goodbye 2009, hello, 2010 sorta thing and these endless and ultimately meaningless ‘end of a decade” media lists of the best and worst things is making me crazier than normal.
“The 10 best Craps I’ve taken” is surely coming in some online publication. Now, that phrase just gave me the first laugh out loud since opening the Medicare A & B envelope.
Thank you, sense of humor. Stick around, will ya? I think I’ll be needing you in the years ahead.
©Pat Coakley 2009
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good luck figuring out the Medicare stuff. I’ll be trying myself in just a few more years
Unfortunately, the “best/worst whatever of the decade” will not pass quickly. Perhaps the only thing good to come of it wil be that some light will shine on the great damage done to our nation by the conservative ideology of the Bush era.
Your photos are wonderful. The soft gold stripe going through the background above gives life to the dead stalks; and I fell in love with the textured richness of the eyes-closed picture. Wide-angle is good! And you are only as old as your imagination makes you. May you not need that Medicare card for many years!!
What are you saying? That you DON’T remember the 10 best craps you’ve taken? Maybe it’s true that the memory is the first thing to go.
But for you, your humor could not be diminished by age, excised by surgery, or lost on any of your loyal readers.
Ah, we have to keep laughing or they win.
And with age comes the privilege of being able to lose the editing feature as witnessed by my then husbands 96 year old grandmother who with a twinkle in her eye, asked me if I knew what Shakespeare said.
No, I answered. What did he say?
As she threw out her hand in that oh get out of here motion,
” Ah, F–k, em all, big and small”.
Who could argue.
Your eyes are closed but your mind and your lens are always open.
Good riddance 09.
Happy 010 Pat.
Davis, Rowing through the medicare information takes a skilled oarsman! Someone said there was a “donut” involved somewhere and I got more interested but sigh, twas only a hole in the prescription drug coverage!
Oh, Don, you make an ol’girl feel good! I was thinking of spooning some of the caramel sauce I made for Christmas eve directly from the jar but I’ll hold off now!
Ahoy, Bon Bon! O me loves your ex’s grandmother! I’m not as good riddance to ’09 as I was ’08, so if I start with that premise, I should make some headway in the channel! Best to you whose words on so many occasions still inhabit my rescue drawer.