Retrophobic

I got this off Amanda’s blog, actually. She got an ad in the mail that was surprisingly creative; it lists 101 things you should do before you die.

Aside being designed so well you want to gobble it up, it was a pretty cool list. Now, some of the stuff you’d never catch me doing (spend the night in a haunted house, blow a month’s wages on shoes), and some of the stuff I have done (make a baby laugh, learn to play a song)… but it’s a long list, and there’s a lot of stuff on there that I think would be really awesome to do (give my lunch to a homeless person, spend a week at sea, give an emo a big sloppy kiss).

Advertisement aside, it’s a lot to think about. We’re not on this earth for long… let’s make the most of it!

Where I work, there are a lot of older customers; I don’t know what it is. They come in for ice cream or they come in for lunch, or just to sit together in the morning over a cup of coffee and the town’s latest gossip. Just like younger people, they’re all kinds. Some are cranky and think the world owes them something (more often than not, it probably does), and some… you’d like to adopt them as your new Grandpa.

Right at the beginning of lunch, this older gentleman came in and just sat at a table. We asked him if we could help him, but he told us no, he was waiting for his partner. About twenty minutes later, I saw him jump up (and I’d say he was probably seventy or eighty, no easy feat) and hurry towards the front door. He had seen his wife pull up and was going to open the door for her.

While they waited for their food, he held her hand across the table. He got their drinks and she got everything set up just how she knew he wanted it.

I don’t hold high hopes of ever getting married, but if I do… and I get old… I hope to still be this much in love.

There’s this lady who comes in to eat breakfast where I work all of the time. She’s loud, she’s rude, and her and her husband have this bad habit of ordering collosial amounts of food (which they do sit there and eat!) at all the wrong times, like when the cook is on break, or as we’re trying to start serving lunch. She annoys the heck out of me.

She came in this afternoon wanting a sundae. She came and looked at every single flavor of ice cream, pondered over every entry on the menu board, and finally, after making me stand there and wait for her to make up her mind, she decides to order Old Reliable: the hot fudge sundae.

“But hey,” she protests as I’m about to start her sundae. “I don’t want no nuts.”

Okay. Maybe I’m a grammar snob. Maybe I grew up a stuck-up Yankee who believes in double negatives. But if you don’t want no nuts, that means you do want nuts.

I resisted. You should be proud of me. But seriously, what do they teach in schools down here? “I didn’t hear nothing.” “She wasn’t using no spoon.” Come on!

This year for Father’s day, we got my dad an iPod shuffle… you know, just one of those little, fifty dollar, 1 Gig clip-on things. And of course, it being my dad, we also provided him with lights and tools and other “daddy” toys. Usually, he’s excited by the tools and the gadgets. This year he was only momentarily distracted (”oh! laser!”) and put almost all of his focus on his brand new iPod.

We haven’t been able to pull it away from him yet.

He’s not overly tech-savvy, but you had better believe that within five minutes he had iTunes loaded on to his computer, busy importing all of his music files, with the first twenty or so already loaded onto his iPod.

Today he came home and hopped straight onto his computer. “Mel! Come here!”

I went in to his room to see him triumphantly holding up a green card. “What is it?” I asked.

“25 iTunes dollars,” he replied. “Some guy gave it to me when he saw I had an iPod. What can I buy with it?”

“Music,” I responded. “99 cents a song.”

I have never seen my dad so happy. Who says iPods are just for young people and Apple geeks?