This is a follow up to the previous blog post titled The Price of Pizza.

This is a story of a wrong made right. Of the power of the people. Of the little guy getting a win. Of the free-market capitalist system working as it should.

You may recall that in The Price of Pizza I talked about how my favorite pizza place, Maple Glen Pizza, changed their pepperoni from the large, generous slices they used to have to small, little stingy ones. This altered the overall taste of the pizza and what was before, hands down, the best pepperoni pizza ever, became just an average, regular, so-so pepperoni pizza.

My sister, niece, and I were having a texting conversation of Seinfeldian proportions the other night. It started off with me referencing my Girl/Empty Nester Dinner (see previous blog post on that topic). I mentioned that it included grapes.

My sister, who was also having a Girl/Empty Nester Dinner of her own, said that hers did not include grapes because when she tasted one at the store they were sour.

“You taste the grapes before you buy them” I asked?

“Yes, she said. “Just like Nanny would when buying them from the huckster.”

My niece replied with, “I taste the grapes because she does.”

“Goodness gracious great balls of fire,” I exclaimed the other day.

Ernie looked up from his puzzle, puzzled by my words. “What did you just say,” he asked?

“You heard me right,” I said. “Goodness gracious great balls of fire.”

He said, “Seriously? Who says that anymore?”

“Well, clearly, I do. I am making an effort to curse less, “ I offered by way of explanation.

Cursing. There was a time when cursing did not come easy for me. I grew up in a non-cursing household. I don’t think I have ever heard either of my parents utter a single curse word. Unless you count Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—which I will come back to in a minute.

Today being Easter Sunday, it seems the appropriate time to share the story of The Easter Bread and The Wedding Ring. I’ll save the blog post on cursing for next week.

First, a little background. Italian-Americans have a lot of traditions and a lot of the traditions revolve around holidays and food. Easter is no exception.

We make this most amazing bread for Easter. It’s so good, I never understood why we couldn’t make it year-round. I guess it wouldn’t be called Easter Bread if that were the case.

Growing up, my mom, aunts, grandmother would all bake the Easter Bread. Those loaves of bread were like currency too. An aunt might drop by for a cup of coffee and say, “Oh, here’s an Easter Bread for you. I had some extras.” You truly could never have enough Easter Bread.

Ernie and I were raised with two entirely different approaches to grocery shopping. His was Frugal Core. Mine was What’s A Coupon?

As you can imagine, these two diametrically opposed philosophies led to some clashes of epic proportions early on in our marriage.

I bought a shirt the other day. The first time I wore it, I noticed something bothering me. It was the 500 tags sewed into the side seam of the shirt.

There used to just be like one, two tags tops on an article of clothing. The material type and washing instructions.

Even those two tags would usually require cutting off as they would be itchy against the skin. And you had to cut them, not rip them as I sometimes would do. Ripping them risks ripping out the seam and could leave you with a hole.

Cutting the tags off with scissors requires the skills of a neurosurgeon though. If you don’t get it precisely right the remnants of the tag will still be itchy and bothersome. So you’ve got to cut it closely enough to avoid that scenario.

Wow. I finally get one up on the aging process, but who would ever know? It remains hidden, never to see the light of day and only was recently revealed to me via an X-ray.

I went to an orthopedic doctor a couple of weeks ago. I had this bump on the back of my hand that my primary doctor thought was a ganglion cyst.

The orthopedic doctor examined it and said, “Nope, not a ganglion cyst. Looks like some arthritis forming. Can happen with aging, and the bones start to bump up against each other.” Or something like that. I can’t really remember the details (also something that can happen with aging).

He said, “But let’s get some X-rays to be sure.”

You know those Progressive commercials where the Millenials are turning into their parents and Dr. Rick tries to help them?

Well, paging Dr. Rick for Baby Boomers turning into their parents.

It struck me the other day when I was having a conversation with my friend. I was meeting her for lunch at a place about a 20 minute drive away. She had also invited me back to the same area for a happy hour with former coworkers.

Paradox. A situation, person or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.

Paradox number 1. I love the Grateful Dead. I hate going to their concerts.

Now, normally, any band I love, I love going to see them live in concert.

I love the Grateful Dead, but had never been to any of their shows until I was married to Ernie.

Ernie not only loves the Dead, but is indeed a Deadhead. A super fan for any of the uninitiated.

So much so that the song he picked (with her approval of course lol) for the father of the bride dance at our daughter’s wedding was Scarlet Begonia. H

He even surprised her with a scarlet begonia and tucked it into her hair. Afterwards, the bartender told us that that was an epic father/daughter dance and that he had never seen a Grateful Dead song for one before.

So, in the mid to late ‘80’s when he realized I had never been to a show, he couldn’t wait to take me.

How much did your Valentine’s Day cards set you back, last week?

A few blog posts ago we took a look at the price of pizza. This week let’s take a look at the price of greeting cards.

When did a greeting card go from costing $1.50 to $8.00? Is it just me, or is $8.00 for a greeting card ridiculously expensive?

Especially for something that someone will read, and whether it’s later that day or days later, will eventually toss it in the trash. Unless they are a hoarder. In which case, they will keep it, along with any other greeting card they ever got, forever.

No one was more disappointed than me when our local gift shop, which sold their greeting cards at 50% off and I never had to spend more than $2.50 for a decent card, went out of business. I no longer have a go to discount card store.

Talk about losing hours endlessly scrolling through social media?

That’s got nothing on losing hours endlessly watching on demand streaming tv.

How did we ever watch a weekly tv series in the past? That seems so antiquated now. Kids today could never imagine having to wait a week to get the next episode of whatever show they were watching.

Now when you watch a series on Netflix you build your cocoon—blanket, drink, snacks and you don’t leave for HOURS, possibly even days. Just. One. More. Episode. You don’t even have to do anything to get the next episode—it just comes up on its own in seconds. And just like that, 10 hours have gone by.

Social media. Because your life isn’t complete unless you are up to date on what your neighbor is cooking for dinner, what that person you haven’t seen in 30 years is doing for vacation, and what some distant relative’s political views are.

My introduction to social media happened one day when my husband Ernie asked me how my one brother was doing after his surgery. I looked at Ernie quizzically.

“What surgery,” I asked?

“I don’t know,” he answered, “but he posted something about it on Facebook.”

Seriously—we’ll look at each of these individually, starting with smart phones this week, but all three can be categorized as time sucking vehicles.

As you get out of bed in the morning, you think, oh I’ll just glance at the headlines on my news feed, 30 seconds tops. Next thing you know, you’re late for work. But let’s explore, shall we?

Smart phones. These things have become like an appendage to our bodies. We all know the outright panic that occurs when you accidentally misplace your phone or can’t remember where you left it.

And God forbid you leave the house without it. You absolutely must turn around and go back to get it, no matter that you are thirty minutes in to your 60 minute work commute (pre-Covid of course).

And then there’s the charging anxiety. Constantly checking your battery life. 100% = yay! 75%= oh, ok, that’s still good, nothing to be alarmed about, 50%=hmm, getting low, half life here, 25%= oh shit, where’s my charger? Gotta get it charged. It’s gonna run out. When you hit 20% and you get that message that it’s going on low power mode to conserve battery, your anxiety is at a 10/10.

You madly text the person you are texting that your battery is low and you might lose them. You scrounge your purse for your battery charger to plug in, or you’re smart enough to have an external charger and you hope you were smart enough to make sure that was fully charged.

Ah, the indignities of aging keep-a-coming. Despite your best efforts to tone, tighten, and strengthen your aging body, one must recognize that there are things outside of one’s control. No matter how healthily you eat, how much exercise you do, when it comes to the aging body, well, it’s gonna do what aging bodies do at some point.

There I was the other night, cozily ensconced beneath my blanket, sitting on my sofa, waiting for the Chiefs-Dolphins football playoff came to come on.

Ernie walked in and asked, “Did the game start yet?”

I looked up to answer him and I saw fireworks. Now, to be fair, what married woman doesn’t see fireworks when she sees her beloved husband? Am I right ladies? But no. These weren’t the figurative kind. They were the literal.

“That is asinine.”

So texted my dear friend Christine to me when I told her I was participating in Dry January.

She followed up with, “All things in moderation” and “January has to be the worst month anyway for something like that when it’s cold, dark, and not much to look forward to. June would be a much better month.”

I followed up with, dang, she’s right and went ahead and poured myself a glass of wine, thereby removing myself from the Dry January experiment into the Damp January one.

Oh, it’s a slippery slope when you find yourself on Mount Aging. And you will, one day, find yourself on that slope, if you aren’t there already. It’s a fact of life. Like death and taxes. It comes for us all.

But don’t dismay. All is not gloom and doom. The key is to be aware and have the knowledge to navigate that slope. And most importantly, acceptance. Once you accept the situation, adaptation, the key to Darwin’s theory of evolution mind you (smart man), life will be easier.

Ernie, who retired a year ahead of me, took up kayaking. His sister introduced him to it, and he and she and sometimes a couple of her friends would go kayaking on the various lakes and creeks in the area.

Ernie encouraged me to try it. I thought it sounded like fun. Why not give it a try? I’m an outdoorsy person, right? At this point, thoughts of our ill-fated ski trip (see previous blog post) should have come to mind and raised some red flags.

Like the Robot in Lost in Space who would warn Will Robinson about impending danger, my internal warning system should have kicked in with a “Danger, Mary Lunghi, Danger”.

But I blithely gave him the go ahead to purchase two kayaks. He was clearly into it, I thought I would enjoy it as well, and it would be a fun, outdoorsy activity for us to do together in retirement.

The year was 1988 or thereabouts. I was working at an agency in downtown Boston. In a tall, skyscraper type building located at 101 Arch Street to be exact.

One day, the windows were being washed. By a very hot guy. Needless to say that all of the young women in the office, about 5 or 6 of us, had congregated in the hallway outside of the office of the windows he was cleaning.

We thought he would not be able to see us if we stood in the hallway (we didn’t want him to think us rude or make him feel uncomfortable), though we could see him clearly. Very clearly. Did I mention he was hot?

As he completed that office’s windows, he slid himself over to the next office’s windows. We shuffled ourselves like we were a single entity down the hallway to the next office where we continued our gazing.

Used to be, that if asked about the categorization of clothes, I’d have responded as follows: athleisure (which in the old days we just called sweats), casual, work casual, professional, dressy, and formal.

However, post-Covid and post-Retirement, there is another, far more important categorization that trumps all the others, IMHO. And that is, soft clothes and hard clothes. Really, all clothing can be boiled down to those two descriptors.

That’s what it has come down to for me. And guess where I fall? If you thought soft clothes, you thought right.

There are two kinds of people. Those who buy real Christmas trees and those who buy fake ones. I suppose you could say that there is a third kind, those who don’t buy any Christmas trees at all. But for the purposes of this story, we will not include them.

So, real vs fake Christmas trees. There is no middle ground here. Talk about your divisive issues. Maybe not to the level of gun control, abortion, or same-sex marriage. But close.