Pat Snyder Online

Book Is Balancing Act

Pat Snyder — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 14:59:25 +0000

How long could it take, putting together a collection of columns? After all, they’re already written. At least, that’s what I told myself in late February, when I started down the road of self-publishing a book.

Apparently, the phrase “24 to 72 hours” stuck in my mind as the time it would take to have a book up on Amazon via Kindle Direct Press (KDF). I hadn’t focused on the first three words “when the book is done.” Done turns out to happen after all the columns have been located, after someone else has proofread it and someone else has designed a cover and formatted the interior in book-like fashion.

This is not to say that DIY efforts are out the window – only that I’ve never found a typo or grammatical error of my own that I could catch (and there may still be some – sorry) and that I have absolutely no graphic arts talents. For these tasks, a friend suggested Reedsy and Fiverr, budget-friendly online marketplaces of eager freelancers around the world.

After keeping them all straight on a chart, I found a proofreader in NYC, a cover designer in Austria, and a formatter in South Africa. It is now an international project! Happily Austria and South Africa are in the same time zone. Happily, KDP has a phone and chatroom, and these freelancers are very patient. On the verge of being ready – I think – to start the 24 to 72 hour clock, I keep remembering my tech-y friend who said, “It’s not brain surgery. Everyone is doing it.”

Too bad. I was planning to feel absolutely brilliant at the moment of publication.

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New Year Could Be Time For Earworm Audit

Pat Snyder — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 14:55:13 +0000

My daughter, 34, was online-searching to rent a B&B last month when she found “the perfect” cute and cozy one, over a garage.

Unlike me, she has a flawless track record finding perfect rentals. And yet somehow, via text and link, she felt compelled to assure me that this one deserved my happy Hurray!

“Nice!” I replied, to which she declared, “And it has a CO detector. I know you were about to ask.”

Huh?

One time, I must have. Right? Maybe in some hyper-vigilant moment, I’d envisioned some suicidal landlord in the garage below, engulfing my daughter in poisonous fumes. And now forevermore, she would hear that nagging voice, checking in on the CO detector.

The whole exchange made me realize that it’s nearly impossible to parent without creating earworms, those casual words, uttered in a moment and then forgotten by the parent but hanging through old age and playing relentlessly in the child’s ear. It’s terrifying.

I carry a few of my own. My dad, a vigilant accountant-type meticulous at calculating risks, told me once in response to something I’ve long since forgotten: It only takes once. I’ve managed to apply it both to my credit and detriment for decades.

It comes in handy when I’m tempted to check that text message while driving. (Thanks, dad, even though texting was uncommon in your lifetime.) Not so handy when I passed on zip-lining in Costa Rica for fear of a rough landing. An earworm like It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity would have been more productive.

On the other hand, some of his earworms are unabashedly helpful. On the odds of things going well in selling a house or meeting a romantic partner: Don’t worry. It only takes one.

Not so helpful, my mom’s declaration Beauty knows no pain. But I do appreciate her Stitch in time saves nine.

All this makes me wonder whether in the new year, it might be a good idea to conduct a sort of earworm audit. I could examine the playlist I’m carrying in my own head and also the ones I’ve unintentionally created for my children and grandchildren. Are they useful? Not so much? Do I even remember how this music was first composed? Maybe I could still set everything straight!

I suppose it’s only natural to want to do this now that the children are long out of the house. My mom, whose earworms also included If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, once set out to correct any childrearing missteps by being bold.

“Was there anything I did, raising you, that was harmful?’ she asked. I believe she had just read a magazine article about adult children whose parents had badly transgressed.

I was so touched by her nervous courage and well-intended parenting – and so tuned into her earworm – that I scrambled to find a transgression that would simply make her laugh and move on.

“It was really embarrassing,” I told her, “when the other kids wore bathing caps in the backyard wading pool, and you made me wear a shower cap to save money. I still have the picture to prove it.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, sufficiently relieved.

So maybe, if my own offspring carry the politeness earworm, this new year audit will go no place at all, and maybe I secretly hope that’s the case. But I should probably be at least as brave as my mother was.

Meanwhile, I am relieved that my daughter will not be poisoned by carbon monoxide. Whew.

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Homemade Ornaments Guarantee Immortality

Pat Snyder — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 03:49:43 +0000

Grandma Woodcock moved in with us when I was 12, and noticing I liked to write, declared that everyone has at least one good book in them.

“Yours,” she added, “should be about me.”

I get it now. She was pushing 70, had a bad heart, and wanted to be sure that after she passed on, she wouldn’t be forgotten. She needn’t have worried.

Like everyone who has a flair for making crafts, Grandma had scissored, knitted and glued her way to immortality. I tell myself that even without the book, her left-behinds tell her signature story: that it was honorable to “make something out of nothing.”

The value of her something-making became clear a couple of years ago when I moved to a smaller house. Knowing that my 112-pound monstrosity of a Christmas tree would not be coming along, I pawed through boxes of Grandma’s homemade ornaments in an effort to pare down the collection.

All those cute hand-knitted bells from red, green and white yarn remnants! The seven-inch doll with orange yarn pig-tails! The wooden spools of thread tied up with plastic holly! I could not part with a single one. And the Santa’s sleigh she’d made by hand…well, it was falling apart, but I’d just keep patching it up and putting it under the tree. How could I not?

All these creations feel important because they bring back happy memories of early childhood visits to her craft room in Florida – one of two bedrooms in the tiny apartment she’d shared with Grandaddy. Instead of a bed, it had housed her “craft table,” a giant sheet of plywood balanced on gray concrete blocks.

On the table, she’d done her own gluing and cutting, and best of all, she’d invited each visiting child to make ornaments by cutting bright scraps of felt and holding them together with Duco cement.

Not surprisingly, over the years these memories and her something-from-nothing tradition have inspired me and my three children to make even more. In the ornament box are little mitten ornaments I’d sewn and hung with red yarn, paper chains my older son made 45 years ago, the younger one’s oven-baked Virgin Mary, and my daughter’s potpourri apple ornament made from wilting discounted roses from Kroger. Grandma would be proud.

The only complication this year is the sleigh, and that’s the dilemma. It has a history.

She used birch bark from her native New England to make one for each of her three daughters. Each was pulled by eight tiny shell-and-pipe-cleaner reindeers and a red-nosed Rudolph. The sleigh she gave my mother featured a Santa made from red yarn shouldering a red-yarn pack of toys, notably a pink plastic angel playing a violin. The only child, I naturally inherited it and have been trying to hold it together for over 15 years.

During this time, the reindeer have lost some of their tiny coral antlers. The pink angel violinist was lost in an earlier move. The pipe cleaners have rusted and become weak in the knees.

Every trip to Florida, I’ve scoured funky gift shops in search of coral tiny enough to make replacement antlers. No luck. A few years ago, I enlisted my granddaughter. A clever crafter herself, she replaced the missing antlers with masking tape. She grabbed a tiny Lego to replace the lost angel. Good enough, for a few seasons. And I reveled in how much Grandma would admire this obviously inherited talent.

This year, the tiny deer legs have collapsed under the weight of time and if Grandma had also given them tongues, I’m sure they would be hanging out after at least 70 trips from the North Pole. The whole crew is sprawling along their birch bark bottom.

I’ll give my grandson one last chance at the salvage effort. He did, after all, make me a lovely bright blue wooden ornament last year from a wood scrap. But there will be no guilt if he cannot bring the birch bark sleigh back to life.

Maybe we can at least wrest Santa from his long-held perch and dangle him from a branch – the final chapter in the book Grandma wrote for herself.

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No-Fuss Hair Brings Unexpected Complications

Pat Snyder — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 14:03:35 +0000

When I decided to keep the white hair my no-salon Pandemic life had handed me, I crowed about saving myself the time and trouble of coloring it.

“My new white blonde is starting to feel like a pandemic accomplishment I don’t want to undo – a sort of souvenir,” I wrote in this column then. “To color it over now to ordinary blonde seems almost like erasing a hard-earned part of my life.”

I have stuck with this commitment to white-haired-ness even as friends have rushed back to the shampoo bowl and emerged with a golden glow.

I even joined a Facebook group called Going Gorgeously Gray, in which gray and white-haired women cheered each other on – many of them sporting waist-length locks in defiance of the idea that older women must wear their hair short.

But I have to confess that the venture has taken an unexpected turn. I haven’t saved all the time and money I bragged that I would. Instead, I’ve just spent time and money elsewhere, making sure that my white-haired self didn’t now fall victim to the stereotypes of aging.

First, there was the haircut.

When a still-blonde friend commented that the do I’d long sported looked “like a helmet,” I immediately filled in the words and very dated and changed not only the haircut but the stylist – opting for a 30-something with a cheeky attitude and a pair of fast-moving scissors. Voila! I emerged with my ears showing for the first time in years and a few long locks on top only because I said, “Wait!”

Despite the teaching of Going Gorgeously Gray, I’ve rarely had interest in hair so long that it takes more than a few minutes with a hand blower. But with shorter hair, earrings become a must. As a blonde, I’d only worn studs – for so long that my daughter-in-law had to wrest them from my ears.

“Now you can wear dangly ones!” friends cheered. Except that I had almost no dangly ones, and the ones I did have were the wrong color. White hair, I learned, demanded silver, not gold, and nothing brownish or orangey. Life was getting complicated.

At the risk of dating myself, I will confess that I sent off for one of those books, popular in the ‘80s, that lets you know which season you are – winter, spring, summer or fall. Since white hair had apparently shifted me back from a spring blonde to a winter, I ripped out the winter page with its color squares of just-right hues, discarded the rest, and walked along the row of coat hangers in my closet. Uh-oh.

Let’s just say that a “spring” friend got a handful of gold earrings and Goodwill got a load of otherwise perfectly good clothes for all those still-blondes out there. With my own wardrobe dramatically reduced, I was pawing through thrift store racks and sale catalogs myself for acceptable colors. Purple! Teal! Bluish red!

But the anti-aging quest didn’t end with earrings and clothes. It quickly found its way to technology when a discussion group I was facilitating required that I show video clips on Zoom and again when my nine-year-old grandson acquired a Gizmo watch.

Once, a year earlier, I had succeeded in sharing a video clip and playing it full-size with sound. But the magic formula now escaped me, and I spent the better part of a day reading instructions and practicing with friends so that I wouldn’t come off as an aging technophobe. I’m not sure my blonde self would have worked quite so hard.

The bigger challenge came with my grandson’s Gizmo watch.

“Just download the app,” my son said casually. “We listed you as a trusted contact.” Somehow, it felt important for a trusted contact to be available in emergencies.

But I couldn’t get the Gizmo to work, and I didn’t want to be “THAT grandmother” who struggled with technology. I Googled. I called my cell phone provider. No answers. Finally, I just called my grandson’s new Gizmo phone number.

“Hi, Pat!” he said brightly, and then corrected himself. “I mean Grandma.”

At that moment, “Pat” felt exactly right.

The post No-Fuss Hair Brings Unexpected Complications first appeared on Pat Snyder Online.

Chautauqua After The Bubble Burst

Pat Snyder — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 20:43:59 +0000

For years, I’ve told friends that a centerpiece of my own balancing act has been spending a week or two each summer at Chautauqua Institution in Western New York.

My personal advertisement touted Chautauqua as a place to get life in balance.

“You’d love it there!” I told anyone who would listen, and launched into a sales pitch for the idyllic 750-acre gated community my daughter calls “Disneyland for adults.” I’d go on to describe the dizzying array of lectures, concerts and plays, imposing Victorian houses and gardens, and the sense that there the clock had rewound to a quieter time.

It was a place, I said, where children rode their bikes on red brick streets, came home for lunch, licked ice cream cones.

Friends have so often heard my sales pitch for this place I’ve called “a piece of heaven” that when the brutal attack on lecturer Salman Rushdie occurred in the Chautauqua Amphitheater one Friday in August, my phone blew up.

“Are you at Chautauqua?” they wanted to know. “Were you there?”

Fortunately, I was not. And when I arrived a week or so later for a scheduled visit, the stage had been cleaned up, restored to the shiny hardwood that had long hosted the silky strains of the Chautauqua Symphony.

But, as a long-time Chautauquan observed, “the bubble had burst.” Somehow, violence from the outside world had rushed into this seemingly safe space. And instead of providing pure solace from the rest of the world, Chautauqua was struggling with its own balancing act.

I believe in learning from best practices. And post-attack Chautauqua offered many lessons in resilience. Institution officials praised those good people who had rushed forward to help and pledged to continue a tradition of free speech. There had been prayer vigils and press conferences. The Governor of New York had arrived to say, “The pen will always prevail over the knife.”

And in the final week of the nine-week season, when I was there, speakers inspired us to find common ground in divisive times, to listen to each other, and in a program in conjunction with the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, to use the arts as a way of learning to communicate.

But still, in understandable and also disturbing ways, the outside world had clearly crept into the bubble. It was sobering to notice three armed guards standing at attention in khaki pants and white shirts at the Institution’s open-air Hall of Philosophy while an African-American scholar spoke about theology. When my water bottle rolled to the floor, I made eye contact with one of them and was extra careful picking it up.

The metal detector installed at the Amphitheater entrance was no different from anything I’d expect entering a courthouse or airport security. But there, its silver-blue posts felt chilling.

And it made sense to be newly restricted to small wristlets or clutch bags (4 ½” x “6 ½”) when we entered performance spaces. I discovered, as guys have for years, that pants pockets are enough for most essentials – a phone, a credit card, these days a mask.

But waiting in line to hear Mary Chapin Carpenter and Emmylou Harris, I came unmoored. A monitor was waving a card cut to the permissible dimensions, directing women to a bag-check table and shouting, “No knitting needles!” My late sister-in-law had laughed and knitted her way through a Carol Burnett performance there with me once.

“What,” I wondered, “would Marilyn think?”

This season, more than ever, I realized the extent to which Chautauqua had become my own brand of lake house, to which families return every year. No wonder I had pieced together affordable ways to visit – teaching a class to score a free gate pass, staying at various church denomination houses on the grounds, bringing two late husbands and several friends, and encouraging others to do the same – which I do even now as I am struggling with its new realities.

Maybe a Unitarian minister, speaking the first morning, of my visit, created the best metaphor for rebalancing the imbalance, both inside and outside Chautauqua’s gates. To soar, he said, we need to feel both pain and joy. Too much hurt and empathy can drag us down. Being with nature and with each other can pull us back up. We need both. And that, he said, is why eagles have two wings.

I want to feel the wisdom here.

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Fried Green Abundance

Pat Snyder — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 14:16:05 +0000

I know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And I’ve heard there are no such things as free puppies or kittens. But at a time when worries about scarcity seem epidemic, I’m going to share a story about abundance, courtesy of a tomato plant named Tom.

Tom came to me this summer, thanks to my favorite nursery. I was loaded up with hanging baskets and more annuals than I’d intended to buy when the cashier pointed to a cart by the check-out. It was full of pots with green vines slumping to the floor.

“Feel free to take a tomato plant,” she offered. “No charge. We’re clearing them out.”

I’ve never tried my hand at raising vegetables – only flowers. But who doesn’t love a bargain?

I grabbed a plant, named him “Tom” because that was the only remaining part of his broken plastic marker, and headed to the car. He looked pretty thirsty, just this side of death. The price being what it was – or wasn’t – neither of us had much to lose.

The first days were iffy. I dug a hole by the back fence, plopped him in, and tied him to the boards with string. Otherwise, he would have passed out across the back bed. For a few days, I watered him to no avail. His leaves still slumped. Then several days in, I noticed that a single watering would perk him up for about 12 hours before he bowed his head and went blah.

My gardening persistence is generally not impressive, but for some reason I kept this up for week or so until voilà, the lawn sprinkler seemed to be enough and Tom started flexing his muscles – actually climbing up the fence, sneaking through it to my neighbor’s side of the fence, and crawling out with the enthusiasm of a kudzu vine to embrace the little Buddha statue that sits on the edge of the bed. As with most things – thunderstorms, snowstorms, squirrels – Buddha did not flinch. He paid no attention to the fact that Tom was now producing an impressive collection of tiny yellow flowers.

By now, the neighbor, more vigilant than Buddha, had either noticed the flowers or had trouble mowing his lawn and erected an impressive metal trellis on his side of the fence to somehow tame Tom. Encouraged by the flowers, I applied a little fertilizer, in hopes of pushing out tomatoes.

Apparently, it worked because within a couple of weeks, I had a single tomato vine on my side covering both Buddha and 30 square feet, along with at least three dozen green tomatoes, a few about to turn orange. At that point, it became a contest between me and some critter – I think a rabbit – to see who could get to the ripe ones first. When I noticed we were running two for two (and my two were delicious), I started picking the green ones and following all the gratuitous advice I received about how to ripen them off the vine.

Informed now that tomatoes produce something called ethylene, which makes them ripen, and that I could expedite the process by stashing green ones in brown paper bags, I headed to the store to stock up on paper bags, which were soon littering my back porch tables.

Dinner guests, noticing the bags, offered more advice.

“Put a banana in each bag,” said one. “It will go faster.” So I was off to the store for bananas. But the process was slow, and Tom kept producing green tomatoes.

The logical next step was to work with what I had, which meant returning to the store for corn meal to find out if the “easy” air fryer recipe for fried green tomatoes was actually easy, in which case I probably had enough tomato supplies to open a small restaurant. It was, and with a little Remoulade sauce on the side, they were delicious. Good thing because frost was coming and the plot Tom had taken over was the only place I could plant my new weeping cherry tree.

By the time three guys from the nursery had arrived with shovels and the tree, I did the unthinkable – thanked Tom, then chopped him into two-foot chunks, deposited his stalks into two garbage bags and plunked his green tomatoes – 65 of them! – into a couple of buckets.

I hear that stored properly (no ethylene), green tomatoes can last almost a year. Or if I don’t mind a “rustic feel,” I could hang them from my kitchen ceiling to ripen them. But since Tom had come to me for free, it seemed only right to pay it forward.

Friends with air fryers have been eating a lot of fried green tomatoes, and Buddha, sitting under the cherry tree, can finally see the light of day.

Thank you, Tom.

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I’ve Revived the Art of Personal Griping

Pat Snyder — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 12:32:22 +0000

There’s plenty to complain about with breaking news – Ukraine, climate change, and depending on your point of view, the recent raft of Supreme Court decisions.

But it’s occurred to me that in all this opportunity for big picture complaining, we have lost something else: the opportunity for good old personal gripes.

How, you might ask, with the world in shambles, dare I complain about my microwave going out? Button up, we tell ourselves, and carry on! Look on the bright side!

Having buttoned up for a while, I was thrilled to stumble on an article that discouraged ruminating over misery but encouraged saying, at least to ourselves, This sucks. I’m unhappy with what’s going on. I was also surprised at how much practice it took to break the no-griping habit.

With that, I feel inspired to offer my own laundry list of personal gripes from a week-long period last month. In the name of mental health.

The kick-off was an apologetic last-minute phone call from friends who’d invited me for a week of lectures and concerts at Chautauqua, that one had just tested positive for Covid. On the bright side, I told myself, I didn’t get exposed. And it was a nice day for driving back home from New York. And Isabel Wilkerson, the headliner, had canceled anyway. I felt embarrassed to say It sucked. I was unhappy with what was going on.

I turned the car around and drove just in time to get a text message from a neighbor: “We just spotted a skunk running into the bushes under your bedroom window.” This launched a round of sightings – in the neighbor’s prairie grass, darting across my yard into the shrubs, sauntering along my driveway.

‘At least I’m not obsessing about Chautauqua,” I said. But actually, it sucked; I was unhappy about what was going on. Between us, the neighbor and I went through two jugs of granules, a pound or so of cayenne pepper and two bags of moth balls. Reading that making noise would keep the skunk from being surprised, we clapped our hands every time we exited our houses, and finally I cranked up a radio on the back porch to an eager evangelist who urged the skunk – and all my neighbors – to Repent! It was the last I saw of the skunk.

Meanwhile, in the midst of the skunk-repelling, I went to heat up lunch in the microwave and was surprised to see that while the dish twirled and the light was on, there was no heat. Apparently it had burned itself out cooking a sweet potato. According to YouTube, I might need to replace the magnetron, which costs as much as a new microwave.

“Good thing I didn’t burn down the house,” said my bright side, which wanted to say This sucks. I’m unhappy with what’s going on.

By now, ready for a glass of wine, I spent 15 minutes trying to pull open the kitchen utility drawer and get a corkscrew, but it was jammed shut by the toaster oven tray and no amount of jostling up and down and could seem to shake it loose. To my credit, I could see no bright side to never again having access to my rolling pin, cake tester, meat thermometer or steamer basket. This sucks! I said, along with a couple other things. It was getting easier.

By nightfall, I was so busy hoping that another predicted “severe thunderstorm” would not wash away all the skunk repellant that it never occurred to me that it would instead strike two trees the next street over and knock down the power lines servicing our street for a day or two.

This sucks, I muttered, and didn’t even say I was relieved it wasn’t my tree.

Happily, the power was restored before I was covered with bug bites from attending a barbecue, developed a fever, had to run to urgent care and also the chiropractor because of low back pain, which she attributed to stress.

“All that happened?” she said. “That sucks.”

“Yes, it does,” I said.

I think I’m getting the hang of it.

The post I’ve Revived the Art of Personal Griping first appeared on Pat Snyder Online.

Pandemic Economic Theory Comes In Handy

Pat Snyder — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 20:07:42 +0000

It’s too bad inflation has reared its ugly head. I was having so much fun with the pandemic rationale for splurging: Think of all the money I saved in 2020.

It’s one of the handiest things to come out of the pandemic – especially for someone raised by Depression-era parents – and I’ve gotten better and better at it.

The Theory is not altogether untenable. 2020 was a great year for unintended savings. I didn’t fly anywhere on vacation, didn’t take any road trips, didn’t eat out at fancy restaurants, or even pick up a latte. And I’ve become a pro at mentally tallying up all the theoretical savings without benefit of any actual figures.

Sometimes I throw in 2021 too, when I only visited relatives I could reach via road trips or on short non-stop flights. And what the heck. In 2022, I’m still staying in the USA. This provides a marvelous two years and counting of theoretical savings to justify just about any sort of splurge.

The cruise brochures that seem to be flooding my mailbox make it that much easier.

Granted, I’ve never taken a cruise and am still Covid-fearful of them, but if I were to schedule one, the cost would be a whopper. Even a little 8-day river cruise up the Rhine on the Viking anniversary special would be $1,999 (thankfully not a full $2K) per person, and the 17-day all-inclusive voyage from Vienna to Bucharest would lighten my wallet by $5,299. That’s for a standard stateroom. Never mind the explorer suite with wraparound veranda and French balcony.

“Wow!” I tell myself. “Think of how many pairs of crop pants that would buy! How many new pairs of running shoes! Why am I even hesitating?”

One of my greatest successes in applying The Theory has been my new porch fan, which doubles as a heater and an air filter.

Normally, I might have relied simply on the belief that it would extend the use of my back porch for several weeks each year. But this year, when I hit Submit on the online order form I was thinking Think of all the money I saved in 2020 and, as a bonus Think how much more comfortable I’ll feel, believing that the air my guests breathe is Covid-free. I did not even feel guilty about paying full price for the sleek upright rotating gizmo that connected to an app on my phone. It was still less than the five days I didn’t spend in Santa Fe when the new variant came out.

My most notable application of The Theory, though, came during the summer power outage that left me with long stretches without lights, AC and internet from one Tuesday afternoon until early the following Thursday morning.

Miserable and facing a second night of no power in a stifling bedroom, I didn’t think twice – and probably had my Depression-era parents rolling over in their graves – before I headed to Expedia on my almost-dead phone. Guiltlessly, at least in that moment, I searched for a room in a location that looked outage-free and checked myself in, thinking of – you got it.

I felt grateful in that moment for The Theory and the privilege of exiting the outage with a blast of cold air when it was nearly 100 degrees outside. With only a smidgeon of guilt, I savored my cold salad accompanied by a chilled glass of wine, charged my devices, and watched TV. I didn’t get to do this in Santa Fe, I reminded myself.

But then I did go out and buy myself a battery-operated fan for the next time, not because of all the money I saved in 2020 but maybe because those childhood economic theories had more time to take root.

We did, after all, save the holiday wrapping paper and iron it for the next time.

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“What’s Your Superpower?” Is Intimidating Question

Pat Snyder — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 22:29:30 +0000

A pandemic benefit has been reconnecting online with old friends, and even as we’re cautiously out and about, some of those connections have happily held.

So it was that I took up the challenge a few weeks ago to “Name Your Superpower.” This came courtesy of classmates from the little women’s college I attended in Central Georgia. To focus our one hour a month, we usually agree on a topic. It was easier when we simply had to come with the title of a favorite book.

Superpower? “Good Lord!” I thought, already intimidated by the classmate who would be traveling at the appointed hour and had e-mailed in her superpower ahead. It involved an impressive list of “making things happen” that I cannot even imagine tackling. For one, organizing a program at a historic farm teaching students how to bake in a 1700s oven without burning your eyelashes.

There would be other astounding feats, I knew from a previous call about hobbies. One had not only learned to ride a horse but ridden in a rodeo. Another had mastered an art form called intarsia, and another had woven masterpieces on a rigid heddle pedal loom. Still another had mastered hula dancing.

So my superpower? I thought hard. First, I thought it was efficient errand-running. I can pack in more errands on the way to another errand than anyone I know. But after a couple of days, two more things came to mind: figuring out how to assemble a peony stand solo and training a vine to grow over the top of an arbor without climbing on a ladder.

The more I thought about it, these feats of mine loomed larger and larger. First, the peony stand. Who has not sunk into despair learning that an online order advertised as requiring “some assembly,” recommended “assembly by two adults” when the product and actual instruction sheet arrived? Sure, I have friends and neighbors who later said “You should have called me,” but I try to reserve emergency calls for true emergencies, and the peony stand did not seem to rise to that level.

Still, pulling all the rings and struts out of the box, I could see where a second person and possibly a third could have come in handy. They could hold the struts steady while I – oh so carefully – snapped the rings into their little holders. But string! Why not lash all the parts together and prop the whole affair up against a shrub? I did! And it worked. At this moment, the assembled stand is holding my false indigo plant upright, preventing it from falling under the blades of the lawn mower.

And on the very same afternoon, terrified of ladders which seem to send friends into rehab facilities for weeks on end, I figured out how to train my autumn clematis to climb over an 8-foot arbor without ever climbing on one

String again! I’d just get the vine to inch its way up on its own by tying string to the top of the arbor and letting it climb. How to attach the string? you might ask. Simply tie a heavy metal washer to the end and throw it over the top. Voila!

“My superpower is Ingenuity!” is proclaimed to no one but me. By the time I arrived at the call, I was absolutely full of my superpowered self.

I was inspired – but not intimidated – even by the classmate who had analyzed legislative bills and written testimony for a Women’s Prison Project.

But I was not prepared for the quiet one, recovering for months from a broken femur, who confessed to “a little whining” but mostly had immersed herself in dozens of books, and reported that her superpower was Equanimity.

I looked it up: “mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.”

And it described her. It really did and always has. No wonder, even at 19, I wanted to borrow her superpower. Maybe there’s still time.

The post “What’s Your Superpower?” Is Intimidating Question first appeared on Pat Snyder Online.

Who’s Smarter? Me or My Watch?

Pat Snyder — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 13:22:37 +0000

I’d like to think that if I walk 7,000 steps, climb three flights of stairs and stand up every hour, I can pat myself on the back and say, “Yahoo!” “Good job!” “You rock!”

That would make sense, but instead I keep looking at my watch.

This has nothing to do with telling time. That was when I had a cheap Timex with a glow-in-the dark dial.

This has everything to do with getting applause. And not even from a person. From the activity app lurking under its digital dial.

It wasn’t always like this. I shunned the Fitbit when it first came out.

“Who needs that? I said, confident that I could give myself all the needed encouragement. After all, it’s self-validation that really counts. Right?

But then I started obsessing over the fact that the house I downsized into had no phone in the basement. My old one actually had phone jacks. And my exercise equipment was down there! How would I call 9-1-1 when I suddenly became lightheaded and slumped against the exercise bike? (I’ve been known to catastrophize.)

I have breakfast most weekends with folks who are technology nerds and eager to share the latest.

“What you need,” they said, “is a Smart Watch. If you pass out and knock it hard against something, it calls 9-1-1.”

I blew them off for a while, but then imagining the awfulness of being slumped undiscovered for hours or possibly forever, I made an online beeline for various Smart Watch purveyors.

Now the owner of such a gizmo, I can vouch that what the breakfast crowd told me is true. When I’ve knocked my wrist against the ping pong table trying to return some errant shot, voila! If I don’t stop them, the watch crew will call the squad, and there’s no calling them back.

I wore the thing for easily six months before I discovered – again listening in at breakfast – that there were all sorts of other features. It would monitor your sleep, watch you for heart palpitations and – this is the possible kicker –like a Fitbit, it will also keep track of your steps.

Once I got into it, it wasn’t long before I’d found the little icons to touch so I could keep track of where I was with my fitness goals on any particular day. From there, it was a short hop to realizing that I needed to put the thing on the moment I got up, or I wouldn’t get credit for all the steps. A walk without first hitting the “Outdoor Walk” icon feels like a walk that has not really occurred. Occasionally – hallelujah – if I forget, it sends a little message like, “It looks like you’re walking” and I can respond with a finger touch that said Yes, yes, yes, and it fast-forwards me to the minutes I’ve already put in.

After a while, If I I’m lucky, I get a message “You’ve completed your exercise ring,” which feels suddenly like carte blanche not to exercise anymore– except that typically it will come back in and say, “Time to stand,” which is apparently connected to another goal. This message generally pops up on a Zoom call or in the middle of a concert.

I recently read an opinion piece by a New York Times columnist who decided to abandon the Smart Watch applause and simply listen to her body. This was a much-debated decision, based on research that showed watch-watchers were no more fit – and often more stressed – than those who relied on their bodies’ natural intuition when it comes to exercise.

Moved by her impassioned decision, I felt tempted to pitch mine as well– until I took time to examine my body’s “natural intuition.”

“Just a few more minutes at the computer,” I heard it say. “And while you’re there, it wouldn’t hurt to check Facebook. And how long before Mrs. Maisel Season Five? “

So maybe I’ll keep my Smart Watch a bit longer. For now, at least, its natural intuition is feeling a lot smarter than mine.

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