Shell

The year was 1969, and I had just returned from Mexico. My high school choir always scheduled its annual tour a day or two after graduation. It was a disappointment for me that year, because the previous year we had gone to Hawaii, and Mexico was no match for the exotic lands of King Kamehameha.
One night of rest later, my dad and I were off to Houston to work. The job was Two Shell Plaza in downtown Houston; a 35-story building, twin to its sister skyscraper, One Shell Plaza. Shell was going to move its international headquarters to the buildings in two years, but in the meantime we needed to wrap the outside with slabs of marble.
The suspended scaffold was already several stories up (maybe 10?) and frightfully high to me. I was never comfortable with heights, and in this environment there was little between me and the ground but a long drop. Each square of scaffold support had a hand-operated crank that wound up the twisted cable suspended from pikes somewhere above. There were boards across the supports to make it wrap completely around the building, but it still bounced  with the slightest movement. I didn't like it.
I can almost remember my first time stepping out the hole that would become a window and onto the creaky boards in the humid, gusty air. I don't know how long it took, but eventually I was able to mix a bowl of plaster in the building, sprint to the window, and land on the boards in a trot, hustling to get the plaster to the waiting slab before it started to harden.
We lived in a boarding house while working on that job, not as friendly as the boarding house where we stayed in Atlanta the previous summer. I remember noticing the diesel odor on the street when we arrived there, and I remember the next morning when I was amazed at the difference in the air. There was a bus driver strike, and all the buses were off the roads that day. What a difference!
This all came back to me today when I heard the news that Shell was moving its headquarters out of downtown and over to the west side of Houston. It hit me as a tick on my personal clock, showing how things change as time continues to pass. I don't know how I feel about it. I don't have any real connection to Shell except this one event, but it somehow feels profound.

He took a stroke and died

I remember Vendyl Jones saying when you don't recognize an idiom it makes you an idiot. That's a little over the top, as he often was, but true.
When my parents moved to Fort Worth in 1946, they lived in a few different places before borrowing money to make a down payment on a lot in the Fox Hollow development of Sansom Park. There, they built (with her dad's help) a small dwelling. It was "two rooms and a path," I was told. The fence on the east boundary of the lot was erected by "Tom Daddy," my mother's dad. I heard the story of his work on it as I was growing up, often conflated with the story of his death. The words I remember are, "He took a stroke and died."
In my head I could see him with a sledgehammer, pounding on a fencepost while collapsing in the yard. He took a stroke and died.
It was many years later, after that image was burned into my memory, that I learned the two events were not really connected. He did build the fence, and he did "take a stroke," but the stroke had nothing to do with the fence.
Once more, as I often conclude, I should ask more questions.

Cheap solutions

My car isn't new. I'm reminded of that fact when I get a rental car for work and connect the sound system to my phone over Bluetooth. The new cars not only allow me to make and receive calls handsfree, but also stream music, play my phone's GPS sound, and even read messages to me. I particularly like the GPS and music (or audiobook) being coordinated so they don't play over each other.
I considered buying a replacement sound system, but the (almost) thousand dollars it would cost is a powerful deterrent. Instead, I found a Bluetooth audio streaming device that plugs into the audio input. It only streams audio, not phone, so it doesn't interfere with the car's Bluetooth phone connection. The streaming device seemed to be just the thing, until I realized I had to take it into the house to charge every night, and then reconnect my phone to it before leaving for work every day. That got to be a problem quickly. Plugging in a charger creates a ground loop and distorts the sound, so that wasn't a good fix.
I found the solution in a device I was given in a class: an external battery for cell phones. I found that I could leave a cord connected to the streaming device and plug it into my external battery to keep it charged, and as a bonus, plugging it in wakes up the device so I don't have to connect to it manually. I just take the external battery in at night to charge, then plug it in when I leave for work.
I've been listening to library books with my phone using this arrangement. It makes my drive seem shorter, and I enjoy the stories.

Is it normal yet?

All my life I have heard ways of expressing the anticipation of things settling into a “normal” condition.

“I’m looking forward to being out of school so life can be normal.”

“We’ll get married, and soon things will start to be normal.”

“Once I get both the kids in school, things will get back to normal.”

“I’ll just be glad when this blows over so things can be normal again.”

What many people don’t realize until they get much older is that there is no such thing as normal.

Every day is filled with new experiences, new choices, new physical and mental challenges. The seasons change, we get a little older, we learn new ways to do things…. Our lives are the essence of change. Nothing is exactly the same as yesterday.

Oh, it may seem to be the same. That’s the same wallpaper over there, and the carpet feels the same. In small (and sometimes huge) ways, things are changing around us, and we ourselves are changing. We get stronger, we get weaker, we get more experienced, we adapt to our surroundings.

Archaeologists learn that over time, even untouched rocks buried in ancient caves slowly gain a “patina” that makes it unique. The patina is permanently bonded to the rock, and is part biological (tiny microbes live and die on the surface) and part mineral (microscopic particles travel through the air and adhere to it). A group of scientists are currently testing a hypothesis (successfully, so far) that a spectroanalysis of a rock’s patina can identify it with the particular cave in which it sat and associate it with other rocks found there.

Yes, the world spins and flies through space, the sun rises and sets, and in our bodies millions of cells die, while other cells are generated to take their places, but every day the arrangement of those cells is a bit different. We look forward to Friday, and when it comes we find that it isn’t exactly what we expected.

Our concept of normal should be permanently bonded to the concept of change. We are changing, and that’s good. Fear of change is fear of living. No, it isn’t all good change, but it is going to happen, and we should want to be there.