An unexpected interruption, the question of shot or no shot and finally, the wisdom of Mary Poppins

“Everything is possible,
even the impossible”
Mary Poppins

(Emily Blunt and the always enchanting Angela Lansbury in the new Mary Poppins
movie as seen on our son’s TV)

Ok, so where was I…??

Ok, so maybe the question should be… where in the heck have I been?

When we were last together, I think I made mention that we were off to see the Mayor…
bringing her home with us for a few days…

Well…we did…sort of…….

A week ago Monday evening, late, we got a call from our son.
Or someone who was supposed to be our son who was sounding very puny, croaky and cloggy.

A pained voice informed us “I’ve just gotten back from Urgent Care and I have the flu
so you’ve got to come get the baby NOW!!!
The doctor told me not to be around her.”

“Ok” I’m thinking.
Your wife is 8 months pregnant, your 13th-month-old has been right there—
you’ve all been together in very close proximity up until now—
so if anyone is getting the flu…
well, that ship sailed days ago when you first started feeling bad.

That’s how viral things work—they make the rounds before you even realize
they’re at work making the rounds.

“We’ve planned on coming tomorrow …
I don’t think the night is going to alter the course of viral destiny”
I calmly respond to a panicked first-time dad.

“We’ve had the flu shot.
We’ve all had the flu shot…
even Autumn had the flu shot…”
He practically wails apologetically with deep lamentations.

“Oh well” I quip a bit caustically.

For you see, at this very moment, I too was oddly not feeling well.
I felt chilled and suddenly zapped of all energy as well as slightly nauseated with a headache.

“Buck up,” I hear an inner voice commanding from someplace deep inside my head.

The satellite Woobooville office was all set-up and good to go—
awaiting our return back home with the Mayor.

‘We are to be on a rescue mission’
I defiantly proclaimed while trying to dismiss what my body was now feeling.

“I don’t feel well” I heard myself tell my husband…
“I’m going on to bed”

“But it’s just 9 o’clock”

“I can’t help it, I’m freezing”

About an hour later I was running a frighteningly odd yet very low-grade fever,
all the while I was violently shaking.

I asked for some Motrin.

And it was just about this very moment in time when my husband began complaining
about having the same symptoms.

This made for a very long, sleepless night of misery.

And yet we were still having to drive over to Atlanta bright and early to rescue the Mayor,
I was more than fretful.

That’s when I noticed how badly my left arm was hurting.

Hummmmmm…

For you see… I’ve failed to share with you that is was on that Monday
(last Monday as you read this today), that both my husband and myself went to get a shot.

A preventative vaccine mind you.

Similar to the preventative flu vaccine our son had gotten.

It was the Shingles shot.

When we went to our pharmacy on Monday Morning, in order to get the shots,
I explained to the pharmacist that we were planning on getting our
13-month-old granddaughter the following day…
so would she be ok with our getting the shot?

“Of course no problem.”

HA!

By Tuesday morning my arm was in full-blown shingles mode.

A burn/bruise-like area the size of a large eggplant covered my arm—
but not at the injection site.
It hurt terribly on a deep level yet was itchy on an up top level.

Eyes now rolling in my head.

My husband had no rash but redness at the injection site along with a
horrific headache, fever and chills.

We struggled to get ourselves up and dressed…
Yet we loaded up the car and headed off to the Mayor’s.

Our son was to be out of town the coming weekend and desperately was trying to
make that still happen—
he stayed home the day we arrived but went on into work the following days
as not to miss any more work.

In the meanwhile, the Mayor came home with us.

They had fretted how she might be feeling.

The Mayor, however, was having none of this as she felt great.
In fact, she was feeling so great, she was actually a live wire—
albeit a live wire with a
very runny and snotty nose.

The next day, I noticed I now had a sore throat and a very cloggy snotty nose
and a headache…
still with my eggplant looking “faux” shingle rash.

The Mayor’s aides were more than puny.
And keeping up with a live wire when feeling puny makes for a tough go.

I called the doctor telling the nurse what was going on.

She calls back the following day.

“Yeah, we’ve heard this shot has had those sorts of reactions…
but as it’s a two-part shot, you’ll need to follow up with the booster
in a couple of months.”

“And get the very viral infection I was trying to avoid in the first place
for a second time??!!” I incredulously announce rather than ask.
“Thanks but no thanks,” I reply before curtly hanging up.

A week before we picked up the Mayor for her visit, our daughter-n-law informed
her OBGYN that her baby daughter, aka the Mayor,
had gotten what was thought to be Fifth’s Disease.

Such a name comes from the all-knowing medical folks who simply ran out of things
to say when telling everyone
“oh, it’s just a viral infection– you’ll simply have to wait it out”

They decided to give the latest “wait it out” illness a name.
Fifths Disease.

Now if you count Sunday day one in the week…then this disease was named on
Thursday…the fifth day of the week.
But if you’re like most working folks, you count Monday as the first day of the week,
which in turn makes Friday the actual day Fifth’s Disease was named—-
and Lord knows we couldn’t
name a random disease after everyone’s favorite day of the week…
hence the name–Fifth’s Disease.

After having blood drawn then processed, the nurse calls to inform our
daughter-n-law that she is actually immune from Fifth’s Disease.

Who knew one to be immune from a virus?!

Kind of what I was hoping to be from the Shingles.
Immune.

Go figure!

Should the Mayor come down with the Chicken Pox,
knowing I’d eventually be a helping nurse,
I didn’t want to, in turn, get the shingles—
since I had the chicken pox at age 5.

So it turns out that all I had to do was to get the preventative vaccination
and I’d in turn, get the virus.
Kind of like our son and the flu.

Is this beginning to smell of something fishy—
like a little pharmaceutical racket???

Ahh, but I digress.

And so a very rotten puny me headed back to Atlanta Friday,
following the torrential downpours,
in order to take the Mayor home and to spend the weekend with our daughter-n-law while
our not so well son went on out of town as planned.

That had been the plan.

The plan before all the shots made everyone sick.

Our daughter-n-law’s faculty friends were giving her a baby shower for the new baby
(aka the new sheriff in town) on Saturday—
I was to go along with her and the Mayor.

We eventually did—and it was a lovely gathering…
A great bunch of Catholic Parochial school teachers.

Yet all the while… I had a Shingle’s arm and flu-like symptoms from
what our son must have passed along via the Mayor.

Did I mention that we, as in my daughter-n-law, the Mayor and myself
were having to dog sit?
As in a friend of our son’s was leaving his boy dog in their care.
As in an unfixed boy dog that is actually a herding dog…
as in a herding sheep sort of dog?
A herding sheep sort of dog that is oddly being made to be an indoor
pet named Alf.

All the makings of a worst case scenario.

He is a nice enough dog that is wound up like a nervous ninny–
hence the suppressed need to be herding…

And so it fell upon the Mayor to be the chosen item for herding—

despite the Mayor’s wailful protests.

(The Mayor and her watchdog Alf / Julie Cook / 2019)

Think indoor chaos.
Indoor chaos for a sick chief aide and an 8-month pregnant overworked teacher and an impatient
13-month old Mayor.

Note, the Mayor’s actual dog Alice is on a long term vacation due to the arrival of
the herding indoor non-fixed sheepdog.

I was actually supposed to stay until tomorrow, until when our son got home—
however, I was slowly dying and desperately needed to head home as soon as possible
so I could simply crash and burn in the comfort of my own home…

But before I do so… crash and burn that is—
allow me to briefly share with you about our having watched the new Mary Poppins movie
with the Mayor Saturday evening.

Now back in 1964 when the original Mary Poppins movie debuted, I was 5.
My dad, a big kid himself, made certain to take me to see the movie in the theater.

Granted I’ve rewatched the movie throughout the years ever since that year of 1964…
yet I have oddly never been a huge fan.
I liked it well enough as a child but found it to be somewhat odd and boring.

Maybe I just wasn’t a musical loving child at the time.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke…but the movie
didn’t do much for me when I was a little girl.

However, while I was there helping, or more like dying–
whichever way you’d like to look at it,
my daughter-n-law suggested we watch the movie.
She told me she thought I’d love this latest new version.

They had just gotten a new television and I must confess, not being a huge TV
nut like our son or even like my dad had been, I have to admit,
the picture quality was indeed amazing.

And yes I really did enjoy this new version versus that classic version
of my childhood—
Which is really quite something given the fact that I am never a huge fan of the re-makes.

Maybe it was because I was feeling poorly…very poorly.
Maybe it was because Dad will have been gone now 2 years tomorrow.
Maybe it was because there we were in what had been his house, dad’s house, and my house
and now their house…
all the while watching a movie whose story merely picked up 25 years past the original story…
picking up where the original movie’s children were now grown up with their own lives of bluster,
loss, and need—much like my own life.

But Mary Poppins, this enigmatic figure, who mysteriously yet magically appears in the most
timely of times, arriving out of a burst of stormy winds,
all at the singular moment when one is at their most dire times of need—
albeit one who has no idea of the depth of that need…
A time when one is in great need of her eclectic whimsy and almost militaristic regime
of peculiar order…

She arrives for the person who needs to be reminded that nothing is ever truly lost.
She reminds her charges that those things, which at first glance appear to be impossible,
are never really that way at all but are actually possible all along…
for it’s all just a matter of one’s perspective.

And so I found my thoughts dancing over to the idea of our relationship with our loving Father,
the Great I AM…

He who comes not in the earthquake or the fire, or the storm…
but the One who rather comes to us in the stillness of a whisper…
always reminding us that with Him, nothing is ever lost nor is it ever impossible.

So thank you Mary Poppins…maybe it was the fever talking, but thank you for reminding me
that with God, nothing, in particularly me, is ever lost… and no matter what I do,
with God’s help, all things are indeed possible…

Oh, and when “they” tell you to get the shot…run like hell the other way.

But Jesus looked at them and said,
“With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
Matthew 19:26

feed the birds

“. . .All it takes is tuppence from you
Feed the birds, tuppence a bag
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag
Feed the birds,” that’s what she cries
While overhead, her birds fill the skies. . .”
Lyrics from Feed the Birds / Mary Poppins

(no this is not a bird / Julie Cook / 2015)

Tuppence, two pence, pennies on the dollar—that’s what it once cost to feed the birds.
A handful of bread or grain sold by a simple street vendor to be tossed out to the pigeons, who would descend en masse, happily and greedily gobbling up nary last crumb.

Today’s birds seem to have more expensive taste.
Kind of like everyone and everything else these days—some sort of bird inflation I suppose.
I paid $12.99 at Target for a sack of black oiled sunflower seeds this week, that being the sale price. A sack which fills dad’s entire feeder.
I buy my birds the nut and fruit seeds which are even more expensive.

It wouldn’t be any big deal I suppose but it’s a lot more than just birds eating the feed and that sack of Dad’s won’t last 3 days. There will be days that my birds will have to go without as they like to eat me out of house and home. And it wouldn’t be that bad had the grackles not moved in and the raccoons hadn’t figured out how to open all the feeders in the middle of the night cleaning me out of house and home.

But Dad is a different story, his birds may not go without.

I filled his feeder up last Thursday.
The feeder was empty as of Tuesday.

The phone rings and I see it’s dad calling.
I break out in a cold sweat as I fear the worst. . .one of them is down for the count and can’t get up and I need to call an ambulance and come quick.
But yesterday’s call, thankfully, was not that sort of call.

“Julie, when you come up tomorrow, how ’bout picking me up some bird feed, we’re all out”

I bought it yesterday Dad.

“Oh, you’ve got some already?”

Yes Dad, that’s what I said.

“Will you bring it with you?”

Yes Dad, it’s already in the car.

“So you’re bringing it with you?”

YES DAD!

“When are you coming?

TOMORROW. . .

This conversation lasts a while. . .

There are the cute little chipmunks at his house who scurry about on the back porch, below the feeder, scrounging for dropped seed. . . so cute. . .
Or that’s what I thought until I watched the chipmunk scamper scale up the brick, dashing tearing its way up the screen and precariously
jumping onto the feeder. . .Hummmm. . .
What a cleaver little sweet creature. . .hummmmm

“Dad, the chipmunks are climbing the house to get to the bird food. . .
“Oh I know I just love watching them, aren’t they cute. . .
Hummmmm. . .

(the chipmunk birdseed stealer as seen from Dad’s kitchen window / Julie Cook / 2015)

And yet there are other, more sinister varmints feasting on my hard bought feed.

I was sitting in the den with dad watching one of his never ending 1930 black and white movies when suddenly a loud bamming and booming hits the roof.
KAPOW
Followed by a sound of someone or something ripping the screens off the sunroom porch window frames.

DAD!!??? WHAT IN THE WORLD???!!!”

“Oh, that’s the squirrel.
He just loves the bird food”

Racing out to the porch to see what has attempted to tear part of the house off its foundation, I spy a giant grey squirrel hanging upside down from the gutter reaching his body out, stiff as a board, away from the house and grasping the feeder. I believe they call that sort of stunt planking.
The birds are now noisily perched in the trees expressing their great disdain for this usurper.

I proceed to watch this greedy grey acrobat race from the bush, to the gutter, to the screen, to the feeder over and over for the remainder of the afternoon.
Never allowing a single bird to gather near.

You should know that this squirrel is as big as a very large house cat. With the fullest prettiest tail I’ve ever seen on a squirrel. Not so for neighboring squirrels who are scrawny and lean.
Dad’s squirrel is super squirrel and he loves this squirrel.

Actually my dad loves all animals.
Not that I don’t, I certainly do but I do not give money to every organization on television who uses those sad big brown eyes staring back at me while Sarah McLachlan is sadly singing “In the arms of the angel”
This is a man who unknowingly, or knowingly as it depends on who you ask, has been giving money to what some have deemed a terrorist organization— PETA.
Not that giving money to animal rights activists is a bad thing, but the whole activist wording leaves me a bit nervous. People who kill other people because of animal violations scare me just a bit. Not that I haven’t wanted to beat people senseless who abuse animals, but to act in an organized vigilante sort of kill or be killed mentality just makes me, like I say, nervous.

I didn’t know about his funneling giving generously of money until I took over paying his bills. He had letter upon letter from PETA sitting in the black hole of an office, aka my old bedroom, when he was at his worst–just getting the mail and putting it away, never to look at it again—hence why I finally had to take over—it was either that or the IRS was going to put him in jail. Plus I feared PETA may send strong-armed big men out to get their annual, hush money, donation.

So now, we are no longer funneling giving away money except to the power company, the phone company, the gas company, the insurance company, the care service as well as to the Government. . .

And of course to big fat grey squirrels as I’m now off to buy yet another bag of feed to take up later this week.
At 26 bucks a week, I just may need to take out a tuppence loan in order to feed the birds. . .

(a small mess remains from the birds and squirrel / Julie Cook / 2015)

(the never ending feeder / Julie Cook / 2015)

tuppence

“Pan, who and what art thou?” he cried huskily.
“I’m youth, I’m joy,” Peter answered at a venture, “I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”
― J.M. Barrie

(Black capped chickadee / Julie Cook / 2014)

Each day, joy and merriment meet at the feeders.
Skiddering and teetering
Hopping and flittering
Precariously maneuvering from atop a tiny high wire act without worry or care.

Oh that life could be so seemingly carefree. . .
Flying, darting and dashing about, entertaining one and all.
Yet it is to the readily available food they come.
Hurrying to gather succulent morsels one by one.

Fragile yet intricate they fascinate and marvel
Envious of their flight, humankind has been drawn to them since the beginning of time.
Yet it is to the cry of the human heart. . .
Oh but to be a bird, to take wing and fly away. . .

Heavenward I world soar, past stars and moon
Upward past sun and clouds, I would race.
For there, waiting with hand outstretched I would find you.
You, the Creator of all of life, waiting.
Waiting to cup me gently in your warm hands,
Longing to find joy in my final return flight home. . .

Early each day to the steps of Saint Paul’s
The little old bird woman comes
In her own special way to the people she calls,
“Come, buy my bags full of crumbs;
Come feed the little birds,
Show them you care
And you’ll be glad if you do
The young ones are hungry
The nests are so bare
All it takes is tuppence from you
Feed the birds, tuppence a bag
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag
Feed the birds,” that’s what she cries
While overhead, her birds fill the skies

All around the cathedral the saints and apostles
Look down as she sells her wares
Although you can’t see it,
You know they are smiling
Each time someone shows that he cares

Though her words are simple and few
Listen, listen, she’s calling to you
“Feed the birds, tuppence a bag
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag”
Mary Poppins