Category: Humor - trish hermanson

My Madhouse with a Mammogram

8/30/2019

It’s smashing time, the annual ritual in which my twin orbs are pressed into pancakes and x-rayed, to be studied by a stranger.
     And I’m a “call back,” one whose pictures weren’t “quite right,” so I’ve held my breath through another torturous compression. Now, I’m trapped in a waiting room. My choices here? To flip through a twenty-six-year-old magazine about houseplants (I’m not joking), or read an article about how supermodel Gisele Bündchen battled anxiety.
     Why would I be anxious?
     A cheery tech appears and announces the second shoot was “questionable.” I’m sent down the hall for an ultrasound where I’m introduced to a whirring machine named Unetixs. I wonder if this rhymes with “lunatics.”
     Then I’m camped in another Hades waiting room. A Martha Stewart magazine from sixteen years ago tells me “100+ Ways to Get Festive” for Christmas - and it’s August.
     Am I going crazy?
     One wall of this room is painted green like overcooked peas, which matches my flap-open gown that I clutch to keep from exposing myself.
     Two hours have crawled by. I guess that’s why I’m called a “patient.”
     The doctor appears. He announces that my anomaly is my “new, best friend,” a water cyst. Nothing to worry about.
     I breathe again, dress, and walk out the automatic double doors, shaking my head. I know mammograms can save lives, but something about this process strikes me as inherently degrading, dehumanizing.
     So when I have the opportunity, how can I create an environment that showers sensitive dignity on others in their most vulnerable times?

Getting a Fresh Coat of Paint

8/2/2019

My husband Duane says I get more paint on me than on the walls, but I’m trying to rejuvenate our home with a fresh coat of paint. And how the memories flow as I listen for hours to rock classics: “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to” - when Frank didn’t show up at my party. “You’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’ - when Larry and I broke up.
     These were tragedies back then, but we all kept going because we were told “don’t let the sun catch you cryin.” And there was always someone to “help me if you can, I’m feelin’ down.”
     Life was simpler, with “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.” It wasn’t until years later that any of us faced the tough things like debt, divorce, disease, death.
     My playlist rolls out “Mrs. Brown you’ve got a lovely daughter” while my body aches from rolling wide swatches of paint. Today, Herman’s Hermits would sing that song: “Mrs. Brown you’ve got a lovely walker.”
     My steps aren’t as lively anymore either. I used to stay up into the wee hours to “do the jerk.” If I tried that now, I’d stumble through a knock off of the Bee Gees: “How can you mend a broken hip?”
     My body is tattered, and so is my home. But the old house is getting rejuvenated, and I think that will put a spring back in my step, too.
  Especially if I grab some “Afternoon Delight” today - a nap.

DEAL! Lunch for Less than $5 Million

6/20/2019

Deal of the week! For less than $4.57 million we can have lunch together.
     That’s how much tech guru Justin Sun is paying to have lunch with financial whiz Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha. Proceeds go to charity.
     So here’s my offer: bid on a lunch with me, and if you win, the Ditz of Denver promises not to give you a shred of financial advice. The winning amount will go to a nonprofit where I volunteer, JeffCo Eats (jeffcoeats.org), which supplies food to kids who qualify for meals at school but sometimes find the cupboard bare on weekends.
     It’s a horrible problem. In one family, the kids play a guessing game of who’s going to get to eat when Saturday comes.
      The winner and I won’t dine at a swank place like Buffett and Sun do, and I won’t wear a suit and tie. We’ll visit a local barbecue with paper napkins and plastic forks for lip-smackin’ food (or somewhere else, if you wish). If you live outside Denver metro, I’ll send you a gift card. I’ll also give you an autographed copy of my novel “The Wooden Indian Resurrection” or my children’s book “Hooty McTooty Discovers True Beauty.”
      So let’s spread the love for kids and do lunch. Email me or post your bid on my Facebook page by June 26, with the opening bid $15.
  We common folk may not be able to raise five million bucks, but we can ease some kids’ hunger pains. And to them, that’s worth millions.

My Kind of Cookbook

5/24/2019

I love writing so much I’ve sometimes forgotten to eat. If it weren’t for my husband, a great chef, I’d turn into a scrap of dried leather. (He thinks I compliment his culinary skills only to keep him in the kitchen, but I relish every meal he creates - especially because I’m not making it.)
     It’s not that I’m a bad cook. It’s that I’m distracted. My mother used to concoct a twenty-four-hour salad - prepare it a day in advance so the flavors meld. I never start it until it’s nearly time to eat, so I call it my twenty-four-second salad.
     I’m not the only writer like this. C. Robertson says her poetry is “a disease, a sort of recurrent itch that keeps me awake nights and makes me burn the bacon and causes my husband to use unholy adjectives.”
     I’ve set some burnt offerings on the table, but I call them “blackened.”
     Author Virginia Greene Millikin says that just as loaves of bread won’t rise without yeast, stories don’t rise “without that piece of your very heart that you have put into it.”
     So that’s my problem. I don’t put my heart into cooking. Maybe if I…oops, gotta run. I need to have a meal ready in fifteen minutes so we can get out the door.
  (Did I mention my husband is a great chef?)

You Talk Like a Sumerian?

4/25/2019

Do you talk like a Sumerian?
   That ancient civilization developed humanity's first written communication through pictograms. But our ancestors soon discovered that pictures weren’t enough to get their point across, so they created a code for words - the alphabet. With that, communication spread onto clay tablets, papyrus, and paper, then exploded through printing presses, typewriters, copy machines, and emails.
     But everything was TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), so dialogue imploded into one-sided tweets. And now we’re back to pictograms through emojis, which makes me wonder whether we’ve regressed 5,000 years.
     TBH (to be honest), IDK (I don’t know). I’m SMH (shaking my head) about this.
     But my granddaughter’s messages do make me giggle.