Author: Gretchen Reed

El Communicado Non Comprehendo Part III

Gretchen Reed

(A View of an Orthopedist’s Office from the Inside Window Looking Out) By the time I was nearly an octogenarian I had assumed new environments would not often be part of my life. I had been in my home community for decades and was used to its attendant communication challenges. My high school teaching days were long past, which made the memories of overcoming generation gap challenges more amusing than challenging. I had lived at Pheasant Run Airport for 40+ years and dealt with hundreds of people visiting and attending…

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Portia, Porsche, Calpurnia, Or?

Gretchen Reed

Not long after my husband Chuck and I purchased a home on 68 acres in Leroy Township, Ohio, in 1977 and started developing the land into a private airport, we wondered if there was some force out there that spoke special messages to stray dogs and cats saying, “Go see the Reeds; they’ll feed you and give you a home.” Over the years, we took many cats and a few dogs to rescue centers because of the number of “drop-offs.” Further complicating our animal ownership was my severe allergy to…

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Wisdom of the Aged Not What It’s Creaked Up to Be

Gretchen Reed

The theory that advanced age and wisdom pair well together is an appealing concept until one actually approaches old age. All senior citizens would like to think they had been adept at predicting the future. Remembering past decades can make an older person realize how clueless he or she was about reality. For example, I doubt my teenage peers in the ‘50s were thinking that most married women of the future would hold jobs outside their homes. The first moon landing seemed a distant mirage. Most of us thought classes…

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El Communicado Non Comprehendo, Part II

Gretchen Reed

Because northeast Ohio is a region with widely varying demographic locales, it is easy to encounter residents from areas that are much different from one’s own. Therefore, a person living, let’s say in Cleveland or its suburbs, might have little or no experience with rural areas, even though many exist to their south, east and west. Because my husband and I established, in 1977, a small airport and aviation museum in Leroy Township, we often encountered visitors who had no idea that a home on such an expanse of land…

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El Communicado Non Comprehendo, Part I

Gretchen Reed

In a country with diverse nationalities and languages, it is hardly surprising that some difficulties arise in communications. However, listening to and understanding others often happens between people who speak the “universal” English language as well. For two examples about misunderstandings that can happen even when an American native knows another language well, retired RHS Spanish teacher Marietta Lipps knows how confusion can arise. She wonders sometimes about what happened when the Chevy Nova automobile was named because “no va” in Spanish means “It doesn’t run.” One can only hope…

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Observations: Burger Flipper for the World

Gretchen Reed

Causing drivers to make sudden unsafe exits from freeways, eliciting excited screeches from children, making the family dog whine and yelp in anticipation, yanking old men with canes and walkers into snowstorms to meet their cohorts for coffee and other tempting things: Ah! It’s McDonald’s Golden Arches at work. The power this nearly universal trademark has on hungry people makes it seem as if the “M” of the arches should stand for “Magnet.” Possibly the most recognizable trademark in the world, it has been pulling humanity in for enough decades…

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To Pea Or Not To Pea; To Bean Or Not To Bean

Gretchen Reed

Are dogs able to spit? Can they puff up their jowls and force air out like as human’s “p-tui” in response to something disliked? Our coonhound Brutus made me imagine strange possibilities one morning when I picked up his food bowl several months ago. Brutus has always had a hearty appetite, no doubt enhanced by my habit of adding something tasty to my dogs’ kibble meals: a scoop of canned dog food, some chicken skins, some gravy. The previous evening, I had part of a chicken pot pie left over…

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Gremlins

Gretchen Reed

Very few people avoid being plagued with gremlins, whether the creatures’ presence is obvious or not.  Gremlins avoid super-organized, compulsively neat folks and wisely keep their distance but still wait for the pouncing moment. Gremlins’ only good quality is their loyalty; they never leave their assigned people. Their qualities range from the mildly contentious to the averagely malevolent, to the downright destructive, hateful S.O.B./Bitch types. Gremlins are always of the same sex as the host person as they emerge right there on the birthing table of about 80 percent of…

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Revisiting “The ’22 Winter of Our Discontent”

Gretchen Reed

(with apologies to John Steinbeck) A recent comic strip, “B.C.” by Mastronianni & Hart, used extreme anachronisms to produce humor during the 2022 January “snow event” in the northeastern United States.  The strip’s only character was Grog, who is always portrayed as a ball of hair sitting on top of two skinny legs and having a large nose and rudimentary arms. Grog was looking at Wiley’s dictionary searching for the word “dusting.”  The definition was “What people in Buffalo call snowfall that everyone else would call a blizzard.” If this…

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One Photo, One Painting, Multiple Coincidences

Gretchen Reed

For many years I had a photo of a pretty blonde young woman in an ornate frame in my attic: my paternal aunt. I also had an oil painting that had hung in my aunt’s home; my father and I retrieved it when he was executor of her estate. I moved the painting to various places around my house, but only recently did the photo and the painting become the center of a remarkable set of events that started when I was a child and have just recently surfaced through…

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