OK, I know this series is only two years old. Like me, you will remember it as if it first appeared yesterday. That’s how two years seem at our age. Still, I enjoyed telling this Christmas story, and I enjoyed it again when I reread it this morning. I reason that if I enjoy it, you might, too. I hope I’m right. Now, if you will excuse me, I have Christmassy things to attend.
The Aluminum Tree
By Jimmy Johnson
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120 responses to “The Aluminum Tree”
Delayed Y2K effect?
Well, Jackie is preparing to be discharged. Other than the fact they can’t find the wheelchair they purchased to send home with her. 🙁
Have you ever moved a king-size frame, box springs, and mattress out of a house by yourself? And then moved a queen-size into its place? I have. (Our help we had lined up couldn’t make it on time.) “My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.” 😀
Poor Dickens kept running into the bedroom after I got the big bed out and whining like he’s thinking, “What happened to my bed? Where will I sleep?”
Sitting in my wheelchair which they found waiting for transport driver. Had my pain pill. It is 2 hour drive over rough beaten out roads back to Eufaula. In Oklahoma we don’t drive on the left side of the roads, we drive on what’s left of the roads.
If your driver’s van is anything like mine, I hopr he puts you in the forward position, Jackie.
Helpers showed up, loaded king-size, and left. (We gave it to them for hauling it off. They needed it, badly.) Ready for final wet-pad mopping of bedroom, then queen-size will go in when floor is dry. Interestingly, just the box-springs and mattress. The 24-inch height actually aids in Jackie (who has short legs) making the transfer from chair to bed, and vice versa. Me getting out of bed may resemble a comedy skit more than anything else, however. I’m six two.
I’m remembering a 12 Days of Christmas theme in a comic strip where the characters are waving farewell to the drummers, pipers, etc., leaving their home. Was that an A&J strip?
TR, try De 30, 2013; Ja 3, 2011; Ja 5, 2018; and Ja 5, 2019.
.
I checked all years from De 20 to Ja 6, and the above constitutes the results.
Thanks! The final one was what I needed to contribute to a group discussion amongst my interfaith choir members. Our director claims Christmas isn’t really over until the drummers leave!
Jackie’s back. Happy New Year.
I bet the tail was wagging the dog! Welcome Home, Jackie!
Dickens is confused with furniture moving and vanishment. I got home and started moving clothes to lowest closet rack, all I can reach. He lept onto stack of clothes to use for a bed
Wheelchairs are hard to work from. I got ten pairs leggings and ten shirts hung together. Exhausted and ready for bed. Ghost is cooking dinner.
Glad you made it home!
Welcome home together, Jackie, Ghost, Dickens, et al!!
Welcome home, Jackie!!!
Curmudgeonly Ex-Professor: Wow. I don’t know why I thought I had to download something new but I finally finished the grant proposal I’ve been working on and so sat down with your instructions and went “Oh sheesh it’s just Google maps street view” and went to look at the pics. Yet though I have used street view, I didn’t ever realize it shows archived images of things that are now gone. So what a creepy time-machine sort of experience that was, to see all the buildings of Stouffer Place but with much bigger trees than when I lived there, and with surprising additions (a third story added to some of the buildings? unless I have forgotten things?). I lived there the academic year of 1972-73, my senior year in college. That’s nearly *50 years ago* now! Which seems impossible. Yet, looking at the pictures, somehow I can feel that span of time and perceive, at a very deep level, just how much has changed since then — in the world, yes, but also in my own life. It was a whole nother reality. In so many ways.
Sometimes I think about how the world used to be, especially the wild places I love so much, and I feel a lot of grief. But visiting this place I used to live when I was so young (just 21 when we moved in) showed me that I actually like the life I have come to live *now* a whole lot better. That’s a very pleasant surprise, and I don’t think I have ever felt it this way until now. So thank you for sharing this with me.
Dawn, there are many sites these days that are trying to capture the lost and abandoned before they are gone for good. For my home part of the country there is one called Abandoned Southeast on the internet. On YouTube there is Exploring Alabama, Adventure Archaeology and Sidestep Adventures. I just found another YouTube site that is covering old mining and railroad sites in Alabama under MrTropics64. So if you do some googling for your area, I bet you can find lots of photos and maybe video of the way things were and as they are now. Have fun.
I did run across something like this not long ago for Scottsdale, the little one-horse town in Arizona to which we moved in 1959. Now it’s, well, not a “town” anymore. It’s Rodeo Drive East, more or less. I literally do not go back to my old haunts there because I just can’t take how it’s changed. I guess that brands me in some way. But I cherish the memories I have of what used to be, that’s been obliterated by pricey neighborhoods of the extremely well-to-do that used to be beautiful desert. It literally hurts to see the places I once walked and rode horseback “miles from anywhere,” covered over with freeways and strip malls that extend 40 miles *beyond* the places I never imagined would be “developed.”
When we moved to Houston and Kingwood in 1974 we were among first 500 families. Texas Highway 6 was 2 lane and still gravel in stretches. The little towns extended north with big stretches of highway and country, a Sunday drive for a country cafe and lunch.
Now Houston suburbs stretch towards Dallas, endless shopping malls and food franchises. Our 500 initial families are now 500,000 fifty years later.
Have not been in Houston for six years, hate the big cities, not much of Texas that is charming anymore. I loved it once.
Dawn and Curmudgeonly ex-p, Here’s something that might interest you: https://www2.ljworld.com/photos/galleries/2015/aug/11/ku-150/
Thanks. Some names are familiar, though the photos precede my years there by just a tad!
Love it, Anon! Thank you!! I have seen some of these pictures before, but it’s been ages. And others I have never seen. Very kind of you to post!! 😀
Re 12-29-20 real-time cartoon: Late, unexpected Christmas gifts can be the best Christmas gifts.
Much the same as I don’t like for my birthday celebration to last just one day. A week, at a minimum, is much better. 🙂
I now have to admit that I must be “post-middle age. I now have a walker and today I ordered an “I’ve fallen and can’t get up’ button Does anyone remember who said “God is in his heaven and there’s a Democrat in the white house”..
You know, Jerry, middle age isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway. I mean, now you’re a wise Elder! I’m raising a toast to you!! 🙂
So tired. Working on getting things organized here at house in bedroom and bathroom for my access. Had two different nurses today for home physical therapy and home health.
Ghost is cooking delicious meals, tonight’s is chicken stir fry on noodles with fruit for dessert. Dinner has arrived!
Jackie, You are the luckiest person in the world.
Jerry I agree. What I tell people is I have a flock of guardian Angels because one is not enough. So many miracles
Ghost is a Special Angel sent to me by God. And Arlo and Janis.
From non-sunny Eufaula, where it’s windy and raining this morning…
A Winter Poem
Crap, it’s cold!
The End
Metallica and Ice Dancing — A perfect match?
https://www.ksl.com/article/50075436/have-you-seen-this-metallica-and-ice-dancing-is-a-match-made-in-heaven-or-hell
That’s my current tree. It is still serving !!!!
Hope your Christmassy things turned out OK, Jimmy. Bet you are doing New Yearsy things now. Happy New Year to you.
Jackie is working herself to a frazzle trying to get everything in drawers and hung on racks down to within reach in her wheelchair. I commented that what she needed was one of the “Hobbit houses” like they built in New Zealand.
She told me she has a friend in Australia who is about four feet tall and has a number of Hobbit costumes she frequently wears in public. She wore one when she got to visit the Hobbit village in NZ, and the tourists went crazy taking photos of her and posing with her. She had a ball.
https://mymodernmet.com/hobbiton-new-zealand/#:~:text=Called%20Hobbiton%2C%20it's%20a%20movie,the%20sides%20of%20rolling%20hills.
If I’m figuring it correctly, the New Year arrived on the island of Tonga several hours ago. I suppose Arlo has been doing his campaign-and-kisses-with-Janis-every-hour-on-the-hour.
“champagne-and-kisses-with-Janis-every-hour-on-the-hour”
Of course, he may be campaigning for something, too. 😉
I didn’t realize it, but I had been posting as Anonymous here the last couple of times. I’ve remedied that now.
Got my car back from the shop yesterday. Final repair cost for catalytic converter, two oxygen sensors, new muffler and I think some pipework: $2780. I have a $500 deductible and Geico covered the remainder. Thank you, Geico. And thank you to Christian Brothers of Tulsa Hills.
Big Box Electronics Store of Tulsa Hills was where I got my iPhone battery replaced. Good service there. Nice shopping center. But if, Heaven forfend, I ever have to fight Christmas Eve traffic there again, I’ll pack a lunch.
Well, now my whole name is out there. ****** Where’s that correction button?
That happened to me one time Mark. I thought that we had a new member to the Blog! Hoping this gets posted. In the past the blog went dark after a week, but I think I remember Jimmy correcting it.
Happy New Year Everyone!