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Health & Fitness

Flowers Of Happiness And Snippy Aunts

There is a great saying that says to only “say nice things or say none at all.” Mom always preached that to us.

We had an aunt who was the opposite. She always had only snippy things to say about people. She seemed to get pleasure doing and saying this.

I saw somewhere where balloons were set off outside to go up to the sky. The unusual thing on this is that before they were blown up, flower seeds

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had been inserted in them. The point was when they popped; they would scatter seeds to be carried by the winds wherever they are meant to go.

We once went to visit Aunt Jean and Uncle Louis at their new and beautiful home way out in the suburbs. I had never seen such a big house where the washer and dryer were in the kitchen, where they had no basement and where they had a family room as large as our whole apartment. We admired her beautiful bushes outside and she said she had not planted them; the wind must have blown some seeds and they landed on her property and they were the most beautiful flowers I had ever seen.

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Now I notice in my own development, most every lawn has these white weeds all over the lawns. It seems the wind must have blown all these weeds in our particular neighborhood and we are all having the same white, distasteful flowers around and we are all alike. Ralph Waldo Emerson said “a weed is a plant whose virtues have not been discovered yet.”

Many times we know people who we think are not established yet in their fields and we think as my aunt did snippy things about them. In my doctor’s office many years ago, he had a female physician coming to work there. One day I was there and he confided in me that he was wary about having a lady doctor there. At that time in about 1984 or so, you did not see a lot of females practicing medicine so much. There were lady lawyers and lady pharmacists, but the female doctors were not so prevalent, at least not where I frequented. He said he wondered in his specialty, would the males coming there be interested in using her services. Well, he was wrong, the moment she came to work there, she had plenty of patients of both sexes. She was very stern looking, wore a business like suit, no pants and everyone liked her for her abilities and her kindness. She even had a few well known baseball players as patients and I said Hi once to a very prominent one.

One day I was shopping in the supermarket and there she was in her jeans, loose shirt with her young daughter in the cart. I could barely recognize her until she said hi and I thought “where do I know her from?” Then it dawned on me she was Doctor So and So.

My snippy aunt would have characterized her as “wow she sure looks different, just real ordinary.” I thought how nice to see her in the different environment and especially with her young child.

Now we have a lady dentist, a lady gynecologist, a lady dermatologist, a lady podiatrist and friends of ours have a female lawyer. Bravo to these ladies who became practitioners of men’s’ occupations. When I worked in 1957 at a printing company, we got our first lady pressman. This was a person who made the printing letters to be printed on a plate out of the metal and then they ran the printing presses. Now it is done on computers. She was a tough looking lady named Catherine but she was a mom, wife and daughter too.  She had gone and learned typesetting as it was called in those days and she did a fine job. At first, the men resented her and then they became pals as workers do. There are lady surgeons, physical therapists and of course writers.

 

Snippy aunt would have said “they go in these professions to get a husband.” We had a neighbor when I was a kid in 1944 who became a pharmacist which then was a man’s field too. True, she did marry her husband who she met in pharmacy school, but in those days you rarely saw a female one. My mother-in-law had a friend who way back in about 1928 was the sole female in her law class. She did not marry a lawyer, she married a business man.

Women now days do and become whatever they desire and bravo to them for acquiring the tools and education to be what they want to be. The girls I knew in high school became nurses because that was a female profession. Now you see male nurses too. Men were usually the accountants, times changed and smart women went into the field if they liked numbers, details and math. Other women became school teachers, rarely was there a male teacher in the public schools and when my kids were in the sixth grade, they had one male teacher on the staff and he was a fine representative of what a good teacher was and is.

Snippy aunt would have said “he wanted to meet females that is why he became a teacher.” True, he was married to the music teacher there.

Snippy aunt was so wrong about so many snippy things; we nieces and nephews nicknamed her Aunt Marysnippa.

She was married to my uncle, a quiet and reserved man and she and he were two opposites who made it work. They ran a small grocery store together and she was the boss and all the customers knew that and they made a living and that was fine.

So females can do anything they want, where and when and they have been doing so now for approximately sixty or more years.  Kudos to all of them.

I ran an office in the days of 1952-1960 which was a high powered job in the days of no computers and we got a Xerox machine in about 1957 which made us feel real modern. We also obtained a few electric typewriters, a coffee machine and a ‘thing a ma jig’ called a teletype machine. We were amazed at how it worked. It was almost like a precursor to a computer. We could receive from our clients a change to their printing which was very important and they typed on their machine in New Jersey the change they wanted and it came over to our office on a piece of paper similar to a fax machine. There were no fax machines in those days, we had never even heard of the word yet. Then we made the printing change and sent them off a copy that we did it. We were amazed and excited to get this machine in our office in those olden days. Very few of our clients had the machine on their end, so it was used only for the select clients who had them and their corrections, changes and additions were done instantly to the printed matter. I was too ahead of my own time; I earned ten thousand per year in my executive position which was a lot of money especially for a female.

Oh how we lived in those ancient times and how thrilled we were when a new addition was added to the office. We could not wait for its installation and we exclaimed with great joy watching it deliver what it was attempting. The first Xerox copy we made, we stood there and applauded us and the machine. Times have advanced and days are easier with all of these expensive accruements and we take them for granted. I do not because I remember so well the days without these convenient equipment pieces.

So to snippy Aunt, I wonder what you would say, if you would have had these nice instruments of convenience to make your life easier in your business. Maybe, just maybe, you would be pleasanter, happier and feel real modern.

Maybe the balloons with the seeds in them who are carried by the wind will bring even more flowers of great worth this time around and the weeds will be gone and we can send a picture of our new flowers over our fax machine, our cellphone, our computer, out into the world of computer space and someone will have an extra smile that day when they see them. We will say something nice about it and we will have flowers of happiness be planted in our minds.

 

J

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