Tag: living life

Lipstick On His Glass

My husband keeps complaining that I leave lipstick on our glasses. He’s ninety-two and I keep reminding him he is a lucky duck at his age to still have a hot woman around to mess up his glassware with a Chanel shade named after him – Arthur.

For Arthur’s ninetieth the children and I took him on a transatlantic round trip on Cunard’s Queen Mary. I found ‘Arthur’ in the Chanel section at the boutique and decided why not. I spent $20,000 on this party for him, why not $50 on me. I love Arthur, but I also love lipstick.

There is something to be said about growing older. Arthur reminds everyone when he gets in and out of trouble with the etiquette police , “Im an old guy.” He can do ‘head scratching’ things and get away with it. Because he is old.

We just had a phone call from friends who have been together for 30 years. She has never been married and he has. She is over 80 and he is younger. She is afraid to fly so they have traveled the world together for thirty years by tramp steamers, cruise ships, trains and car. Now, on his part, that’s love if I have ever heard of it. Arthur would have left me years ago if he for thirty years had to take freighters to get from point A to B when traveling.

For our friends, everything for thirty years seemed just fine. They were both in the together groove without strings attached. They lived in her Manhattan apartment and vacationed in his Pocono house and traveled the world in between. Well, that phone call, they are getting married and we are invited to the wedding. True. We are going to a wedding in July. There is something to be said about growing older and not giving a hoot what others think.

I guess you could think of it as sometimes it takes couples longer than others to realize that they are in love. Forever love.

Hummmm? I wonder. She probably never leaves her lipstick on the drinking glasses. She finally got her man.

Copyright©️ Sandra Hart

WHAT IS THAT?!

I recently had a comment on one of my latest videos that said I should be doing ASMR videos. What? What is an ASMR video? I said out loud to myself.

It just so happened that I was sitting next to my 10 year old granddaughter who heard me and without any hesitation she explained it to me 1-2-3. A 10 year old! Just goes to show you how out of the Youtube loop I am! I am a creator who is stuck in my own box.

I do have to add that my subscriber said that my openings are already ASMR, so it should be easy for me to do one. She said the young girls are boring and she has to switch them off.

In case you are in that box with me, here is the explanation of ASMR:

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a euphoric experience characterized by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine, precipitating relaxation.

After digesting this a bit, I thought …

Humm… maybe there is a place for over sixty creators like me in the ASMR community. There is nothing like trying to teach an old dog new tricks. Let’s see if it works!

Copyright Sandra Hart ©️2018

CAN I DO IT AGAIN?

I have been doing videos on my Youtube channel lately talking about bucket lists and not putting off one’s dreams. All of this has me thinking about my own list. How can I motivate others and neglect my own unfilled desires?

The last time I sang in public was at my oldest daughter’s wedding in the 80’s. It was in a large vaulted church and I sang Schubert’s Ave Maria in Latin. When I look back now to what seems a long lifetime ago and why have I chosen to lock away my voice after that performance I don’t know. Life just happened, I guess.

Taking into consideration it is said if you don’t use it, you loose it. If singing in the shower once in awhile doesn’t count, well, I haven’t used my musical voice in years. The other morning a fear shot through me. Just out of the blue. I started wondering if I have lost it. If it’s too late to get back the gift given to me that once was so much of what made me happy.

As a young girl I sang in church and in a girl’s choir. I soloed at my music teachers wedding and I dreamed of singing opera one day in Europe. I met my late husband through music. My son is a musician. My daughters love music. Music has always been such an integral part of my and my family’s lives. How can I let it die within me?

I started vocalizing a week ago. My voice is there within the rusty pipes. I hear it. It’s still there. I know it won’t be ready for awhile, but I am going to get it back – every scale run by scale run.

My bucket list? Recording a song or two. For me. Just for me. Never say never.

Copyright Sandra Hart 2018©️. All Rights Reserved

It’s All About Arthur 

I never thought about age differences thirty-three years ago when I married Arthur.  Somehow when you are really young age difference matters, then it disappears in adulthood, and suddenly the awareness reawakens as you get older. It really is a strange dicothemy.

My husband is thirteen years older than I am and when we got married, I didn’t even think about our age differences. My parents were ten years apart and it worked out just fine for them.

It was only  when we celebrated Arthur’s ninety-first birthday, that I realized how lucky I am. All of his friends are gone and he is standing alone and quite healthy in his nineties.  The odds are that it could be a quite different story for both of us.  Sometimes I think he has more energy than I do!

To celebrate his milestone I recently interviewed my husband about how it feels to be in his nineties. 

Copyright Sandra Hart©2017. All Rights Reserved 

Our Clothes Are A Mirror Of Who We Are

” She had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners.”   Louisa May Alcott

Our clothes and style are a mirror of who we really are, aren’t they?  When we wake up in the morning what we wear indicates how we feel, where we are going and our attitude about the next twelve hours.  

For men more than women, I think, sometimes dressing becomes routine as soon as their feet hit the floor. They throw on their favorite well-worn jeans, T shirt, slip on flip flops, loafers or old sneakers and are ready to face the world and what is out there waiting for them.

Most women are different animals all together. We plan, organize, accessorize and treat clothes as an extension of who we are. Our clothes don’t actually make us, but we make the clothes our own.  

Copyright Sandra Hart© 2017. All Rights Reserved

How Sweet It Is!

 Grandchildren at times can be both joy and the backside of heaven!

I hate to admit it, but I have finally reached middle age, or to be more honest, I am just on the edge of the  cliff from being ‘old’ at least in my grandchildren’s eyes. And who sees clearer than a bunch of  pre-schoolers with virgin honesty that has not yet been corrupted by watching us adults? No one I have yet to meet in my travels, anyway.

For most of my adult life I have been writing about life around me as I see it. First as a CBS affiliate  anchorperson and then as an author. And for several years now I have been writing about everyday living and how to make the most of it.

I am at my happiest when I am with my family or when I am creating. As much as I enjoy being in the public arena, entertaining, lecturing and helping other people, I was born a very introspective person. For some reason I have not always been able to comfortably share my own deepest thoughts and feelings, even with my closest friends and family.

Perhaps that is why writing so comfortable for me. What I feel, what I think becomes a fountain when put on paper. As a young girl with an older brother who was always off on his own with his friends, I learned to use my creativity to entertain myself. Being able to put my thoughts and feelings down has always been joyful to me.

During the 12 hour ride from New Jersey to Lexington, Kentucky this weekend I learned a new meaning for ‘sweet’ from my 18 year-old  grandson. To me “sweet’ has always meant the stuff that packed the pounds onto my hips, the taste of root beer or the look on my little girls’ faces when they wanted something from me. But today it seems that ‘sweet’ has replaced ‘cool’ in hip teenage vernacular.

So when I think of aging gracefully, if there is such a thing, I say ‘sweet’.  I told him about the comedian Jackie Gleason’s famous line as his character Ralph in The Honeymooners, “How sweet it is!” To me that always meant things were darn good. So maybe this current tweaking of the meaning of ‘sweet’ is not too far from Ralph’s gleeful proclamations years ago when life was rockin’ with Alice.

All of this thought pattern continued when in Lexington I picked up at the local Barnes & Noble a copy of Dr. Andrew Weil’s book, “Healthy Aging.” According to Dr. Weil we all begin aging from the time of birth. (Whoa! Isn’t that a depressing thought!)

He quotes the words of an Eastern philosopher, “The sun at noon is the sun declining; the person born is the person dying.” 

Aging is really not reversible. But on the positive side, his message is clear. At any age it is important to learn how to live in appropriate ways in order to maximize health and happiness. That really should be an essential goal for all of us.

 

 

Prologue

For those of you who have read my memoir, Behind The Magic Mirror, you are familiar with the story of my life up to and until the year 2002.

I grew up in Steubenville, a gloomy Ohio Valley steel town on the banks of the Ohio River and as a young woman realized my dream of leaving the industrial grime and smoke that I grew to hate.

Attending college far away from home was not only a way out, but also during my years at school, life afforded me a break. I was asked to audition for Bert Claster, the creator of a popular children’s television show, Romper Room, syndicated throughout the world.   This occurrence changed my life forever and I began on a whirlwind of life-changing events that caused me to eventually lead a double life. My public persona was that of a successful anchorwoman, but my private life was one of personal pain and constant terror.

My mind was occupied with a stalker that had threatened my life and in searching for the truth, I discovered that it was my husband, who eventually was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1980 he disappeared from the face of the Earth, never to be heard from again.

It took me eleven years to sort out the mystery of my husband’s disappearance and to also sort out my feelings when I discovered the truth.

When the ball dropped in New York’s Times Square on the Millennium and we all survived while entering the next century, I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to tell my story.

My initial plan was to combine a journal that I kept traveling the Nile River in 1984 with the story of my life and the investigation I started thereafter involving Jennings’ disappearance.

I wasn’t too sure that anyone but me would be interested in my emotional evolution during that prior journey to Egypt, so I gave my journal to several of my family and good friends to read. They encouraged me to go ahead and begin telling my story using my journal, but I decided to put it aside and just start telling my story right from the beginning as it was lived.

After years of trying not to think about my life with my husband and his death,  I thought that if and when I made the decision to validate my pain and let go of the anger that there would be a great emotional healing that would release me. That there would be a great catharsis that would set me free.

So then why was I sitting there trying to fight back not tears of joy, but of emptiness. Why was there no feeling of an end for me? An end to my life with him, a severing of the cord for once and for all. He was gone and now I could get on with my life.

But as I sat there I knew there would be no end for me, and no end for my children. How could I not have seen it before? Knowledge gives us power, but it would never give us complete closure. We can never erase the days and years he was a part of our lives. Those memories we will carry forever.

So I have traveled this long journey to discover that in the end to find answers is just part of the closure. And it is not the most important in the trilogy  of finding peace within. It is the confronting of truths and the forgiveness of  trespasses against us that brings final peace and closure.

So that is my story. That is part of who I am. The answers I had looking for closure had released me to another journey that begins for me everyday my feet hit the floor. I can’t wait to see what is around the next bend in my after-fifty road. And I thank all of you who are willing to travel with me as I experience life and living here on this planet we all are lucky enough to share together.

♥♥♥♥♥

Conundrum

What words plea

Upon the page

 To tell my tale

Expose my soul

 So I can feel 

 So you can see

What I know? 

Me.      

♥♥♥♥♥

 ©Sandra Hart 2012