. Spinning .

What is the meaning of sunshine, green grass and flowers?  What do they cost in a life?  Taking stock of all, where do they sit in the grand portfolio–are they up there on top with the rugs and the couches and paintings and twenty shares of Microsoft bought back in ’97? 

What is the cost of a day not well spent?  What is the value of children not taught?  What is the right of an ungrateful mind to sit inside someone’s head.

Last evening I noticed a flutter at the feeder and thought it to be a very hungry bird that tried to get the seeds from inside the feeder out of reach.  He hustled back and forth a while and then he stopped.  I realized his greedy little head was stuck inside. 

I do not like quick moving jumping at me kind of things.  But I was, I saw, the little sparrow’s only hope.  I went over to the feeder, speaking softly to him since he could not see me and lifted the top and slid the plexiglass partition up.  It took a moment for him to realize that he was free; it took a moment for me to realize he wasn’t dead.  He roused himself from flattened form and flew away.

Oh I do love small victories, and this one turned into a big one for lotsa little folk like me.

A couple years ago I was a payment behind on my SBC yellow page advertising for the frameshop.  I usually paid three to six months in advance at a time, but often just the $33 monthly charge if times were slim.  A small retail business is a feast or famine situation, and if I took in a lot I’d sit down and catch up all the bills if they had gotten a month or two behind, and pay in advance if possible. 

SBC hit me with a $25 late fee on a single $33 monthly payment.  I sent them $33.  The next month, having applied the payment first to their late fee with the balance of $8 towards the past due, they hit me again with another $25 fee and despite phone calls, they racked up $100 late fee charges.  This, even when I sent the final four months’ advertising charges in advance to pay in full the contract balance.  This, when two letters stating that a $25 late fee was most likely usury and quite illegal, and that I had no intention of ever paying this.  Nevertheless, they kept billing me for the $100 (which they showed as advertising charges, having paid their own fees first), and only when the annual contract was up for renewal and I refused to sign did they magically wipe out the charges. 

Yesterday I received notice as a possible participant in a class action suit against SBC Yellow Page Advertising to the tune of close to $4,000,000 and a ruling against the company meaning they will have to pay this out (in most cases, $.50 on the $1.00 credit or up to 78% of charges paid as credited to your advertising account).  That’s a lot of $25 late fees people paid.  Me, I get nothing because I refused to ever pay them and when they wanted my continued business, they waived the unpaid fees to clean the slate.

I’m not a fighter, will go a mile out of my way to avoid argument.  But I stand firm on grounds of principle, and have been known to spend a day in small claims court to win my rights.  I took great pleasure once in allowing an accountant who overcharged me after filing a late tax return (his fault) and getting me in dutch with the IRS because he told me I’d owe nothing more then I got hit with several thousand dollars owed.  He wanted his last $75.00 (I’d paid him $75 more than he’d estimated already.)  He had a lawyer spend the day there with him (at what hourly fee?).  I only brought a book to read.  At the end of the day, I walked out owing nothing, but finished the novel just in time to go before the judge. 

From the north hills country to the shore, spots along the way I’ve been before.  Route 8 south, first exit down the Rod & Gun Club, next where Louis lived–he’s now married and in Virginia.  Next one down my father-in-law, the small stone church where Jim and I were married and down the next where at the reception we danced just once together.  His brother lives off of the next exit, a couple more my former eye doctor.  Pat from Tennessee had fathers off the next three exits, Oxford, Beacon Falls and Seymour.  The hospital in Derby where I was born and where my mother last was taken when she fell.  Then the cemetary where three generations of my family lay, the next, my childhood home, my dad’s.  And the the schools and church and a decade of my life.  Another five years spent driving off the next exit across the river to an office upstairs from the factory where my father worked as foreman, now it’s flatlands that the fire left behind from the explosion.  The next exit was a regular routine with my mother and the doctors, a few years later up the hill to the home where I sat with her when she died.  Two exits up my oldest sister lived for years, the one who pulled up roots and moved to Sarasota.  Two exits more my other sister, soon she will be moving several exits back.  We pick up the Merritt Parkway then I-95.  Past the largest mall where I shopped several times a week, now very much the smallest.  Then I smell the salt air of the ocean.  We pull into the parking lot of Jimmy’s for whole-belly clams.  I cruised the lot of Jimmy’s as a teen, but Jimmy’s wasn’t here–it has been moved.  And Savin Rock the rides and games are gone–but Savin Rock itself is there, though I had never noticed it in all the years I walked the beach.  He goes off to see the classic cars on cruise night–a different kind of cruise night then I remember; Pat at the wheel with two guys trying to pick us up while I slurped two dozen raw clams off their home plates before I joined the conversation.  I take off my shoes and feel the sand and shattered shells grab at my toes.  Stare down the gulls who’ve come to see the people as their feeders.  Low tide never bothered me before, but worse than seaweed washes, wets the sand.  And though I feel a stong tie to the ocean, I cannot, maybe being from the north now, make myself go in.

Well that was kind of neat.  We were just sitting out back after a lovely pork roast and gravy dinner (done on the grill) and admiring the coral pink and aqua sky of sunset that slowly faded to colorless dusk.  Noticing movement to my left on the porch I looked down and there’s a young raccoon coming right up to me.  I of course let out a small scream and he looked up at me, looked at Jim, turned tail and ran.

An hour earlier I talked to a lady hummingbird outside the window over the kitchen sink as I washed the dinner dishes.  You see, she isn’t afraid of me, and lately the male has been chasing her from the feeder I have stuck in the flower box.  If I keep talking to her, the male, who doesn’t trust me the way the female does, won’t bother her. 

Gawrsh, I feel like Mother Nature.