Workin' at the bloomin' bench

Medical Laboratory Observer,  June, 2008  by Carren Bersch

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Hey, for those of you laboring away at the bench this afternoon and wondering how much gas will cost later today, guess what? Miley Cyrus is writing her memoirs. At 15, she already has enough of a memoir to add an "s" and make it plural. And while you might be pondering whether you will get a 1% or a 3% raise this year, Miley signed a reported seven-figure deal for her book.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Miley needs to let the world know about her relationship with her mother. This prompted me to scour my house for my old journals. Heck, when my memoir outsells "Hannah Montana's," I will smile smugly and say (like Kathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes), "Face it, Hannah, I'm older and I had a sassier mama."

The search for my diaries from the 1960s prompted my recall of an old hippie poster that once extolled the virtue of "blooming where you are planted." So I did. I even skipped "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy" for several evenings to "plant" myself in the master bedroom floor reading through some pretty interesting adventures about which I have no conscious recall. But, then, there is much to be forgotten in this life. While I was anxious to give little Miss Miley a run for her memoir money, I did remember some wit and wisdom: "Fame and riches are fleeting. Stupidity is eternal."*

Folks who know me well do not think it strange that I have that floor covered with cardboard files full of papers. They do not find it odd when I say I have no idea what is in one single file folder in one single box. Except for my sister. She finds it strange and odd. "Face it, Carren, you are older ... and you need to clean house."

My paper collection has been "seasoning" for what my questionable mathematical skills calculate as approximately 30 years. Whatever is in my files is extremely valuable, however. It must be. For ages, I paid a climate-controlled storage facility a hefty price for space so the papers would not disintegrate. I paid an even heftier price last June to have a young friend cart them up to my second-story "greenhouse." "Face it, Boss Lady," he puffed, "you are too old to haul this stuff around, and you ain't gettin' any younger."

Between the 40-odd years of collecting obituaries of people who contributed to my life (like the guy who invented TV dinners) and those thought-provoking quotations (like Einstein's "I don't need to remember my own phone number; I can just look it up in the phone book."), I seem to have stockpiled more of other people's adventures than my own. One box contains sympathy letters and cards received when each of my parents died, recounting their friends' and relatives' memories of them. Another is chock full of photos and diaries, letters and memorabilia from my father's family history dating back 1,000 years in Scotland. Oops, there is this box devoted to pear recipes. I began collecting these long ago after asking my cook of a mother if she had a pear pie recipe. "Face it, sweetheart, you are no cook, and there is no such thing as pear pie," she laughed. Well, there is, and I intend to write a best-selling specialty book on pears dedicated to her memory (and to my pocketbook).

After planting myself night after night for weeks going through the boxes, I realized that I was growing roots. Miley Cyrus could sort through her famous short life better than I could mine. She got an earlier start. She has an agent to help her. And Disney pays her enough that she can hire a ghostwriter.

Besides, I am older, and I can bloom where I am planted.

And for those of you planted at that bench this afternoon, the price of gas just rose another nickel a gallon since you began reading this treatise; so, bloom where you are planted. Who can afford to go anywhere anyway?

*Don Williams Jr.

cbersch@nelsonpub.com

COPYRIGHT 2008 Nelson Publishing
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning