500 Words, Day 29 - Mason Jars

I just spent a half hour looking around on my Facebook page for something I wrote about Mason jars that I was going to use to get started on 500 Words, Day 29.  I failed to post on the appointed day, but a deal is a deal so I’m just going to finish up a few days behind schedule.   If I’ve learned anything about myself on this month’s voyage, it’s that when I say I’m going to do something, I take it very seriously.

So now I’m working with that sick feeling you get sometimes when you have to reconstruct some work you did that was pretty decent at the time, but now what was brilliant about it is escaping you so you have to write about the process of writing the story instead of the story itself.  How meta!  (I love that phrase that I learned this month, so thank you to The Frozen Yogi, Ph.D.)    

The background:  We were going through glasses faster than the dishwasher could keep up, because in addition to moving in my daughter’s lowlife drug-dealing boyfriend, my ex had also moved his nephew in from Alabama.  “Just a few weeks while he figures a living situation out,” was how it was explained to me, but by the time I myself had moved out six months later, he was still living there, rent-free, despite having located a job where he made more money that I did.  (That sentence is needs some real structural help but let’s leave it for now because I spent a lot of time looking for the Facebook post instead of writing the piece I was going to use it for, and now there’s very little time left to write, let alone edit.)

That’s how I knew that I had posted the vignette sometime between August 2012, when Nephew moved in and February 2013, when I moved out and stopped caring whether there were enough glasses to drink out of between dishwasher cycles.   I had gone to Goodwill because I had wanted to buy a bunch of glasses that I wouldn’t care about if they broke because cheap.  But of course I found really awesome glasses that I really cared about when they broke because conflicted.  

While I was there, perusing the shelves of glassware, I saw a young woman, maybe 22 or so, who appeared to be looking frantically for something in particular.  She hurriedly pushed aside the glasses until she came across a Mason jar, setting each one she found carefully in the handbasket she had lined with a silk blouse that I recognized from the women’s clothing racks.

She turned to me.  “If you see any more glasses like this, can you grab them for me?  You know, if you don’t want them.  I know they’re hard to come by.”

“Actually,” I offered helpfully, “They sell them by the dozen at OSH and a couple other places around here.  Are you doing a canning project today?  What are you going to put up?”  

Blank look.  I couldn’t tell if she was stymied by the question or the discovery that her search was unnecessary.  “Canning project?  What do you mean?”

“I mean, you know, are you making jam or spaghetti sauce or pickles or what?”

“Well, I’m having a barbecue.  I’m making mojitos and the guys are bringing beer.”  She furrowed her brow quizzically.  “Do you mean people use these glasses to make jam and pickles? How funny.”

I am not even kidding right now.  That really happened.  And when I wrote about it the first time, I told it a lot better than this, which is why I’m mad at Facebook right now.  And mad at myself for not preserving greatness.    Haha.