Amazon delivered the box to the wrong address. Instead of sending it to me, the very large package was shipped to my son’s very small apartment in West Hollywood.
“Mother,” he said when he called to report the incident, “it seems to be, um, underwear. Is it yours?”
“Depends,” I muttered.
“What?” he asked.
“That depends,” I corrected more firmly. “I’ll have to check and see what happened.”
Sure enough, my very large order was shipped by mistake to my son along with a small gift that I meant to send.
There were 10 items in all — shampoo, conditioner, and other necessities — but the big problem was the huge box of ladies disposable underwear. I can tell that you’re wanting to ask why I would need to order 76 pairs of ladies disposable undies. I will tell you. None of your business.
Let me just remind you that not everything we purchase is intended for its original use. It often happens that we have to use tried and true items for new purposes. As a child, I used to sneak the wax paper bread wrapper out to ride on to make the slide more slippery.
And of course, there was the time my husband repurposed the kids’ swing set into a Fourth of July fireworks arsenal.
As in many families, in the days before there were restrictions on fireworks, the head of our house couldn’t get enough of firecrackers — the bigger, louder and more likely to amputate fingers, the better. Number One Son remembered his Dad taking over our backyard swing set in Taiwan where firecrackers are much loved when we were stationed there with the Army in 1962.
“(Dad) repurposed a long skinny piece (1-inch diameter, about 3 feet long) of metal tubing from the swing set by cutting a square hole at one end so you could put a skyrocket in at the bottom and the fuse would stick out the square window. Dad would light the fuse with his ever-present cigarette lighter and voila! We had a skyrocket bazooka. I seem to recall launching skyrockets from our bazooka across a narrow river or wide stream.”
(Mom remembers: Actually this was an open benjo sewer ditch into which Number One Son had, a few years earlier, dropped his brother. But what the heck, we were able to fish brother out and dry him off. No harm done.)
The miracle is that this repurposing sometimes extends to the people around us, with much better results — like with my daughter’s second-grade teacher.
I remember that Mr. Andres could always take what seemed to be a deficit and repurpose it as a success. For instance, there was the kite-building contest when every child had to build his or her own kite — nothing from the store. Since this wasn’t a class in aerodynamics, most of the kites didn’t fly. But Mr. Andres created an award for each effort — and not one of those dumb plastic things, either. Every child received an award based on actual accomplishment. I remember well that my daughter’s award was “tried the most times!” My daughter never forgot his kindness and perception.
When she was in high school, she repurposed her inability to get into the drill team and organized a marching drill team for younger children who dressed as gardeners, marched in Steilacoom’s Fourth of July parade and won awards for their participation. That resulted in an invitation for my daughter to be part of a national drill team. There’s always the chance to give up or move on, it seems.
Back to that package in question: Many sources including CNN and Instructables.com offer a long list of things that adult diapers can be used for, from rescuing books accidentally dropped in the bath tub, to making warm indoor slippers . In fact, after reading these ideas, you’re bound to wonder how you can possibly get by without running right out to buy a big box of these wonderful resources.
This is what I’ve learned. You can’t jump to conclusions about what an item is to be used for and no one should be embarrassed to have any item on their grocery list or in that grocery cart. So I hope I’ve distracted you from speculating on the contents of that large package. Amazon says they’ll be coming to pick up the misdirected package from my son’s house in a week or so. They seem less sure of when, or if, the goods will arrive at my house.
In the meantime, of these accessories, I’m living a normal life. Modern Life is uncertain. We don’t know what’s ahead. It all depends.
Where to find Dorothy in July
Note: Dorothy Wilhelm is 90-1/2 years old and is the longest continuously on-air and in-print X-chromosome person in the Northwest. If you’d like her to come and speak to your group, contact her at Dorothy@itsnevertoolate.com/
Her podcast, Swimming Upstream Radio Show, can be found at itsnevertoolate.com . There’s a new show every Monday.
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