Pop Tabs

It’s not always easy to pinpoint the genesis of an obsession, but this one is pin-pointable: summer 2009.  That summer, the Livermore Shakespeare Festival produced A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Concannon Vineyard.  The costume designer decided on a steam punk theme for the fairies’ costumes and sent out a call to all of us in the company to save pop tabs for her, pop tabs she would use to make the fairies’ jewelry and decorate their costumes.  My daughter, Karen, who is also a member of the company, mentioned that one of her coworkers collects pop tabs.  Collects pop tabs.  Ah, yes.  Of course.

Karen’s friend, Kathy Hampel, the pop tab collector, was willing to donate as many pop tabs as needed.  She had boxes of them.  We were all grateful and agreed to collect pop tabs to repay Kathy for her kindness without a thought as to what that might mean.

We started by simply breaking off the tabs before recycling aluminum cans.  We don’t use too many of them at our house, but we soon started buying anything we could in aluminum cans instead of bottles so we could get the tabs – V-8 juice (me), diet soda (husband Neil and Karen).  Then we started noticing an occasional aluminum can in a gutter or thrown against a building.  Grabbed it and retrieved the tab.  Touring a theater complex, we saw some cans in a field left over from workers’ lunches.  Grabbed them and retrieved the tabs.  We mentioned to our friends that we were collecting pop tabs, and they began saving them as well.  When Neil has his Monday lunch get-together with the guys, his friends often bring a handful of pop tabs they’ve saved. 

When we go for our walks, we peer into garbage cans in the parks; when we find aluminum cans we grab them and retrieve the tabs.  One day, we passed a truck parked in front of a neighbor’s house.  The little side slot in the side of the truck bed was filled with aluminum cans!  Our fingers were itching – but we didn’t see the owner to ask permission so had to let them go.  Sometimes on recycling days we’ll find cans in the gutter or street that the recycling truck leaked.  The other day, Neil came upon a brown paper bag on a picnic table.  He looked in the bag.  It held a 12-pack of Bud, empty cans (all but one).  So he grabbed and retrieved 11 pop tabs!  Bonanza!  It’s all we can do to keep from leaping out of the car on freeway approaches when we see cans lying in the weeds.  We keep our eyes peeled for pop tabs on the street, in parking lots, wherever we are.  It’s an obsession, an addiction, a frenzy.

So what do we do with them?  Well – we pass our collection along to Karen who turns them in to her coworker, Kathy.  As it turns out, Kathy belongs to an exclusive Airstream recreational vehicle owners club whose members gather for an international rally somewhere in the U.S. each summer, and club members perform community service projects.   One of these is supporting the Ronald McDonald House Charity, an international organization that supports the families of children receiving medical treatment.   And one of the ways to support RMHC is to donate collections of pop tabs (all explained on the RMHC website at http://rmhc.org/how-you-can-help/pop-tab-collections/).   Those little tabs can make a difference.  Last year, Kathy’s club collected 1628 pounds (!) of pop tabs and donated $300 to RMHC.  One RMHC chapter in the midwest raises $30,000 a year through its pop tab program.

If you’d like to join in, send us your tabs.  And if you should see a hoary-headed (see Post #2) couple rummaging in trash bins, the situation may not be as dire as it appears.  We’re just looking for pop tabs.

Gray or Grey?

Once I determined my vanity could accommodate gray hair, I worried about how to spell it: gray or grey?  A retired English teacher, I am pretty persnickety about words.  Which would be correct?  Or at least best?

Curious, I Googled.  Turns out gray-with-an-a is the generally accepted American spelling while grey-with-an-e is British, according to the definitions I looked at.  One helpful site pointed out a nifty mnemonic: grAy = American spelling; grEy = English.

Which diverted me from obsessing about gray (or not) hair to considering some of the differences between British and American spelling (not to mention definitions and pronunciation, but that’s another topic or two).  I vaguely remember that when I was very young, some spellings retained the British “u”in words like color/colour, honor/honour, favor/favour.  I thought the spelling conventions were just then changing, but it turns out (another foray into Google) that current British English spellings follow, for the most part, those of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), whereas many American spellings follow Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).

Naturally, the next step would be to find out how Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster spelled gray/grey in their respective dictionaries.  Assuming that grey would be Dr. Johnson’s choice, I looked there first.  Here’s the first part of his entry: “GREY. adj. [gris, French. More properly written gray.]  See GRAY.”  Hmm. He does, however, quote a line from King Lear which uses grey, but no doubt gray is his choice.  He goes on for at least a third of a page with definitions of gray, including illustrative quotes from Milton, Newton, Dryden and Shakespeare, among others.  (That Shakespeare used both spellings is no surprise.  He’s never been accused of being a consistent speller.)

Well, then.  Let’s see what Noah Webster’s American dictionary has to say.  “GRAY.” Webster doesn’t include any examples, just several definitions of gray as both noun and adjective (“white with a mixture of black,” “white: hoary,” etc.).   Webster’s entry for grey reads simply, “See Gray.”

So much for the observation about American/British spelling sources, at least where gray/grey is concerned.

So I’m glad I chose gray-with-an-a.    Gray seems lighter, airier, less ashen than grey.  Though I kind of like Webster’s “hoary.” Jazzes things up a bit.   

Going Gray

So here I am, an old dog trying to learn a new trick:  how to write a blog, how to share some of my thoughts on senioritis in general and some on my exciting retirement projects.  But that's for later.

Right now, I'm getting used to the idea of having gray hair.

I went gray after over 40 years of attempting to reject the aging process by coloring my hair, colors ranging from OLR (old lady red) to beige.  ("Blonde," it seems to me, implies something other than the color of an aging woman's hair.)  My natural color – as near as I can remember – was a kind of reddish-brown.

For a while coloring meant regular trips to the local drugstore, bringing home a hair-coloring solution, trying to keep from splashing color all over the bathroom walls (and usually spending more time cleaning up than dying), and breathing shallowly to avoid the foul-smelling ammonia or whatever it is that smells in those formulations.

I finally decided I couldn’t deal with the mess anymore so took on the time and expense of having my hair colored at a beauty salon.  For a while OLR was the color of choice.  After a while it seemed too garish (esp. as the years advanced), so I toned it down to that beige color adopted by SO many women of a certain age.  Boring.  But I stuck with it until the cosmos decreed otherwise.

My hair is thin, exposing my scalp to sun damage, leading eventually to a shaved head.  For a while I wore a wig.  It was fun.  I liked having HAIR!  Not so thin.  The wig was the same beige my (colored) hair had been, same style, so I didn’t feel like I made too obvious a change.  As my hair grew back in, I thought, "Well, I'll just dye my hair to match the wig.  No one will know the difference." 

Well – the scalp issues continued.  I had to use a special shampoo that would strip the hair of artificial color.  Not only that, but while I was (more or less) hairless, the wig pretty much stayed in place, held by peculiar little strips of tape. Once my hair started growing back, the wig began slipping around.  I didn’t have enough of my own hair to pin down the wig effectively, and my (by now) gray hair was showing around the edges.  Everytime I caught sight of myself in a mirror, the wig was askew, or I'd catch myself adjusting my "hair" as I cruised the aisles of the supermarket.

Fine.  The hair-coloring business, the wig, the worry was getting way too complicated.  Forget it (to put it politely) and go gray.  Which I did.  But....gray or grey?  Next post.