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Health & Fitness

May I Rant?

A personal rant - with national implications - all about promises not kept.

“A promise is a promise,” my father always said – until he walked out the door, never to return, when I was thirteen.  Too many promises to keep, I guess, and so he ran off with his manicurist, with whom he had been tooling and fooling around (we later learned) for many years.

“Promise you won’t give the babysitter a hard time. . .”  “Promise you’ll eat your lunch.”  “Promise you’ll call me when you get there. . .”  As a mother, when the children were small, and even when they were grown, out on their own,  married, there were always promises to be kept.

“Pinky promise?” I ask the grandchildren.  That you will never feed your sister rabbit poop again?  That you will never throw out your peanut butter and jelly sandwich and tell me that you ate it?  That you won’t stay up reading until midnight?  “Absolutely promise!” I am assured.  Hah!

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And then there are the other promises:  like the politicians who vow that they will have the interests of the people in mind.  Excuse me, but who are the people?  The one percent with all the money?  The ones who can use the first class bathrooms on the airplanes while the rest of us line up in the back?  The ones who jet their children to private camp? 

To bring it down a few levels, there are the medicinal/pharmaceutical/everything else promises -  like the remedies that are guaranteed to cure whatever ails you.  They will eliminate your pain, lubricate your dry spots, reduce the size of your prostate (only if you have one), make you happy, take away your stress, cure your cold.  Just buy one, or two or three, of everything that’s in the store or on a shelf, and it’s instant relief.  While listening to Radio Classics the other day, I heard a 60 year old ad for Four-Way Cold Tablets.  One would have thought, while listening to Basil Rathbone (is there a reader out there who recognizes that name?) that there would not be a cold germ left in the world.  Obviously there are more than a few, and more than a few new solutions to the problem.  Four-Way went the way of my father, I guess.

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But, at a time when we, the people, are reeling from what has transpired in Washington, what has put me over the edge is an $80 beach umbrella purchased in July 2010 and used approximately 25 times since then.  This was an umbrella that promised to be “wind resistant”.  I would never spend $80 on a beach umbrella; I’m more the Ikea/Target/Amazing Savings kind of woman, but I was tired of the inside-out effect, or chasing after an umbrella that was well staked in the sand.  And so, once again, I bought a promise.  And the ribs started falling apart as I opened it up the first time this summer season, and the upper level now flaps so that the sun shines through, and the other day I grabbed it as it flew away – in the first and only wind – before it could land in the ocean.  No recourse, of course.  Just a terse note from the company stating:  too late.

The bottom line?  Frustrated, mad as hell, but somehow, still believing.    A promise is a promise, whatever that means!  And, with apologies to Robert Frost, I have promises to demand and keep and miles to go before I sleep. . .

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