Signs of Early Senility

There was only one. You know, it was something about serenity to change things and not change things, and the wisdom to know how to spell serenity. If you saw a sign and it had pretty letters on it, chances are that’s what it would say. Either that or “Hot dogs, 89 cents.”

That was back in the day. Now there’s a trend to put some old boards together with peeling paint, that look like you dug them out from under the tool shed, put a pithy saying on them, and sell them for forty-five more dollars than the hot dog cost. 

But here’s the deal, at least the serenity thing had a beginning, middle, and end. Kind of. Now I constantly see these signs in people’s houses that sound like you picked up the extension phone in another bedroom and heard a segment of the conversation. 

They say, “And so together they built a life they loved.” Who? Who did? And what happened to them before that point in the story? Have we just jumped to the last chapter before we even started the first one?

“And she believed she could, and so she did.” Huh? Who? What did she believe she could do? Give me some details. Are you related to her? Why is there a wood sign about her in your house?

“And we will never go back.” Who? Back where? Where did you come from? Why? Why are you not going back there? What happened? Does this have something to do with mice or snakes?

Does this bother anyone but me? We were pretty much fired in school if we started a sentence with a conjunction. Fired starts with an F, by the way. 

But now it happens. (Yes, I do know that sentence started with a conjunction.) It’s very popular to put a fraction of a sentence with no contextual clues right in your entrance foyer. Let’s go ahead and get the confusion started before they even enter the general chaos.

We don’t care that our participles are dangling anymore. We dangle them from the wall hooks and the barn pegs. Pretty sure we’re just saying random things now, and hope no one will notice.

And if we don’t have a pithy sentence part, we have a long boring set of family rules. We didn’t have pretty signs with rules on them growing up. They were pretty much just shouted straight from Mama’s lips. DON’T WIPE YOUR FEET ON THE CARPET! THAT’S WHAT THE BEACH TOWEL IS FOR! She didn’t put that in calligraphy on a rustic board. I guess that’s why she said, “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times.” If you had paid someone 45 dollars and 89 cents to put it on a sign, and hung it in your foyer, you wouldn’t have had to tell us 1,000 times.

I find that the rules these days are more general. Things like laugh a lot and forgive freely. Those are rules? Why didn’t one of you people adopt me back then?

If I’m doing the sign for our house, for the record, the rules are: 1. Don’t eat my bacon. 2. Don’t change the channel while I’m gone to the bathroom. 3. No bouncing basketballs before 5 a.m. 4. Put the seat back down. 5. Don’t use the good towel to wipe stuff off the floor. Asterisk: This means all stuff! 

In pretty letters of course.

People need affirmation, and I get that. I mean, I get that they want it; not that I get the actual affirmation. So they hang the sign “I am enough” instead of what most of us are probably really thinking, “I’ve had enough.” 

But I’ve always heard from the experts that affirmation works well if it’s very specific, so why are we not seeing more signs that say, “I can spell Antarctica without googling”; “I can hold my nostrils closed for 16 seconds”;  “I passed a 14 mm kidney stone”?

I guess because no one cares. And if you put a random part of a part of a sentence in a story you haven’t heard, people at least crinkle their brow as if they are either slightly interested or constipated.

Or should I say, “and together, we furrowed our brows"?