"I don't pretend to be captain weird. I just do what I do.".......Johnny Depp

There is rarely a week that goes by that someone doesn't tell me I'm weird. A lot of the time it's my boss, Nikki E. who, though she loves me dearly, doesn't really "get" me. My love of words, reading, going to office supply stores for no reason at all, taking my first ballet class at 51, joining the Red Hat Society and purposely going out into public in purple clothes and exotic red hats so people will look at me....it all mystifies her, as I might say, it does a lot of the people I know.

I can't tell you how much it used to bother me to be told I was weird, or different. As much as I tried to be a cookie-cutter girl, that just never worked for me. It started when I was a kid. A case in point was my favorite toy, my stuffed mouse, Retina. You read correctly....my stuffed mouse, Retina. Yes, he was, at one time over 45 years ago, a real live rodent, scampering happily through the rice fields in China. Retina had a family; a little mousie wife, many small mice children, a nice tiny home with an itty-bitty mortgage. Then, one day on his way to work, he suffered a heart attacked and died. His family, being of a charitable nature, donated his body so that even in death he could continue to bring joy to others. He was stuffed, given red bead eyes, placed in a tiny gilded bird cage, sold in a Chinese marketplace to the grandmother of one of the little girls in my neighborhood and brought to America.

I can still vividly recall the first time I ever saw Retina. It was late on a sunny summer afternoon, and my sister and I were playing on the sidewalk in front of our house. Jonjee, who lived two doors down and was a couple of years younger than Debbie and me, called us over. She held in her hand the little gilded cage her grandmother had just brought back as a souvenir of her trip to mainland China. A beam of sunlight bounced off of one of the golden bars of the cage as I laid my eyes on the most perfect little white mouse I had even seen. His little red eyes twinkled at me, and I knew I must have him for my own. But how?

I needn't have worried. Jonjee was quite astute for a girl of 6; she knew right away she had something I wanted, and I had something she wanted. She laid it out quite simply: I could have Retina (whom she had given the unimaginative name of Squeaky) if I would give her my life-sized baby doll with all her clothes. Now, this doll, Baby Ruth, was special because of her clothes. BR had been a Christmas present from my Aunt Velda. Every piece of her clothing had been sewn by hand by my aunt, who was a seamstress of unequaled talent. She had stitched every seam and hem herself. There was no sewing machine involved at all. Tiny stitches barely visible to the naked eye. Absolutely magnificent.

It was a no brainer; I ran to get BR, and handed her over straight-away to Jonjee. And into my trembling hands was placed my beloved Retina. No, the tiny gilded cage was not part of the bargain, as Jonjee really liked that. I felt like I had made the best deal in the world and took my new acquisition home to show my mom. Boy! did Mom hit the roof! She was furious that I had given the doll away for a stuffed rodent. After all, my aunt had spent months making those outfits. But no amount of threats or cajoling would make me take Retina back to Jonjee. He was mine. Forever. And I still have him to this very day. All of his snowy white fur has rubbed off, his red bead eyes dropped out, and his ears are gone. But he's my prized possession and I love him dearly. Heck, even my own kids were never allowed to play with him when they were little.

So, you ask, what has all this got to do with anything? Well, I went to Staples Office Supply and got to buy tons of stuff today! (Please refer to paragraph one, sentence three above). I bought new ink for my printer, nifty new paper, pink envelopes, pens, a day planner, a paper cutter, notebooks.....so much stuff! I'm all ready to begin my letter campaign for donations! Oh, how I love the smell of an office supply store in the morning!

I told you I was weird.