I got my first pair of (many, many) glasses when I was twelve years old. I was playing tag in my grandmother’s yard (with a friend-who-was-a-boy) and so of course not only was I running around like a nut, I was also distracted. So first I was chasing Scotty, trying to tag him, and the next thing I knew I was on my butt in the grass, holding my mouth, bleeding.
I said, “Oh, crap!”
Scotty said, “Oh, bye!”
He left quickly.
What the hell happened? I had somehow managed to smash my mouth into the front of my father’s car, which was parked on the grass where we were playing. To my horror, as I went into the house to tell my mother what happened, I realized that I had shards of…what, tooth? Tooth! Shards of tooth were in my mouth! Not only had I gotten a fat lip from my “car crash”, but I’d also broken my front tooth.
My parents were more annoyed than sympathetic (this was gonna cost them). We didn’t have dental insurance so the fix was minimal (“I’ll just file it down so the sharp point from the tooth doesn’t puncture her tongue,” the dentist offered cheerfully). Worse than this was that the cause of the crash. I hadn’t crashed into the car because I was clumsy (well, not just because of that), as was first thought, but because I couldn’t see how close I was to it.
I was nearsighted.
The state provided my glasses. I had no choice about which frame I got since there was only one option: the lovely cat’s eyes that you see pictured above. Although my dad tried to be upbeat about it, there was really not one bit of excitement involved.
So, I’d lost half a tooth, but hey, I gained a pair of glasses soon thereafter.
I recently read a magazine article about Valerie Bertinelli ( Woman’s Day, I think; she was on the cover, if that helps) in which she describes a day that she spent in bed. Her husband was away travelling (I think), and of course she’s had an empty nest now for years, so there weren’t too many arrangements for her to make in advance. She gets a stack of magazines, books she has been wanting to read, movies she’s been wanting to see…then takes to her bed, staying in her jammies (duh) and even brings any meals right there to the bed for consumption.
I immediately started wondering how the heck to arrange a Pajama Day for me.
I found a day in March that looks promising.
“Now, if there were only closer opportunity for a mental health–I mean, pajama–day!” Then a funny thing happened…I got sick.
My stack of magazines is already assembled. My stack of books is already next to the bed (and the couch, and my desk) and currently I have not one, but two books that I am actively reading and loving. My movie list is already compiled on Netflix (not to mention my DVR queue that at this point is looking longer than my life). In fact, a movie that I have been dying to see for weeks had just (finally! finally!) arrived from Netflix and was there waiting for me.
I never get sick. Here was my perfect opportunity to take a pajama day, handed to me on a silver platter, and what did I do?
I went to work.
Stupid.
It’s hard to not be afraid to just focus on oneself.
Oh, I did use the fact that I was sick as a ‘get out of (going to the) gym free’ card. Just sayin’…
I recently visited a popular restaurant in Wells, one that I go to frequently. Usually I go with my husband but this time I was with my daughter. We went there on Saturday. My twelve-year-old picked the restaurant and was excited to be going out for lunch with her mom.
My preference is always to sit in a booth, but they were all filled, so we agreed to take one of three small, two-seater tables in the center aisle. Before we ordered a booth opened up to our right, and we asked our server if we could move there. “Sure, if it’s not spoken for already,” she said. “I’ll go check.” We watched her talk to a woman in a Wicked Good! sweatshirt who was making the judgment calls at the door in terms of who sat where.
After a few moments, our waitress returned, apologetic. “A larger party is waiting to sit there,” she said. Really? There was no one at the door. This is an establishment that does not take reservations. I say again, “Really?”
Okay, so we stay put. We order. The table sits vacant. Two more parties of two (women) come in, ask for the booth, and are given the same story by the girl at the door in the Wicked Good! sweatshirt. They take small tables like my daughter and I did.
But then….a party of two (wait for it….) men come in. At first, the Wicked Good! girl gives them the same story that the rest of us (women) got…but then she says, “Well, all right,” to them, and proceeds to sit this party of two (men) in the booth that my daughter and I couldn’t have (not to mention the other 4 women that asked for it).
Did I mention that it was two men who got the booth? I guess the Wicked Good! girl can’t do math. Hello? A party of two is not larger than a party of two.
To add insult to injury, when my fried seafood came, it was on a dirty plate.
I’m reminded, as the new year looms, that I haven’t done an update about My One Word in a few months. You remember… my New Year’s Resolution? Redolent in its simplicity… the purity of one word (“Edit”) that morphed into the clutter of two words (I added “Focus” one month in to make my resolution double in size).
I have been focusing and editing. My bookcase is still looking pretty good. For the most part, when I’ve gotten a new book I’ve removed one (or more) from the shelves to make room (or to compensate…). I’ve done a pretty good job of making meals using what we have already in the pantry or the freezer (although I think my husband would not agree with me on this).
I remember when I was a teenager and in my twenties, I went out of my way to fill my days…every minute of my days…with work or school or time out with friends. I never had a day off. Never. I worked 6 or 7 days per week, sometimes double shifts, and went to school full-time. I wanted it that way. I was happy to have every minute programmed in.
Now, in (okay, at the end of) my forties, I am completely the opposite. I want to have all of my time unscheduled, unplanned. I am thrilled when I can arrange for a day to be completely empty, versus completely filled.
Not that it stays empty and uncluttered, usually, but knowing that there is no where I have to go and no one expecting me to do something or be somewhere at a certain time is a wonderful feeling.
No, that’s not an oxymoron…or is it? I set out to bake some muffins that wouldn’t comprise my total recommended caloric consumption for the entire day.
It has not been an easy row to hoe (or is it ‘road‘? Whatever). First of all, I have a husband who will always tell me exactly what he thinks of whatever it is that I’ve baked (or cooked, for that matter). I understand that there are some people out there that appreciate this level of truthfulness.
Usually (at least when it comes to my culinary efforts) I do not count myself among them.
I found a recipe that largely drew me because I had everything I needed already to bake them immediately, so I made them while my husband was at work. I figured we’d have them for breakfast in the morning. I tried one (okay, three) when they came out of the oven and thought they were just fine. I tupperwared them up and went to bed.
The next morning, there the lovely muffins sat on my kitchen island. My daughter tried them. She said they were good. My friend Kristen tried them. She said they were good. I mentioned this to my husband, as he eyed them suspiciously, blatantly not trying them. He apparently was not convinced.
I tried again. “You always say you don’t like baked goods because they’re too sweet. This recipe is not too sweet, which is partly why I chose it.”
“Okay, I’ll try it…” he said. He picked one up. He gingerly took a bite. He turned and spit said bite into the trash. “Ugh, that’s horrible!” he said. He started to throw the remaining piece out when I grabbed it and said, “Stop! I’ll eat it! It’s good!”
Later on that evening, after I’d mostly forgotten (but only partially forgiven him for) his performance earlier in the day, he leaned over and whispered…”You know, I even threw one of your muffins to the chickens this morning.”
I watched a Dr. Oz episode that I taped last week, just for something mindless to do for an hour. I usually tape them every week, read what the topic is, then delete them without watching them. This time there was one I wanted to watch…something about losing weight and maybe becoming a millionaire…great! Sign me up for that, right?
So I watched that program describing Dr. Oz’s Transformation Nation. I was motivated! He’s partnering with Weight Watchers and the program is FREE. I went to the website last night to check it out. It’s actually very similar to the Weight Watchers online program, except that it calculates calories instead of PointsPlus. So, after about 3 hours of completing quizzes, entering lab data, and logging food and activities for the day, I was set to go. I uploaded my picture and started Day 1 of my Oz-blog.
Life was good…until this morning.
When I (still motivated, after getting on the scale and finding I’d lost a little over a pound) tried to log in to set up my food plan for the day, and found it that none of the info had been saved. The website didn’t recognize my email address.
Is all lost?? Is it true that you get what you pay for?? Should I just suck it up and pay Weight Watchers Online to build on what I started yesterday?
I hope not. In the meantime, while I wait to hear back from Dr. Oz’s customer support, I will try to stay motivated.
Susan Conley recently came to Kennebooks to read from her book, The Foremost Good Fortune. Susan is a Mainer, raised in Woolwich. In addition to being a great writer, she is also a great reader. Maybe this is because (as we learned in her talk) Susan is a poetry teacher, and when she reads passages from her book aloud, in her slow, sing-song-y sort of way of drawing out the syllables, the consonant sounds…it makes her book sound like poetry. Could this manner of speech perhaps be connected to her learning to speak Mandarin?
I also learned that hula hooping and badminton are “huge” in China. That she was involved in the founding of The Children’s Room.
“Memoir is all about honesty,” Susan says, and further states that “you feel it when it’s not (honest).” This is why, after her writers group read her earlier drafts of this book they basically asked her, “Where are you in this?” and she ultimately rewrote so that she was now “showing up” on the page. “You’ve got to take us to those places,” her writing friend said, of “emotional complexity” that were lacking in the earlier work. Oh and of course, I learned the significance of the title of the book.
🙂
Susan started writing her book, was diagnosed with cancer, then started writing it all over again. A different book. This book. She says she told her story in the present tense in the book and thinks of it as a love letter to her sons, who she hopes will read it one day.
Finally, The best thing that I learned is that Susan has been cancer-free for three years.
Susan may be back at Kennebooks in March as part of the Maine Women Write Book Club. Consider joining! The first meeting is slated for mid-October at the time of this writing. Call (207-967-6136) or email Ann (ann@kennebooks.com) at Kennebooks for more information. Hope to see you there!
Well, the vacation may have just started but….the party? It’s definitely over. What am I talking about?
I got off the scale a minute ago. It wasn’t pretty.
After I got over being mad at myself (you know, for getting on it in the first place) I decided to (try to) get real. I did a quick review of what I ate yesterday (vacation day 1; ice cream twice?? And one of those times I used it to dress up an enormous and amazingly good piece of strawberry rhubarb pie).
Pie a la mode
Steps:
Start counting (ugh) Weight Watchers points again. I never did pony up the cash to re-join so that I could learn the new Points Plus system, so either I rejoin (joining fee is no longer being waived, of course) or use the old system as best as I can remember it from 4 years ago. UPDATE: Just saw an ad in the WW magazine that starting 8/28 they will be waiving that $29.95 joining fee again (for Weight Watchers Online, at least)…guess I got a week’s reprieve!
Go back to getting up early and walking for 30 minutes every morning (maybe I’ll wait till after my vacation to start this one, since I’ll already be up early every day at 5:45AM when school resumes August 30). I stopped doing this after a particularly vicious horse fly attack.
Stop wearing my cupcake necklace for a while . Hmmmm…I wonder if they make a carrot stick necklace?? Just in case there’s something to “the power of suggestion”.
Drink more water, yada yada.
Note: It’s going to be a bumpy road; I still have 2/3 1/3 of that pie left.
In the book What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty, she talks about the idea of spacious days.
What a concept!!!!
Mostly, my days feel jam-packed to me, without a moment to spare for anything. That’s how I usually think about them, at least. My to-do list is longer than my arm. I suspect that other mothers feel this way as well, since today I heard my friend Donna (also a mother) say those exact words.
In yoga, spaciousness is sought in your body through postures, in your mind through meditation. I’ve been searching for spaciousness through yoga for 4 years now (I’ll let you know when I find it).
🙂
Four years seems like kind of a long time to me…but as a percentage of my age, it’s not that long really. Could it be that all I really need is an adjustment of perspective?
Back to yoga class: this week, our instructor Kristen happened to mention that there was a period of her life that she would gladly relive, which sparked a conversation among the women in the class on this topic. As some of them mentioned ages that they would be interested in repeating, I did a quick review: high school? No way! Early twenties? No thank you! I soon realized that I couldn’t think of any time period of my life that I would want to live through again, but then I reframed the question: What was a happy memory?
When I asked myself this question, I got a very clear image in my mind. It was in the summer: August 1991. It was in the first apartment that I shared with my husband after we got married. The sun was streaming in through the large windows in the dining room, shining on my infant son, born just a couple of weeks prior. I remember being in that room, gazing at the baby, standing in the sun, and realizing that I’d never been happier than I was at that moment. Twenty years later, I can still stand in that room in my mind’s eye, and still feel that happiness just as strongly as I did that day.
So, I guess time is relative, just ask Einstein. Or Liane Moriarty.
My friend Susan told me to have a: “Happy Birthday!!! Enjoy the whole day and do what YOU want!!”
My response: “Well, since I’m working it will be hard to DO whatever I want, but instead I’m going to EAT whatever I want!”
🙂
So here goes: Day 2B of “The day I ate whatever I wanted”…I’m starting to fear that this is a slippery slope…better reign it in after today. This is what I did on the actual day.
I decided not to go to the gym so that I could sleep an extra hour. Good decision. I decided not to do any laundry and not to stop to gas up the car. Those things could wait. My mantra for the day: “If it’s not ‘all about me’, I’m not doing it.”
Breakfast: Decided to wait until I got to Portland then sprinted over to the Standard Baking Company (no website, unbelievably) to get a chocolate croissant. Monument Square was packed with dressed up, suited up people at 8am; usually it’s a ghost town on the weekend at that hour. I heard there was some sort of a convention going on which almost made me late for work (reference: “sprinted” to the bakery!).
Note: Around noon I started rethinking the whole shorts thing; may not have been the best idea…it barely made it out of the 50’s in Portland.
I continued to go where the whim took me. I didn’t follow any plan at all. I had two days to celebrate: the day before my birthday with my husband (which was awesome), and the birthday itself, which was kind of the icing on the (cup)cake after Friday.
For lunch, Micucci’s Pizza was a no-brainer. I was in luck too; they were just putting out the slabs of pizza when I ran up the stairs and grabbed one out from under the noses of the slower people assembling boxes to my right. When I ran down to pay I got to say “Hi” to the baker, Stephen Lanzalotta (author of The Diet Code), who was just putting out the fresh cannoli…I resisted, since I had a piece of tiramisu from my son and a chocolate coconut cupcake from Two Fat Cats waiting for me for later on. A colleague at work, Laurie, handed me a chocolate shortbread cookie chaser after lunch, which enabled me to save the cupcake for later.
🙂
Had to miss my regular yoga class (with Kristen of Windsong Yoga) in the morning so I was thrilled when a colleague Mary Ann said “Hey, want to do this yoga dvd with me at 2:00PM?” I just happened to have my mat in the trunk, so that’s what we did.
To balance it all out, I ate half the Micucci’s slab for lunch then had the other half with a salad (with greens from the garden) for supper, followed by the cupcake and my favorite (which is unfortunately seasonal) Keurig coffee that I saved from Christmas: Spicy Eggnog.
When I got home from work at 8:30PM I had a surprise waiting for me: gifts from the kids:
An adapter that allows me to play my MP3 in the car from my son Anthony that I’ve been wanting forever and
A handmade card with 3 dark chocolate covered cherries from my daughter Izzy.
What can I say? My kids know what I like. 🙂 My husband gave me my gift The Day Prior, but actually started it last fall. He got all of the raised beds ready for my fruit and vegetable gardens (not to mention most of the actual planting and watering thereof), and he bought many more lilac bushes for me (my favorite flower) and scattered them around the yard. He knows what I like too. :D.
Karen Creamer Author, Coach, Speaker 
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