EVERYTHING CHANGES

My chest is tight. I have that oh-oh feeling when I wake up each morning. I say mean things to my fine husband. Like, “Will you please put your day-old socks in the dirty clothes basket for once? They are having a two-day orgy on the foot of the bed. Very distracting and I’m trying to make a list of things to worry about.”

Don shrugs, smiles.  “Perhaps one item on the list should be to investigate why my black socks resting quietly on my side of the bed make you think of orgies.”

Not orgies, really, more like riots.  Like what’s going on in my head.  I explain, “It’s almost Christmas. I had the nightmare again last night. The one where I’m about to give a speech and I can’t remember why I am standing dumbstruck at a podium.”

“Oh, oh,” he answers and he picks up his socks.

I am the matriarch of my small family. Actually, my mother is but she’s 101 and ten years ago she handed over the scepter to her elder daughter. A pencil, actually. And a piece of paper.

I rewrite my list four times, shop my catalogs, and review the menu, always cheese fondue for twelve folks, young and old. But last year something happened to the cheese and eating it involved trying to spear and move to one’s mouth long strings of rubber.  I don’t like working all day on a meal and ending up having people laugh at it.  This year it will be vegetarian lasagna, I decide. Safe. 

The phone rings.  My cheerful son surprises me by volunteering his talented teenage daughters as cooks for our Christmas Eve dinner. “To give you a break,” he says.

“Sure,” I manage to answer. “I’ll set the table.” I am deposed as matriarch. I hang up, overcome with negative thoughts.  Even they don’t want the fondue again. They think I am too old to manage.  They hate singing carols. The Bible story we always read bores them. Maybe they’d rather stay home.

Depressed, I ask my mother how she felt when I took over the role from her.  “Happy.” She gives me her sweet smile. “Why?” Nowadays Mom smiles a lot.

I do understand that change is the only constant. However, when you have eighty years of changing, usually for the best, it is difficult to accept what is changing right now: the control of body functions, neck, memory, ability to get up from the sofa without groaning, children whose hair will soon be as gray as mine, the loss of the responsibility of stirring a pot of cheese into rubber. 

“Everything changes,” my husband says as we walk to the bookstore. He takes my hand, perhaps because I’m inclined to shuffle over cracks, perhaps because he needs me as much as I need him.

 “Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” Bette Davis and my mother whisper.

 I‘m going to stop whining. I squeeze his fingers. “I’m not a sissie,” I tell him. 

“Nope, and I’m not either. Ice cream store coming up. Kefir again?”

HOW CAN I FEEL JOY ON SUCH A SAD DAY?

In the midst of constant radio coverage, TV photos of traumatized students, a million words pouring out of the minds and mouths of onlookers who attempt to gather their thoughts into rational responses to yet another mass murder, how can I rejoice in a small happy moment of my own life?

I was swirling through my Facebook account, reading the posts of both famous and not-so-famous people who, though stunned, managed to express their anger, shock, their condolences, and their sense of helplessness. We, we, we, have to do something, they wrote, and some had ideas of what that something might be.  Control guns, do more about the mentally ill, protect our schools, defend ourselves with our own weapons, and one, not smiling, suggested that congressmen who voted against more funds for mental health projects be sent to a mental health facility for a while to experience what is not being done for those who need that kind of help. (Never mind that many of those facilities have been closed for years in a wave of new medications that promised to deal with disturbed people without locking them up. But perhaps that’s another story.) Others threw up their virtual hands, which shook with anger, fear, hopelessness, offering no solutions.

I couldn’t bear to read any more.  My silent voice had joined this chorus of keening mourners, and I needed to find some sort of respite. I went to my email. When I clicked on a note from a familiar writing site, I was informed that a review of Never Too Late was complete. It had received five stars and had been posted on a number of social media sites. The review made my book seem like the next New York Times best seller.

Finally! My first reaction. All those weeks of scouring the internet for  someone to read my book(s) had resulted in one person who did.  And liked it. A cloud of sweet euphoria settled over my shoulders and I read the review three times.  Maybe I am a writer, I told myself.  Maybe I should keep going on that novel languishing in my computer.

Then I remembered.

And now, hours later, sadness and joy are still crouched inside me, in a facedown, eyeing each other, making tentative jabs at tender places, desiring to win the fight to determine which one would win my day. However, a moment ago I experienced an epiphany, a truth so obvious I won’t write about it to my friends on Face book. I was looking at the review one more time, and I understood the power of one person telling another that she is worthy of her dreams. I knew then that somehow joy will overcome sadness, in me, in others. The result will be Hope.  And with hope we all can move forward as we support each other’s dreams.