When I told friends my fiancé and I were driving to the Florida Keys for an astronomers’ star party, their still-thawing bodies twittered with envy.
“Awesome!” they said at the thought of hundreds of telescopes along the beach. “But why drive?”
It’s simple in the movies. The guy bends down on one knee, pulls out a ring and asks, “Will you marry me?” The girl tears up, accepts and jumps for joy. Next comes a phone call or two, to parents who may be waiting for the call and to girlfriends, who respond by squealing.
It’s not so simple in real life, at least for us widows and widowers with children.
My mom had a saying when life’s stressors came in bunches. She would sigh deeply, shake her head and announce: “This is all we need.”
So when my cell phone rang on the eve of cataract surgery with a call from the Bank of America fraud unit, I knew exactly what to say.
January used to be for wiping the slate clean: packing up décor, sweeping up debris, and making grand resolutions to go to the gym.
This year, there’s no time for that. I’m too busy learning to use my new labor-saving devices,
Holiday plans. An oxymoron if I ever heard one. As if someone could actually – as experts recommend – plan the holidays.
Help. I’ve complicated my life with obsessive family tree climbing. I can’t extract myself from Ancestry.com, and I’m pawing through stacks of yellowed letters left behind by my mom.
In 1980, I had a garage sale.
“Never again!” I declared.
But just as the brain blocks out labor pains to perpetuate the species, it blocks out negative garage sale memories. Maybe to perpetuate decluttering.
When I ventured onto eHarmony several years into widowhood, I said I was looking for “a poet and an adventurer.”
It made perfect sense. I like poetry, had vowed to read and write more of it myself, and who doesn’t like a good adventure?
I used to think that Facebook was my most serious online addiction. That was till this week, when I discovered Pinterest.
The online virtual scrapbook innocently describes itself as “a tool for collecting and organizing the things that inspire you.”
I prefer the description offered by my Pinterest-possessed daughter-in-law: “It’s like flipping through magazines on crack.”
If I were in the last month of a pregnancy, I’d expect the “nesting” instinct to kick in. No knitter, I’d be knitting. No painter, I’d be painting. All in breathless anticipation of the new arrival.
Little did I know that the same phenomenon applies to grandmas. Just days away from Grandchild #2’s arrival, I became obsessed with a dangerous desire to make a sock monkey.