(By the way, I say this as if these two events are equally likely. To suggest otherwise would be tactless. Also I didn’t want to give her a heart attack.)
“Mom, do you want your son’s last memory to be that you wouldn’t speak to him? Or your last memory of him to be that you wouldn’t give him a kiss?”
“God forbid.”
“Exactly.”
“Make the call.”
She hung up. She was already on it.
And the last I heard, they were having meatballs.
Commencement Day
Recently I had the great thrill of receiving an honorary degree, so I stayed up all night before, drafting a speech for commencement day. I tried to write something meaningful and profound, because you can’t joke around in a commencement speech. It calls for loftier sentiments, and though I’m not incapable of same, I love to get laughs.
I was aiming for meaningful laughs.
In other words, every draft came out terrible.
I was up until dawn, fussing over 1500 words, which is crazy. It should have been easy. I can sneeze 1500 words. But go-out-and-change-the-world stuff doesn’t come naturally to me. I hate to put that kind of pressure on people. Why isn’t it good enough to live a decent life? For me, it is. If I can parallel park, I’m doing good.
Also, I was getting bollixed up by the fact that I had heard J. K. Rowling deliver the best commencement speech ever, and she outsells me 8,376,373,838 books to one. So I was having a major case of performance anxiety by the morning, even after I had drafted a generic go-change-the-world speech. I went downstairs to make a pot of coffee and a white light bulb went off in my head.
Literally.
And not in a good way.
There was a white flash of light, but no idea came to me. I blinked again, and my eyes didn’t seem to clear. All I could see were bright prisms of colors, like looking out of a kaleidoscope.
I covered one eye and then the other, but all I could see were fragmented rainbows. I thought I was imagining it and went to look in the mirror, where I saw my own eyes staring back from wacky shards of color.
I had become a Cubist painting.
It wasn’t a good look, for a single girl.
I went back up to the computer, logged into WebMD, and read through my colorful prisms, learning the symptoms of the various eye diseases. I determined that I didn’t have macular degeneration or a detached retina, but the kaleidoscopes weren’t clearing. I remained calm because there weren’t a lot of other choices. Forty-five colorful minutes later, I was considering driving to the emergency room, through what would undoubtedly look like a psychedelic tunnel.
But the whole time I was thinking, what if I went blind? If I had a choice, which sense would I give up?
Sight would not be my first choice, though I have come to meet many wonderful people who have coped so well with their blindness. I’m also partial to smelling things, like lilacs and spaghetti sauce, which I love, or dog breath, which I love even more. And I’ve gotten used to hearing things, though I’d give up the sense of taste in a minute. Then everything would taste like tofu, and I’d lose weight.
But seriously, what would it be like if something I had taken for granted, like my eyesight, was suddenly taken away?
I sat there in my very vibrant haze and realized that tons of people go through this hardship, every day. They get a diagnosis that takes their sight, or their hearing, or their very life.
Just like that.
And my eyes suddenly cleared. No joke. The prisms dropped away, leaving me with a clear view of my computer and a dull headache. In time I called a doctor and found out I had experienced an ocular migraine, which can be brought on by lack of sleep over a 1500-word speech. But the good news was that because of my ocular excitement, I knew which 1500 words to write.
I threw out the change-the-world draft and wrote instead that the graduates should live in the moment. That they don’t know how many moments are allotted to them, in this, their one and only life. That all of the blessings of this earth—as well as their very senses and the regular beat of their heart—aren’t guaranteed to anyone. That interviewers will ask them where they think they’ll be in five years, but life isn’t to be lived in five-year stretches.
Life is moments.
And smells, and tastes, and the sight of your daughter’s face. Or the sound of a kitten’s purr.
So the only time is now.
That they call it commencement day because it’s the beginning of life after college. But the real truth is, every day of life is commencement day.
Every day is a new day in which we wake up and choose how to live. Whether it’s to apply for a job or to ask somebody out on a date. Or buy a sweater or save for a car. Or sell your house and find a better one. Or fall in love. That we choose every action in every day of our lives.
And I told them, and myself, to rejoice in the first of this string of commencement days. We don’t have to know what’s next. We shouldn’t think about next now. Be right where you are, in the present, in this moment.
Your moment.
Just be. And see and hear and smell. Because we are all of us so very lucky to begin again, every day.
Happy Commencement Day today.
And tomorrow, too.
Gym Dandy
As I get older, I’m figuring out that the reason people talk about their ailments is that they’re sharing useful medical information. At least, this is the rationalization that works best for me, because while conversations about cholesterol and lower back pain used to bore me to tears, now all I want to talk about is cholesterol and lower back pain.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I don’t have lower back pain, but I hope to someday, so I can be like everybody else and join the national conversation. I do, however, have high cholesterol, which is why I’m on Lipitor, and I’d be happy to tell you about that, should you ask. In the meantime, kindly permit this story on a different medical subject.
Here’s what happened.
Daughter Francesca came home from college and suggested that we join a gym, which is exactly the problem with educating your child. They get dangerous new ideas. Be forewarned.
But I went along with it, thinking it would be fun. Now, you should know that I’m no slouch in the physical department. I walk the dogs two miles a day, ride Buddy the Pony twice a week, and swear by the South Beach Diet. To be honest, I thought I had maybe five pounds to lose. By the way, you may have heard about that study in which women were asked if they’d rather lose five pounds or gain five IQ points. You know which they chose?
The five pounds.
I would, too. In fact, I would kill to lose five pounds. I’m pretty sure it would be justifiable homicide, at least if I got a woman judge.
Anyway, to get to the point, Francesca and I checked out the gyms in the neighborhood, which was fun. She asked about trainers, and I asked about defibrillators.
It may not be a good idea to join a gym with your kid. You look for different things. She wants treadmills, and you want CPR.
She’s trying to look hot, and you’re trying not to die.
Long story short, we joined the gym that gave us three free sessions with a trainer, and then we went for our first session. We started by warming up on the elliptical machines, watching Judge Judy on the big TVs, and yapping away. Then we met our trainer, a manchild with biceps that could cut hard cheese. I liked him until he told us it was time for our “evaluation,” which included me holding a white plastic gadget that measured my body fat.
You wanna know?
Thirty-one percent.
WHAT?
I stopped having fun immediately. There had to be some mistake. My weight was in reasonable control, at least according to my bathroom scale, which always gives me good reviews. And I’ve been strict on my diet, if you don’t count the margaritas.
Thirty-one percent body fat?
How did that happen? And when?
&nb
sp; I considered the implications. A third of me was fat. I wondered if it was the top third or the bottom. Answer: It’s the middle, stupid.
I couldn’t believe it. How can you be not-that-overweight and have thirty-one percent body fat?
I’m guessing this is because of my age, which is really unfair. Why do we have to pay so high a price for sneaking a piece of chocolate now and then? The punishment doesn’t fit the crime. I was so bummed that if I’d been home, I would have gone straight to the refrigerator.
But I was at the gym, so I lifted every weight the trainer gave me. I yanked every rope, flopped around on every beach ball, and curled muscles I’d sooner have left straight. I did everything but claw my thighs off in public.
And, of course, I signed up in for ten more sessions, to begin after the free ones ended. I didn’t care what it cost. If I could have done all ten sessions on the spot, I would have done that, too.
Of course, you know what happened next.
The next day I could barely walk, sit, or drive. It hurt to laugh and breathe. It did not hurt to eat. It never hurts to eat. Not until later.
I’m thinking that maybe I should have taken the extra five IQ points.
Then I could figure out how to lose five pounds without going to the gym.
Happy Birthday
It’s the time of year when Mother Mary comes to visit, and drama follows.
This time it begins as soon as I picked her up at the airport. Brother Frank wasn’t able to make the trip with her, so he had ordered a wheelchair to fetch her from the gate. She can walk, but he wanted to make sure she was able to find her way out of Concourse A, and I thought that was a good idea.
So I waited for her at the end of the concourse, expecting to see her emerge in the wheelchair, but no dice. Easily three hundred people walked by me on their way out of the concourse, all of them tan and superhot, which I have learned is the Miami Express. Finally, at the tail end of the photogenic horde came Mother Mary, all four feet eleven of her, in her oversized white South Beach T-shirt and white Capri pants. She walked very slowly, watching every step to make sure she didn’t fall, so her head was downcast, showing a gray-white whorl at her crown. Right behind her was an exasperated airlines employee, pushing an empty wheelchair.
I didn’t understand. “Mom, why aren’t you in the wheelchair?”
“What did you say?” She cupped a hand to her ear.
“The wheelchair, behind you.”
“Huh?”
“Forget it.” I gave her a hug, and she felt little and soft in my arms, like an octogenarian Elmo.
The guy from the airlines shrugged in his maroon jacket. “I told her I had the wheelchair for her, but she walked right past me. I guess she didn’t hear.”
I took mother’s arm. “Ma, you wearing your hearing aid?”
“What?” she asked, but I saw that it was nestled like a plastic comma behind her ear.
“I didn’t hear,” she said.
The reason she’s here is that she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I told her—a visit from her. So she was guilted into coming, which I’m not above. We had my favorite birthday dinner of take-out hardshell crabs, and by the time the birthday cake was lit up with candles, I asked myself The Question.
Let me explain.
Every birthday I secretly ask myself this question: what lesson have I learned this year? This is my version of my the birthday wish, because my birthday wish never comes true. For example, for many years, my go-to birthday wish was not to get older.
See what I mean?
So instead, I try to figure out what I learned this year, because if I have to get older, at least I’ll get wiser. I make lots of mistakes every year, so I try to pick the biggest one and learn a lesson. My biggest lessons, of course, came from Thing One and Thing Two. And though someday I might make the mistake of Thing Three, I’m pretty sure that with my new system in place, I’ll stop before Thing Nine.
Usually the lessons I’ve learned are Oprahesque. For example, last birthday, I learned to Ask for What You Want. The birthday before that was Take More Risks. And before that was, Don’t Say You’re About to Ask a Dumb Question before You Ask a Dumb Question, Because They’ll Find Out Soon Enough.
But this year, my birthday lesson was simpler:
Margaritas are Fun.
That’s one you can take to the bank.
It might even be BREAKING NEWS..
I learned it at my birthday dinner, when daughter Francesca showed off her college education by making us the most superb margaritas ever, and three generations of Scottoline women got sloshed en famille. We played Frank Sinatra on the iPod while my mother told stories from her first job, in Woolworth’s toy department, when she was seventeen. She still remembered the toys she sold, and it turns out that Kewpie dolls and windup cars were big at Christmas, 1940.
And Francesca remembered that when she was six, she threw a stuffed animal at my mother, but was lucky enough to miss. And I watched them laugh in the candlelight, with Sinatra singing in the background, and I was thinking about how lucky I was to have them, and wondering if Margaritas Are Fun was my only lesson this year.
Because by the end of visit, I had learned a better lesson.
As Long As You Can Walk By Yourself, Do.
Unbreakable
Francesca looked up from her magazine, open on the kitchen island. “Mom, it says here you’re supposed to change your razor every three uses. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“How often do you change your razor?”
I thought a minute. “Every three uses.”
She waited a minute.
“Okay, every month.”
Her eyes flared an incredulous blue. “That means you’re scraping a rusty blade along your skin.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So that’s gross.”
“It’s an armpit. It’s born gross. Why, how often do you change your razor?”
“I use it four times, then I throw it away.”
“Good. I raised you right.”
An hour later, I was driving Mother Mary to the airport to go back to Miami when she told me she was still angry about her colander that had broken, a month ago.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I drained the spaghetti and all of a sudden, the leg snapped off. You believe that? I loved that colander. You remember that colander?”
I watched rain dot the windshield, thinking a minute. “If it’s a colander I remember, it must be kind of old.”
“Nah.” Mother waved me off with an arthritic hand. “It was about fifty.”
“The colander was fifty years old?” I looked over, astounded. “I’m fifty years old!”
“Wrong. You’re fifty-three.”
I let it go. “So the colander was fifty, and you’re angry that it broke?”
“Yeah.”
“Fifty years is a long time, Ma.”
“So what? I paid good money for it, and I had to throw it out.”
I tried to process it. “But how much could you have paid, back then? A dollar?”
“How do I know? You think I remember? Fifty years is a long time.”
My point exactly, but I let that go, too. You know the question I really wanted to ask. “Ma, how often do you change your razor?”
“What razor?”
“You know, the razor you shave with in the shower.”
She blinked behind her bifocals. “I don’t shave.”
I didn’t understand. “How can you not shave, like your armpits or your legs?”
“I don’t have hair anymore.”
I tried to hold the car steady. Luckily we were almost at the airport. “What happened your hair?”
“It went away.”
“What? It disappeared?”
“Yeah. It’s gone.”
I felt appalled. I had no idea. Was I going to lose all my leg hair, too? Nobody told me, which is why I’m telling you. I needed more in
formation, for both of us. “When did it go?”
She shrugged.
“Was it recently?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
We both fell quiet a minute, and the only sound was the thumpa thumpa of the windshield wipers. I worried that I’d made her self-conscious.
“Well, was it before the colander broke or after?” I asked, and we both laughed.
We reached the airport, where I parked and walked her to the gate, having successfully convinced the ticket agent that she gets confused in airports and needed to be escorted. We stopped by the gift shop, where she got two puzzle books and a bottle of water. They sold only the large bottles, which she struggled to hold in her gnarled fingers. We made our way to the gate and took our seats, her with her bottle and books on her lap, waiting for the plane and watching the babies go by. We thought every one was cute, but none cuter than Francesca when she was little. This is a conversation I never tire of, and the only person I can have it with is my mother, who was the first one at the child’s bassinet twenty-odd years ago.
I gave her a nudge. “Ma, you know, Francesca throws her razor away every four uses.”
Mother frowned. “Why?”
“The magazine says you’re supposed to, now. After three times.”
“Throw away a perfectly good razor?”
“Yes. It gets dull.”
“What magazine says that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do. A crazy magazine.”
I thought about that a minute. About being old enough that all your hair has fallen out and you can barely hold the water bottle and you need help just to find the plane because all the announcements are incomprehensible in both English and Spanish, and the airlines love to play musical gates. About the fact that she had lived through a Depression, a world war, and the death of each and every one of her eighteen brothers and sisters, which is not a misprint. She was the youngest of nineteen children, three of whom died of the flu during their childhood, right here in America. Leaving only her, the youngest.