2041

Imagine thirty years from now, when I am 91, or not.  It will be 2041, whether I am here to witness it, or not.  We will know more about Global Warming by then.  We will be several generations smarter.  I hope to still be going to the gym, in geriatric workout clothes. I don’t know if they make a granny panty thong; perhaps they will by then, so my panty line doesn’t show under my yoga pants. Perhaps you will be able to see the little lumps of muscles under all that skin which should be about as far South as its going.

Perhaps I’ll be competing in the You’ve Got to Be Kidding Division of some sport or other.  I don’t know why I would since I’m already far from those days when I relished setting myself against someone else(s) and pushing myself to beat them.  But if I do, in 2041, perhaps it will be something unimaginable now, like flying the furthest by meditation alone, or ripening the tomato with the greatest concentration in the shortest time.

Or healing.  Maybe all of us will have the power to heal all manner of things, transform all manner of matter into its better, more complete self. Maybe that is what we’ll be doing in 2041.

I entered this reverie this morning simply by listing all I would like to have done before guests arrive in two days time.  I started thinking of the time line while making the second-day list for the plumber.  He’ll be back this morning with more faucets and renewed determination to make the hot water heat work in the guest house.

I started imagining this list as stretching far into the future, sitting on the shoulder of all the lists, or at least all my lists, stretching backwards.  I think I came into this world with a list;  suckle, poop, pee, nap, suckle poop pee, nap. I probably didn’t put on that list wide-open-wonder-at-this-world-I-have-landed-in, just as I don’t now.

Yesterday was one of those days.

The sky!  God, the sky, opening and closing in pure technicolor. One moment nothing but a gray backdrop, the next, an arc of primary colors against a dark background, a brilliant sun on the other side.  Then!  Slashes of brilliant crimson crossed through with black. It seemed impossible this color.  Two women employees took pictures just outside the doors at Lowe’s, pulled outdoors by the spectacle.  Then!  Moments later, it had all disappeared, as though it never happened.

That was not on my list.  The faucet was.  Which turned out to be the wrong one.

Again.

Instead of going on the list, again, John, the one of us who knows about faucets, went back to the store last night and got the right one. Maybe.

Did you see the sky? I had said to him earlier.  No, he said, puzzled. It was all gray when I looked, all gray.

This was just before he pointed out that I had gotten the wrong faucet.  And out of my mouth came I don’t give a s- - -.

Smart man that he is, he took a step backwards. I’m not sure what I just stepped in, said John.

I didn’t either.  I was making dinner I was too tired to make, after a day which on the surface of it didn’t look very stressful.  Who knew that one’s good nature could drown in a list, even when flooding that list was a rainbow and moments of tearful astonishment?

Days and days and days of working the list, accommodating accommodating, accommodating, as each item seemed to require more of me than I anticipated.  And everything on it seemed to have a mousetrap at the end, something that just refused to be easily resolved.  Over and over.  I was growing weary and I didn’t even know it.  It was time for a movie about a dog with a happy ending. And some breathing.

It is all working out, maybe.  The plumber is coming back today, maybe, and maybe one of the faucets will work, the one we got, or the one he’s bringing.  The house guests will come, maybe, and will have hot water in the new shower, maybe or maybe not.

I do know this.  There will be a whole other set of astonishments today.  Like right now, the stubble of emerging trees against the dawn sky.   Maybe or maybe not I’ll notice.  Maybe or maybe not more things will get crossed off The List.  But if I’m here in 2041, I’ll hope for more astonishments than accomplishments.

I think I’ll put that on my list. . .

Bah Humbug Lite

I’m not sure how it got to be December already. But November seemed particularly greedy, gobbling up the days getting ready for Thanksgiving, then afterwards a few more days getting bed linens washed and my head rearranged. There was travel and there were medical tests (all normal, thank you), both of which tend to take up more than their space on the calendar.

Travel reaches out on both sides, before and after.  Before, with all the tiny bottles that have to be fetched. Afterwards with the dissipation of I'm-still-somewhere-else while trying to get through the piles of all that got postponed so you could leave, plus all that blew up under the door while you were gone.  

Medical tests take up a different kind of room.  Anxiety is a mental narcissist, how dare you pay attention to anything else. Days can go by in a scratchy blur.  Then the tests.  Time suspended.  Then the results and a new place to stand.

A deep outbreath.  It is December.

The first of the month, for a few days, ordinary life can reassert its importance.  Until you turn on the radio, or try to shop for something innocent, like cotton balls.  Then you realize: it has already begun.

Pa rum pa pum pum.


But the Thanksgiving guests have just left.  I don’t even have the sheets back on the beds. 
It doesn’t matter.  It is December. . .

Even if you put your foot down and give goats instead of cologne, Christmas has its own momentum.  Even if you put up a few subtle white lights instead of a yard full of electrified plastic, Christmas takes over.  Money leaks out of your wallet.  There is an irresistible urge to have and to go to parties and eat tiny food.  Even to break out platters of tiny food for gatherings of people you see every day, those people redecorated in red hats with furry balls on the end.  

If you are a believer, now is the time to get disgusted at all the crass commercialism, Jesus is the reason for the season.  And if you are a nonbeliever. . .well Christmas takes over anyway.

Here's a secret: we kind of enjoy being overrun, no matter how many donations we make to worthy causes, no matter how many oranges we put in stockings.  Despite the train wreck we make of the notion of abundance, there is something liberating about the whole hog scattershot that the season seems to endorse.  Spend!  Eat! Put a bow on the dog!

As much as we complain, and declare ourselves above it all, there is something in us that unlocks at this time of the year that doesn’t have permission any other time.  We arrive at the shores of the New Year spent, exhausted, buffeted by the repeated waves of holiday demands. Budgets and diets blown.
Making nice with relatives we don’t normally see, those members of the family whose job it is to help us realize we're doing pretty well by comparison, pretty well indeed.

And then there are those opportunities to intersect with lives we didn’t know existed, people with whom we share ancestry we know not when, maybe as far back as when humans were invented, people whose potentially whacky personalities we don’t have to be exposed to, people who just desperately need us to help them to have a meal, or to make a living with that goat.

Yes, its crazy, these holidays.  Norman Rockwell expectations; Debbie Downer reality: boredom, fatigue, too much dessert, too little exercise, too much Uncle So and So, too little sleep.  But maybe down the middle is something that stretches us a little on both ends.  Maybe when we slowly come back to the center, which is what January is for, our vision is a little wider, our heart, if also our pants, just a little big bigger.