Aug
31
It's hard not to be joyful with ice cream on your nose
A few years ago I was going through one of those troubled times when I couldn’t decide who to blame for my misery but knew damn well somebody was to blame and somebody should pay. I was chock full of self-pity and self-loathing and lots of other self-defeating beliefs and behaviors.
One afternoon, mid-summer, I had one of those brief, shining moments that I like to call a God Shot — for no discernable reason, I was filled with joy. In that instant, I understood that I was free to choose joy. I also understood that I would forget joy was always there for the choosing but that, in odd moments here and there, joy would choose me and I would remember.
I decided to make the most of that moment. It will not surprise you to know that “making the most of it” for me involved ice cream. But not just scoop-it-into-a-bowl, eat-it-with-a-spoon ice cream. I would go in search of those little cones we used to have when I was a child. I would cram one of those cones full of ice cream and let it run down my fingers and stick to my nose. It’s hard not to be joyful with ice cream on your nose.
I went to the grocery store and picked out mint chocolate chip ice cream because nothing says summer like mint chocolate chip. I’d never bought cones before, but I thought I’d seen them there before, at the end of the freezer case beside Hershey’s syrup and caramel sauce. I turned the corner and sure enough, there they were, boxes of old-fashioned cones. The brand name, it big, kid-attracting letters: JOY.
Tonight is the final night of August, surely the perfect night to celebrate the end of summer. In the kitchen, I have an old-fashioned cone and a single-serving container of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Some of which will stick to my nose.
Aug
7
Miss Bailey, up close & personal
Woke up this morning clinging to the edge of my pillow, having been nudged off dead center sometime in the wee hours by the 6.5-pound cat, Miss Bailey, who shares my bed.
Miss Bailey is about the size of a relatively small newborn child. I was just over six pounds myself when I was born. So it’s hard to understand how she can dominate the bed. But she does.
It starts because she wants to sleep on my face. She climbs up, drapes herself across my cheek, mouth and nose, then settles in with a sound of contentment halfway between a robust purr and a delicate snore. I, myself halfway between sleep and wake, adjust to avoid a mouthful of fur. Miss Bailey snuggles closer, sometimes reaching for my cheek with a soft paw. The push-pull continues and soon it’s 6 a.m. and I wake up to find Miss Bailey enthroned on the center of the pillow, body curled around the top of my head.
This is not, I think, an isolated event in my life.
I invite people into my life. They want to get closer. I want to avoid the messiness of fur up my nose and down my throat. So I try to edge imperceptibly away, without sending them flying off to some other room, some other soft spot. They sense my distance and reach for me. I resist, withdraw. We are beyond negotiating a healthy give-and-take, caught as we are in that dreamy state of near-sleep where all we want is what we want. I wake up resentful. Miss Bailey, like so many others, wakes up alone and feeling rejected.
And so it goes. Unless, as I did this morning, I take Miss Bailey in my arms, lie back on my pillow and pull Miss Bailey to my chest so we can finish our sleep, heart to heart.
Aug
3
Compromise: a settlement of differences by mutual adjustment or modification of opposing claims, principles, demands, etc.
That’s what Webster’s says about compromise. Here’s what I say: Once the compromise has been reached, the goal should be to support the compromise and to work together to create success from that compromise. To do anything less is childish and petty and self-serving to the extreme.
Nobody is happy about the economy. Nobody likes everything about the debt ceiling deal that was reached in recent days. The only way one person or group or party gets all of what it wants is in a dictatorship. We the people have not granted 100 percent control to any one person or party. So we compromise. Sometimes the people who do the compromising even do so in the spirit of finding the best solution from among a smorgasbord of conflicting ideas.
Here’s what needs to come after the compromise: unity in the service of success.
Not continued bickering or bellyaching. Not fingerpointing or namecalling, which belong on the playground. And not, even in this era when news coverage has been replaced by yammerers, ceaseless rehash.
Unity and hard work to make it work.
I can’t make that happen in Washington or at Fox or at CNN or in the vitriolic comments added to blogs all over the internet. All I can do is support the spirit of compromise by refusing to be part of the attack mentality that has replaced rational discussion. I’d like the work of our political leaders to be successful in restoring our economy and our good name around the globe, even if I don’t agree 100% with how they get there? Wouldn’t you?
A compromise has been reached. It’s time to set aside differences and pull the plow together.
