The Saving Grace of Wishes Not Granted

I live in the middle of a cul-de-sac. The end of the street that opens up to another street is lower than the other end which gives me a good view of six or seven houses downhill. From a distance I can watch kids playing in the snow, parents going off to work and people walking their dogs on the icy sidewalks. It’s like they’re all living in a snow globe, in a world I’m not part of and can never be again. That’s a false declaration but no one said logic was going to be a part of this post. I’m old and I’m allowed to take liberties with the truth. The fact is no one has me chained to my bed. I could go outside in the winter. I could walk my dog. I could even start a snowball fight with kids a fraction of my age. Sure, I’d have to ignore my osteoporosis, chance falling down and breaking a hip. But old doesn’t translate to stupid, so I stay inside in my safe little cocoon, protected from life… or rather protecting me from a life ending up in a nursing home which usually happens after an elderly woman breaks a hip.

It must be nice to have grandchildren you can use as an excuse to go outside and play. I’m quite sure if snow sculpturing had been as popular when I was young as it is now I’d have been building dragons in my front yard. If I had grandkids I could park a lawn chair in the snow and direct them on how to pack the stuff, carve out a mythical figure, dye the scales and fiery tongue and then soak it all with water to freeze the creature hard so it could greet anyone who ventured up my cul-de-sac until springs comes along. Sometimes when I look out the window and the yard is full of snow I have an overwhelming impulse to go outside and at the very least, build a snowman. I used to love winter---building snow forts with my brother, ice fishing with my dad, ice skating at our cottage, sledding with my nieces and nephew and then after I met Don, snowmobiling on the wooded trails that go on for miles here in Michigan. 

And how could I forget those two years when I was in college and I tried to like snow skiing because I had the worst crush on and was dating a guy who had a passion for the sport. Why couldn’t he have liked cross-country skiing instead? I could have stuck with that sport after we broke up. He never got married, by the way. Turns out he was an in-the-closet gay guy who was trying as hard to like girls as I was trying to like downhill skiing, a fact I didn't learn until a decade later. He’s one of the reasons why I’m so happy that gay people are freer, now, to come out of the closet and be accepted. I think about the unhappy life I could have had if I had married him, been his cover for a secret life that didn’t get exposed until half our lives were over and I’m grateful for the saving grace of wishes not granted. How many women did that happen to, Dr. Phil, back when I was young? How much did that kind of marriage destroy a woman’s self-esteem before the truth finally came out? One could view those years we dated as wasted time but in hindsight they gave me more empathy for a segment of society that could use all the empathy it can get. It’s not easy bein’ green, as Kermit the Frog likes to sing. Although the lyrics of Kermit’s song doesn’t make sense in this context but, like I wrote earlier, no one promised logic and this post would marry and live happily ever after.

I got straight A’s in logic and math classes I took in college. Who would have ever guessed that based on my high school grades? Certainly not me, the “stupid one” who couldn’t tie her shoes or tell time until I was well into grammar school. Certainly not me, the dyslexic girl who couldn’t consistently tell her right hand from left until she was old enough to get hot flashes. Certainly not me, the girl who couldn’t sound out words or spell until---well, I still can’t do those things and I’m on the dawn side of my seventies. If it wasn’t for my thirty year old Franklin Language Master 3000 I couldn’t write unless I got one of those voice recognition programs. I’d come to a word I can’t spell and it would be two days before I could figure it out without good old Franklin. He outshines Spell-Check ten times over. 

Jeez, I’ve got to end this ode to Franklin before I start plastering his plastic casing with kisses. I’ve been known to do that and he doesn’t like it. He’s a serious dude who doesn’t believe in inter-materials dating. I’m flesh and blood, he’s plastic and precision electronics and I have no logical way to end this weird (?) post, so I’ll just quit typing here.... I take that back. I could end it by promising never to take Franklin for a winter walk around my cul-de-sac, wrapping this ending back to the beginning. That’s how I was taught to write essays back in the same time frame that I learned about the saving grace of wishes not granted. And that reminds me I still have to give closure to my post's hook so here's that literary nugget: It's not always what we do in life that gives us our defining moments, sometimes it's what we don't do---the roads not traveled. ©

Defining Moments

I’ve been trying to come up with the defining moments of my life without much success. So, as I often do, I decided to just start writing and see where it leads me. Defining moments are those split second decisions we make that end up defining who we become in life. One of the most common examples used of a defining moment is when someone pulls the trigger of a gun resulting in another person losing their life and the shooter thus brands him or herself a murderer. I suppose it’s a good thing that my own defining moments aren’t such glaring and obvious moments. Most people’s defining moments aren’t huge like that. We all make decisions every day that become little defining moments that, added together, define our lives. Neil Armstrong, for example, had a lot of little defining moments that led up to the mother of all defining moments: being the first man to walk on the moon. If he had made any number of those little decisions differently someone else's name would probably have been etched in the annuals of mankind’s greatest accomplishments.

The plot of one of my all-time favorite films---In Pursuit of Honor---is based on a defining moment or in the words of the lead character, “It’s a long story about a quick decision.” In the movie Don Johnson plays a member of the U.S. cavalry who decides to defy orders to destroy hundreds of army horses and instead he drives them to Canada with the U.S. Army in pursuit all the way from Texas to our northern border. I don’t know what it is about the movie that speaks so strongly to me but the fact that it was based on a little known event in history has something to do with it. I’m fascinated that someone threw away what was best for his own future to go AWOL and pursue what he considered to be the more honorable thing to do. What’s not to love about a man like that?

One defining moment in my life, which led to a whole series of defining moments, took place after Don’s stroke when I decided to take on his recovery process instead of following the advice of the medical community and leave him in a nursing home for the rest of his life. To steal a line from another one of my favorite movies, “that decision changed life as I knew it.” Another one of my defining moment happened the summer after high school when I backed out of going to an art school in another state where I’d been accepted, opting instead to go to a city college closer to home. If we had do-overs in life I’ve often thought I’d like to do that one decision differently. But if I had, I might not have met my soul mate, Don. I say “might” because during the time frame I would have been at that out-of-state art school Don had spent several vacations in the same town I would have been in. I tend to believe we still would have found each other just like we did eleven years after our first, brief meeting as high school students.

Now I’m at a point in life where I have a lot of decisions to make and several will become defining moments for the rest of my life. Widowhood does that to a person…it forces us into facing a basket load of decisions. Some big and important decisions like when, where and if I should move, some not so big. But right now I have to decide what to have for dinner. ©