Ten Things I will Never, Ever Do Again

1. I will never, ever fly again. I did it five times in my life---long before 9/11---when the seats were bigger, the food was real, the flight attendants actually gave you service and the lines at the airports were shorter. I did not enjoy the experience all five times, now I’d probably hate it.

2. I will never, ever pick stuff off the carpet again without my glasses on. Scared the crap out of me when I did it once and the “lint” started moving. I dropped that spider and he got away to live another day.

3. I will never, ever eat sushi, liver, veal, crickets or any insects even if they’re dipped in chocolate. Actually, except for liver, I've never eaten any of these so I should kick #3 off the list of things I'll never do again or maybe change it to: I will never, ever pass up a chance to eat Ben and Jerry’s American Dream or mint chocolate ice cream.

4. I will never, ever use Krazy Glue again without protective eye wear. God, it hurts when you accidentally glue your eye lid to your eyeball. I was fixing an antique kitchen chair and I put glue in a hole and shoved the chair rung into the hole, splashing the glue in my eye. At the emergency room they said it’s such a common accident that they keep drops in stock that un-glues the glue. The burn the Krazy Glue caused took a couple of weeks to heal but left no permanent damage.

5. I will never, ever knowingly break a law---well, except for speeding. I do that way too often. I keep wondering when that old person gene kicks in that will have me driving fifteen miles an hour in a fifty-five mile zone. But in general, I’m a rules-following kind of person.

6. I will never, ever text without punctuation and proper spelling…except for when auto-correct changes things and I can’t fix it. It took me too long to learn how to do those things correctly or I should say do them within a reasonable degree of accuracy. And have a complained lately about how much I hate acronyms? Except for LOL I have to look them all up.

7. I will never, ever make love in a patch of poison ivy again. Once in a life time is enough. But you’ll have to use your imagination because I’ll not be sharing more details of that moonlit, summer night.

8. I will never, ever grow old gracefully. I’ve never done anything gracefully in my life. Why start now? I do hope to grow old, though…100 would be nice but that’s assuming I won’t be living out of a shopping cart and sleeping under a bridge. A week of doing that and I’d be slitting my throat.

9. I will never, ever stop caring about the environment, the French Impressionists, my family---not necessarily in that order---civilized society, educational opportunities for all, liberal arts, libraries and books, wildlife, sea-life and domestic animals.

10. I will never, ever quit wondering what my life would have been like if I knew in my twenties what I know today. I’m pretty sure we all do this kind road-not-taken mind-game on rare occasions and I’m also guessing that most of us come to the same conclusion---that if we could do it all over again, we’d take the same path…missteps, mistakes, warts and all. No missteps are ever wasted because they teach us how to recognize and grab onto the good stuff that comes along. So I keep all my memories tucked away and invite them out to play on those full moon nights when sleep eludes me. ©

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by….”  Robert Frost

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. ©