Yesterday I felt a shiny nickel's worth of joy again.
It all started with our new President-elect. Nothing sexier than a whip-smart family man with an action plan, a steady hand and a irresistible grin. I feel better just thinking about him.
A few days later I had a delightful lunch with an old friend topped off by a malted milk shake-- black and white godliness with extra, extra malt-- so good I danced a chair-jig. Then I ran for the A train and caught it just in time. Speedy and nimble like Wonder Woman leaping through a shrinking portal, I had just enough finesse and swirl to keep my cape from getting caught in the closing doors. I actually had to stop myself from winking at a fellow passenger as I stuck my dismount, cocky and head sure, hands on hips to the tune of the subway's familiar, "Bing-bong."
The real pinnacle of this day's fiesta of personal triumph came when, walking briskly through Penn Station, the gum I was chewing fell out of my mouth and I caught it in my hand! I could have peed in my pants with pride and accomplishment. "Holy moly, I'm on a roll!" I thought, "Nothing can stop me now!" I popped the gum back in my mouth and nearly pumped my fist in the air with a leap and a guttural, "Yeah!" usually reserved for football games, campaign rallies and the last scene in every John Hughes movie.
Smugly, I sauntered to track 3 with a subtle bounce in my step not known or felt for sometime. Things were lookin' up. To the uninitiated I was a gum-crackin' suburban lady on her way home to a life of filling stations and shopping carts, but I had a glint-- a rarity these days. I had hope, I had luck and I had the gum in my mouth to prove it. I was a woman with just enough naivete, (and a smidge of blithe denial), to feel certain, if only for a moment, that everything was going to work out. Our country was going to be fine, my son was going to be fine, the divorce was going to be fine and that I, in the end, was going to be fine.
So let's raise a glass to President Obama, a long life, hope and small joys.
I've said to folks going through tough times, "Things may be brutal now, but this will all be cocktail party banter before you know it." Such will be my divorce. One of life's little anecdotes in a laundry list of experiences, I'll reel it off with the same world-weary inflection given to tap dancing and playing the tuba on MTV, getting kicked out of Lenin's tomb and taking a hammer to the Berlin Wall. The older the dame I become, the longer the list I'll recite. The more husbands I go through and filter less camels I smoke, the droller my delivery, the snappier the comebacks and the better the wilting hors d'oeuvres will seem to everyone tipsy around me.
I once asked a friend, sitting numb in her car, how long would I Feel This Way? She said that we usually feel shitty until the feeling passes and then we feel OK until the next time we feel shitty. She said the trick was in knowing that the feeling will pass and that it won't last forever. "If it did," she said, "we'd all be in the hospital."
I think of that advice often and then connect the dots through each variation, disguised in different texts or spoken to me from different mouths, over and over, day in and day out. It's all the same message, no matter how you slice it. And if I can just remember it, tattoo it to the inside of my eyelids, the milkshakes may appear more often and my gum may stay nestled in my cheek, with joy sticking to me like burs on a sweater or just within reach, like hail at my feet.
