fate

I watch the news these days with one eye closed. One eyes worth is all I can bear. The reason I even watch it at all is to stay current on politics which is the basis for a new screenplay I’m writing. 

You can also mix with that a dash of “car wreck” mentality. You know, when you drive past a bad car accident and you WANT to look away but you just can’t. You’re so afraid of what you’re going to see that you pull your glasses out of your purse and slow down. 

Is that just me or is it human nature? Please say human nature.  

Anyway, the events of each news cycle have been so “stick-your-head -in-the-oven” horrible for the past year and a half that local stations have actually started to devote an entire three minutes of a 1440 minute day to good news.

This morning it was about a recent medical miracle.

A thirteen-year-old boy in Alabama suffered a brain injury and actually died—for 15 minutes.  Although they got his heart to beat again, the lack of oxygen for such an extended period of time (a brain can survive without oxygen for only 4-6 minutes) left him brain-dead and on life support for several days while his parents made the agonizing decision to donate his organs.

All of the sudden, the day before he was scheduled to be taken off of life support he started to show weak signs of brain activity. That was two months ago. He still has a long recovery ahead of him but he is walking, talking, and nowhere near the vegetative state he should be in. 

“There’s no other explanation but God” he says. 

He should know.

My husband also suffered severe brain trauma due to spinal meningitis before he was my husband, so, BH. He was a healthy forty-seven-year-old man in the prime of his life and then he died. Once in the emergency room, they brought him back, did a spinal tap and pronounced him ”terminal” which meant he was pumped full of Morphine and wheeled into a room to die. As luck or fate or the angels who had listened to me cry my eyes out for a good man would have it, one lone doctor decided to treat him with everything at her disposal and within 24 hours she informed his family he’d live but would most definitely be a vegetable. (Which is why we currently have a health directive.)

But after three days in a coma, my before-husband-husband woke up quoting Proust and I.M. Pei. Okay, maybe only I.M. Pei, but my point is this: He could see, hear, and speak knowledgeably about French architecture—all of the things some of us humans can do that vegetables most certainly cannot.

“He’s a scientific miracle!” They all declared.

They should know.

Here’s what I know—

The boy is right. There is no other explanation but God. I mean, come on! 

Science can’t explain EVERYTHING. They try. We listen. They have rules and stats that are true for MOST of us MOST of the time, however…

If it ain’t your time—IT AIN’T YOUR TIME! 

If your brain dies and you wake up fine, I’d say it ain’t your time. 

If a piano falls on you while you’re walking down the street eating an eclair, I’d say carbs kill, no, I’d say sorry, it was your time. 

Nothing is certain. Apparently, not even death, (let’s shoot for taxes next).

Nothing is cut and dried, black and white, end of story, that’s all she wrote. Nothing.

I believe, or rather I know, there is a special ingredient, a secret sauce of sorts, a power greater than doctors, science and statistics. 

Call it prayer, hope, a miracle, or Miracle Whip, I don’t care, just as long as you know it exists.

That’s my good news segment for you this fine morning. Now skedaddle! Go out there and make it a glorious day! (And watch out for falling pianos.)

Carry on,
xox

“What if you saw your life from beginning to end, would you change anything?”~ The movie Arrival

Besides placing my little baby self with the perfect set of parents, on the beach, in Malibu, while being fed organic, gluten-free, free-range apple sauce by a giant silver spoon…

…I’d like to think I wouldn’t. But if I’m being truthful here, which I always try to be, I’m sure I’d take out my pair of big, sharp scissors and edit out all the painful parts.

The places where I didn’t get the part. Or the job. Or the boy I wanted more than a dish of really melty chocolate ice cream.

Where I was embarrassed. Sad. Ruefully disappointed. Or ashamed of myself. Yeah, I’d cut out those parts too, because, hey, nobody would miss them—least of all me.

And lets not forget the times where my heart got broken.

Where my chest hurt so much it felt like I’d recently had open heart surgery. Only to figure out later that the pain came from the exact opposite—the force of the slam. You can all relate to the force of the slam, right? Where you’re sailing along, all open-hearted (la, la, la, la, la), and somebody you love, respect and admire betrays you?

Or somebody dies.

First you hear the creaking of the hinges, because, hey, your heart is flung WIDE OPEN. This closing up tight thing will take a minute.

Then comes the slam. SLAM!! It batons down all of your hatches, locks every single rusty lock (and there are a shit-ton of locks, more locks than your average Manhattan walk up)…and installs a moat.

NOBODY is getting in there anytime soon. Am I right?

So, yeah, I’d say it would probably be in my best interest and the interest of love in general if I just cut out all of that messy shit —and pretend like it never happened.

But we all know we aren’t able to alter those things. I’m thinking of starting a “Go Fund Me” page to get that changed. Who’s with me?

Think about it though. Would you wipe out all of the people you’ve loved and lost? Just delete them from your script?
That would change so much. I don’t know if I’d be willing to do that. Because in hindsight each situation had an effect on another, kinda like the butterfly effect. In other words, it would fuck everything up.

Things we can”t even imagine. Things out of our purview.Things that are above our pay grade to even comprehend.

Didn’t not getting some of those things make you better? Stronger? Savvier? Funnier? And smarter?

Yeah… me neither.

In all seriousness. All of those things that felt like big, fat, obvious mistakes were like rocks in a stream, each one causing the path of the water to shift, which may have held us under, choking and spitting and gasping for air…until something (the fickle finger of fate?) grabbed us by our wet bathing suits, gave us a wedgie and led us to where we stand right. this. minute.

If I saw that in a life overview I’d probably laugh my ass off. Wouldn’t you?
And I probably wouldn’t change one goddamn thing. Would you?

Carry on,
xox

“And then, when you’re off chasing a dream, you miss out on what’s happening right under your nose.”
~Charles de Lint

Oh, hello Paris, it’s me, Janet…Again.

In my mind, we are old friends given the fact that’s this is the third time in a decade that I’ve visited your beautiful City of Lights.

You might not have recognized me. My hair is a softer shade of red now that I’m rounding the bend toward forty, and I may even resemble a local Parisian woman, not the ‘American in Paris’ tourist whose skin I inhabited the other two times.  Much to my surprised delight a Frenchman asked me, ME,  for directions this very morning.  Anyway, it’s okay if you didn’t know who I was.

Paris: Bon Jour Jeannette, good to see you again. Nope, sorry, you are right, I didn’t recognize you because all American tourists look the same to me.

Me: But the man asked ME… uh…right. Was it sitting on the wall on the banks of the Seine, having my picture taken that gave me away?

Paris: No. Well, yes, that and the metro schedule and map of the city that I can see protruding from the little bag you’re carrying. Also, and I say this with the all the sensitivity I can muster ( I am Paris after all), no self-respecting French woman would be caught dead walking around my city with a sweater tied around her waist.

Me: Right.

Paris: Enough idle chit-chat, what brings you here?

Me: Oh, uh, it’s kind of awkward. I’m here with my boyfriend, but I can see the writing on the wall. We’re here for a friend’s wedding, traveling around Europe for three weeks by train and I’m sorry to say we can now add long distance travel to our ever-expanding list of incompatibilities.

Paris: Right. Sorry. How can I help?

Me: Ugh. I’m so tired. Chasing love for so many years is exhausting. Although…I do have to say I love your men. I think my next serious relationship has to be with a European man.

Paris: Well, Ma Cherie; there’s European men and then there are French men. Do you think you are ready for a Parisian man?

Me: Yeah, sure…no, you’re right…probably not. But I think they are sublime. I’ll aspire to one, yeah, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll…

Paris: You can start by untying the sweater from around your waist. Try your shoulders instead.

Me: Right. Listen, do you think I need to move here to find true love? You know, I’m not getting any younger and I’ve fantasized about doing that for years! What do you say? Rent an apartment here, eat cheese and warm baguette while walking the city, find an amazing jewelry job and a gorgeous French husband all at the same time?

Paris: This may surprise you but—I don’t believe in chasing dreams. I say go back to Los Angeles and be yourself. Wear your sweater as a belt and let the love of a Frenchman find you there. You never know, there could be the Parisian man of your dreams living within a ten-mile radius. Fate will intervene. If you are meant to marry a Frenchman…he will find you. Stop running.

Me:  Thank you Paris. I have to go now. I’m wearing a dress and the rough stone is exfoliating my ass and not in a good way. I love you.

Paris: Je t’aime Jeannette.

This is a true story. Mostly.
Actually, the moment our plane landed back in LA my boyfriend and I broke up. That was okay. I had my European dream and I just kept putting it our there and lo and behold, four years later, on a blind date in Los Angeles…I met the most delicious Parisian man…who it turns out lived within a ten-mile radius of my house. Fortunately, he was able to overlook my poor use of sweaters—and married me nine months later.

To me, that just goes to prove that ANYTHING is possible!

Carry on,
xox

My feelings got hurt, lightning stuck, a miracle occurred, and I avoided a fight.

Otherwise known as Thursday at my house.

See what I did there? I copped to the fact that my feelings got hurt.
I said it.
Out loud to my husband in real-time, to my girlfriend when I relayed the story on Sunday and to you guys now in print.

I think that’s important so I’m gonna point it out. Then I’m gonna stop because…well, because I believe that the very act of saying, “That hurt my feelings” diffuses the hurt a bit; and also because that’s enough whining for one post.

Here’s the deal:
My husband and I are in the midst of planning a motorcycle trip for this September.
I have been waxing nostalgic for Italy, the smarmy southern part, the part south of Rome, closer to Sicily where my people are from DNA wise, (I have the mustache to prove it), and Pompeii in particular.

I also want to see the leaves turn color on the East coast of the U.S. I think that would blow my mind on a motorcycle.

My husband is like…meh, ambivalent. Undecided. Uninspired. Comme si Comme sa. You get the picture.

Winding mountain roads with the sumptuous scenery of Vermont, the first hint of a nip in the air and the spectacle of the vividly colored leaves surrounding us.
OR
Warm, Indian summer days, dusty, ancient, red clay roads, the smells, sights and sounds of the Italian countryside; their food, their vino—and a city full of instantly fossilized citizens struck down mid-sentence during a cataclysmic volcanic eruption.

I know!
What to do?
So hard to decide.

I let it go, and the trajectory was sloooowly, (like the Titanic turning to avoid the iceberg) headed toward New England and the leaves.
Fine with me. That trip is up there on my list.

But fate intervened.
I used to balk at any sudden change of plans. Fate—Shmate. I never saw it as fate. It was just somebody sticking their big nose into my business, messing things up. Now we just call that Sunday.

We had emailed the company that was leading those Changing of the Leaves Tours of Vermont. Crickets…
Meanwhile…Raphael received an email out-of-the-blue from one of his Wolf Pack (The guys that he takes amazing motorcycle trips with every year) asking if he was interested in joining them for a four to five day ride in Europe. It fell at the exact time in September that we were planning our vacation.

Uh…hell yah, he answered explaining the serendipity of the timing and the fact that we (he and I) would be there together.

I’ve ridden with these guys many times. Tons. In all types of terrain and weather. As far as riding is concerned, I’m a dude. I leave my uterus at home in a drawer. At fifty-seven it’s not like I’m using it anymore.

Cool! A few days riding the Alps with the Wolf Pack, starting and ending in Milan. Then he and I would continue down south.
Fossilized citizens of Pompeii, here I come!

Until last Thursday night.
“They want a definite answer about the trip so they can purchase the tickets. The only thing is…by the looks of the count, they aren’t including you. I distinctly told them it would be you and I.”

Fuck. Fuck them! Oh, what is it? AnAll boys trip? I sneered.
“Um, yeah, no wives are coming” he answered sheepishly, never looking up from the text on his phone.

“None of their wives EVER come on the trips—they don’t ride!
Besides, It’s OUR vacation, I’m not trying to tag along, I’m there because it’s our vacation…and I’m not a wife! I’m a dude!”

“I know” he answered, looking more and more confused. I was getting pissed.

“That hurts my feelings!” I announced, surprising myself with the intensity of the declaration.
I think I even stomped my right foot and did a head thing—like a three-year old.

“It just does. You’ve got to work this out. Quit telling me they’re not including me. That just hurts my feelings! Let me know what you guys decide.” I turned and left the room with a dramatic flourish in a full-blown hissy-fit.

Into the den I stomped, flopping down on the couch, arms swinging wildly then resting across my chest, crossed; my bottom lip protruding beyond the rest of my face.
Just for affect.

A moment later lightning struck (because a tropical front was wafting through LA) and a miracle occurred.

I stopped being hurt and mad. Just like that. Big lip flop-down—to clarity—in 2.5 minutes.
A record. A personal best.

I didn’t want to go ride the Alps.
Been there done that, barfed on the T-shirt.
Too twisty of roads. Not my favorite ride. Soooo 2005.

I’ll pass and I’ll meet them in Milan! Genius! Fuck the Wolf Pack and the Alps, it’s southern Italy I want to see anyway.

He can go and I’ll meet him!

I ran back into the kitchen where he was furiously stirring something delicious. “Listen, here’s my plan. Call them back…”
As we started to flesh out our new-found solution—we found the nugget. It had been there all along, we were just too…lame? Stupid? Spoiled? Short-sighted, all-of-the-above, to see it.

It never occurred to us that they (their company) would be springing for plane tickets and renting the bikes. That would be four days expenses and Raphael’s flight taken care of—we just had to pick up another week or so, and my ticket.

NUGGET! (Happy dance)

When I told my friend this story her response made me laugh. Hard.
“You’re getting really good at this marriage thing” she remarked. “It’s great to see.”

Shit! I should hope so after almost fifteen years.

Carry on,
xox