Pack it Up

“Molly,” I said to my daughter who sat at the kitchen table, absolutely starving. I was carefully crafting a chicken wrap for her which, though a college graduate, she apparently had no idea how to make. “When are you going to pack?”

“Mom,” she said firmly. “I'm packed.”

Molly was home for two weeks in May, between the end of school and the beginning of her real life. She has the attic bedroom in our house and for most of her life I avoided going up there. However, as time got closer to her departure, I couldn't help but sneak a peek when she was curled on the basement couch watching Orange is the New Black. 

I bit my tongue and poured her a glass of lemonade.

 

Two months later, it was Max's turn.

“Don’t forget you have to pack!”  I called to the elusive six-foot-three body as it breezed through the kitchen.

“I got it, Mom,” was his response as the back door slammed. The same response I had gotten at least ten times in the past two weeks.

And then, came Leo, who for now, was only going away for a week, not a semester or a lifetime.

“Leo,” I yelled as the plugged in eighteen year-old skulked through the kitchen in search of his post-noon breakfast.  

“Hmm?” he said, lifting one of the over-sized, over-priced, noise-canceling headphones off his left ear.

“Don’t forget you’re leaving tomorrow at 6:30 in the morning. So make sure you pack before you go out today.”

“I know,” he said, replacing the headphone and cracking three eggs into the frying pan.

When I gently reminded Leo again, seven hours before his scheduled departure, hours which may have been better utilized by sleeping than packing, his response was, “Mom. I have been packing myself for ten years. It’s always gotten done and I haven't forgotten anything yet.”

When I go away, I start making lists about three weeks in advance. I fold, roll and plastic-bag my clothes into my over-sized suitcase at least four days before I go. I know what outfits I am wearing each day and pack at least an extra four in case I change my mind. I leave my suitcase lying open on my bedroom floor with sticky notes reminding me not to forget the essentials: phone charger, kindle and passport. I also sticky-note easily-replaceable items such as toothbrush, make-up and shampoo.  I make it nearly impossible to forget anything. And I would never, ever leave my packing to the last day, let alone the last hours.

My friend, Claire, understands my packing anxiety.  She has been know to circumvent the inevitable by packing her children's bags for them. I can only imagine how great that would be. The packing would be done early, neatly and correctly. I wouldn't have to nag at my kids nor would I toss and turn the night before an early morning flight worrying that Leo forgot to pack his sunscreen. After all, imagine how difficult it would be to find sunscreen in Aruba. 

However, I just don't have it in me. I am not a nurturing soul by trade. And doing for others does not come naturally to me. Instead, I pretend that I am intentionally trying to be a good parent by fostering independence.

But, somewhere, it seems, something fell apart. My kids didn't catch on and I was starting to worry that I had failed in the parenting department. After all, wasn't it my job to teach them right from wrong? And clearly, my way of packing was the right way. 

And then, just before spiraling into the parental pool of guilt, I had one of those aha! moments.

Maybe I hadn't raised a trio of hopeless procrastinators after all. Maybe some of those words that  went in one ear and out the other really had sunk in, along with a life lesson or two. Maybe it was simply a matter of reluctance, not resistance on their part.

Because maybe, just maybe, they put off their packing because they love me so much that they can't bear the thought of packing up a moment before they have to.

That must be it, because when all is said and done, all three of them do a pretty decent job of packing up and getting out.

 

Crazy Love

I went to a perfect wedding last Friday night. My friend Theresa’s oldest son, Phil, was the groom and the very beautiful (inside and out) Sonia, his beaming bride.

Everything about the wedding was beautiful. The wedding gown was beautiful. The bridesmaids were beautiful. The mother of the bride was beautiful. The mother of the groom was doubly beautiful. The church was beautiful. The guests were even beautiful. And best of all, the beautiful day was blessed by the bride and groom’s fathers in heaven who kindly zapped the humidity right out of the forecast.

I think I've been to 100 weddings in my life. Being married to a conscientious journalist has taught me to (somewhat) verify facts before I print them. So, I sat down and scratched out a list off the top of my head. I hit a wall at 56 then came up with 20 more. I'm certain there's another couple dozen I've simply forgotten about. But, regardless of the exact number, suffice it to say, I have witnessed many a marriage .

I have been to all sizes and shapes of weddings. My friend, Brenda, got married in a rooftop ballroom at the St. Regis Hotel on Central Park on a snowy night in December. My college roommate, Sue, exchanged vows with Larry on a Boca Raton beach with guests donned in flip-flops, shorts and sundresses. My soul sister, Ann, rode on the back of a motorcycle to Las Vegas, saying “I do” in a wedding chapel and threw a backyard party when they got back home. My blood sister, Nancy, had two wedding receptions. The first, a sophisticated country club affair, immediately followed her Friday the 13^th ceremony, offering passed hors d’oeuvres and big band tunes from a tuxedo-ed five-piece ensemble. The next day we flew to Wisconsin for a party in her future ex-husband’s home town of Chippewa Falls, climbing over snow drifts to get inside the VFW hall. Debbie and Lou’s reception was at Otto’s Diner, Betsy and her twin sister Pam had a double outdoor wedding (one marriage lasted, the other mercifully didn’t). In the middle of Madge and George’s wedding at the Embassy Suites Hotel, the fire alarm went off and we all had to evacuate. Bob and Michelle’s fairy-tale romance culminated with a fall wedding in Ocean City, one of those rare Indian summer days that allowed for dancing outside all night long. My spouse and I were wed in a big, beautiful church and had the reception at the now defunct Bentley’s Restaurant, choosing a barely edible brunch in exchange for a bigger guest list. I insisted on a morning wedding so there’d be  plenty of time for a four-hour reception in the afternoon followed by a keg party lasting into the wee hours of the night.  

I’ve been to weddings with traditional vows and weddings with garbled vows. I’ve been to weddings with all kinds of music, from bands to DJs to cellists to teenagers spinning records on a turntable.  I’ve been to weddings with incredible spreads and weddings with chips and crudité on plastic-covered tables. I’ve been to weddings that never should have happened (i.e., the bride who had one last fling the night before) and weddings that were made to last.

But, despite the massive amounts of weddings I’ve attended, on Friday night I realized that Phil and Sonia’s was a first for me. It was not the biggest or the boldest. It was not the weirdest or the wildest. And despite consuming 10,000 calories at the cocktail hour alone, it may not even have been the wedding at which I consumed the most amount of food. I certainly have drunk more at many a reception, but youth is no longer on my side. This wedding was different because it was the first of my friend’s kids to get married.

Maybe it’s because I’m a month away from my long-anticipated empty nest. Or four months from my own 25^th anniversary. Or maybe it was because I was at the wedding without my ever-loving spouse who was pedaling his bicycle ride across Iowa. But this wedding hit me harder than most.

Sonia’s and Phil’s love story was told in a heart-felt toast by Charlie, cousin and closest buddy of the groom. Of course, Anthony, who has made an appearance in many of my stories, was involved. He was a sixth-grade boy with a beautiful teacher whom he wanted to show off to his brother and cousin. The rest is history. Anthony and Charlie are still single. Phil is not.

As Phil and Sonia danced to Crazy Love, I got goose bumps thinking about the timelessness of love songs. I thought of all the young couples I know and wonder how many of them will make it to the altar. And how many shouldn’t.

When Phil led his mother to the dance floor and they hugged their way through Josh Groban’s You Raise Me Up, I got a lump in my throat knowing that one day in the not too distant future, one, two or all three of my own kids may get married. I will welcome their wives, or whomever they choose to love, into our family with an open heart. And, like my mother before me, will forever embrace any man brave enough to make my daughter his bride.

But in the meantime, I will watch from a distance as Phil and Sonia waltz their way through life. And I will wish for them all the good that love has to give.

I hope they will always remember how happy they felt last Friday night. And when they’re not feeling it, that they fight to get it back.

I hope they will always feel as special as they did on their wedding day and know in their hearts that what they have doesn’t come easy.

I hope they will always feel loved, by each other, and by their friends and family who share their joy.

I hope they will always feel as rich as they did when they tore open their envelopes, even if their wallets are thin and their bills are big. 

But most of all, I hope that many years from now, when their kids and their friends’ kids get married, that the two of them will be there together, hand in hand. And that they will hold each other tight and smile, knowing just how incredibly lucky they are. Because only the lucky are given the lifelong gift of Crazy Love.

Bucket Lists

I don’t have a Bucket List. After all, I have done just about everything I’ve ever wanted to do. However, if I were pressed, these would be the kinds of things that would top my list:

1. To be rail thin (while still consuming massive amounts of pretzels and ice cream)
2. To write a best-seller
3. To have central air conditioning
4. To be rich enough not to cringe with every “Mom, can I borrow the credit card?”
5. To live in a house with a master bathroom
6. To have a newly-paved driveway
7. To live long enough to become a beloved grandmother (but not yet)   
   
8. To own a refrigerator with a working ice maker and shelves that are not duct-taped together
9. To enjoy my kids’ financial and emotional successes
10. To own an ocean-front house on an astro-turf beach

 But, alas, these are not the things on which Bucket Lists are built.

No, I should want to go skydiving, climb Mt. Kilimanjaro or swim the English Channel to make my life complete. Or perhaps, as my friend Penny suggested (see my last blog for explanation on my old friend’s new name), I should zip line through a jungle and bobsled down a mountain in a poor Caribbean country that can’t possibly have the same caliber of sue-resistant safety precautions found in our conscientious USA.

In the weeks before our cruise, Penny and I talked about shore excursions. I suggested the Bob Marley Bus Tour which promised reggae, rum and an insider’s view of the Jamaican country side. Penny countered with the Tranopy Adventure.

“Go ahead, google it,” she suggested.

And so I did.

The tour starts with a 15-minute chair lift ride up Mystic Mountain, offering amazing views (if you’re brave enough to open your eyes) as you dangle 700 feet in the air over the canopy of the tropical rainforest. 

You then zip-line half-way down the mountain, “flying through the canopy on a series of cables and pulleys that are interconnected on both tree and land-based platforms.” If you live through that, you return to the chair lift, ride to the base of the mountain, loop around and head ever-so-slowly back up to the summit where you hop aboard a bobsled and “hold on as it plunges through 3,280 feet of twists and turns down the mountain.”

I had but three words for Penny.

“You’re surely joking.”

I went on to read some reviews mentioning “the vertical drop, the rickety bridge and this is not for you if you are afraid of heights.”

I am afraid of heights.

I last rode a chair lift on my honeymoon in Montreal. I wept the entire way to the top of the mountain. My spouse laughed at me. Once, while hiking in the Poconos, I came to a three-foot wide bridge with no railing spanning a deep ravine. I took five steps and froze. I tried crawling, holding hands, looking straight ahead, but nothing worked. I ended up tacking an extra mile onto my hike to avoid the perilous crossing. And when I took a 70-floor elevator ride to the observation deck at the top of Rockefeller Center, I couldn’t look down.

“It’s time we start doing Bucket List things,” Penny argued.

There was not a single thing in the Tranopy Adventure Tour that would have come anywhere near my Bucket List.

But Penny has a sense of humor and the next thing I knew, I received a text confirming our spot on the tour. It wasn’t cheap.

“I paid for it so you wouldn’t wimp out,” Penny said.

And for some reason, I didn’t.

As the eight of us gathered anxiously on a worn wooden platform, donned in our harnesses, helmets and disposable shower caps (to avoid Jamaican lice, said the guide), I tried to reason my way through what was about to happen. The wire could snap, my sweaty palms could slip off the handlebars, I could slam into a tree. Statistically speaking, I was probably safe. But statistics don’t keep your knees from knocking when your life is entrusted to a kid who answers your "Am I going to die?" question with "Yup!" a split second before he kicks the milk crate from under your feet and sends you zipping through the jungle. 

 

I’ll admit, once I got going, it was kinda fun. Until, of course, I came to the end of the line heading 60 mph (which was probably more like 20), straight into a tree which was smack in the middle of the next platform which was suspended in the air. With no pillars gripping the ground. I screamed at the top of my lungs and the guides giggled as they zapped the brakes – some sort of contraption made of a pulley and a wooden block – in the nick of time.

What I didn’t realize was there were four more longer and faster zips to go, including a two-story straight-down drop followed by a walk across a swaying wooden bridge high above the tree line.

But, I did it.

By the time we rode the bobsled which they promised couldn’t derail, I was happy as a kid on a roller coaster. 

And by the last trip down the mountain, I found myself swinging my feet and even looking down over the side of the chair lift. I saw a mongoose scurrying through the rainforest as well as many, many big, big spiders weaving intricate webs an arm's-length away. I saw our cruise ship in the distance and the beautiful clear blue sea. I saw green, green leaves and tall, tall trees and waved to tourists as they passed above us on their trip up the mountain. I barely even held on.

I can’t say I'll never be afraid of anything again. Or that I'll ever actually enjoy putting my fate in someone else's hands. And I can promise you that I will never, ever jump out of an airplane. For any reason.

But I am proud of myself for doing something so totally out of character. I'm prouder still of Penny for prodding me to do it, knowing how I can get when my heels are dug in deep. But like all good bosom buddies, she also knows how far she can push and just what will motivate me to step outside my comfort zone. 

 

"OK, so it might not be on your Bucket List," she said. "But I bet you could write a blog about it."

Making friends for the world to see

I hope the day will be a lighter highway,
For friends are found on every road.
Can you ever think of any better way
For the lost and weary travelers to go?

Making friends for the world to see,
Let the people know you got what you need.
With a friend at hand you will see the light,
If your friends are there then everything's all right.
-Bernie Taupin / Elton John

My friend Patty, who from this point forward I will call Penny in order to protect her privacy, simply cannot understand the value of Facebook. Granted, she holds a position where she shouldn’t display wanton cruise behavior on social media sites that anyone can see. But, then again, don’t we all?

I look at every life event as an opportunity to make new friends. I ask a lot of questions and get a lot of strange looks, but defend my inquisitive nature as being nothing more than that. I genuinely care about people and want to know everything about them. I can’t understand why anyone would be offended by my barrage of personal questions and only wish someone, anyone, would ask half that many questions of me. I would take it as the highest compliment.

When Penny and I arrived in the dining room on the first night of our cruise last week, I nearly shrieked with delight at the friendship prospects that abounded. We were seated at a table for ten with a bunch of females from totally different walks of life. Clearly our paths would never have crossed had it not been for the cruise, but I barged right in anyway and did my best to create friendships out of our dissimilarities. 

Faith and April are cousins from Baltimore who work for the Baltimore City Police and an airline company. I’m pretty sure they love Jesus more than I do. They are a good ten years younger than I and compared to them, I am a very, very old mother on track to be an ancient grandmother. April wakes up at 3 am every day, just about the time I’m on the second of many nightly trips to the bathroom. By the time I get up in the morning, she’s finished her lunch break.

Aimee and Ashley are college friends who brought adorable Tennessee accents and sunburned shoulders to the table. Aimee, who looks like Amy Adams, is an intelligence analyst, a job way too intelligent for me to understand. And Ashley is a first-grade teacher, a job way too difficult for me to ever undertake. I know because I had one first-grader three times, but never twenty of them at once. Aimee and Ashley are young girls with old souls, loving both Justin Timberlake and The Golden Girls.

Olga, originally from Ukraine, once worked as a youth counselor on a cruise ship so had lots of inside scoop. She flaunted her status, and long golden curls, to get us a free bottle of wine from the maitre d’. Olga worked hard for a Master’s degree, but even harder for United States citizenship. Her eleven year-old daughter, Mary, is the sweetest thing I ever did see. Theirs is an all-too-familiar tale of a hard-won battle that kept them apart for far too long far too many times.

Damara works in an ER and is as pretty as a princess. When I touched her baby’s footprints tattooed across her side, her eyes bulged at my audacity, but she continued to smile. Marlene is a singer, so I was immediately star-struck. She has dreadlocks and piercings and many, many musical tattoos. Damara and Marlene are thirty, give or take a year or two, and each have a unique style that reinforces my lack of hipness.

As different as we were, we did have one common connection – social media. We hadn’t been off the ship for an hour before my first friend request came in. And shortly thereafter, all ten of us, I mean nine (because poor Penny continues to extol the virtues of privacy) were connected.

“You mean to tell me, the whole world can see my picture without my permission?” Penny raged.

“Yup,” I answered, searching eagerly for more.

“What if I don’t want my picture plastered all over Facebook?”

“Too bad,” I answered, thumbing through my Instagram timeline.

“What’s wrong with just looking at a photo album?”

“Nothing. But people in Miami can't see it at the same time as people in Chicago or New Jersey."

“Exactly,” she responded.

I tried to explain to Penny that being just a click away opens up a whole new level of friendship.

One day, I want to look on Facebook and see that Ashley has given Alvis her heart. That she didn’t allow her parents’ problems ruin her own chances at love. And I hope I’ll see that Aimee is “in a relationship” with the blind date she’s meeting next weekend. In a year or two, maybe I’ll see pictures posted of them on their wedding days, one as a bride, the other beaming behind a bridesmaid bouquet.

I’ll check in with April and Faith in years to come and see pictures of adorable grandchildren and more vacations taken together. After putting her mother through the wringer, I’ll learn where April’s daughter decided to go to college, keeping my fingers crossed that she opted to live away from home. And when I look at Faith’s timeline, I’ll always remember overhearing her say, “Who wouldn’t love Betsy?”  Those words will stay with me a long, long time.

I’ll look for the vegetarian pictures to disappear from Olga’s pages and hope they are replaced with a genuine man who is ready to give all of his heart to Mary as well as her mother. And as I follow Mary on Instagram and watch her grow into a beautiful and confident young woman, I’ll smile knowing she’ll never have to live without her mother again. Until, of course, she wants to.

I’ll sneak peeks at Damara walking hand-in-hand with her little daughter who she will teach to be open-minded and accepting of all kinds of people. I will see Damara’s big smile and hope that she knows how much she is loved, because it is clear that she is. And Marlene, Lady M, has already blown me away with her stunningly beautiful profile picture. I can’t wait to see Twitter crash as her music tops the charts. Because any ultra-cool Spanish, hip-hop rapper likened to a female version of Pitbull who can respect a frumpy middle-aged woman confessing to know every single word of every single Taylor Swift song, well girl, you have won my heart.

And as far as Penny’s concerned, I hope one day she joins us on social media. But if she doesn’t, that’s OK. With over 40 years of friendship under our belts there’s not a whole lot we haven’t already shared.

Speaking of which, Private Penny was relieved that I never shared the story of our first cruise that I promised to tell on our last night together.

Maybe I’ll post it.

Or maybe, I’ll just wait until we meet again.

Separate But Equal Vacations

 

“You are so lucky!” groused one girlfriend who shall remain nameless to protect her ruthless husband.  “John / Tim / Roger (fill in your choice of name) would never let me go on a cruise without him!”

I know I’m lucky to have married the man I did. But, I also know I could never have fallen in love with someone who prohibited me from doing anything.

“You know Paul / Sam / Joe just gets so jealous.”

I simply laughed. And while again, I admit I’m lucky that my spouse doesn’t have a jealous bone in his body, I have to wonder. Is it that he has no fear of me hooking up with a random seaman or is he smiling to himself thinking, “If you can put up with her, you can have her.”

Either way, his gracious spirit has blessed me with many, many trips away with the girls in our twenty-four-and-a-half years of marriage.

And so, I’m packed and ready for a cruise with Patty, my bosom buddy since high school.

This will be our fourth cruise together, the third since I've become a cantankerous adult. I like to say that Patty and I travel well together. But the truth of the matter is, Patty has learned to put up with my travel quirks.

Patty knows about my sleep issues.

She knows that I won’t leave home without my portable fan to drown out the sounds of her sleeping two feet away from me. She also knows I will bring my own extension cord after once having had to rearrange the furniture due to a plug shortage int he room. She knows that I insist on eight hours of sleep and will cut a night short in anticipation of an early morning.

Patty knows about my acclimation issues.

Although we have exchanged daily texts of excitement, she knows that when we embark I will get cranky about the crowds, bitter about the buffet lines, skeeved out by the miniscule hair found in a remote corner of the bathroom and annoyed at the size of the cabin, despite knowing the room size in advance and having sprung for the junior suite to circumvent aforementioned annoyance.

Patty will then suggest a 700-calorie umbrella drink of the day and I’ll respond with one of my many rules.

“I can’t drink until five o’clock.”

 

She’ll roll her eyes and toss down a shot of tequila to make me easier to deal with until I come around. And I will. Before long I’ll be sitting on the balcony watching the waves kick up in our wake shouting, “This is the life!”

And then I’ll start making friends with the wait staff and the room steward and the family from Miami who will undoubtedly be placed at our table in the formal dining room. And because it is the late seating, the three year-old will be tired and loud and I’ll do my best to provoke his tantrums. After dinner, we will stroll the decks, roaming from the craps table to the piano bar where we will sing “Bye, Bye Miss American Pie” at the top of our lungs even though we hated the song in high school and hate it even more now. We’ll take in a comedy show after I adamantly declare how much I HATE comedy shows and I’ll do my best not to laugh.

In the mornings, Patty will sneak out of the room at dawn in search of coffee because she knows I hate the smell and would never allow it to be brewed in the room. No bananas either. I’ll look at my watch and see that I’ve only had seven hours and twenty minutes of sleep and wonder if I should break a rule and get up. When I do, I’ll head to the gym and fight for a treadmill, give up and power walk around the ship counting my steps until an hour has passed.

Patty will have waited in hopes that I would join her at the breakfast buffet. But since I never eat anything but an English muffin in the morning, off she’ll go alone and I’ll stoically starve. But before doing so I will debate long and hard whether to purchase an unlimited soda card. I will go over and over the pros and cons until Patty tells me yes or no.

After dipping our toes in the pool, losing 20 dollars on Bingo and walking out of the art auction, I'll start getting cranky. Patty will suggest a nap to which I respond, "I NEVER take a nap."

Patty will roll her eyes and order an 800-calorie umbrella drink-of-the-day (extra 100 calories for an extra shot of rum) at the Red Frog Rum Bar. I will look at my watch and realize it’s an hour and thirteen minutes until five o’clock.

I'll think about what Leo said to me before I went away. "Don't define yourself by your rules. You can be anyone you want to be."

"Make it two," I'll say. And we'll click our glasses to broken rules and oceans of fun.

My spouse is also taking a vacation this year. He is going to RAGBRAI.

RAGRAI stands for Register’s (as in the Des Moines Register newspaper) Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. Yes, that is the vacation he has chosen. He and three of his buddies are riding 481 miles across the state of Iowa. In one week. With 10,000-plus other lunatics. They have employed the services of Pork Belly Ventures to carry their gear and deliver it from campsite to campsite. Where they will sleep. In tents. Without fans to drown out the sounds of nature. They will make use of mobile shower trailers. And Port-a-Potties.  It will be 90 degrees, hot and humid. They will ride, rain or shine. They will be given instructions on what to do in case of a tornado.

My spouse does not get bogged down with my kind of burdens.

And so, when my friends say how lucky I am to be allowed to go away with the girls, my ever-loving spouse will be laughing all the way across Iowa. As he kisses me goodbye this afternoon, he'll be beaming with love thinking, "Bon Voyage, Patty. Bon Voyage! If you can handle her, you can have her."