The thing about your birthday is that it’s going to happen whether you learned anything the year before or not. So mine is happening. Right now. Today. At the start of my birthday month, I gave myself the gift of a thirty-day detox to clear my head and decide what I want to do with the rest of my life. No wine. No Sugar. No grains. No legumes. But that wasn’t enough. I decided to go paleo while I was at it, because it’s a no brainer. Today is day 26 of “clarity.” If you’ve ever quit anything you know that while getting clear is a great idea in theory, what you see isn’t necessarily a picnic.
Example. Saturday night would have been my mom’s 103rd birthday, and I was really irritated. Note. I have NOTHING to be irritated about. Just being an American citizen is a cause for celebration, but I was pissed anyway. Jay and I were cooking dinner. He was chopping onions. Later he planned to spatchcock a chicken for our Sunday dinner.
The onions were killing me. To escape, I turned my back on them and gazed out the kitchen door at the darkening driveway. I wondered what was bugging me and if I could actually feel happy without reaching for something or someone to induce it. Get a grip, I told myself, get a goddamned grip. You know what you’re supposed to do. (1) Acknowledge the feeling. (2) Feel the feeling (something I’ve always distrusted and tried to avoid at all costs). But I was going for clarity. Man– I was right on the verge of identifying that little stabbing pain feeling, probably missing my mom, when Jay asked me if we had a carrot.
I turned and stomped to the frig. As I pulled out the vegetable bin, he asked if I could pull out the chicken thighs. I slammed the vegetable drawer, and holding on to the carrot, I pulled out the meat drawer to get the thighs from the Goddamn cage-free chickens that were so expensive they must have been roaming wild in the Hamptons.
Then the meat drawer dropped off it’s trolley, and all the meat came crashing out, the pork foot, the sausages, the bacon, all my caveman food. As the pork foot (or is it hoof?) tumbled to the floor, it kicked at the uncovered bowl of leftover Brussels sprouts, which Jay had made and stored UNCOVERED. It’s his fault. Everything is his fault. The sprouts bounced and scattered across the floor. I didn’t care because I had eaten my share. That’s how much of a nasty woman I’ve become.
Then just to make the special day even more special, Jay invited me to sit on the balcony and look at the Sunset. Usually this is my favorite time of the week– the time I begin my Saturday night romp through my two glasses of wine– maybe two and a half. The thought of doing this for the third week in a row without my alcoholic brain stimulator, did not make me happy.
Nonetheless, I wanted to experience life with out any blur at all. I gamely grabbed my bottle of Gerolsteiner Mineral Water in one hand and a mason jar full of Arbonne fizz in the other, tucked my phone, my moleskin and a pen under my arm in case Jay said something brilliant and followed him to the balcony. He opened my director’s chair. Very polite. The kindest man in the world.
It’s dark I said. It’s still beautiful he said, and I lowered myself to the chair. CAREFULLY I placed my mason jar on the goddamn COCKTAIL table and sat down and prepared to say something interesting. But somehow I forgot I was balancing the mineral water and all my other baggage, and the next thing I felt was soaking wet. My brain knew something was wrong, but the last thing it thought was that the problem was me– that I had spilled the bottle of Gerolsteiner onto my lap. For a second I wondered if I had spontaneously wet my pants with icy mountain water. It was cold and fizzy, and it kept spilling onto my crotch until I leapt up and screamed and the bottle clattered to the floor. I just exploded at that moment like I was a bottle of mineral water, cursing and flailing and drying my phone. Calm down, Jay said.
Seething, I put on dry sweats, and we back to the kitchen to continue making dinner– time for sweet interaction. But all I wanted to interact with was a cigarette. Seriously, after all these years. Jay must have sensed how twisted I felt. I’ll put on some music, he said, what do you what to hear? I don’t care. What do you want to hear? Never mind. I’ll put on Jazz.
Then, as I’m sitting on the floor cross-legged in front of the frig trying to clear room for his spatchcocked chicken to spend the night, he came over and gave me a little tickle under my arms, which scared the shit out of me. What? He said. You tickled me. Well sorry. I put on Louis Armstrong, “Satchmo,” to take you back to your roots, he said. I got up, walked to the garage door and burst into tears. Long story. Mom and Satchmo on stage at a benefit she chaired. Me on Satchmo’s knee at the after party. Eight years old. How ya doing, Princess, he said.
All that horn playing and Satchmo singing made me nostalgic for a time before I was even born back when bombs destroyed and the greatest generation danced. Is that coming again? You’re the one who wanted to strip your brain bare, I said to myself, well here it is. Sad and aggravated and worried. Feel it? Okay. Now figure out what to do.
It’s time to pull up to a better feeling and put on my big lady wise-woman pants. Time to ask not what the Chardonnay can do for me, but what I can do with the original tool kit God issued to me when I was born. Sixty-six is my right time to actually read the directions on how to use my gifts (and the refrigerator) in act three.
I see the recommendation is to dig deep in myself– to use the chisel that comes with the kit to chip away until I hit the ancient city of Authentic. That is where I will live. I can cease the hunt for the perfect master-planned community. It doesn’t matter. Now it’s time to fly. Yeah, I get to fly at last. I am a badass flying tiger. An elder female tiger getting my joy – my happiness from the people God-Source-Woo-Woo puts in my space. Love is the thing. It’s all about love. Today, my birthday, I’m jacked on clarity, on clean mental edges, and I am definitely high off the squirrel card Jay gave me. Tonight, after tap class, I’ll feel like I’ve gone to heaven when my daughter lights the candles on my paleo birthday cake, the one she baked herself.
My plans for future decadence include listening to what people are saying instead of thinking of the next thing I’m going to say, and continuing to get high off of nothing at all. Same hustle. Different drugs.
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