Once upon a time, a while ago, I broke my heart open and I told someone what was inside. He was kind to me, this someone, gentle with my broken open heart. He said he was moved and flattered. He said if he were not going to try to make things work one last time with his girlfriend...and then he said a few more things about that.
Since then, I have been trying not to wait around and hope. But being a hopeful sort of individual, it is difficult for me to just throw in the towel. It’s not in my nature. Plus I liked that towel. However, I’m trying to do other things beside wait, because of the old adage that a watched pot never boils.
The other day, I found myself parking in the parking lot of a local supermarket. I walked past the depressed-looking Salvation Army bell-ringer in the Santa suit and through the automatic doors. It was early in the morning and I realized I had taken a 15-minute detour from my route to work in the hopes that a certain sad-looking supermarket checker would be on duty (this is not the guy of the first paragraph, this is me moving on). I had never before thought about the work schedules of the local grocery clerks. I would probably now be late for my first patient. As I walked through the doors, trying to think what groceries if any I really needed, I had the thought: What the hell are you doing? Some thoughts are louder than others.
In my defense, the sad-looking checker is really sweet and kind. And as he checks my groceries, despite his lingering air of melancholy, he also seems to be saying we must not take ourselves too seriously here. I like that. He wears a name tag and I like his name. He’s ten years too old for me and I wonder what led him to become a supermarket checker. But I have found myself going for groceries more than strictly necessary lately. He doesn’t work very much. I have a lot of food in my fridge now.
The shortest day came and went. Long on dark and short on light, this brittle wintry time, but enough light to see. Although from the above you may think my vision a little compromised, and although I don’t profess to even a rudimentary understanding of the workings of my heart, I feel that I am seeing fairly clearly. I shouldn’t wait around too long, for example. I see that. On the other hand, I tend to get distracted and drift off course, and I sometimes need a nudge. No better person for this than the teen daughter. That’s why we were gifted with them, the teens, no?
Mom. What have I done now? Apparently Old Spice shampoo is only for men. Why can I not use it too? Because you smell like a man. This is a bad thing? Then there is something wrong with the Christmas wrapping paper that I purchased. Apparently it is not fancy enough. There are five different kinds, but none of them meet the fancy standards. And where’s our ribbon? We have that plasticky ribbon that you can make curl with a scissors if you have that skill, which I was somehow born without. But that, also, is the wrong type of ribbon. It is rewarded with a frown. I try the argument that it’s not worth spending a ton of money on wrapping paper and ribbon when people just rip it off their gifts and throw it in the trash. This is a lame argument that does not hold up to teen inspection. I wrap all my gifts in the unfancy paper. I like how it looks.
We also don’t have any tissue paper. We had tissue paper, but now, at 9:07pm on Christmas Eve, we are out. Could somebody reading this please run out and get some? Because apparently this is an emergency.
Throughout the tissue paper emergency, I remained impressively calm. I have learned that most domestic emergencies involving teens eventually pass by, especially if you show initial shock and horror at how terrible the emergency is, while secretly sipping wine and waiting for the situation to downgrade from red to orange to yellow alert. Sure enough, my daughter locates some paper that is even better than tissue paper. Better yet, it’s some paper that I purchased at a yard sale years ago for a dollar that she has now discovered is in fact superior to regular tissue paper because it is tissuey yet has designs on it.
I realize this may be a tedious topic to read about, but the happy ending to this story is that with a combination of the designy tissue paper and the curly ribbon that she naturally knows how to make into impressive ringlets, her gifts end up looking extremely pleasing indeed. And not just to me, with my horribly low gift wrapping bar. But to her. She steps back and surveys her handiwork artfully arranged beneath our dying Christmas tree. She even photographs one of the gifts. When I question her about this, it turns out she is photographing it because it is a gift she wrapped for a friend of hers for his girlfriend. Because guys, you know, they’d use newspaper. Or forget to get a gift altogether. So she picked out the gift, wrapped it, and is now sending him a picture of it so he knows what a great job he did.
Turns out, although it’s no surprise to me, my daughter is a number one standout friend to male and female friends alike. This is only one of the many reasons I like her. Plus she went around all the gifts under our tree and she noticed how many of them were from me to her, and even though some of them were wrapped with subpar wrapping paper, she was thrilled. We are going to have a good Christmas morning together. Next Christmas she will be on her gap year, and probably somewhere exotic like Belize or Byron Bay. And maybe my fractured heart will be in the careful hands of some mystery stranger. I hope he doesn’t really care about what kind of paper his Christmas gift is wrapped in.
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