Observations from The Middle

My 45 year old friend Dana told me how she identified exactly with an aging Leonard Cohen at his concert. Days later we held our beers, head-nodded and hip-swayed, sure of our peership with the young 20something front-woman of a band called Phox.

I listen to NPR and whatever classical music comes on just like my parents do, until I hit CD and overbite to Greenday’s American Idiot or Weezer or whatever Husband stuck in there. I almost wrote Wheezer. Case in point.

I’m often the only person at a table of my friends without glasses. I don’t have to color my greys. Yet.

My current mantra is “I am calm, centered and peaceful.” I practice gratitude out-loud in my station wagon.  I’m becoming my Woody Allen character.

Our house needs love. The fancy Room and Board couch we purchased in 2000—weakened by cat-claw aerating and boy-jumping–split down the middle seam. I hand-sewed it closed. We can’t buy anything new until the cat dies.

The kids are finally of the age that changing the house doesn’t rattle their core sense of stability. We have four different swatches of paint on one wall—all blues and yellows, none of them right. We painted our first apartment in blue and yellow.

My favorite quote right now is Lao Tzu: “When I let go of what I am I become what I might be.” Husband has little interest in what I am. I think he knows what I might be more than I do. I wonder if this is where the urge to run/stray/distract originates. People who know us less seem taken more with the “what we are” of us. Almost as much as we are.

My metabolism is slowing. My desire to eat is not.

I hear myself grunt when I get up or bend over, just like our cleaning lady Birdie used to do.  She kept Certs in her purse, watched All My Children, and gave me baby aspirin if I complained that my head hurt. I keep gum in my purse, watch Parenthood, and dole out children’s Motrin on occasion.

I remember, as a child, not being able to understand the people singing on the radio. Eventually I understood context and lyrics. Until yesterday I thought Miley’s love was like a rainbow.

On my run through the arboretum yesterday, I saw a bunch of daffodils on the road. In reality it was a sprig of fallen yellow maple leaves.

Maybe I need glasses.