Then the Dog Ate My Phancy Glasses
I haven’t written you in a while. I’ve been - I think I’ve been - kinda practicing what I preach. Meaning, living, every - er - minute of it. Truth, a good friend of mine died. She’d had a good long life, it was time, I wrote some blog tributes I didn’t post, and then returned to the business of living the most appropriate life for me, at this time, under these circumstances, with my particular set of dynamics internal and external.
Hoping to catch that current of appropriateness, the place where movement and action come from a spontaneously generated kind of propulsion, a place of ease and comfort, rather than a place of fear, a desire to outrun death or poverty or obesity or whatever your particular bugaboo is.
So I was doing that, when I realized I’d lost my new, splurgy, gold-rimmed super-phancy reading glasses. When Ax first saw them he asked, “Are those real gold?”
“Yes,” I told him. “They are real gold.”
“Ohhhh,” he said, impressed, reaching to fondle them. Ax is at that age where he is incredibly worldly and brilliant in some ways and still very much a child in some ways. I revel in witnessing his blooming.
Anyway, some months after I got these beauties, my first official pair of reading glasses, which were actually “workspace” glasses, which sounds much cooler than trifocals - clear at the top, medium in the middle for looking at a computer screen, and “girl, you’re going blind” at the bottom for actual book reading which I still do, though less often than I’d like, but more often than never.
So, point: Some months after I got them, I misplaced them. I tore the house apart. I tore my car apart. I was sad. I was annoyed at myself. I convinced myself I’d perhaps thrown them out. All the money and self-indulgence and vanity self-flagellation rose up. How could I lose such phancy glasses? Why had I even thought I’d deserved those phancy glasses in the first place? Why am I so all over the place?
And then, one day, out driving while talking on the phone with my girlfriend Jule I casually stuck my hand into the driver’s side door storage thingy where old masks, sunscreen, poop bags, and empty Spindrift soda cans live and - lo and behold — the phancy glasses.
“Omigod!!! My phancy glasses!” I exclaimed, on Bluetooth.
“Did you find them like, right now?” Jule said.
“Yes, like, right this second while I was talking to you!”
“Omigod!” She said.
And when I got home I put them on and swore I’d never let them leave my office again and always treasure them like the treasure they are.
And for 2 whole days I wore them to my zoom meetings, feeling phierce, rather than frumpy, aging, and getting closer to death, which frankly some readers - I mean workspace glasses - can make a girl feel. And so, I felt, once more, justified. When I put these glasses on I feel cool, badass, and hot. They say, “I am here for business and I am amazing!” And the 5 for $20 ones I got just don’t have the same effect. They allow me to see, but that’s it. These other ones … you get the idea.
And so, just now, I came into my office to do my morning meditation quiet time thing and - lo and behold - my phancy glasses, sitting sadly in the center of my seat cushion like a wounded bird or a mangled bicycle, one lens out, nose grippers cattywampus. No way salvageable.
I know the furry four-legged culprit. And I know my part in it: I did not put the treasure in a case, up on a shelf, when I took them off. I put them casually on my desk along with my collection of cheap-o readers, which remain there, uneaten and pristine.
And so there is a lesson for me here, maybe more than one. Easy come, easy go? Don’t trust the doodle? Phancy is on the inside? Treasure what you have while you have it? Nothing lasts forever? Whatever it is, all I know is, I’m gonna keep going.
www.livingeveryminuteofit.com
www.combatcovidstress.com
For Sheila.
