Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Give It Up, Girlie
Every time we pass someone driving an RV or pulling a trailer on the freeway, I create a story for the driver and their passenger, almost always around our age, that involves their being totally carefree. They have great health, plenty of money, and their children are, as my dad would say, ‘squared away.’
For all I know, they could be headed to a far away state for a last ditch treatment for a fatal cancer after selling their house and having a lawn sale of all their beloved possessions. Maybe he just sold his dad’s golf clubs, maybe she just put 50 cent tags on her mother’s embroidered pillowcases. No one would know by looking at them, especially from another car on the freeway going 70 miles and hour.
My obsession with being carefree has been years in the making. I now think that most older people except me have figured out how to be carefree while I sit here with my ancient Coach saddlebag filled to the brim with cares – old ones, new ones, ones that landed from Mars, and ones I asked for in a fit of wanting to be useful to the world. In any event, there is no carefree on the menu here. It’s all you can eat cares.
Today, sitting on the beach with my two dogs, I constructed five tiny cairns of beach stones. No, I don’t have a picture. I just have the memory. One dog lay next to me and the other stood behind my back, panting, which seems to me the perfect metaphor. One dog is oblivious to the cairns and is nearly sleeping. The other breathes and watches, makes tiny cellular movements, which only I detect, that signal his intention to trample the cairns. He doesn’t. But he could have.
Here’s the revelation of the day. I’m giving up on this carefree deal. It’s not going to happen. Yearning for it makes me a greyhound racing around an oval track after a fake bunny. And, you know, if the greyhound is fast enough to catch the bunny, he finds out it isn’t real. It’s a stupid, stuffed bunny.
So that’s it for me and carefree. I now officially eschew being carefree as a life goal. Instead, I embrace my bag of cares. I’m going to make little neat compartments for all the different types of cares and take each care out of its compartment every day and admire it like a string of pearls or a Faberge egg. I’m going to revel in my cares and look down my nose at people who skate around without a care in the world. What lightweights they are. Me, I am a heavyweight. With stones.
Tomorrow, I’ll go find my wee cairns on the beach and take a picture.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
We have friends who moved from here (New England) to Carefree which was, I think, in New Mexico. There weren’t carefree, but they got to put it on the return address of the cards they sent for birthdays and Christmas.
Carefree might happen if you are old, but very healthy and probably wealthy. Mostly, I don’t know those people. Who knows? Maybe they think WE are carefree.