A Week with Many Good Things Friday Round-Up

I sold my car. This, after months of angst about whether to fix my beloved Thunderbird, the car I’ve owned for sixteen years. We said goodbye in the back parking lot of the dealership where it’s sat the last two months waiting for our decision to replace the engine or not, a question rendered moot when we were told that the undercarriage (I call it that, not sure what the pros call it) was rusting away. When we got the last remnants out of the car, I stood, hesitating, sad, and my husband, bless him for ten thousand reasons, said “We have twenty minutes until we meet with the sales guy for the new car. Do you want to sit shiva?” I didn’t, realizing that he was right that I have developed a “misplaced sense of tragedy,” and I moved on like a grown-up, not obsessed about a car.

I bought a new car. It is sleek and elegant and, inside, has a hundred tiny dials and levers. Everything is very tiny on the dashboard and very counter-intuitive but deliciously foreign and challenging. The new car doesn’t rattle, and it has heat, and drives like a spaceship through the galaxy. I am in love with this new car (Audi A4) but pretty much just when I’m inside it. It’s still hard to find in the parking lot and I’m pretty sure nobody’s going to pull up next to me at a stoplight and yell out, “That’s a fine-looking car!” Well, maybe.

We celebrated our 39th anniversary this week. We got married on a dare. Not figuratively. Actually. But it has worked out. I have no idea why. I am grateful, though. I will say that. This is the picture I posted on Facebook on our anniversary. My husband in the U.P. meeting my entire family for the first time, bringing our cigarettes, towels, and two beers to the picnic table where I was sitting with my grumpy brother. My husband is smiling.

Swirl now has a pillow. He has not eaten the pillow. Instead, he lays his head on the pillow like he is a person. Now I wonder why he hasn’t always had a pillow and whether this has been some deep deprivation in his life that is only now being addressed. He is happy. If Swirl is happy, I am happy.

Everything is about this moment. Every piece of it is about this moment. What to wear, what to eat, how to listen, what to write. It is all about this one moment. Because thinking of anything else – either the millions of moments that came before or however many come next – will paralyze me. I say this “I can’t think about that” a hundred times a day. It’s about age, all about age, handling age, accepting age, eating age with my toast, ingesting it, digesting it, living. As ephemeral and weird as that sounds.