It's Always Darkest Before the Fridge Door Opens: Enjoying the Fruits of Middle Age (15 page)

3. Even full shelves sometimes mold.

Read enough road signs and you can’t miss the message that you don’t have enough. ‘‘You don’t drive a green Jaguar like this one. You poor soul. How have you lived this long without it? You don’t eat glazed ham in a perfect dining room with perfect lighting and the perfect family who laugh at all your jokes while the yellow Lab retriever lies at your feet flea-less and grinning. You call that a life?’’

If the rat race is getting you down, here’s an exercise you may want to try: Leave your credit cards at home and stroll through a mall laughing at all the things you do not need. We each have done this and enjoyed ourselves immensely. Here are some of the things we’ve found:

A water fountain for your cat

A cell phone that works underwater (thank God for that!)

Alarm clocks
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that project the time on your ceiling in the middle of the night (when you should be sleeping) but can’t be read during the daylight (when you should be getting up)

Gas-powered blenders for the backyard

Pants that talk (they say ‘‘Zip me!’’)

We don’t drive green Jaguars
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or have perfect families (and the ham on our tables is more burnt than glazed), but we do have some things you can’t buy at Wal-Mart. We have a thousand memories we hope to recall in the old-folks’ home. We have close, faithful friends who gather round when times get tough.

We have enough money to give some of it away. And when we notice that the neighbor’s grass is greener, we remind ourselves that their water bill is probably higher. And, oh yes, they have to cut it more often, too.

I try to take one day at a time,
but sometimes several days attack me at once.
Jenifer Yane

I have learned from experience that
the greater part of our happiness or misery depends
on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.
Martha Washington

¹
This beauty should be called The Insomniac’s Dream

²
Though Martha has part of one on her bumper from a parking lot incident.

Not So Smooth Moves

It’s a funny thing being a writer. During those terrifying moments in life when you know you are going to die, whether at the hands of a stubborn parachute, a leaky canoe, or your mother-in-law’s wild driving, all you can think of is: I sure hope I live so I can write about this! But there are also those horrifying occasions when you have done something so incredibly dumb that you know you will never have the courage to confess it to your faithful and long-suffering readers.

Knowing, however, that our readers are above average and can keep a secret, we have decided to confess several of the dumbest things we have managed to accomplish over the years.

First off, we want you to know that we are not alone. Others have accomplished similar dim-witted deeds. We’d feel better if we exposed them first.

A Wisconsin man makes us feel much better. Before leaving on vacation, he decided he should hide his handguns and ammunition, just in case thieves broke in and stole them. But where do you hide such things? In the oven, of course. Who would ever look in an oven for artillery? Unfortunately he forgot to tell his wife where he’d placed them, and when they got home from vacation, well, you can guess the rest. Turning on the oven to cook dinner, she got the surprise of her life.
USA Today
reported that when the bullets began exploding, the couple took cover behind their refrigerator. Finally the intrepid husband was able to use an extinguisher to put out the fire (and firearms). Luckily no one got hurt, but I guess that’s one way to put a hole in your Bundt cake!

In Great Britain, a truck driver by the name of Klaus Buergermeister ran into a Smart car without knowing he had. Klaus proceeded to drive for two miles with the tiny vehicle wedged to the front of his semi, before being flagged down by police. (I know Alabama truck drivers have hit some pretty good-sized mosquitoes, but nothing like this.) Andreas Bolga, the terrified driver of the so-called Smart car, was finally able to escape before anything worse happened. Klaus, age fifty-three, told
The Express
newspaper that he had felt only a slight bump and added: ‘‘I could not believe it when I got out and saw there was a car stuck on the front of my truck.’’

At the pinnacle of my (Phil’s) hockey career, as all the teenage girls in our little town watched, I scored the overtime goal of the championship game! Quite a feat. Except that I scored it into my own net. I was publicly humiliated, to say the least. In fact, I don’t remember much about the next eight or ten years of my life. But I do remember what happened when I got home after the game. My father sat with me, and he grinned. Then he snickered. Then he laughed with me. And best of all he told me he loved me in spite of my very public mistake.

I (Martha) have shared this story before, but it bears repeating. Once while in one of those super shoe stores, I decided to try on a pair of boots. I looked around for a place to sit down, but all the stools were taken. Behind me, however, was a row of large boxes that obviously dozens of shoes were shipped in. I figured I would just turn around and take a seat on one of those.

My plan would have worked had the boxes had anything in them, but because they were
empty,
when I sat down, I sank all the way to the floor. My legs were now sticking up out of the box like a couple of chopsticks in a Chinese takeout meal. It was a tight fit and I couldn’t budge. So I had to rock the box side to side to get it to fall over so I could crawl out! Since this store was at the mall, there’s no telling how many people were watching from the window.
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The embarrassing moments of life are good reminders that it’s good to be humbled. Humility. It’s the one thing few of us ask God for, but it’s so necessary in life. Humility keeps us from judging others too harshly. It also reminds us that we have a Father who smiles and sometimes even laughs with us in the midst of our dumbest mistakes. Why? Because he has an eternal perspective, and because he knows we’re not perfect. And if we’re wise, we’ll learn from those mistakes.

We’re sure that Wisconsin couple has learned and by now must have found a regular cooking timer instead of their Smith & Wessons. And we’re sure that truck driver probably checks his bumper for small cars every time he stops now.

And now when Martha tries on shoes, she makes sure the seat where she sits isn’t a trapdoor. As for Phil’s new hockey career? Well, whenever he plays now, the sign his team has hung above the opposing net that says ‘‘THIS ONE!’’ has sure helped a lot!

Finish each day and be done with it.
You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

¹
If you were there and had been wondering all these years who the chopstick lady was, now you know.

High Hopes

Blessed is he who expects nothing
for he shall never be disappointed.
Alexander Pope

We’re sure this has happened to you. You’re craving that last piece of chocolate cream pie. You saw it in the refrigerator just this morning and have been putting off eating it until now. After all, you couldn’t very well have it for breakfast. Chocolate cream pie isn’t a breakfast food, at least not in the same way that pizza is. You didn’t even have it for lunch, because that’s the meal you’ve been trying to cut back on and just have a health drink. But now it’s dinnertime. You had only a salad, passing up the mashed potatoes and dinner rolls just so you could indulge in this one pleasure—the last piece of chocolate cream pie! You have been surprisingly disciplined, passing when the pie first made its go-around. You’ve been good. But now there’s only one piece left and you’ve staked your claim on it. You didn’t shove a flag into the whipped cream or anything like that to claim it. But you have made it known to the entire family that the last piece of pie is yours.

You’ve excused yourself from the table and walked to the refrigerator, fork in hand. You’re not even going to dirty another plate. You’ll just eat it right out of the pie tin. You open the fridge door and what do you see? Cheese, butter, eggs, six jars of jelly, some leftover pot roast, but no pie! What happened to your pie?! You turn to ask your beloved family, the family you work forty-eight hours a day for. The spouse you pledged your love to. The children you birthed. Even your mother-in-law. But no one is ’fessing up. At least not at first. Then your three-year-old confesses. You’re impressed with her honesty, but that was
your
piece of pie. She was the only one you hadn’t been emphatic with. You didn’t think you needed to be because she can’t even open the refrigerator, right? Apparently she can, and apparently she and the dog enjoyed your piece of chocolate cream pie together. You know this because of the whipped cream you find in the dog’s ear.

Disappointment. Life is full of it. Being denied your piece of pie is sad, but there are far sadder stories that have to do with disappointment.

A second grader watches as everyone else in the class gets Valentine’s cards, but his bag remains empty.

A bride gets left at the altar.

An old man gets dressed up for his birthday and waits all day for someone to show up to celebrate it with him, but no one comes.

Disappointment can sure rob us of our joy, can’t it? What hurts so much about disappointment is the negative self-talk we go through after it:

‘‘Why’d I get my hopes up, anyway? I should know by now that nothing goes right for me.’’

‘‘Of course no one gave me a Valentine. Who’d give me one?’’

‘‘I should have known I’d get passed over for that promotion. What was I thinking to even apply for it?’’

What makes disappointment so bad is the gnawing notion inside of us that says we wouldn’t have had so far to fall if we hadn’t built up our expectations so high in the first place. If we hadn’t even tried out for
American Idol,
we wouldn’t have known what it feels like to be rejected. If we hadn’t told everyone we know about that new house we were going to buy, we wouldn’t be so embarrassed now that the loan didn’t go through. If we hadn’t told them we loved them, it wouldn’t hurt so much to hear them say they don’t love us back.

Disappointment.

But even disappointment can be a good thing. I (Martha) remember one of the toughest afternoons of my life happening when one of the ‘‘cool kids’’ at my junior high school invited me to a party. She gave me her phone number and told me to call and find out where it was going to be. But later that night when I went to call, I couldn’t find that phone number anywhere. I remember looking all over the house and crying, feeling like my big chance was passing me by.

My mother was sympathetic, but looking back I wonder if she also hadn’t protectively ‘‘misplaced’’ the number herself. This was back in the sixties, and a party with a bunch of teenagers that she didn’t know probably wasn’t her idea of a safe environment. My mother is gone now, so I’ll probably never know what really happened to that phone number. I do know, however, that I got over my disappointment and went on with my life. I also found out the next day that the party had turned into something I wouldn’t have wanted to be at anyway.

There’s a wonderful old poem written by Edith Lillian Young. Think through the words carefully:

Disappointment—His Appointment

Change one letter, then I see

That the thwarting of my purpose

Is God’s better choice for me.

His appointment must be blessing,

Tho’ it may come in disguise,

For the end from the beginning

Open to His wisdom lies.
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Disappointment . . . sometimes it’s for our own good. But now, being cheated out of the last piece of a chocolate pie? Well, that’s just too sad for words!

Disappointment is the nurse of wisdom.
Boyle Roche

¹
Public domain.