Not worth the gamble

I know I wasn't hallucinating. 

I had been under the influence of sedation, but I had concrete proof. 

Five years ago, after my first big milestone screening test – the one that no one remembers but ends with a report complete with the most colorful but least scenic tourism photography imaginable – my lower digestive tract was declared completely unremarkable except for the appearance of a redundancy – an “extra loop” – which had put a gleam in the doctor’s eye, and which he assured me was not abnormal nor would preclude me from membership in the elusive 10-year club. 

“Congratulations.”

It felt like I had won the lottery.

But the form letter that arrived in the mail just a few weeks ago was an unexpected invitation to take the sightseeing journey early.

“Oh yes,” the lady who answered the phone said when I asked about why they were taking away half my lottery winnings and making me spin the wheel again. “I see that your recall was shortened. Probably happened during a review of your files when your doctor retired. You could postpone …”

“Or I could just get it over with, and not spend the next five years wondering what could be growing unchecked in the recesses of my ascending colon.”

“Probably not worth the gamble.”

So I made the appointment, which turned out to be two days after Christmas. 

And though I tried to keep it all very hush-hush, buying the preparations on the sly, and keeping my nervous energy in check, my secret was discovered when the boy found bottles of electrolytes hidden in a cabinet behind the lunch boxes.

“So when is the colonoscopy?”

Why would you think that?

“Because you never buy Gatorade, and Grandma never buys Gatorade, but I found it in her house last summer and she said she had just had a colonoscopy.”

“It’s two days after Christmas.”

“That's a pretty crappy gift … all puns intended.”

Yes … and no.

The prep is a time-consuming process that requires precision. And test anxiety is ever-present. 

But in my experience, and as strange as it seems, there are more uncomfortable procedures than colonoscopy. And since it's truly preventative, the test can also be a treatment, preventing cancer before it begins. 

The hardest part, for me, has always been having to coordinate a driver. 

If it were an option, I would prefer to wait out the drug-induced delirium and drive myself home.

As it is, I will have to suffer the slings and arrows of my husband telling jokes, ad nauseam, about the funny things I said or did while under the influence of sedation. 

But, thanks to pandemic protocols, he was waiting in the parking lot and not in attendance to witness me waking up drowsily in recovery. 

Even if I danced on top of the nurses’ station, he wasn't there to see it, so the question of it happening would be moot anyway. 

As it turned out, the big day was just another Wednesday in December. With a mid-morning nap, unremarkable results, and my new place in the Five-Year Club celebrated as solid.  

Season's Greetings

 Tomorrow we will sleep in.

That's the plan, anyway.

Tonight we are neither on guard nor on our best behavior. There will be at least four cheeky arguments over which holiday movie is the one WE ALWAYS (or WE NEVER) watch on Christmas Eve. (It's NOT Waking Ned Devine, no matter what my husband says.)

Santa's workshop - also known as the downstairs guest bedroom, where parental elves have toiled into the wee hours on the 24th day of December for the last two decades – has finally experienced the sluggishness of an aging demographic. 

There aren't mountains of gifts to sift through anymore. There is nothing to assemble. Any wrapping we might do is quite actually the work of but a moment. 

(There's plenty of time for wine).

I count myself fortunate that this shift to something smaller hasn't resulted in big or hard feelings. 

Not only have our children matured beyond the stage of development where they are salty that Santa’s magic has always been connected to their parents by cartoonishly visible nylon strings, but we Middle-Agers are salty that we awaken before dawn, whether we want to or not, without any impish joy.

They wake up slowly, wanting warm liquids and breakfast before commencing a round-robin style gift delivery they see as tradition.

“Did you know some people just go all in … they just find their names and start shredding?” my daughter says when I ask her to tell me her favorite part of Christmas morning. “I love that it takes us all day to get through the same amount of presents others tear through in minutes. It’s just nice.”

And she misses what we all miss: Grandpa setting up his toy trains under the tree, and Grandma nagging him to “let the kids play engineer, for goodness sake!”

For all the things we lose in this life, there are so many things still to find.

For instance, I find myself in a new camaraderie with strangers in snippets of overheard conversations. 

I want to high-five the man at the jewelry store shopping for a gift for his daughter who is finally home for the holidays. 

I want to hug the lady at the supermarket who was buying a sweet treat for a loved one in hospice. 

I can reread every letter my kids wrote to Santa from memory as I walk past the families waiting in line at the Shopping Mall’s North Pole.

I am grateful my girl is home. And that we will talk late into the night. I will rejoice that for the brief time between now and New Year, she will drive her brother anywhere he wants to go; and he won't drive her crazy. 

It seems like every Christmas we've ever shared is playing on a loop. 

I feel so lucky I want to knock on wood. 

By the time we are ready to sleep again, we will have laughed, cried, and chatted late into the night with the favorite members of our far-flung families. We will have heard old stories and told some with details that seem entirely new. 

We won't want the season to end.

Accepting a different kind of festive

The house looks like it always does. There are mountains of clean laundry piled on chairs throughout the downstairs rooms waiting to be folded. Dishes in the sink that have yet to be stacked in the dishwasher. And there are bits of debris from snacks of toast and crackers strewn about the carpet like confetti that need to be vacuumed. 

It's a different kind of festive this year. 

The only things here that are reminiscent of a traditional winter holiday season are a garland of some variety of ever-plastic greenery and a sign wishing all who enter a Merry Christmas. Both of which have managed to lurk in their respective haunts perennially. 

The cards, ordered late, have arrived but haven't been processed for mailing. A single round of holiday baking has occurred, but my resolve to plan more has ebbed. 

Ordinarily, we would have a Christmas tree by now. Procured by the time the sun had set on Black Friday. The six-foot balsam would be shedding its needles all over the carpet while the dog and cats would be drinking out of its Christmas-flavored water receptacle. In addition to vacuuming up pine scent on the daily, I would be playing a never-ending game of picking up decorations from the floor and returning them to the low-hanging branches, from whence the cat had scattered them.  

I know it's just timing. What with the daughter off at college, not scheduled to return until just about the time Santa is supposed to be finalizing his lists; And the boy being in absolute solidarity for waiting. 

 But this new compression has also seemed to wring some of the joy from my holiday heart, leaving me with a complicated math of emptying the storage compartment of all our ancient ornament just in time to put them all away within a fortnight. 

Honestly, I wondered about this day. 

The first Christmas that slopes with me into middle age. 

The first Christmas that'll light has dimmed from childhood joy. Where there are fewer gifts to buy and cards to send. Fewer place settings at the table. And yet despite this winnowing, somehow, even the littlest thing will feel like a gargantuan chore.

I mean … I don't even know if those lazy snowflake light cannons work anymore let alone where in the garage they might have landed. 

I certainly would have noticed if I'd had to 

mow around them. 

Or at least I think I would.

This all rattles around in my brain as I sit amid friends during the coffee talk portion of our mid-week run.

Talk of miles and ailments has ended and the banter of baseball starts to wane. Christmas takes its place. The cost of a live tree is only a momentary complaint before postcards from our pasts start to sail around the table. 

Who among us hedged their bets at the tree farm by leaving a glove on a contender only to have misplaced the tree and the glove? Who was the earliest riser on Christmas morning and whose mom let them open just one present? What was the strangest tradition?

By the end of the hour, I had absorbed so many sweet secrets, that it felt as if I had been visited by the ghosts of my own Christmas’ - past, present, and future. 

And I felt more relaxed. I don't have to be ready, I just have to remember.

A lock on time

Who is that woman? 

Her hair, frizzy and dry, was a tri-blend of color that needed … at the very least … a bit of attention. 

She looked vaguely familiar but I avoided making eye contact. It’s a small place. It would be awkward, if not painful, to stare directly into the mirror. 

If this had been a campground, I would have been the tent pole; with a full circle of fabric cascading around my neck, covering the place I inhabit almost entirely. I held my phone between my two hands, prayer style. I could still feel its warmth even if I couldn’t read the screen. Like the fire.

It might be nice to be small under the stars. Quiet-like. 

The young woman who had welcomed me motioned to a seat and then disappeared into a back room to collect materials. The place was abuzz with activity. Soft music played while scissor blades whisked against each other. Conversation floated above us in gentle waves. 

Before long, she selected strands of my hair, parted and stretched them, then painted and folded each piece between sheets of colorful foil. Layering upward, the woman peering back at me from the mirror looked like she was wearing the roof of a pagoda as a hat.

She is quick efficient and naturally personable. She takes her work so seriously that she uses her spare time to prepare.

“Oh, I didn't have much of an interest in the Barbie movie, myself, but I knew it would be something my clients might want to talk about, so I thought it would be good to see it.”

The women in chairs all around me talked about their families. Their pets. The best things to watch on Netflix. They upsold travels and downplayed travails. Keeping the conversation steady and effortless. 

With cordiality considered there seemed to be no unsafe subjects.

It occurred to me as I sat there in my tinfoil hat, waiting for science and artistry to transform the cantankerous keratinous filaments I had too long ignored, that the so-called journey had led me here kicking and screaming. 

Far far too long, this ritual of self had felt like just another chore. And a chore that could also be fraught with personal failure under the gaze of a professional. 

And although I stopped coloring (and trimming) my own hair long ago, I have not managed to keep these tresses any better managed. Nor have I ceased worrying that the state of its split ends and tangles shouldn't be justification for semi-public shaming, But I have accepted my age and the changes it has visited upon my hair and I have committed to increasing the number of visits I make to the professionals per annum. At least two times as we go around the sun. 

“How has it taken me so long to prioritize,” I wonder each time I leave the salon and sit in my car. My hair feels lighter. Younger. Full of possibilities. And if I squint I can almost recognize the girl in my rearview mirror.

Adulting in Z formation

“When you come can you bring one of the air mattresses?” 

An undulating college commute for the holidays - where we spend a few non-continuous weekends together as a family here and there before a month-long respite takes hold -  was underway and negotiations were getting heated. 

“I could” … I retorted cheekily. “But why do you want it?”

“We need something to sit on … and something for people to sleep on if they stay over,” she replied, reasonably enough. The months-long season of multi-festivity was coming in fits and starts, but the one thing she has this year that she didn't have last term was a place to keep her stuff during the interim.

Though she is living in a dorm, I would tell anyone who asks that she and her roommates live in a pretty “epic” apartment. 

Wording it that way makes me feel as if my own salad days weren’t so long ago.

Now, I never lived in a fifth-floor corner city apartment with secure access and hardwood floors. I didn’t have a balcony-like window that looked out lovingly over my campus.

But I did have a windowless room in a basement that was all my own, even if it was more than seventeen blocks away.

And I NEVER would have asked my mother to donate the old folding cot in the basement to my cause to find accommodation and party furnishings.  

I would have resorted to doing what all the countless Xers of my Generation did - take a walking tour of the better neighborhoods on trash day. 

That is, after all, how I procured one AMAZING mid-century modern sectional couch with a Hollywood Regency flair that lasted more than a dozen years – through one party after another, one apartment after another – all the way into the new century. 

And I would still have it now if I hadn’t felt the call of nostalgia and released the blonde, jacquard beauty to a new generation of college students one fateful trash day. 

But that is not how Gen Z rolls. Afterall, my daughter points out, there are epidemics of bed bugs and other forever-pests to think about now.

“One of the air mattresses will be fine,” she says with a heavy sigh, as if wading through my nostalgia were the physical equivalent of swimming the English Channel. 

“Or … it would have been fine if the dog didn’t puncture the thing last time we had guests,” I said, narrating the sudden memory I had miraculously withdrawn from my post-pandemic memory bank and accepted as true without the arduous task of investigating the evidence so as to avoid doing a thorough search of all 11 tote bags in bottom of the front hall closet where the thing is probably jammed.

“How about I get you a bean bag lounger instead … Did you know companies make human size dog beds now? They are so versatile. They can be a lounger, or a couch, or a bed.”

“I know! We live in WILD times.”

“The only thing wilder would be if a drone had delivered the 40-pound, vacuum-packed box to your balcony window within the five- to seven-day shipping window. … As it is, we’re going to need your brother’s help to schlep it up the stoop and into the elevator.”

“I’m sure dragging it out to the sidewalk on move-out day will be much easier.”