My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman (14 page)

It’s true that I believe in UnResolutions, that is, resolving to keep doing things you like. But I also try to make the old-fashioned, conventional New Year’s resolutions.

As usual, I’m easy on myself.

I know I’m not going to keep all my resolutions, and that’s okay with me.

I always resolve to do things I know I won’t do, so why should New Year’s be any different? Last week, I resolved to get my truck inspected and my roots done. I didn’t do either. If you inspected my roots, I’d get a ticket.

Don’t mistake me, it’s not as if I didn’t intend to do the things I’d resolved to do. It just didn’t work out. And I don’t feel guilty about it, because there are so many other things to feel guilty about.

Ask Mother Mary.

Maybe the problem is with the word
resolution.
It has a legal vibe that’s no fun at all. A
resolution
is for a corporation or a national constitution.
Resolved
is a good start to a preamble about the right to free speech, but it’s overkill for me losing five pounds.

Resolution
is just too intense for what we’re talking about. If you look it up in the thesaurus, its synonyms are
dauntlessness, staunchness,
and
tenacity.

Got a headache yet?

I do.

I suggest we replace the word
resolution
with
wish,
and from now on, we can all make
wishes
for New Year’s. It’s dull to make a resolution, but it’s fun to make a wish. It makes you think of birthday cake.

Everybody loves birthday cake.

And if you look up
wish
in the thesaurus, its synonyms are
desire, hankering,
and
itch.

Isn’t that better?

Wish
doesn’t take itself as seriously as
resolution,
and neither should we. We’re just people, and often we fall short. To err is human, right? For
Homo sapiens,
failure is a job requirement.

If we stop
resolving
and start
wishing,
we would never fail, because nobody ever expects a wish to come true. For example, I wish I could marry George Clooney. I wish I could lose five pounds. I wish I had naturally blond hair, so I didn’t have to worry about my roots in the first place.

We know that none of my
wishes
is going to come true. But I really do
wish
for them. And I’d like to keep
wishing
for them.
Wishing
fulfills a human need that goes beyond common sense. After all, we buy Powerball tickets and hold presidential elections.

Somebody wins, but it’s never us.

I bet some of you are reading this and shaking your head. You agree that
resolution
is too hard-core, but you think
wish
is for slackers. You seek a compromise between
resolution
and
wish
. You wonder, isn’t there a middle ground?

Don’t despair. I have another word.

Aim.

How does
aim
suit you? You could make a list of New Year’s
aims.
I view
aim
as
resolution
with a fallback. With
aim,
you get to announce your
resolution
, but it automatically includes a Plan B. Like an exit strategy, built-in.

How would
aim
work?

Let’s say you aim to lose ten pounds this coming year. That’s like saying you resolve to lose ten, but you’d settle for losing two. In other words, if you lose ten, great. If you lose five, also great. But if you lose only one, then you have to feel guilty and worthless for the holidays next year.

Aim
is like a pre-nup. You want to keep your
aim.
You will try to keep your
aim.
In fact, you
aim
to keep your
aim.
But you’re realistic enough to know that you might not be able to keep your
aim.
Because you can get so sick of your
aim
, it’s not even funny. And if your
aim
tells that duck story one more time, you might commit murder.

But I’m off track. Bottom line, if you don’t keep your
aim,
you keep the house, the Schwab account, and the car.

Aim
is growing on me if you can’t tell.
Aim
has the connotation of physically aiming at something, like a target, but there’s wiggle room, in case your
aim
was off. As if you just missed the mark. Close, but no cigars. The failure wasn’t your fault, exactly. The sun was in your eyes.

You with me?

Come along. I’m converting to
aim. Aim
works better for me.

Observe.

Here is my New Year’s aim: I aim to marry George Clooney, but I would settle for sleeping with him.

Am I aiming too high?

Or would that be a miracle?

The relationship between a grandparent and grandchild is an easy one to take for granted. I was lucky enough to have my grandmother as my babysitter when my mom was working; she was like a second mother to me, so we’ve always been close. But time has passed, she moved to South Beach to live with my uncle, and I’ve grown and moved out of my mom’s house, so you know how it goes. Things change.

Mainly, my grandmother got too cool for me.

Not that she loves me any less, I’m not sure my grandmother could love me any more. But the last time she stayed with us, I really wanted to spend quality time with her. I didn’t merely want to be in the same room with her, I wanted to do things together, share things. But I had to face it.

She’s just not that into me.

For example, I got up early every morning with my mom, so all three of us could have breakfast together. But we quickly discovered that my grandmother sleeps in until noon or later.

She’s a hard-partying granny.

When she did shuffle downstairs, her short white hair disheveled, I offered to make eggs. But all she wanted for breakfast was an Apple Fritter from Dunkin’ Donuts, and would I mind running out to pick one up for her?

So much for brunch.

But, hey, when you’re eighty-six and you beat throat cancer, you’re allowed to enjoy whatever fatty, sugary confection you want. I figured I couldn’t expect her to change her routine, so I should try to show an interest in her hobbies.

Namely, “the puzzles.”

My grandmother is a master of word puzzles: crosswords, cryptograms, acrostics, seek-and-finds, etc. She has whole books of them. But crosswords are her very favorite, her puzzle soul-mate. Every morning, my mom would lay out the daily crossword from two different newspapers for her, and my grandmother did them first thing. They’re practically part of her diet.

I was an English major in college, I’m a better than average Scrabble player, and my mind is young and sharp, so I thought maybe I could help her do one.

Turns out, I suck.

In retrospect, I was deluded to think I could possibly help the Grand Master with her puzzles. She’s been honing her skill for more than a half century. She could probably teach Will Shortz a thing or two.

But I was worse than unhelpful. I was a handicap.

First, I answered the clues out of order, which made my grandmother insane. I had the gall to skip around, when the only proper way to go about a crossword puzzle is block by block.

Then, when she directed me to fill in an answer, I did so with a black pen. Outrage. Who raised me? Red is the only acceptable color ink. Black matches the lines and numbers, and therefore is not clear.

Red has contrast, not to mention style.

I let her do her puzzles in peace.

So I took a different tack. My grandmother was a hot number when she was younger, and one beauty habit she’s kept over the years is filing her nails. Her fingernails are always shaped and smoothed to perfection. She carries an emery board with her at all times.

She refused to carry that Life Alert we got her, but God help her if she can’t find her nail file.

Maybe it’s genetic, because nails are sort of my secret talent. I can do a perfect, freehand French manicure, even on my right hand. Impressive, right? So I thought, perfect—I’ll paint my grandmother’s nails for her!

Not interested.

Nail polish chips in a day, not to mention contains dangerous chemicals, she says.

This from a woman who held a cigarette between her fingers for sixty-five years.

So a “no” to the nails.

Finally, I make her an offer she can’t refuse.

“Will you teach me how to make your famous meatballs and sauce?”

This got her excited. She carefully dictated the shopping list, full of secret ingredients like onion powder, garlic powder, dried basil, and diced, pureed, and paste forms of canned tomato.

Freshness is against tradition.

When I returned from the store, I cleaned off the kitchen table and laid everything out for her approval. Everything passed inspection except one thing:

Me.

“You’re wearing nail polish,” she said.

“So?”

“You can’t make the meatballs with nail polish on. It will poison them.”

I knew better than to resist. “I’ll take it off.”

“With remover?” Her brown eyes got even larger behind her giant glasses. “Even worse. You can watch.”

But I begged, I pleaded with her to let me make them, and no grandparent can resist a wailing grandchild, even if she’s twenty-four.

So we set to work. I made plenty of rookie mistakes—making some too big, too small, too wet, or too dry—but even my grandmother’s nitpicking was loving. “No, Kitten, like
this,
” she would say.

If only this picture were scratch and sniff.

And when my over-enthusiasm for rolling sent a meatball flying through the air and onto the floor, she didn’t scold me. She laughed.

She may pretend I’m a nuisance, but I am her favorite nuisance.

When we were finished, we had made the most delicious meatballs in existence. Over fifty of them, which should give you an idea of my family’s portion control.

That night, the three of us had a spaghetti-and-meatballs feast. As I was clearing the table, I asked my grandmother if she could write out the recipe so I could make them on my own.

“My hands feel dirty. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

But her hands looked clean to me.

When I reminded her the next day, she said, “My eyes are tired. Later, Cookie.”

We love each other like crazy, emphasis on “crazy.”

But she did two puzzles after that.

What gives? At first I didn’t understand why my grandmother was reluctant to write down the recipe. Then it occurred to me that maybe she didn’t want me to make the meatballs without her. Not that she wanted to be the lone expert, but that she wanted to feel needed. She didn’t gather from my interest in breakfast, puzzles, and manicures how much she already was.

When we were saying goodbye at the airport, my grandmother pointed a finger at me and said, “Don’t think I forgot. I’ll write the recipe when I get home and send it to you.”

I gave her a hug. “We’ll make them next time you come up.”