Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (28 page)

I have detected another difference between men and women, in addition to the one you’re thinking of.

Before I begin, the credit for this observation goes to best friend Franca. She told it to me the other day, and I agreed. That’s the great thing about having a best friend. We agree on everything. In fact, I can’t recall the last time we disagreed about anything, and Franca would be my first phone call after I murdered someone. She wouldn’t even ask why I did it. She would know I had an excellent reason. She’d just drive over with a shovel and a Hefty bag, no question.

A best friend is just another name for accessory after the fact.

I would do it for her, too, though Franca’s too nice to kill anyone. She’s the good twin to my evil.

So here’s what happened.

Franca lives in the suburbs and she loves this time of year, when dandelions appear on her front lawn. We agree about loving dandelions. We’re not dumb, we know that they’re weeds, but that’s a technicality, isn’t it? They’re beautiful, and where do you draw the line between weeds and wildflowers? And if it’s a pretty weed, grows naturally, and costs nothing, why don’t we welcome it?

Don’t start in with the fact that dandelions kill grass. There’s
room on the planet for both dandelions and grass. In fact, I think it’s high time that grass learned to share.

But it turns out that some of the people in Franca’s neighborhood don’t like dandelions, and they’re men. One of them knocked on her door to suggest that his lawn guy could give her an estimate on getting rid of her dandelions, and another left a bag of Weed N Feed at her door. She thinks they were trying to do something nice, but I’m not sure. If someone left a six-pack of Slim-Fast on my doorstep, I wouldn’t see the upside.

The dandelion issue reminded me of scenes from my second marriage, which is like watching a horror movie without the Raisinets. Thing Two liked the lawn to be dandelion-free, so we paid somebody to strew pretty balls of poison all over the grass, like nightmare Skittles. They made the yard reek of high-school swimming pool and left greasy spots on the front walk. Plus I worried that the dogs would eat them and grow a fifth leg.

Sadly, the dandelions went away, and happily, so did Thing Two.

Now my dandelions grow freely, bright splotches of yellow dotting the green lawn. They make me happy every time I see them. I love them so much I might paint my shutters that color, which Benjamin Moore calls Mellow Yellow (2020-50).

Franca likes dandelions even after they’ve changed to balls of wispy seeds. She reminded me that when our kids were little, we used to pull the dandelions, make a wish, and blow the seeds into the wind. She said that her lawn is full of “fuzzy heads of wishes” and when she looks at it, she sees the “magic of our babies’ childhoods.”

I told you she was the good twin.

And really, who hasn’t wished on a dandelion? Wouldn’t the
world be a better place if there were less Weed N Feed and more wishes?

I wonder if this difference over dandelions applies to lawns in general. Thing Two was fetishistic about the lawn, and assistant Laura tells the story of the day her sons were playing wiffleball and her husband felt bugged that home plate was messing up the grass. Laura told him, “We’re not raising grass, we’re raising boys.”

He agreed, and he likes dandelions, too.

So I can’t decide if this is a boy/girl thing or not. I’m curious about what you think.

And I wonder what this means for buttercups.

Daughter Francesca is graduating from college, and I spent the last hour trying to figure out her school’s incredibly complicated commencement schedule. According to the website, there are three separate commencement exercises, and the main one will be attended by “approximately 32,000 people.” The gates open at 6:45
A.M
., and not everyone will get a seat, so the website advises me to get there in advance.

Ya think?

And how exactly do you play musical chairs with a small city?

And how early should I get there—1986?

Nor does the website advise how to wake up my 83-year-old mother at that hour, much less provide her with the requisite coffee and apple fritter from Dunkin’ Donuts. Our fancy hotel doesn’t serve breakfast until 6:00
A.M
. and it offers items like steel-cut oatmeal imported from Ireland and omelets with organic eggs. The website doesn’t seem to understand that if you try to sell my mother a $30 breakfast, she will throw it at you.

The website also states that the commencement exercises will be held outside, but neither does it state how to get my mother to walk on grass, which she regards as exercise and therefore against her religion. Nor can the website conceive of
how slowly Mother Mary walks. The hotel is only three blocks away, but she will have to leave two days prior to make it by dawn.

The solution would be for her to skip the first graduation ceremony and attend only the second ceremony, which will be smaller, attended by only ten thousand people. But the website gives no clue as to how to find her in a crowd that size, as she is only four foot eleven inches tall and the oldest member of the Lollipop Guild.

She’d stand out if she wore her lab coat, but then she could end up at the medical school graduation.

In theory, brother Frank could escort her to the second ceremony, but that would require him to find me in a warren of colonial brick dorms, all of which look alike and are badly signed, the better to keep out the unwashed. Like the Scot-tolines, until Francesca got in.

The other possibility is that my mother goes to the third graduation ceremony, to which alumni and bigwigs are invited because that’s where the celebrity intellectual is speaking. The only problem is, the third ceremony has nothing to do with my daughter, and to us, she’s the celebrity intellectual.

The fourth option is that my mother waits in the hotel and watches all three ceremonies on the local cable TV, but for that she could have stayed in Miami and not missed her personal marathon of
Law & Order
.

So I’m confused.

I need an advanced degree to figure out how to deal with college graduation. Or maybe a chart with color-coded highlighting or a map with flag pins. But maybe all this confusion is good, because it distracts me from the larger topic—that my daughter is graduating from college.

Of course it’s an enormously happy occasion, and it goes
without saying that I’m proud of her. It doesn’t go without saying
to
her. I tell her how proud I am at least three times a day and I think every kid needs to hear it, even big girls in caps and gowns. But what I mean is that while I’m so happy with the fact that she’s graduating, we haven’t had a chance yet to talk about where she’s going to live until she finds a job. You know my answer:

Home.

Or better yet, in a convent.

Now that college is over, it seems only right that she should move home and get back into her diapers.

I mean, that was the deal, right?

I let my kid go to college, now she should come home. It’s only fair, even though I have enjoyed being an empty nester, and it seems like only yesterday I wrote about missing her. Well, I do, and now I want her back. When I told this to a friend of mine, she told me a joke:

What’s the difference between an Italian mother and a Rottweiler?

The Rottweiler eventually lets go.

So college graduation is good news and bad news. The good news is that my kid is healthy, happy, and now, well-educated. And the bad news is that her life is beginning, without me in earnest, so that boo-hoo-my-kid-is-going-to-college was only a step in the separation that began when they cut the umbilical cord.

That was my first mistake. I should have stopped them, right there. In my view, it was medical malpractice.

And after the initial snip, the separation proceeded incrementally to first step, then first date, first car, and first degree. She’s beginning her life as an adult, on her own.

I guess they call it commencement for a reason.

And so we will attend, our raggedy and irregular little family, there to bear witness at this awesome event. I can picture it now. The golden girl we all raised, beautiful in cap and billowing gown. We will bring roses too cumbersome to hold. We will shift on hard wooden chairs. Mother Mary won’t be able to hear or see anything, yet she will weep. We all will. It will be an estrogen fest. Thank God that brother Frank is gay, so he can join in.

And back at the hotel, Ruby The Corgi will be ordering the imported oatmeal.

Nothing but the best, on this very, very special day.

Congratulations, Francesca.

We’re proud of you.