Life… On Its Own Terms

My friend Pete stopped by last night unexpectedly. Pete is among my oldest friends — I have known her since we were both 10 — and easily among my favorite people on the planet. When we were teenagers Pete experimented with her sexuality, which meant that we got into the most ridiculous trouble together. We did things like tell our parents we were sleeping at each other’s houses so we could stay out all night and go to topless bars to see how Pete reacted to supposedly sexy definitely naked women. I would wear blouses with ribbons that tied at the neck and high-waisted jeans and would sip my coke and make sour faces, looking like the town librarian who’d gotten lost on her way home from church.

One night we left the bar and found the tires on my car slashed. All four of them. It was random — all the cars in the lot were disabled. We ended up sleeping (sort of) on some random person’s floor then getting up at dawn and calling Triple A and spending a month’s wages from the Burger King to get new tires (exactly half the cost each, as it was a no-fault incident), driving down every dirt road we could find to get the brand new tires dirty, and then keeping our fingers crossed for weeks hoping that no one would notice the brand new tires and why no one ever did (I asked years later, when it was safe) I will never know.

Anyway, Pete is in town for a quick weekend pre-Christmas visit. She has no children and delights in Mimi. Either that or she is the kind of friend who thinks it is important that you believe shedelights in your children; either way she is a dear.

So we took my sister’s dachschund on a walk in his twee little harness and fishing-line leash. Mimi was bundled in the stroller which she long ago named Bob. She didn’t sleep last night because we went to a Christmas party and ate candy until 10 PM (I didn’t drink, but Lordy, the wine looked inviting) so she was a crankypants all day long and by this afternoon was in that awful state in which she was too tired to function but her body couldn’t relax enough to sleep. So the fresh air was meant to lull her into a nap but she kept twitching awake so finally she got out and pushed the stroller.

So if you’d been driving down my my mother’s street in Florida this afternoon you would have seen our little parade: a dappled dachchund on a string, a miserable preschooler pushing a stroller down the middle of the road, a flaming redhead in a bright green coat (told you Pete is a keeper) and me, hoping that putting on my red sneakers with my sweats constituted wearing presentable clothes.

So Pete — bless her — and I entertained ourselves with all of the silly things three-year-olds say, everyone of them says such things, in one form or another, yet it sounds absolutely unique and precious to a mom. (And her dear friend.) Like mixing up pronouns (“Poppy is finished with her cereal”) and suffixes (“I want red nail polished on my toes”) and switching v’s and b‘s (“I will dig a hole with my shubble”) and calling her prayers her “God blesses” and …. oh, you know what?

I was going somewhere with this but she just woke up and climbed out of bed and is lying on the floor with her head in my lap and her lullabies are playing and her breath is whispering on my leg and her pajamas have snowmen on them and her skin is as soft as an angel’s kiss and glows and I am going to scoop her up and crawl back into bed and hug her close because she is mine and I am her mama. So goodnight!