cute puppy passenger

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There’s nothing like a puppy face to make the world a better place, especially on days you really need one. For example…

Have you ever had someone unexpectedly completely ruin your day?

The sun is shining, you’re driving somewhere fun, life is good. Oh, here’s a merge up ahead… You turn on your signal to let someone know you’d appreciate a place to squeeze into the highway queue–

When some arrogant dick who looks like he eats kittens for breakfast stares at you through his window as he takes your signal as an invitation to not only cut you off, but slow down and try to drive you into the barrier ahead, staring at you through his passenger window the whole time.

The road troll. A person who goes around attempting legal hit and runs for his own amusement. Big city people know this vermin well, but we try not to think about them, because they suck.

I disappointed this one by not dying, but he won in the end: an hour later I was still upset about it. The idea of such a person, roaming the streets being inhuman to people, for fun. The sunshine had lost it’s shine, the springlike air seemed somehow grubby, my fellow humans felt less trustworthy, and I felt like I was having a Bad Day barely before the day started.

Thanks to adrenaline and broken expectations about common morality, this sort of feeling is truly hard to break out of, especially for the more sensitive of us. Other, tougher souls probably shrug it off like Portland rainwater, but I wonder if even they can feel it inside, nibbling away at their happiness.

Oddly, once you get into this funk, the day seems to follow your revised expectations, becoming a self-fulfilled prophecy. A Bad Day will be had, whether more bad stuff happens or not, while the regular stuff just takes on a bad feeling. We change our world by how we observe it, seeing the shadows instead of the light. There is the potential for good and bad in everything, and we can bring it out simply by focusing on it.

Thanks to our caveman evolution, we’re wired to see the bad things as far more important, simply to avoid getting eaten. Five yummy venison meals are great, but it only takes one hungry saber-tooth tiger to ruin that whole week of happiness. Why do you think it takes a dozen very expensive roses to say “I’m sorry”?

We don’t need this instinct as much now, but it’s wired in, so it often takes three to five good events to offset one bad one.

So, there I was coming out of a restaurant over an hour later, still in a funk. As I approached my car, an SUV was pulling into the spot next to mine, driven by an older lady. She noticed my approach and graciously held up pulling all the way in to give me access to my car. She even smiled and said hello. I smiled back and said Hi, but I was still too funked up to put much feeling into it (bad people are contagious).

But as I walked past, I looked over and saw a little black Terrier sitting in the passenger seat beside her, looking back at me with that little puppy face…

Suddenly the day kind of hiccuped: sunlight spattered everything with a twang, a breeze tousled my hair in playful slow motion, the smiling lady became a neighbor, the Earth’s bearings got a new squirt of grease. The universe very, very quietly said “boop”.

It was a while later I recalled being cut off by the dickhead, and when I did, I thought to myself “karma, do your stuff” and forgot all about him.

But I can still remember that puppy face many hours later. It was the expression of a creature who embodies innocence, whose only concern in the world is whether it was giving as much love as it could at this moment. Because a puppy can only live Right Now. That’s all that matters: Love, Right Now.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t get what I mean (I only do enough) or even agree with it. All I can say is, when you’re feeling doubt, anger, sadness, or a loss of faith … like many do these days: all you need is a puppy face.

Kittens and bunnies also work in a pinch.

If you’re curious, visit one at a shelter near you. Take one home if you see what I mean. Don’t let all that love go to waste.

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(A Six-Word Memoir for one of their monthly contests entitled “Really Good / Really Bad Love Stories”.)

Perhaps the Principal was simply anal: every teacher at my high school arranged their students alphabetically . . . as if to break my heart.

For four years I sat behind the same girl, our last names spelled close enough to ward off any interesting interlopers. I got to know her voice, her laughter, her odd quirks, her moods, her smile that got prettier every year. She enjoyed my attentions, laughed at my guarded hints, even teased me about it; but despite how well we got along, her head would only turn for the boys in class. Our last names kept us in close proximity class after class, despite my need to move on to allay the pressure in my chest. Year after year I watched boys come and go, hurting her the way I never would, watching her not learn from their mistakes. By graduation, even my mother knew her name, shocked when I pointed her out. I always seemed too shy to aim so high.

That day the pain subsided and life went on as if nothing had ever happened. Then, many years later, we fell across each other online. She’d married badly and was unhappily stuck. She was just as pretty as I remembered her and I said so. She teased me like old times, and for a moment I wondered if she might have had second thoughts about us…

Broken hearts can haunt us forever.

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Every year a poem appears to hint of my love for winter
… or lack thereof.

This year’s goes something like this…

Pilot flame lit, shivering
I loathe the click and hiss
of the metal box in the corner
for it calls farewell to summer

Fall days grow dimmer, shorter
skirts lengthen to pants
coats cover soft shoulders
ankles disappear into boots

Smiles and skin flee inward
huddle indoors for the winter
Only smokers left outside,
cussing, indifferent to the chill

Summer sprouted love, grew
then withered in autumn shadow
died in winter ice, leaving
no seed to greet the spring

The season of intimacy wanes
while others carefully cultivate
their love, I too wander indoors
to escape the chill, alone

Except for my kittens, who purr
happy for the warmth of my lap
and their love of that metal box that
clicks and hisses in the corner

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Despite how much hope and love you have for the people in your life, sometimes you just need a little closure, even from family.

Silence

Your time is up
A window of opportunity
Closes
Your silence begets

Silence
Five years I gave you
To decide
Am I human … or not

Patiently I watched you all
Dig your holes of hypocrisy
So deep
You can’t climb out

Traded sharp words
Knives in my back
Now you fear bleeding to death
To remove them

In family love is unconditional
Until you have to explain
Me to your friends
Sharing blood is not done in

Silence
Five years waiting for you
To make an effort to
Understand

Life continues on
One day you’ll wake to find
You wasted it being
Uncomfortable

With love to my mom, who has been quietly wonderful, but all too far away. Hugs!! ^.^

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As a beginning–or rebeginning (yes, I’m allowed to make up words, tyvm)–of my hapless blog addiction, I thought I’d share an apropos piece from my Women, Writing & Memoir class. It goes something like this . . .

Why are beginnings so hard?

Middles, that comfy popcorn-spilling-as-we-ignore-yet-another-movie-entwined-on-the-couch, seem so simple and inevitable. That so-perfect-we-can-just-let-it-happen practice at foreverness. Why don’t they give up on beginnings and just start relationships in the middle? I’m really good at middles, if I can only get past the beginnings.

Usually Zen and relaxed in the presence of other women, all it takes is an unexpected smile or a mysterious look from the right eyes and suddenly I find myself walking into the last interview of my dream job missing a shoe.

girl car breakdownIn the moments that follow, something goes clank under the hood: my speech centers misfire and stall, or wind up to a fever pitch with no direction to go. My eyes, once trusted to navigate the depths of a friend’s angst-ridden soul and plot a course to comfort, now seem out-of-balance gyros verging on gimbal-lock. And although I can’t see it from where I’m standing, I sense my body language has switched to an ancient form of semaphore, signaling to this lovely woman:

“The runway is open. The tower is aflame! Make your takeoff roll now!!”

Soon her enchanting smile dims to uncertainty, conversation veers from the fast lane to the pedestrian crosswalk, and then so does she. If only she could have seen who I really was.

If only we carried resumes, crisp off-white pages confirming the years of romantic service and exemplary skills in the face of love, detailed accounts of rendered kisses, massaged shoulders and feet, seemingly endless cuddles, misplaced Saturday mornings, laundry and dishes and meals joyfully created, giggling to tears and overlooked mistakes, races to say I’m sorry first, sunset walks holding hands, high fidelity and low maintenance and promises kept regardless, tallies of unexpected embraces, and turning to listen when she talks.

My resume is missing. Once more I’m ON …and no words can say what I’m wanting to say that won’t sound cheesy or crude, or perhaps even creepy. The First Impression monster has crept in, already checking off the destruction on a clipboard, shaking its head over the lost opportunity, another moment of life left unlived. Crime scene tape is unfurled as two souls part, wondering why life had no rewind button.

It’s not always this way. Strangers traipse into my life every day. But when the chemistry is missing my shyness lays sleeping, relaxed that nothing of importance is happening here. My true self wanders out and says hello, smiling and chatty and happy for the connection. The First Impression monster is observed daydreaming over coffee.

If ever I do see Love again, I’m sure it will have to sneak up on me, like in the movies, in the guise of someone so totally wrong for me that Shyness and First Impression run off to the beach together for the duration, giggling as they splash in the waves. And in moments of disinterested mundanity we let slip random anecdotes from our romantic resumes …

And it dawns on us: We can truly see each other—and the view is amazing!

Is it any wonder I’m majoring in making movies? I’m the perfectly hopeless protagonist of my own romantic comedy of errors. Or perhaps I’m just the pratfalling comedy sidekick.