Suddenly Saturday

My husband bought a home phone system that allows one to choose one's own ringtones. Of course, I chose "Fur Elise." It sounds like a symphony every time the phone rings. It seems wrong not to answer the phone now. It might be Beethoven calling and what if I missed him? I think I need a matching doorbell.

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I was sitting outside under my wrought-iron pavillion tonight, drinking a Michelob Ultra straight from the bottle, and looking up at the sky. A shooting star went by, gone too soon. I wished for what I always wish for.

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I got an email from my desert friend. I don't even know her, but I still kind of miss her.

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I'm going to visit my best friend from high school in a few days. I'm giving her the nickname "my Huckleberry friend." She doesn't know it yet. Isn't it something that we're still inventing nicknames for each other after all these years? I guess we're just creative people. ( :

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My black lab, Finley James Dirtypaws Puppadoplis, is getting older and I don't know if he'll last more than a couple of more years. And I still have determine what's to be done with Drew (Little Grrrl Lost)--I just don't trust her around my son enough to keep her. I love my dogs more than most people I come across; they are always excited to see me come home and sad to see me leave.

***

I bought a second-hand (though still beautiful) fur stole today. It smelled strongly of cigarette smoke.

I imagined an old lady with it wrapped around her shoulders, cigarette dangling from her smudged, red lips as she shivered and struck up a winter conversations with her uptown doorman in her uptown highrise in her uptown world.

One day she opened up her Louis Vuitton cigarette case to find that she had completely run out of her Capri's. He handed her a Marlboro Red without her having to ask. She secretly loved it, though she scowled at her first puff. A Marlboro Red had been her first cigarette; it was given to her by a young man of whom her parents did not approve. She tells the doorman so. She told him things she would never divulge to anybody else. "He won't judge me," she told herself. "How can he? He's only a doorman."

But he did judge her. And it didn't matter. He was only the doorman.

That's the story I assigned to it.

And now the fur stole is mine.

***

If I had to choose the book that has most affected my life, it would be, hands down, A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. And do you think that authors might search blogs for references to their own work? If John Irving ever sees this, I simply want to say that I, too, am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Thank God and John Irving.

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I want to drink sangria and go out dancing in Mexico. And wear a flower in my hair. Before I die. Please, God, allow this. I must do this to say, at the end, that I have really lived.