Lost and Found

For Christmas last year, H. sent me a car key tracker and, as my students would say, “ It was the best present EVER!” It came with a home base, plus a little beeper that attached to the key. Whenever I misplaced my key, I’d press on the home base button and follow the beeping sound until – AHA! I have since broken the device (overuse?), but the point is I am prone to misplacing things. Keys, glasses, earrings. Currently, I have misplaced my sense of humor.

I began this new year by bidding farewell to my relationship with D. We had danced our dance to its very end. Around the same time, I tossed my name into a hat for an administrative job back in New York, at the school that had always felt like home and where I had worked successfully as a teacher for quite a few years. I did not even make the first round of interviews. Me. Pride.Wounded. And then, I lost my sense of humor.

This doesn’t happen often mind you. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to laugh through most situations. While H. and I did not grow up feeling particularly elegant or graceful (partly due to our frizzy, brown hair and freckles amidst a sea of silky, long, blond-haired Swedish cousins), we did grow up with an intact sense of humor. And the more self-deprecating, the better. We have laughed ourselves through travel fiascos, absurd realities (H. rolling a suitcase through an Arlington National Cemetery service comes to mind), relationship woes, and medicinal mishaps. (May I recommend not taking an entire Ambien with a glass of wine if you plan on walking anywhere, even down the hall to bed.)

Death and disease are so horrible that ridiculous laughter at inappropriate times is especially necessary. When tossing our mother’s ashes into the Mediterranean one chilly April, along with the dog’s - he’d been my father’s and we figured all family related ashes should co-mingle in the sea - the wind whipped those ashes right back at us. (On a side note that I make somewhat apologetically, the term ashes is very misleading; think large pieces of sea salt and you’re getting closer.) There we stood with a tiny gathering of relatives we knew in the once-in-a-while-holiday-hello kind of way, including cousins we hadn’t seen in a decade who barely spoke a word of English, with our mother and dog caught in our eyelashes, in the folds of winter coats, in the corners of our mouths. We two laughed all the way to our bistro lunch.

I’m just saying, I can laugh. But now and then, I just can’t really muster up the energy. And without H. close by, it’s that much harder. She’s the funniest person I know. Plan B? I’ve got one. A few years ago, after an unpleasant break-up, I discovered Grey’s Anatomy. Starting at Season 1, I watched as many episodes in a row as my eyes could muster. This was before I’d discovered Netflix; I became a crazy woman driving feverishly along Maui’s country roads at night from video store to video store tracking down the next disk in the series.

Now here I stand again at a crossroads, uncertain of my next step in love, work, home. But before I make my move, I need a really, really good laugh - - and likely a good cry, too. Not because life is so terrible; no, so I can move all that old energy out and make room for the new. Also, if I'm not laughing, it's a lot harder to be Out There in the big, wide world. So, in addition to lots of yoga and walks and, yes, perhaps some wine as well, I’ve started Grey’s Anatomy all over again. What can I say? Nothing like a hospital drama to tug at the heartstrings and unleash the floodgates. But mostly, George makes me laugh. Thank goodness.