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Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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2:18 p.m. - 2002-10-10
Did you ever get to a place where you were so sick of everything, even the sound of your own voice, that you just wanted to pull the covers over your head and stay there for a month? That’s where I am. And what’s odd is that there’s good things in the pipeline. Positive stuff, happy stuff, good news for a change, and it’s coming, coming fast. So you’d think I’d be able to soldier along, eyes on the prize, and just deal for another few days, a week. But as the Albino says in “The Princess Bride”...‘Welcome to The Pit of Despair’. God that sounds dramatic. I’m not really despairing, just tired. A bit bummed. The turn of the season is usually an up time for me. I live for the autumn. The crisp air, the fresh apples, the pyrotechnics of the leaves. But this year I can’t find my happy. My whole attitude is one of BFD. Who cares? Why bother? Whatever. Feh, I’ll snap out of it. I remember my first autumn in Texas. Gads, it was horrible. September, October it was still 1,000 degrees. I was so homesick. I’d moved down there the previous January and by mid-February it had gotten warm enough to use the pool. And it just got hotter, and hotter, and hotter. I hadn’t moved to Texas, I’d moved to Hell. The relentless heat hadn’t abated a whit. 10 months now of horrible brain numbing, soul sucking heat. The endless summer might have made the Beach Boys happy, sure who wouldn’t be? Surfing by day and singing and partying by night. But I had no ocean and after 11 months of marriage, I knew there’d never be any gorgeous harmony between us either. No raucous parties at LA and the Evil Ex’s place, that’s for sure. My supposed rescuer, my Knight in Shining Armor, turned out to have feet of clay and the temper of a weasel. I was stuck in a rotten marriage slowly being turned into a glare blind, juiceless husk. Dammit! I NEEDED some autumn. Something to remind me that I hadn’t always been in this Satan’s Easy Bake Oven. That in other, less brutal parts of the world, there was color and beauty and joy. So what to do? I called my sister and begged her to send me some leaves. She mocked me some for my Druidic tendencies, but agreed. A week later a huge box showed up. I opened it and inside were not only a bushel of leaves, but whole branches. Branches snipped from the maples, the oaks, the sycamores, all the deciduous friends from back home. After a hasty call to my sister, gabbling my thanks, I started decorating. I taped leaves all over the sliding glass door. Strung branches in the front windows and filled baskets with the rest. I sat bathed in the diffuse glow of Nature’s best lightshow with dopey smile on my face and a maple seed pod split open and stuck on the end of my nose. Later that afternoon the doorbell rang. A stranger. She was trembling and her eyes were wet. Trouble? No. She gulped and introduced herself. Then in a quiet voice, almost cracking with tears she said, “I’m sorry for disturbing you. I saw your windows. I’m...I’m...I’m from Syracuse.” Nothing else needed to be said. I tugged her inside and sat her on the couch. I plopped one of the leaf filled baskets on her lap and slipped off to the kitchen to make tea. I broke into my stash of Stella D`oro biscotti and for good measure tossed a couple of packages of Devil Dogs on the tray. Home food care packages sent by Lisa just the month before. I lugged out the goodies and set them on the coffee table. The woman, Candace, peeked over a bouquet of scarlet maple leaves and gave me a watery smile. When she saw what was on the tray what little composure she had broke. She blubbered, “Devil Dogs! Oh my God!” and she really started wailing. I joined her and the two of us sat crying and then finally laughing over our weepy silliness. We talked the afternoon away. An orgy of remembrances and homesick longing. By dinner time we were firm friends. No longer alone in this alien world, strangers so terribly alone so far from everything we knew and loved. I sent her out the door with an armload of “home”, a basket of branches and leaves, some biscotti and of course, a few Devil Dogs. ‘Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion...It can be a terribly keen blade...It can change the one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent, but ugly...perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness-the ache of the uprooted plant.’- Stephen King LA’s Pick of the Day: “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues” by Elton John
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