Stories

1) You can’t find your keys
           Don’t worry about it, no one can ever find their keys

2) You can’t find your cell phone.
           Don’t worry about it, no one can ever find their cell phone

3) Your daughter calls and tells you they’ve just called her from the deli to say you left your cell phone there. And you had no idea it was even missing.

4) You have two things in your hand, a dirty napkin and a wallet, and you throw your wallet in the trashcan.

5) You walk into the bedroom and realize the dresser drawer is open.
           This is a bad sign. There’s a cure. Retrain yourself to do things in a different order. Open the drawer. Take the sweater out. Shut the drawer. THEN put the sweater on.

The Oscars are less than a week a way, and most people have already weighed in on their top choice for the year. So now it’s time to match your top choice with the perfect Oscar Entrée.

1. The Artist (Michel Hazanvicius) has been taking people’s breaths away—and voices. To match the brilliant silent picture, how about some cotton candy, which is a bit old school, light and full of air—the perfect, tasty, silent addition.

2. Join War Horse’s (Steven Spielberg) horse and feel free to treat yourself to a bowl of uncooked spaghetti, so you can join the main character (the horse), as he gnaws on straw.

3. Head out to the ballpark with Moneyball (Bennett Miller), and bite into a jumbo hotdog and extra large fries.

4. Laugh along with Minny (Octavia Spencer) in The Help (Tate Taylor), and indulge in double chocolate pie—leaving her SECRET ingredient out. Please. And thank you.

I am fairly catholic in my choice of reading material; in a pinch I will read whatever is lying around. At summer houses, and in insomniac wanderings in my own house I have read everything from Zane Grey to Boethius, and I actually like things like YA series fiction and “cozy” mysteries. Historically, I have drawn only one line in the sand: I will not, under any circumstances, read a romance novel. I can swallow chick lit, although I don’t like it much, and I delight in a love story woven among the threads of a great novel, but I find the mechanical, predictable storylines and ridiculously overblown language of the average Harlequin to be unpalatable. I know that many women love them, and that’s great. My share may be distributed among all of them, neatly decreasing my suffering and increasing their joy.

Because my reading glasses are broken, and because I was reading books downloaded onto the Kindle on my iPhone, I accidentally bought a kind of supernatural bodice ripper the other night. I swear there were no identifying marks, and that it seemed to be just $2.99 worth of entertainment involving covens, fireballs and demons. (I told you I’d read almost anything). Had I bought this title in a bricks and mortar bookstore, an unlikely proposition since this is a “work” of the type that thrives only in the forgiving universe of e-books, I would have been warned off by a cover featuring a busty woman with her head tipped back in ecstasy, her long hair blowing back as she offered her neck to the cleft-chinned hunk about to kiss her…somewhere. As it was, I went in blind. Literally and figuratively.

1. Check the college’s weather hotline and confirm that classes have been cancelled.

2. E-mail students with directions for the next class meeting. Reassure them that spring will come (this isn’t the first cancellation of the semester), and wish them a joyous day.

3. Survey the landscape and begin shoveling.

4. Take a break to visit with your neighbor, after wading to the middle of the street. Compliment each other’s regalia: she’s wearing a jaunty beret with a pompom; you’re wearing – for which you fervently thank your son – those ear warmers with the band that fits around the back of your head (no hat hair for you, even the morning after a blizzard). When ice crystals have completely lined the inside of the scarf you’ve pulled up over your face, it’s time to stop talking and go back to shoveling.