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I'm going to my happy place in a few days to celebrate my 40th birthday with my mom and my sister. Yippee! Well, I have lots of happy places, actually. In Henry's arms. Where two rivers meet in Vermont. A certain chair in my livingroom when a fire is burning in the fireplace. Sunday mornings in bed. The library. The front seat of any car at the beginning of a road trip. Martha's Vineyard any time of year. That's just the beginning of a long list.
On the other hand, I am a worrier. A thinker. Angst is in my genes. I don't know if it's the Irish or the Scottish in me. We work our worries over and over until they're barely recognizable. What did they even start out as in the first place? Give me a person, a place....I'll find something to be concerned about. Give me a topic. I'll give you an angle to look into. I'm a digger. Surfaces have never satisfied me. If I don't know someone's story, I'll fill in the blanks...usually assuming the worst. I'll imagine the saddest, sorriest stories....whether it's a dog loping along the side of the road looking over its shoulder back at me or a young girl alone on a park bench. Before I know it, I'm involved.
But I can't imagine another way of life. And I don't want to. This is the stuff of life. Right? This is how lives are made. What would life be if we minded our own business all the time? To connect is all! Who said that? E. M. Forster? Whoever it was...they were right. What else is life about...besides connecting with other human beings, other living creatures, with our living, breathing world? That's all there is. What else could we possibly be here for?
The flip side...ah, yes, there's always a flip side.....of connection is the need to disconnect. The need to disconnect in order to recharge. This is most definitely a part of my life as well. I retreat from the world it with books and movies, mostly. I love to read. Always have. And I can while away most of a day watching old movies. I'll watch them all...everything except the Westerns...John Wayne gives me fits, Clint Eastwood gives me hives. I love going out to the movies too. I'm a little more discerning about those though. But I really like going by myself, sitting in the dark with my popcorn and Milk Duds when the previews begin. But there are times when even these diversions are too much about the real world. There are times I need something even more divorced from reality in order to disconnect.
For those times, I always have my soaps. Yes, I can go from reading Dostoyevsky or watching The Visitor to zoning out in front of the Young and the Restless without a problem. And no, I don't suffer from any cranial whiplash. Sometimes, I just need to be in la-la land where people's problems are completely fake and men wake up in full makeup and women slip off their earrings to answer the phone. (Love that!) I come from a long and proud line of women with both high and low brow tastes. My mother will just weep listening to Jessye Norman sing one night and then pee her pants watching Reno 911 the next. She'll attend a lecture on Palestine one afternoon and rock out in the front row of a Tire Biter concert that same night. I wish I was as cool as my mom. She teaches an ESOL class on Thursday mornings for Literacy Volunteers and then sometimes gets so depressed after giving a student in particularly dire straits a ride home that she goes directly shopping, does not pass Go because life is so damn sad and nothing cheers her up like some mindless retail therapy.
Well, I have a place that I go which is my own version of sticking my fingers in my ears and singing, "Lalalalalalalalalala!" at the top of my lungs. Are you ready? You have to promise to keep reading after I tell you what that place is. Okay. Deep breath.
