Planning Your Mid-Life Crisis

The other day, an old friend confessed that she was having an affair. She claims this is not her fault because she is in the throes of a mid-life crisis and needs to do something different to bring some excitement into her life. So, she decided to risk everything by cheating on her husband.
I’m jealous. I’ve been waiting years for my mid-life crisis. How is it that a woman who is younger than me gets to have hers before I can have mine?
You see, I have big plans for my mid-life crisis.
Originally, I was going to buy a Corvette, but as I have been getting closer to my highly anticipated crisis, I’ve realized that I won't be able to afford one. So instead, I’m going to take a nap. I’ve been planning it ever since I gave birth.
You never know how fulfilling a nap can be until you go eleven years without one.
Winston Churchill took naps every day during World War II. He was allowed because he had armed bodyguards at his bedroom door. History says that they were there to protect him from the Nazis. If the Churchills were anything like my family, the offspring were a greater threat to his nap time than Adolph Hitler.
No one has ever been hurt by a nap.
Okay, there are those unfortunates who have spontaneously combusted. Of course, I’m not an expert, but I’m sure if anyone is bored enough to research this, they will find that the annual rate of middle-aged people who have died from spontaneous combustion while napping is drastically lower than the rate of families who have been destroyed by infidelity.
The prospect of having an affair is out of the question for me. Yes, I love my husband too much to want to cheat on him. But, I confess that even if that were not the case, I have another reason for not cheating: I don’t have the time or energy to take on a lover.
I spend every waking hour catering to the needs of spousal units, kids, school teachers, parents, and don’t forget the pets. Why would I want to insert another person into my life and schedule?
An affair requires work.
I’d have to style my hair every day. I’d have to update my make-up from the 1980’s. I’d have to start wearing scents other than coffee.
I love Victoria’s Secret, but my taste in lingerie has shifted from slinky to flannel cotton. I can’t stand to wear anything to bed that doesn’t cover me from head to toe to keep the draft out when Jack steals the covers.
I’d have to shave my legs, which at this point in my life, I only do on the most special of occasions, like visits from heads of state. At the very least, I’ll have to buy a pair of panty hose. Then, I’d have to squeeze into them.
I’d probably have to get a girdle, too. I keep having visions of my lover ending up in the emergency room after having his eye poked out by flying shrapnel as a result of the exploding flesh when I release it from my garments of bondage. Try explaining that to your homeowners insurance.
I haven’t even mentioned the sneaking around. By the time it gets dark enough for a hotel clerk to not obtain a good enough look at me and my lover to give a detailed description to the PI working for the divorce lawyer, I’m falling asleep in front of iCarly. After cleaning up the kitchen in the evening, not even the lastest James Bond can entice me out of my Spongebob Squarepants slippers for a romantic rendezvous.
Naps don’t make these types of demands. All they require is a good lock on your bedroom door (or armed guards if you can convince the feds that there's a threat to your life), a pillow, a nice warm blanket, and thick curtains to block out the sunlight. Don’t forget to turn off your cell phone!
The sheets don’t care if your legs are unshaven. The mattress doesn’t notice if you’ve put on a few pounds. If it does, it won’t say anything to hurt your feelings. No cosmetics, perfumes, or dress codes required.
If your husband finds out about what you’ve done, his hurt won’t be due to a betrayal, but jealousy because you neglected to invite him to join you. Next time, pull back the covers and tell him that he can jump in as long as he promises to keep quiet and not tell anyone what the two of you are doing. All will be forgiven (unless he finds evidence that you had been eating potato chips in bed again) and life will go on as before without any need for a marriage counselor (unless you were eating those potato chips on his side of the bed).
If infidelity is exciting, I’d rather be boring. Train wrecks are exciting, too; but I still avoid them.
Over the years, marriages go through stages. If you're lucky, your marriage will reach the stage that those less enlightened would describe as boring. You have made it through the unsettling years of adjusting to each other. The wars over which way to hang the toilet paper (inside or out) and where does the peanut butter go (refrigerator or cupboard) have been fought. Victories have been declared and treaties have been written.
With not so many battles to fight, marriage reaches a harmonic stage, which can be mistaken for boring. Let me illustrate:
My grandparents were married for over seventy years. Every evening, while the sun would set on our little town, they would sit in their rockers on the front porch to watch the coming and goings along their street. Long stretches of quiet would be punctuated by something like, “Hey, Pap, did you see that? Bud got himself a new pick-up.”
My grandfather would stop rocking, lower his newspaper, and peer out the window in the direction his wife would be pointing. “He must be making good money at the mill. Last week, I saw him at the bank. She was making roast beef for dinner.”
“My! Do you know how expensive beef is nowadays?” Then, Grandma would go on about her last trip to the butcher and how she swore he had put his thumb on the scale.
When I was a teenager dreaming of life as a best selling author traveling the world, I wondered at how dull their lives were and asked myself (and probably them since I had a big mouth), how they could stand living such an uninteresting existence.
Now, thirty years later, as I write this, I sit in front of the fireplace with my husband who is reading yet another deep book about how these are the end times and feel a sense of calm that I would never want to replace with anything…except maybe a mid-afternoon nap.
Someday, my mid-life crisis will come.

One Way to Save On Groceries You Won't Find Anywhere Else

Last week, the dog groomer suggested that I upgrade to a higher quality dog food to make Piranha Puss’s coat softer and silkier. So, I spent twenty-five dollars on dog food instead of the usual fifteen.
Upon seeing the receipt for the dog food and grooming, for which I had paid an extra ten dollars for the groomer not to shave Piranha Puss’s butt, my husband declared that we were going to lose the house and end up living in a box down by the river. Considering that the hour before he had spent several hundred dollars on lumber to build an observation deck in the back yard for his telescope, I concluded that we were safe in our four-bedroom home for at least a few more months, unless he was building that observation deck for the bank.

Like the rest of the country, I am always looking for ways to save money. Granted, it is more out of a desire to make Jack shut up about how much I spend than to accumulate a nest egg for retirement. According to Nostradamus, the Mayans, and the Discovery Channel; the world is going to end in 2012, in which case I won’t be around for retirement anyway. Jack calls this rationalization: I am seeking the path of least resistance, to which I reply, “Do you have a problem with that?”
Here’s a money saving tip that I am considering:
According to Answers.com, the average family of four spends $600 a month on groceries. With a dog, they spend an extra $20. After careful thought, I have come to the conclusion that there are much better areas to put our time, effort, and money.
Think about it. Is grocery shopping really worth all those hundreds of dollars a month?
First, there is the getting in the car, going to the grocery store, finding the items for which you have coupons, and then rewriting your shopping list while in the store after giving up on finding these couponed items. Then, after the paramedics revive your heart when you found out how much those item you had listed on that yellow sitckie cost, you get to haul it all home. Why does John Tesh always wait until the trip home to give me all those tips for saving on groceries?
At home, there is the futile hunt for family members to help unload the car. For me, it is still a toss-up about if finding someone to help unload is really a good thing. If I am able to find someone to whom I am related then I get to go through the ordeal of convincing them that 1) I am really serious about sending them off to boarding school if they don’t help me, or 2) that the meals at boarding school are not going to be any better than my home cooking. I have found it quieter and more peaceful unloading the car without any help.
Though there was that one time that a nice young man sitting in his car across the street offered to help me bring in the groceries. While carrying in one bag of groceries after another and helping me put them away, we had a pleasant conversation about the neighborhood, and the neighbors’ comings and goings. Of course, he ended up being a cat burglar casing the house next door, but I thought he was quite helpful.
Next comes the painful part: Deciding what to cook for dinner?
This is about the time I discover that my grocery list wasn’t quite complete. Yes, I do plan what I am going to cook over the course of the week. Yet, in my effort to give my husband a false sense of comfort that I won’t go over his unrealistic grocery budget, I take stuff off. Unfortunately, when it comes time to start cooking, I realize that I needed that stuff in order to make the meals I had planned for that week’s menu.
One hour after grocery shopping, I am scrambling to find something to cook for dinner. After I find that something, then it is time to start cooking to the sweet sound of whining: “Do we have to eat that? Why can’t we order a pizza?”
After twenty-minutes to an hour in the kitchen, we have the setting of the table; the force feeding of vegetables to the children, which borders on child cruelty according to my son; the clearing of the table; and the cleaning of the kitchen. Within seconds of turning off the light and retiring to the living room, my kitchen will suddenly be under attack by a starving kid who bears a striking resemblance to the one who sat next to me at the dinner table swearing that he couldn’t eat a bite because his stomach was so full from lunch.
Which brings us back to my original question: Is all this fun worth the hundreds of dollars your family spends on groceries every month? Of course, there is this whole starving-to-death issue for people who give up eating. So what do you do?
Well, many parts of the forest are edible and road kill is free.

The Family Pack Mule

This summer, my family went to a Pittsburgh Pirates game. (they won) Before entering the stadium, we were herded through security for a bag search. While approaching the guard, my heart raced. The anxiety had nothing to do with any possible contraband that he may have found in my bag, but due to the volume of items that he would have to dig through in order to determine if I was dangerous to others, or just my back.
When I got to the guard, I opened the giant overweight purse and cracked, “It’s a Mommy bag.”
He laughed. “I’ve seen a lot of those.” He shuffled through a few of the items as if he were afraid that his fingers might get caught in the mousetrap that I have set at the bottom, and then waved me through the gate.
At that moment, watching all the other women weighed down with heavy bags masquerading as purses that carried all the essentials for their groups' outings, I realized that I belonged to the social class categorized as the family pack mule.
This really came home a few days later while in the midst of piling into the car to make the next appointment on our agenda that was supposed to be a vacation. I bent over in the back seat to clean up a mess that no one made, when the Mommy bag landed upside-down on my head and the contents spilled out. Both my husband and son had a good laugh at me trying to collect marbles (yes, marbles) that had rolled into the parking lot.
Back when I was young, shortly after the cavemen emerged and started making their homes in huts, I was free to carry my few essentials (mirror, lipstick, comb, car keys, and wallet) in a chic little handbag that hung in a carefree manner by a thin leather strap from my shoulder. After I got married, chic dropped off my list of priorities. Like a pack mule on a wagon train across Death Valley, I care more about surviving an outing than I do about looking stylish.
It started with my husband asking me to carry his checkbook in my purse. He didn’t have room to carry it in his pockets and since men don’t wear suits with inside breast pockets anymore, the only place left to carry the checkbook was my bag.
Next came his car keys; and then the mail.
Then came our son. That was when I was assigned the task of carrying everything we could think of to bribe him into acting civilized in public.
Sometimes stuff is simply tossed over a shoulder in my general direction with hopes that it will land in the family saddlebag. After years of this, I gave in and got a big old ugly Mommy bag with an industrial strength strap to attach to my body for transport.
What can you find in a Mommy bag? Well, as of this moment, here is what is in mine:
One zipped-up section of the Mommy bag is reserved for my stuff. It contains cosmetics in case I meet someone I want to impress and need to clean myself up.
I also have a vial of holy water. No, I’m not Catholic, but a friend of mine is. She gave me this holy water shortly after meeting my son. I still wonder if she was trying to tell me something. I haven't seen the friend in quite a while, but I still have the holy water in the Mommy bag just in case I need it.
In another section, I have a cell phone that doesn't work. It was a freebie that came with our service. I also have a second cell phone in the Mommy bag. For that one, I paid a hundred dollars upgrade because the freebie didn’t work. The new one doesn't work right either, but that’s another blog. I do have one that works. It's in my son's bookbag at school where he is not allowed to use it. I also have a cell phone battery that I got in hopes of making the first cell phone work, but it didn’t help. That's why I had to get the second one.
I also have two sets of airplane tickets and luggage receipts from a year ago when I picked up my sister-in-law and niece at the airport. I don't know how they ended up in my purse. Both of them are Mommies. They should have their own bags.
I have a pair of scratched up sun glasses that I carry in case I can’t find my good pair. Right now, I don’t know where the good sunglasses are.
I have a recipe for Yukon Gold Potato Salad with a grocery list on the back. There are a lot of old shopping lists in the Mommy bag. I never know what to do with a shopping list after checking out my groceries. I don’t want to throw them away at the store, so I put them in the Mommy bag and they all gather together at the bottom along with the pens I can never find.
The Mommy bag also contains three pairs of 3-D glasses from when we saw Ice Age this summer. As soon as the movie was over, my husband and son handed me their glasses. My son didn't want them thrown away because he wanted to keep them to remember the movie. Considering that they have been in my purse all this time and he has never asked for them, I guess I can toss them now, or I can save them for in case they ever start making road signs in 3-D.
I have a pack of tissues. I don’t know where it came from. Now that I don’t need it, there it is. How much do you want to bet that I won’t be able to find it when I need it if I leave it in the bag?
I also have two crayons and a dozen pens in every shape and color.
Remember when people used to write checks, before they started using debit cards? Every time I needed to write a check, I would have to ask the clerk for a pen because I couldn't find one in my purse. Yet, I could always find crayons. How is it that I could find one of two crayons in my purse, but never find a pen? Go figure.
In case I ever get lost between my house and the mailbox, I also have a map of West Virginia. This was left over from our vacation. I also have a balloon with the US flag on it, a can of bug repellant, a bag of M&M’s (those will be gone in five minutes), and two of those complimentary bags of nuts that they give you on planes. (They don't give out nuts anymore, so you can guess how long these babies have been in the bag.)
I don’t like nuts, but every time someone somewhere takes a flight I end up with a bag of nuts in the Mommy bag. Nobody eats them while on the plane, but instead of insisting that the flight attendant take them back, they hand them to me to store in the Mommy bag in case our wagon train is attacked by coyotes who do like nuts.
Well, I have learned that everyone has an important job essential for keeping the family going. Mine is pack mule. That was okay until I saw an old western and discovered that the pack mule who carries all the supplies is usually the first one that the coyotes attack.

Shopping with Grandpa

The baby-boomers have officially grown-up, not so much motivated by ambition, but because there is no one else to be in charge. Our children are still too young to rule the world and our parents have been forced to pass on the torch as the effects of time have taken its toll. With this transition, the generation that brought disco into the world and took it out; invented hip-hugging bell bottoms that our children have re-invented under the guise of low-rise jeans with wide legs; and can legally call the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and Rod Stewart our own, has been renamed the sandwich generation. We’re the filling between our parents and our children.
Now, we’re in charge. Scary, isn’t it?
Imagine giving up your independence to move in with someone whose diapers you used to change, someone who you had to bail out after they learned the hard way that the down side of credit cards is that eventually you have to pay up.
For a man who was once the king of the house, relinquishing independence is a losing fight in the war against aging. Simple things that once were taken for granted can become battle grounds. Each battle lost brings eventual surrender.
One such battle in the war for independence is the car. We baby-boomers can easily recall the days when we counted down to receiving our drivers’ licenses. Getting our first car was a symbol of freedom.
The status symbol of the car and the independence that comes with driving does not diminish with age.
Six years ago, my wheel-chair bound eighty-one year old father-in-law moved in with my family. The transition of moving from his home in Arizona to our West Virginia home provided the opportunity to get Grandpa off the road. With hardly any feeling in his legs, he would crawl behind the wheel of his New Yorker, speed up to 50 mph, set the cruise control, and go. Of course, with no feeling in his legs, there was a delay in lifting his leg with his hand and placing his foot on the brake if he had to stop. My sister-in-law saw her life flash before her eyes two times before he came to a halt when a deer jumped in front of them.
Rather than sell his New Yorker, Grandpa put it in storage when he moved in with us. He felt secure just owning a car, even though it was halfway across the country. “I feel trapped being here without a car. Granted, I can’t drive, but I still feel trapped.”
So, Grandpa sought independence where he could find it.
Shortly after he had moved in, I packed Grandpa up in the SUV and took him to the grocery store. He had only twelve items on his list, but wanted to get them himself. After loading him into the handicapped scooter at the grocery store, I went to the pharmacy next door for a quick errand and returned to the grocery store, where I ran into a friend. While chatting in the wine aisle, I glanced up and down the aisles for Grandpa. Since he was unfamiliar with the store, I feared that he would become confused if I took too long to find him.
Behind Ed’s back, I saw Grandpa whiz by on his scooter at a high rate of speed. He didn’t appear to see me. Minutes later, I saw him speed by again. Assuming he was looking for me, I tried to end the conversation. Before I could, Grandpa raced by again. This time, he was in reverse!
Hurriedly, I ended our conversation and ran off with my cart to find Grandpa.
Oh, I thought, he must be confused and wondering where I am. Finally, I spotted him racing along on his scooter at what appeared to be top speed.
“Grandpa!” I ran after him with my grocery cart.
He didn’t slow down.
I gave chase.
Grandpa turned a corner and kept on going.
Running after him, I noticed that he didn’t appear to be looking for anything on the shelves while speeding along, nor did he appear to be searching for me. People were dodging out of his way while he charged full speed ahead and hugged the corners to speed up the next aisle.
Three aisles later, I finally caught him. “Grandpa! Are you looking for something?”
A look of disappointment crossed his face when he saw me.
Noticing that he only had two items in his basket, I could see that he had not been shopping while he was in the store alone.
His expression was similar to that of my young son when I stopped him from sled riding down the fastest hill on our mountain, which happened to be major road used by cars.
I had ruined his fun. Such is my lot in life being the filling in our familial sandwich.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
He dug his grocery list out of his pocket and studied it a moment. “Butter.” I led him to the refrigerated section.
For a moment, while Grandpa was racing up and down the grocery aisles on his scooter, this man who used to fly patrol plans over the Atlantic during World War II was once again in the driver’s seat. With the wind in his hair, he was king of the road at our local grocery store!
I’m just glad the grocery store manager didn’t give him a speeding ticket.
(Posted in Memory of Grandpa John A. Zaleski.)