Answering two questions

I’ve almost run out of interesting and uplifting things to do while isolating at home.  While I always enjoy flipping through the pages of magazines, with time on my hands … I mean, how many times can you vacuum the rugs, or write letters … I’ve been paying more attention to articles in magazines directed to those of us who need some mental rearrangement.  You could say that I enter into a dialog with the suggestions which are designed to help me clarify where I am and where I am going.

This particular magazine asked two questions:  Who are you?  What do you want?

At first, I hesitated.  After all, this magazine had featured a “little inexpensive blouse” that only cost $200.  Are they kidding?  Who spends $200 on a blouse?  Ok, maybe a cashmere sweater, but a blouse?  The editors must be targeting a different reader.  But I needed clarity, and therefore began to answer those questions.

So, what do I want?

I want an idle afternoon with no agenda, no “to-do” list, an afternoon that slides into a gentle evening.

I want to talk about inconsequential things with friends.  I want to laugh with them, leave feeling whole again.

I want to spend month-long days with my grandsons, unencumbered by time – lazy days that follow whims and the sun.

You know what else? I want to go walking in the woods, preferably after a light snowfall, the kind that makes the earth look like it had been sprinkled with powdered sugar.   I want to breathe in the crisp, almost bitingly-cold air and watch my breath transform into mist.  I want to listen to the silence, drink it in, savor it.

I want to sit and look at the extraordinarily beautiful illustrations in children’s books about fairies and Christmas and small animals. There is something about these illustrations that brings me back to times when storybooks and life were coterminous and full of the luminous life of fantasy.

I want to play with paper and maybe make something that is pretty, unique, even beautiful.  Does this have anything to do with paper dolls, the kind that I lusted after as a child?  Probably.

Or, as an alternative, I want my hands busy with a needle project. Whether I knit or crochet, I want to make something for someone, a something that someone would appreciate receiving.   Something to remember me by.  I do feel more complete when my hands are busy with such things.

I want to watch funny movies.  I want to laugh big laughs, the kind that make you tear up, that leave your belly a little sore.   I need that so much right now.  Everything else is so desperately down, so sad, so confusing and labyrinth-like.  Simplicity is an aspiration

I want to drink a perfectly-made Cosmopolitan, not so much for the spirits but for the on-edge taste that lime and citrus and cranberry make together.  The vodka helps, too.

And I want to eat something delicious, prepared and served by someone else, in pleasant surroundings.   A meal where my enjoyment isn’t colored by the knowledge that I will have to clean up afterwards.

And, alternately, I want to make and eat biscuits.  Biscuits that are crisp on the outside and deliciously soft inside.   I want to make a deeply-flavored ozzo buco , redolent with spices and memories of Tuscany.  I want to drink a deeply-flavored red wine with that osso buco, at a dinner enjoyed slowly with friends who will talk and laugh away all of the detritus of the day, followed by someone else who washes up and puts everything away.

It is so true that family and friends define us.  Isolation strips us of some of ourselves when we are apart.  You can’t make up for that loss with the refrigerator.  I’ve tried and – no, you can’t.

And, who am I? Who do  I want to be?

I am someone who loved being a teacher and who also found meaning being able to develop support for not-for-profit agencies that provided services to people in need.

I have six cats because no one else will take care of them.  And, yes, I do love them, well most of them.  For some, it’s more like a “big like.”

I loved being a cantor at church and playing in the bell choir, even though my sense of timing is all over the place.

I am the person who loves Diana Krall and the Jazz rhythms of Brazil, especially when played and sung by Getz and Gilberto.  I sing and remember dancing to the Bee Gees and dreaming with the Eagles and identifying with the music in the movie “Grease.”   I know all of the words to all of the songs written by Rodgers and Hammerstein and most of the lyrics to “Phantom of the Opera” and “Le Mis.”  Not that I can hit the high notes.  My emotions are heightened by the soundtrack of the television program, “Call the Midwife.”  Those are my songs, the musical background of my young life and the characters in the show are my agemates, young women whose lives mattered

And what of my deep attraction to another British series, “All Creatures Great and Small?”  For me, each episode is a lesson in how to live a fruitful and satisfying life.

Still, I am the person who saves the good china for special occasions when there are so few special occasions.  There are “good” clothes that rest, unused in my closet, because no “good” occasions are occurring to warrant wearing them.

I live in jeans and sweaters and simple things, musing about memories of walking without assistance, getting things done and feeling accomplished and at peace.

I am, most probably, just like you.  Still searching.

I just want to be who I am, whomever that is.  Most assuredly I am not someone who spends $200 on a blouse. Maybe two pairs of good shoes or a beautiful wool coat or a nice dinner with friends.