The Postscript

Gardening was supposed to be enjoyable and the fact that it always seemed like work to me made me feel guilty. My mother and sister are wonderful gardeners, and I have no reason to believe they are fibbing when they say they enjoy getting their hands in the dirt, tending their flowers and watching things grow. I do enjoy watching things grow—this is the truth. I just enjoy it a lot more if someone else has done all the work.

Her notes appear in little bubbles at the side of the text. “This is reading like a sermon,” a note said. This was a puzzling observation because the passage she was referring to was, in fact, a sermon. But I gathered from the note that sounding like a sermon (even if it was a sermon) was not a good thing.

A big storm would have been nice, but it’s really the lack of color that is getting me down. March is nothing but mud and surprise snowstorms and then more mud. April is nothing but cold wind and gray skies. So I expect big things from May. And, this year, May is dragging its heels. Whatever it is I’m waiting for, it doesn’t seem to be showing up.

I would see the face of the dance teacher light up as they assumed I was a dancer, and I would dread what was coming. I would stand up and start to move and the teacher would immediately realize they had made a mistake—I was absolutely not a dancer. In fact, I had enormous difficulty following the simplest instructions. The notion of “body memory” was alien to me. I had a bad case of body amnesia.

Felix is our cat. He had made a small noise a few minutes before landing, but I had thought nothing of it. Now it smelled as if something was badly amiss. I know you might be having your breakfast as you listen to this, so suffice to say, of the three types of potential messes an animal could make in a small container, this was the worst of the options.

Honestly, I was not hopeful. There are a lot of stray dogs in Mexico, and Muneca was no longer a puppy. We later learned that her owner was not an older person, as we assumed, but a young woman who died unexpectedly. The whole thing seemed terribly tragic.

Jade is one of the new people I have met while spending time in Mexico. Jade used to be an eye doctor. But after retiring from medicine in her 60s, she decided to do something a little different. I’m pretty sure—no matter how much time I gave you—you would never guess how Jade now spends her time.

If having more refined tastes means I stop noticing bougainvillea, I’d be happy with the tastes I have, even if I never understood much poetry. Because it seems to me the ability to notice the beautiful in the ordinary is more important than recognizing the unusual.

Optimism can be clumsy. It can be ham-fisted. Disappointment and grief and setbacks and bad news and failures are all very real things, and the optimist’s impulse is to sweep them under the rug in record time.

A couple of weeks before our 10th anniversary, I suggested to Peter that maybe we should have a party. It was at night, so Peter was mostly asleep. I have found this is a good time to spring new ideas on Peter.

Peter and I will celebrate our 10th anniversary this week, which doesn’t seem possible for two reasons. First, because it cannot be possible that ten years have passed since we got married, and second, because it cannot be possible there was ever a time I was not married to Peter.

At this point, my cat, Felix, was alerted to the fact that something out of the ordinary was occurring and joined me in the bathroom. He surveyed my posture on the floor somewhat disapprovingly. “Mama, this lying on the floor is not a good look,” he informed me as he sniffed my eyes and mouth. I agreed.

I used to feel the need to apologize to my hair stylists, “I’m good at doing some things,” I would insist. “Growing hair just isn’t one of them!” The hair stylist would work away for long minutes, and at the end, I would get up from the chair and there was no hair to see on the floor. It was as if the entire thing had been a pantomime involving scissors.

Felix learned that if he got up enough traction in the carpeted bedroom, he could skid down the polished wooden floors in the hall, zoom across the living room, ricochet off the wall, and land on the couch, all in a matter of seconds. Our entire condo became a giant cat racecourse.

I thought as long as the bakery was writing “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” on the cake, they could just as easily write “HAPPY BIRTHDAYS!” followed by “22 & 91.” Then I could put a single candle by each age and simplify the whole complicated (but mandatory) candle-blowing-out procedure.

My grandmother lived to be 100 and outlived all her old friends. So she made new old friends. By the time she passed, many of her friends were closer in age to her children than to her, but she always seemed to have someone to talk to. And that is what matters.