Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (29 page)

Mother Mary and brother Frank were getting ready to fly up for daughter Francesca’s graduation when trouble broke out in Miami. It began when I got a text from Frank, which read:

CALL ME ASAP ABOUT MOM.

I freak out. Mother Mary isn’t in the best of health, and Frank never texts me. I grab the phone and speed-dial him. “What’s the matter? Is she okay?”

“It’s really bad.” He sounds upset, and my heart pounds in my chest.

“What happened?”

“I got a tattoo.”

Huh? “And she had a heart attack?”

“No, she won’t speak to me. She won’t even look at me. She turns her head when I go to kiss her cheek.”

My blood pressure returns to normal, though I still don’t understand. “This is what you texted me about? This is nothing!”

“Really? You try living with her.”

An excellent point. The two of them battling in their little house gives new meaning to cage fighting. I say, “But you already have two tattoos. Why is she so upset?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the tattoo look like?”

“It’s red roses under a sentence.”

“What’s the sentence?”

“ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME.”

I can’t help but laugh. “This is ironic. Doesn’t Mom realize she’s judging you?”

“It’s not funny. Do something.”

“I’m on it.” I hang up and speed-dial my mother. When she answers, I cut the small talk. “Mom, he’s 51 years old. If he wants a tattoo, he can have a tattoo.”

“It’s ugly.”

“So what? He’s upset.”

“So am I.”

“Why can’t you just let it go?”

“No.”

“But it’s ironic, isn’t it? I mean, his tattoo should say, ONLY MOM CAN JUDGE ME.”

“I don’t get it.”

I don’t explain. Evidently, irony doesn’t come easily to The Flying Scottolines. We’re too literal, or maybe insane.

Mother continues, “I don’t know why your brother has to be this way. What’s the matter with him? What did I do to deserve this? Why is he like this? Was he born this way?” She then throws the kind of fit that other parents throw when they find out their kid is gay. But that, she had no problem with.

Ironic, no?

She was fine with it from day one, when Frank told us that his friend Arthur was really his boyfriend. She even invited Arthur to move in with us, and she was happy to make extra
meatballs for dinner. Now Arthur is gone and she lives with Frank in South Beach, where the two of them have a social circle of moms, gay sons, and meatballs. Their house smells like gravy and aftershave.

“Mom, you have to make up with him. Francesca’s graduation is coming up.”

“I won’t speak to him there, either.”

“You have to. You’ll be sitting with him.”

“No. You sit between us.”

I try to argue with her, but I get nowhere. When my mother sets her jaw, she’s an Italian Mount Rushmore. I cannot imagine them flying from Miami together, side-by-side, then going through the entire three days in Boston not speaking to each other.

Actually, I can, which is worse.

I have to prevent it, but I have only one weapon.

Guilt.

I choose my next words carefully. I don’t want to give her a heart attack. My brother and I have been worried about giving my mother a heart attack ever since we woke her up too loudly and she told us we could give her a heart attack. I’m telling you now, if my mother gets a heart attack, it’s my fault.

“Mom, think about it this way. None of us knows what will happen in life. What if something happened to you, or Frank?”

(By the way, I say this as if these two events are equally likely. To suggest otherwise would be tactless. Also I didn’t want to give her a heart attack.)

“Mom, do you want your son’s last memory to be that you wouldn’t speak to him? Or your last memory of him to be that you wouldn’t give him a kiss?”

“God forbid.”

“Exactly.”

“Make the call.”

She hung up. She was already on it.

And the last I heard, they were having meatballs.

Recently I had the great thrill of receiving an honorary degree, so I stayed up all night before, drafting a speech for commencement day. I tried to write something meaningful and profound, because you can’t joke around in a commencement speech. It calls for loftier sentiments, and though I’m not incapable of same, I love to get laughs.

I was aiming for meaningful laughs.

In other words, every draft came out terrible.

I was up until dawn, fussing over 1500 words, which is crazy. It should have been easy. I can sneeze 1500 words. But go-out-and-change-the-world stuff doesn’t come naturally to me. I hate to put that kind of pressure on people. Why isn’t it good enough to live a decent life? For me, it is. If I can parallel park, I’m doing good.

Also, I was getting bollixed up by the fact that I had heard J. K. Rowling deliver the best commencement speech ever, and she outsells me 8,376,373,838 books to one. So I was having a major case of performance anxiety by the morning, even after I had drafted a generic go-change-the-world speech. I went downstairs to make a pot of coffee and a white light bulb went off in my head.

Literally.

And not in a good way.

There was a white flash of light, but no idea came to me. I blinked again, and my eyes didn’t seem to clear. All I could see were bright prisms of colors, like looking out of a kaleidoscope.

I covered one eye and then the other, but all I could see were fragmented rainbows. I thought I was imagining it and went to look in the mirror, where I saw my own eyes staring back from wacky shards of color.

I had become a Cubist painting.

It wasn’t a good look, for a single girl.

I went back up to the computer, logged into WebMD, and read through my colorful prisms, learning the symptoms of the various eye diseases. I determined that I didn’t have macular degeneration or a detached retina, but the kaleidoscopes weren’t clearing. I remained calm because there weren’t a lot of other choices. Forty-five colorful minutes later, I was considering driving to the emergency room, through what would undoubtedly look like a psychedelic tunnel.

But the whole time I was thinking, what if I went blind? If I had a choice, which sense would I give up?

Sight would not be my first choice, though I have come to meet many wonderful people who have coped so well with their blindness. I’m also partial to smelling things, like lilacs and spaghetti sauce, which I love, or dog breath, which I love even more. And I’ve gotten used to hearing things, though I’d give up the sense of taste in a minute. Then everything would taste like tofu, and I’d lose weight.

But seriously, what would it be like if something I had taken for granted, like my eyesight, was suddenly taken away?

I sat there in my very vibrant haze and realized that tons of people go through this hardship, every day. They get a diagnosis that takes their sight, or their hearing, or their very life.

Just like that.

And my eyes suddenly cleared. No joke. The prisms dropped away, leaving me with a clear view of my computer and a dull headache. In time I called a doctor and found out I had experienced an ocular migraine, which can be brought on by lack of sleep over a 1500-word speech. But the good news was that because of my ocular excitement, I knew which 1500 words to write.

I threw out the change-the-world draft and wrote instead that the graduates should live in the moment. That they don’t know how many moments are allotted to them, in this, their one and only life. That all of the blessings of this earth—as well as their very senses and the regular beat of their heart—aren’t guaranteed to anyone. That interviewers will ask them where they think they’ll be in five years, but life isn’t to be lived in five-year stretches.

Life is moments.

And smells, and tastes, and the sight of your daughter’s face. Or the sound of a kitten’s purr.

So the only time is now.

That they call it commencement day because it’s the beginning of life after college. But the real truth is, every day of life is commencement day.

Every day is a new day in which we wake up and choose how to live. Whether it’s to apply for a job or to ask somebody out on a date. Or buy a sweater or save for a car. Or sell your house and find a better one. Or fall in love. That we choose every action in every day of our lives.