~ a column by Colleen O’Brien
The best thing about being alive — at least right now at this age when I’ve lost beloveds, friends, acquaintances, movie stars, authors, columnists — is when I have something to look forward to.
It comes to this: I’m happy to learn it, eager to employ it . . . that life doesn’t have to be a big deal, like a trip to Europe or a train ride home to lure me into anticipation. It can be about buying a donut.
I decided this morning during my doctor appointment that I deserved a donut. It’s not that I dislike the nurse practitioner. (In five years with this practice, chosen by me because the doctor is a she and she’s in town rather than 30 miles away, I’ve yet to meet the doc that my NP works with.) The NP told me no awful new news that would push me to have to placate myself; it’s just that I see enough of various doctor’s offices – the staff are all efficient, friendly, funny and can tolerate me for 12 minutes – it’s just that I felt like a donut.
As soon as I thought of rewarding myself for something – endurance? donut greed? — I was okay with the 12 minutes and the boredom in the eyes of the NP. Perhaps I’m a boring patient; there’s not too much wrong with me that meds aren’t fixing. Planning a donut as a reward for nothing beyond being alive just suited my mood. I had something to look forward to, and I did so with a glee not usually associated with donuts. Today was different. I was on to something.
I was planning on stopping at the supermarket but saw a Winchell’s and decided I could do a drive-thru. I got in line. I ordered one frosted old-fashioned. The kid told me I could have an old-fashioned but they didn’t come glazed. I ordered a glazed donut. I didn’t take a bite but headed for home. I decided to go whole hog: I’d been told to quit drinking coffee, but I need coffee with a donut. I’d already broken the sweets rule by promising myself a donut, a noun on the do-not-eat list.
I made a production of it – fancy plate, favorite cup, dainty napkin, a view out the window, Tony Bennet singing with Lady Gaga. Ahhh.
It tasted like cardboard.
And the frosted part was gooey, like it was yesterday’s frosting. My glee fled, but I ate the whole thing with no umbrage toward the lack of yumminess; my taste buds fled long ago and thus contribute to the cardboard taste of things, so I couldn’t blame the donut shop, and I certainly was over blaming my feeble taste buds.
The good part, for there is a good part to eating a tasteless treat: it wasn’t the donut itself that made me happy but the looking forward to the donut of memory from Saba Saba’s donut shop on the East side. A nickel apiece. Winchel’s is 30 times that AND tasteless. And I’m still happy.
It’s taken me this long to make up occasions for treating myself? Well, even this makes me laugh. I am suddenly awash in dozens of things I can consciously celebrate. The tinier the better. I need to throw more tiny parties for myself for just about anything going on in my sedate, ruminative, hermit-like existence that right now revolves around books and NETFLIX. Enough already.
Anticipation ideas abound:
*I will go to the library with true anticipation for a book I read 50 years ago and want to read again because I can’t quite remember why it was not appropriate for my age at the time (Frank Yerby’s A Woman Called Fancy). No longer the usual quick selection of a few random books and home to find none of them satisfying. Yerby might be just as boring now as so many books are, but the anticipation? That’s all I really need.
*I have decided that for my house I need a new piece of art that is not made by me. I will go to second-hand shops until something strikes my eye, and I’ll buy it, dust the frame and hang it somewhere, maybe even on the inside door of a closet.
*I’ll take a page from my daughter‘s self-care and buy flowers for myself each week and place them around in my house in little vases so I can enjoy them at every turn.
*I was given a generous plate of leftover salad after lunching at my friend’s. I’d eaten the mixture at her house, but it was tasteless to me of the taste-free buds, so today I dolled it up – with high anticipation. Adding to the red beans, water chestnuts, raw carrots and celery, black olives and hard-boiled egg, I made it better with green olives, bleu cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, mushrooms, olive oil and dill. Looking for more spices, mixing all this – truly a period of anticipation.
*This enhancement of salad made me think that soon I may give a dinner party, not exactly like in the old day, but the kind where I set the table, light the candles, pour the wine. . . and at the end slice the pie. With the guests will come the real meal – hors d’oeuvres, entree, vegetable, salad, the artisanal bread. That means five guests. I look forward to this as something joyous to do. Haven’t sent out the invites yet, but that, too, may happen. The looking forward is the point, right? TThere are surely a ton of things I can anticipate, revel in, plan, do – or not. Anticipation can last a long time. I can recall the anticipation of my warrior returning from the war. It was going to be weeks before he actually arrived on American soil, and the anticipation lasted in full bloom all that time. My current anticipations aren’t quite as lurid as that one often was, but anticipation reveals itself in many forms of happy, pleasant, even the still enticing once-romantic dreaming.
Years ago, I wrote a short story about an older woman sick and tired of her crabby mate. She played Liberace records over and over and anticipated dancing with the vaunted diamond-encrusted pianist. One day, she danced into the street in front of her house on time to get run over by the trolley that was bringing her husband home from work. The anticipation of that fictional character was apparently how to escape her husband. My current love affair with anticipation so far has no sordid fade-out; just the memory of a plot from “Blithe Spirit,” a famous Noel Coward play of making yourself happy by anticipating the disappearance of an already dead wife who is haunting the main character.
I can’t think of anyone or any thing I’d like to get out of my life. But I do know I can fanaticize and perhaps employ a few anticipations to fill the hours when I refuse to watch the news, read the politics, listen to the hate. The denouement of my life is going to be anticipation. Eager anticipation, not the anxious kind.
A P.S. to this column is that in reading a column I wrote in May of !989, I am surprised that I wrote then of similar ennui to today’s.
