Another year of pluses and minuses

Published December 28. 2015 11:29AM

         

This is the time of year when most of us take inventory, not only of our current assets but also of our losses. Sometimes these pluses and minuses are counter intuitive, like I lost weight and gained some back, so much for my assets fitting into last year’s jeans.

That all this counting and summing up comes at the end of something we can’t change, and at the beginning of a promise we make to ourselves to do better and achieve more, is eye opening. If we’re honest we know most likely the new gym membership will lapse by Valentine’s Day, a heart box of chocolates is the last straw, and the credit card balance will continue to increase, new tires and a transmission will do that.

Each year, I tell myself that this time it will be different, but no matter how hard I try Dec. 31 does not wash away the disclaimers of the previous year’s bad behavior any more than Jan. 1 sets me up for perfection. It may take months or maybe years to erase over indulgence around the waist, and unless I feed my well-worn little rectangle of plastic to the shredder, the disappointment of financial gluttony will probably last a lifetime.

I’m not into resolutions but I am into at least researching alternatives as a result of how last year was lived.

Like, I will try to cook more. My husband does most of the cooking and he’s pretty good at it. He should be, I taught him. I will try to stick to the shopping list when I go to the supermarket but turning down a BOGO (buy one get one) on Snickers snack size has me purchasing four, though I originally intended to buy one — for my husband of course.

I will also try to be kinder, nicer and more pleasant. I certainly have no way of judging whether I am able to achieve this monumental self-adjustment because I hesitate to ask the ones I love, and those with whom I associate, “Hey, was I nicer to you today.” I mean really, what might the consequences be if I was not?

I love the holiday season but I’ve never been one to get into the whole New Year’s Eve thing. When I was younger I don’t think I ever had an actual New Year’s Eve date. I’m not sure what that says about me other than champagne, streamers and celebrating with a bunch of inebriated regretful dreamers is not my thing. Now that I am older, my husband and I fall asleep after Wheel of Fortune anyway.

One New Years’ Eve my husband and I promised our young daughters we’d stay up and watch the Times Square celebration with them. The girls wanted to see what the ball in Time’s Square was all about. I did well, a couple of cups of coffee helped, but my husband dozed on the couch up to the point when the hands on the clock hit double digits, then he conked out at full snore. The girls and I took turns trying to pitch popcorn into his open mouth. None of us made points.

For almost my entire life January has been just another month, nothing special, nothing monumental, until 2014. That’s when January presented our family with a new life, a look into the future and a clean slate to get it right. This new life, a little girl, will be 2 years old this January and has a slate so shiny and new with promise, it gleams. And her inventory, all pluses so far and forever.

There's a child in all of us

Published December 04. 2015 9:56AM

 

A few years ago I bought my nephew, the youngest member of the family at the time, a grabber-toy. It was an impulse buy of a two foot long, red and black plastic toy with a handle at one end and big silver pincers at the other. Squeeze the handle and the pincers open and close. It was like one of those picker-upper sticks senior citizens use to retrieve medication bottles that fall on the floor or cans of prune juice from the top shelf.

My nephew loved the toy, but got very upset because he couldn’t play with it, the adults took it over. Grown men fought over who got to retrieve cans of beer from the cooler without getting their hands wet. Sneaking appetizers off a plate from three feet away became quite a scene as did pinching bottoms. Finally my nephew got to play with his toy just as dinner was served. He had to set it aside until we were finished.

I always suspected, but that afternoon proved, that no matter how old we become, the child in us always remains.

I have found that when buying toys for my granddaughter I tend to lean towards the ones I know I will enjoy playing with, right along with her. A train set for little ones seems to be a favorite of ours. When I babysit at my house, it’s the bag of tracks, trains and station pieces she chooses. We set it up on the coffee table and take turns pushing the small engine around the figure-eight tracks and under the small bridge. Sydney sets up the signs and operates the gates. We both supply the choo-choo sound effects. The trick of the train adventure is keeping the characters, a little boy and girl, away from the dog, a miniature dachshund with an affinity for dropped snacks and baby toys. My floor stays clean but the poor little plastic kids already have chew marks.

This year, with this sweet little toddler in our midst, the lament to experience a train ride with Mr. and Mrs. Santa rose above the small crowd of young adults in our immediate family.

“Let’s get real,” I said to my two daughters and their husbands, “Sydney is not even two. She hasn’t a clue who Santa is.”

“But we do,” my youngest daughter, (the Auntie), said.

That’s when the child in all of us, stuck its head out of adulthood, smiled, jumped up and down and said “please, please, please can we go?”

When our daughters were Santa-age we took them to see the man in red, and his very patient wife, on a train full of little ones screaming for the big guy’s attention. Funny thing is that none of us really remember the outing. We know we went, but the kids either fell asleep or my husband and I experienced cocoa and kids overload and blocked out the event.

This year will be different, we all have cell phones with cameras to document the momentous occasion. Because I’m the grandmother I can sit back and take in the pleasure of watching the kids without having to actually act like a parent. I get to experience the excitement and the wonderment of what it’s like to believe that if you dream it, and whisper it, the special man in red can make that dream come true. And that’s just for the adults on the train, the kids, well, they already know who fulfills their wants and dreams; it’s the driver of the big brown truck who leaves boxes on the front steps.

 

Wine, water and walking

Published October 16. 2015 4:32

At the end of September I returned from a 10-day vacation in Italy a few pounds lighter than the day I left. It’s a mystery to me because I ate what everybody else ate and just as late. Try sleeping peacefully after a thanksgiving-like huge Italian meal every night. Wine at every meal, two bottles of water on every table, gas or no gas, (aka fizzy or flat), and 10 days of non-stop travel. From the Swiss Alps to Venice, Florence, Rome and the Vatican, we hoofed many miles a day. I’m thinking that the wine, water and walking was my secret weapon. Actually, it was probably the water and walking because I not a fan of wine.

My husband and I don’t travel much, (Lake George five years ago), so flying over the pond to Europe was a big deal. Because I was told Italians don’t hang out in blue jeans and t-shirts like we do, I bought a whole new travel wardrobe. It now fills my closet as a reserve for job interviews, weddings and funerals.

The last time I saw so many cigarette smokers, cigarettes cost 50 cents a pack. In Italy you can turn your lungs black for 10 times that now. Like here, you’re not allowed to light-up in restaurants, so running a gauntlet of outside smelly smokers is the norm. Unlike here, your dog, (not only a service dog but your pet), may accompany you to dinner in restaurants. The ones we saw were always well behaved, not so with some children, but that’s another story.

We started out in the north of Italy. The breathtaking mountainous vistas and villages looked exactly like every WWII movie I’ve ever watched. On the train to Switzerland the scenes were so spectacular that even though we weren’t in Austria, I half-expected to see a young Julie Andrews break out in “the hills are alive with music.”

I cannot express how beautiful Turano and the Italian Alps are. As a microclimate protected from the harshness of the high regions by the mountains, the valley was lush with palm trees and an autumn harvest of every fruit imaginable, plus miles and miles of vineyards clinging to the mountains on steep slopes almost to the tree line. My husband’s grandparents were from that area. No wonder their gardens, grapes and wine making here became family tradition.

To elaborate on the jaw-dropping scenic sights, or the magnificent artistic and architectural monuments to Italian creativity, would only serve as redundancy in regards to travel brochures. Visually Italy is indeed everything everyone says it is, spectacular, beautiful and very old with a modern mix far ahead of many.

The only serious negative I can come up is the life threatening, aggressive and absolutely maddening way Italians drive. Two-way city streets are as narrow as a driveway. Even though cars are tiny, trucks and buses are not. Put a bunch of buzzed-by-expresso Italians behind the wheels of a Fiat, throw in a couple of full-size tour buses, a handful of delivery trucks, half a dozen insane scooter-drivers, (who make the white line their lane), toss in the six of us in a nine person van with a GPS which assumed Rome, N.Y., was Rome, Italy, and you have a mix that would curl every insurance agent’s hair. It had me whimpering in the back seat.

Maneuvering the narrow mountain roads wasn’t that bad, it was worse. Imagine driving down from the summit of Mt. Washington in two-way heavy traffic at 60 mph, with scooters whizzing by, and you get a sense of how lucky I felt to be alive when I sat down to a late night dinner every night.

Italy is spectacular, we loved it. And I have the memories and wardrobe to prove it.