The right words will come, finally, in their own time like my little dog Freddy comes to the door wanting back inside the house. Both the words and Freddy come when they’re ready and not before. This used to really irritate me – the timing, I mean. You know those people who deliver the perfectly timed quip and everyone at the table throws their heads back screaming and laughing? That’s not me, and, oh, how often I’ve wished it were! To be the Misty Copeland of conversation: agile, smooth, and light on my feet. Alas, my cogent thoughts show up a couple of days later when I’m out walking Freddy, who certainly does not care. So, it’s not that I never know what to say, it’s just that my contribution might congeal in two to three business days. And you know what? That’s okay because I’m not a public defender trying to save someone’s life and I’m not a television news anchor.
I’m a wife and mother and nostalgic member of Gen-RR—that’s Generation Roller Rink, which for those of my demographic and vintage is way more on point than “Gen-X.” We skated in circles under a disco ball to the groves of Kool & The Gang and Hall & Oates. We are stamped with the ink of an unsupervised adolescence the likes of which our own children can’t even dream.
After roller skating, but before I married into the U.S. Navy and became a stay-at-home mama, other experiences tattooed me. I worked at a newspaper and at The White House and at a sandwich shop among other endeavors. There is so much I might have said about all those adventures at the time, but I was busy. That’s what this blank page is for, to tell the stories I might have told back then along with the stories I might have told last week. It’s not that I’m less busy now. It’s that I’ve learned to breathe and stretch and be grateful that the words come whenever they do, confident that slow is not the worst thing. I mean, what if the right words never showed up? Or worse, what if the wrong words came at the wrong time? That’s never good.
There will be no politics here, nor life hacks. I won’t tell you for whom to vote or what to put in your air fryer or how to improve the look of your neck. If I possessed such information, I promise I would share. What I have to offer instead is one maturing woman’s stories and observations. I hope to make you laugh and touch your heart. I will try to use all the right words.