My mom is of the attitude that you need a man to have a good life. I’ve fought her for 31 years, saying that you need a great career, good friends and enough money to buy fun stuff.
Notice that I’m 32 and while I’d rather be alone than with someone who makes me miserable, you read stories like this about people celebrating their 78th wedding anniversary and, well, it makes you wonder about your own remaining years and what they will — or, *gasp,* won’t — hold.
I find that most of the people in my life are Geminis, and so I have a lil something for those of us camped out in the birthday rut, not to mention any girl who gets a little sad from time to time but who, overall, is doing fine.
I saw this in the Town Courier during a stop at a restaurant after work last night. And I think I need to buy this woman’s poetry book post-haste.
At Twenty-Eight
It seems I get by on more luck than sense
not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood,
breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud.
I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.
At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance
as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude
she counts as daylight virtue and muted
evenings, the inventory of absence.
But this is no sorry spinster story,
just the way days string together a life.
Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.
Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.
I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights,
singing like only a lucky girl can.”At Twenty-Eight” by Amy Fleury is reprinted from “Beautiful Trouble,” Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. The poem was originally published in Southern Poetry Review, Volume 41:2, Fall/Winter 2002.
Also in the same newspaper, I saw that Frommer’s has named a metro D.C. city, Gaithersburg, Md., No. 2 among “Best Places to Raise Your Family: The Top 100 Affordable Communities in the U.S.” Considering it’s in the most affluent county in the nation — where they charge you to drive through a freaking park ($9 for three people in a car! The hell?), that’s quite an achievement.
Behold a sneak preview of the dog’s-breath days of summer. Sweet sweltering Jesus, we’re *down* to a temperature 86 degrees, which would be fine if we weren’t situated in the former swampland-turned-cesspool known as the nation’s capital.
I finally broke down and turned on my A/C Monday night, after lying inert in a puddle of my own drool throughout the day. It’s great now — the cats have stopped whining, although I hate not having windows open because those kids take some epic shits, I tell you. The kalidescope of cat funk is intermingling with my La-Tee-Da effusion lamp (currently burning Now & Zen) and making me ill.
But boy howdy, I dread the gas bill now, as I have the thermostat set just below 80 degrees and the A/C, in two days, has yet to automatically shut itself off because the house can’t stay cool. And it’s in the shade, too. Splendid.