Eat the Damn Cake

I went on a walking tour of Brooklyn the other day, with my visiting bonus mom and Bear and some other people we didn’t know.  I learned that when the Brooklyn Bridge was constructed, it was the tallest thing on the horizon. Hard to imagine! I learned some other stuff, too, and I already forget most of it.

One of the women on the tour turned out to have gone to grad school at the same place as me, and she had lived in the same neighborhood during.

“Remember Gray’s Papaya?” she said. “Remember Koronet’s pizza? I think I gained twenty pounds.”

“Oh, I remember,” I said. And we laughed.

We had a little moment of bonding. The way women do when they talk about how much weight they’ve gained.

I think most women bond over college this way. I have had the conversation hundreds of times, now.

“Remember freshman year? All I ate was ice cream.”

“Me too. I ate ice cream three meals a day.”

“I gained twenty pounds.”

“Me too! I totally gained twenty pounds!”

We’ve all gained twenty pounds during some ill-advised period of ice cream and pizza eating. That’s what being a woman is about.

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When I was little, I loved to climb. So I tied my sheets together and climbed out of my window. I couldn’t get back up, though.

I climbed onto the long, sloping roof from the top of the garden fence, and then I climbed to the peak. I climbed trees, when the branches were the right distance apart. I climbed onto the overhang above the back deck. I climbed onto the deck itself, which was high up, wedging my feet in the cracks in the diagonal beams that supported it.

And then one day, I didn’t like climbing anymore. And then one day after that, I was so scared of heights, my breath caught when I came near the edge of something. In the Time Warner Center, on the fourth floor, standing by the glass railing took resolve. On the Brooklyn Bridge, sometimes I look down and, through the slats, I can see cars far, far below, and it seems like I’m walking on air, and my heart picks up pace.

Zip-lining in Costa Rica was a failure. Everyone else loved it. Everyone who has been has a story about how great it is. I still remember what I was thinking when I was dangling over a green, misty canyon on a trembling line, “I am not supposed to fly! I’m a person!” After a childhood of wishing I could fly! What a disappointment.

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There are a couple big reasons why I don’t do yoga.

1. Everyone else does it

2. I know already that I’m bad at it

3. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that people should actually be able to be really bad at

(4. It has this spirituality edge that makes me uncomfortable)

#4 isn’t as big. I can deal with that.

(source)

My mom’s back is messed up. She got a scary diagnosis. She is one of those people who isn’t good at talking about it when something’s wrong. For most of my life, I can’t remember her being sick, because she was so good at not being sick. Even when she was actually sick, she kept going like nothing was wrong, and I only knew when Dad said, “Mom’s not feeling good today.”

“Wait– what?”

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