Too Many Options - Sue

Now the next thing is replacement windows.

All of the seasons have a what for. Spring is for new life. Summer is for long evenings nursing sweating glasses of iced tea while watering the lawn. Autumn is for brisk walks in the shimmering foliage and raking leaves. Winter is for hunkering down in a cozy house with hot cocoa, a good book and a fluffy comforter. If you've got a snuggle bunny to share all of that with, it's twice as nice.

One season has what it is NOT for. Winter is not for bracing yourself against the gale that howls through the living room because the windows don't shut tight. Yesterday morning, Dan, the Window Man, came to fix all of that.

My brain does something weird when confronted with too many options. I start looking in too many directions and wires start to frazzle and ignite. Little explosions go off and I initiate shutdown mode. It's a safeguard against complete self-destruction.

It's all because of the time I couldn't choose which balloon I wanted. All of the other seven-year-olds at my party began to fidget. I got to choose first because it was my birthday, but there was yellow, so bright and lively, green, so smooth and luscious, many different blues that depicted all the different shades the sky could be, fiery red, boisterous orange, dashing purple, and on and on. It was the first time I began to wonder who I really was, how I fit in, what my place was in this wacky world. If I was a balloon, what color would I be? I was all of them, yet I had to choose one. The party-goers began to laugh, and then sneer. "Come on!" Marsha Peterson finally demanded, her pigtails bouncing as she flipped her head and crossed her arms. "We want to choose, too.!" I couldn't. Choosing one would mean not choosing all of the rest. It would mean I was narrow-minded and intolerant.

"She can't make a decision!" Claudia Reingold screamed, and then they all threw sense to the wind and dove in, clamoring over each other for their balloons. In the end, I got nothing. In the end, I knew where my place in the world was, and that was no where. I spent years and thousands of therapy dollars trying to undo all of that. I learned how, in most cases, to break many decisions down into fewer decisions. What's for dinner? Let's start with meat. We have three basic choices. Chicken, beef or pork.

And now, Dan the Window Man wanted me to choose which brand, among thousands, of windows to purchase, all with differing advantages and prices. The wires were sizzling. I could hear pops and pings as I started to shut down, my only way to survive.

I gave him my email address and told him five times to get back to me with a price. He finally left and I took a few deep breaths. Winter is coming. The wind will cut like a cleaver through bone, and it will be cold like a silent, stealthy ghost. "You couldn't decide," it will whisper, its pigtails bouncing. "You couldn't decide."

The Prevaricator...Phyllis

You can call my dad a prevaricator. He would start a story and it would go here, then go off track, weaving and winding around, making things up as he went along and never got to the point. We were sitting at the dinner table once in September. I know it was September because I had just brought home a brand new spelling book from school. I accidentally tore the front cover and I was very worried about it. It was fresh and new and I was disappointed that I ripped it. I taped it back together and it was almost like new again. I never was a very good speller. I got Cs in spelling and an occasional D. Even now, when I hit spell check, it sounds like a chainsaw tearing through my work. He would go on and on and the rest of us would look at each other and my mom would smoke a whole pack of cigarettes while he went round and round like a merry-go-round.

You know, the merry-go-rounds at school were big, heavy metal contraptions. Not like the playground equipment now that’s made of colorful nerf. And they were surrounded with asphalt. If you got forty kids on it and got it spinning, the centrifugal force would throw about seven of them off and we wouldn’t see them again for weeks. The teeter totter was fun, too. They were also made of metal and on a hot day, they would burn the skin right off your legs. It was great fun to jump off when your friend was up and you were down, sending her crashing full force to the ground and biting through her tongue. Well, fun for me, anyway. That’s probably why, to this day, I size people up when I first meet them. If they appear to weigh less than me, then yeah, I’ll teeter totter with them.

And so he would go on and on. We would look at our watches, and we weren’t wearing watches. I’ve never owned a nice watch. I’ve gotten Timex watches for gifts and I was very happy with them. I don’t wear a watch nowadays, but I always seem to know about what time it is. I get to work on time. That’s about the only time I really have to be concerned about it. According to Einstein, time is relative. Try using that excuse when you’re late for work. They don’t buy that theory there. They also don’t respond well to the ‘does-anyone-really-know-what-time-it-is’ excuse. “You’re lucky I came in at all” doesn’t go over very well, either.

But if my dad were alive today and if he were telling a story, I would pretend to look at my watch. And I would think, “This is a trait I’m glad I didn’t inherit.”