Third night in a
row out on the town. I’m dizzy with the excitement of it all. Well, not really,
but it’s been fun. It’s Wednesday night, dinner with Betty night, but tonight
we had a special treat. My longtime (at least forty years) friend Linda came in
from Granbury, and the three of us went to the Wine Haus, had good wine, food
from Chadra, and lots of catching up. Such fun. Glad to see Linda, who flits
here and there about the world—from Dubai to Angel Fire to South Padre—and doesn’t
make it to Fort Worth often enough. Betty and Linda both had pizza, but I
indulged in lamb chops and mashed potatoes and ordered stuffed dates for the
table. Too full to eat all the dates, but they were so good. Nice evening.
Comments on last
nights blog made me realize I needed to clarify impressions of my life, lest I
sound like Pollyanna dancing my way through life in bright red shoes, turning
everything I touch to gold, every minute to joy. As I said last night, I’ve had
my hard knocks: the deaths of my parents and several people close to me; a
difficult divorce; a lifelong battle with anxiety (the doctor says I’m just not
wired like other people—I don’t know how helpful that is). My heart has been
broken by a couple of good men and bruised by a few not so good. I am neither a
best-selling mystery writer nor a well-respected literary author—I’m just a
yeoman writer. In the last three years or so I’ve had several difficult health
crises, with the result that I can no longer walk without assistance and my
vision is slightly impaired, my heart slightly off-kilter. I cannot hop in the
car and go to the grocery or out for lunch. My outings have to be carefully
planned, and I necessarily rely on others. Despite my joy in my cottage, I miss
many things about life in the house that was home to me for twenty-five years,
and despite what sounds like a gay social life, I spend long hours alone in the
cottage. Some days loom long and empty.
But I choose not
to write about those things. I choose, for instance, not to write about the
heartbreak of a dissolving marriage but to focus on the joy I found in raising
four children as a single parent—they taught me more than I could ever hope to
teach them. I choose to be happy and to write about happiness. Like self-pity,
happiness feeds on itself.
The best thing my
ex-mother-in-law could say to others was, “I wish you a lotta luck.” I always
wanted to scream, “I don’t believe in luck. We make our own luck…and our own
happiness.”
