The keys to a happy new year

There are four ways that any given day can pan out. ONE: You wake up in a good mood and you have a good day. TWO: You wake up in a lousy mood and have a fantastic day. THREE: You wake up in a good mood and have a horrible day. FOUR: You wake up in a shit mood and have a shit day. And on January 1, 2011 my day turned out to be a solid THREE.

We were in Tahoe with friends for a long weekend of skiing, sledding and ringing in the New Year. I woke up around 7:30 and the house was quiet, so I lay there for a while listening to the MR. snore. I let him do that some times because I know he loves it. Usually about 20 snores is all I can take before I politely ask him to roll over. But it was New Year's, so I gave him 25.

Opening the blinds, I was greeted with an even bigger winter wonderland than we'd had the day before. I've never seen so much snow in my life as when we first pulled up to the house. It took the MR. over an hour to shovel a path to the front door! And over night, another foot-and-a-half of fresh white powder had silently fallen.

Downstairs, our godson Jake and his dad were starting to shuffle around, getting ready to go to Jake's ski lesson. Realizing they'd need a ride, I got dressed, put on my boots and bounced downstairs. No foolin', I bounced. It was a new year! A new beginning! This day and 2011 were surely going to ROCK! Because 2010 didn't really turn out the way we'd hoped on the whole becoming-a-family front.

To save some time since Jake and his dad were running a tad late, I decided to go ahead and warm up the car. Broom and keys in hand, I headed outside and made my way up the MR.'s award-winning path, making fresh tracks the entire way. Rounding a big snow drift at the top of my trek, all I could see were the wheels of our car. The entire thing was covered in almost two feet of snow. For whatever reason, I decided to start in the back. The snow was so light and fluffy that I could literally just brush it off with a broom. Piece of cake, I thought.

Working my way around the sides and to the front took about 20 minutes. I was just finishing up clearing off the hood, when suddenly I looked down at my gloves. A flame of panic worked its way up from the pit of my gut to the middle of my throat. After what seemed like 8,000,000 slow-moving minutes, my brain finally found the words. The car keys. THE KEYS! Where were the keys? I'd had them in my hand. And now I all had was a broom handle. Holy shit. Holy shit. HOLY SHIT!

Looking at the ground, all I saw were miles and miles of white snow. Yep, I was in hell and it had frozen over. Frantically, I started searching the pile around my feet, digging through and scooping up snow all around me. Nothing. The panic was now turning into a full-on anxiety attack. No, no, no, no, NOOOOOOO! This couldn't be happening. It was New Year's Day. It was supposed to be a good year. It couldn't be starting like this! But it was. And I wanted to hurl. But instead, I ran full throttle down the path to the house.

Barging through the door, I ransacked the room, thinking that maybe just maybe I'd set the keys down and hadn't really carried them out with the broom. I dumped my purse out, hoping and praying I'd put them in there. But I hadn't. They weren't on the counter. They weren't in the bathroom. They were flat-out NOT in the house. Nope, they were buried in an avalanche of snow and I had no idea where. Happy F-ing New Year.

As my best friend tried to talk me off the cliff I'd settled myself on, I heard the MR. walking around upstairs. I knew what I had to do. Slowly, I faced my fate and made my way up the stairs, my legs feeling heavier and heavier with every step I took.

Once I got to the top, I just stood there until the MR. noticed me. He was a little fuzzy from the New Year's Eve revelry, but he registered pretty quickly that all was not well in the land of Darrah. "What's wrong?," he asked with great concern. "Are you crying?" And with a quivering lip, I answered: "I messed up real bad. I lost the keys in the snow." His eyes widened and then he said the one thing I never remotely anticipated: "My wedding ring was on there. I took it off before I went skiing yesterday." And that's when I really lost it.

My shoulders slouched forward and I succumbed to total defeat. Giving me a big hug, the MR. tried to comfort me, telling me it was all going to be okay. But what else could he do? His wife had turned into a flood of salty tears. In reality, I'm sure he was thinking the same thing I was: We're screwed.

For an hour, we all looked for those damn keys. Even our godson was out there with his little purple shovel. We cleared every inch of snow within three feet of the car, on all sides. And nothing. We found nothing. Staring at the 20-foot mound of snow in front of the car that had been pushed there by the plow, I had a thought. What if I'd flung the keys with my sweeping motion? Lord, help me. What if the keys flung out of my hand and into that Mt. Everest-sized snowbank?

Desperate beyond reason, I started pulling the snow down from the pile in large chunks, pausing between each effort to scan the snow. Ten minutes in, I'd found nothing. But there was nowhere else to look at this point. So I continued to pull and scan, pull and scan. And then. There they were. The *$##$#&*#$# keys.

I wish I could say I learned some kind of lesson in all this, but for the life of me all I can come up with is this: Don't carry a broom and your keys in the same hand when you're clearing off your car after a snowstorm. And don't hang the entire balance of your year on a key ring. Because you just might lose it in a snowbank.


A re-enactment of the MRS. losing her keys...

Happy Holidays from the Mrs.

The Game of LIFE

About this time every year, I get nostalgic for a lot of things—for my old friends, for changing leaves, for the sound of football games (a.k.a. tailgates) and, quite simply, for the Midwest. Yet, at the same time I’m filled with happy fall memories, a familiar sadness seems to settle inside my soul. It’s kinda like Sunshine Barbie and Debbie Downer deciding to throw a party together.

Someone somewhere told me once that a shift in seasons can trigger memories deep in your heart—both happy and sad—and sometimes it takes a while for your head to catch up and get a clue. For me, it’s the shift to fall that dredges up a mixed bag of emotions.

I remember in vivid detail driving home to St. Louis after a weekend with friends in Bloomington, Indiana. It was September of 1997. Rather than take the highway, I decided to drive a two-lane backroad for as long as I could. A Son Volt cassette was blasting, the windows were down and colorful trees lined both sides of the road.

I’d just accepted a job in San Francisco and knew that my life was changing. Forever. And the tears just came rolling out. They were happy tears for making a dream come true all by myself, but they were also big fat sad tears for all that I was leaving behind. In my mind, it was the end of an era and I don’t handle good-byes well…with people, places or moments in time. Little did I know then that the biggest good-bye of my life was yet to come. A month later, on October 30, 1997, my youngest sister died.

I still moved to San Francisco in November and went about trying to create a life for myself, but honestly the first years after my sister’s death are, at best, a blur. I look back at pictures and I hardly recognize myself. I was lost. Profoundly lost. Somehow, some way I scraped and clawed my way out of the black hole of depression, sadness, loss and loneliness I’d fallen into and began to see glimpses of blue sky. But it was hard. Damn hard. Before I knew it, my calendar said September 2002. And a few weeks later, I met the MR. How fitting it was to meet the man that was to become my best friend…in the fall.

After going through two miscarriages in the last two years (both in the fall) and a failed match with a birth mom in September this year, I decided it was time to stack my deck with some happy fall memories. To be with friends. To be in the Midwest. To laugh and laugh and laugh. Because I was sick and tired of tears. So I headed to Indianapolis to spend the weekend with the same two friends I was with back in September of 1997 when I accepted my job in San Francisco.

We drank Bud Lights. We laughed. We played Go Fish with my friend’s two daughters. We sang “Don’t Stop Believin” at the top of our lungs in the car on the way to dinner. We danced in the living room ‘til 1 a.m. We visited IU and reminisced about working at Kilroy’s Bar as seniors. We talked about our college loves (and how they were mostly fools). One of us did a cartwheel in Dunn Meadow (not me). We tooled around the cul de sac on Betsy’s Vespa back at the house. We shot hoops (at least we tried) in the neighbor’s driveway. We drank more Bud Lights. And then we played the board game LIFE.

Now I really didn’t know much about the game. My family didn’t play LIFE when I was a kid. We liked CLUE (Miss Scarlett in the Study with the Candlestick, anyone?) and I also remember playing King’s Corner with our babysitter Mrs. Lilly, who seemed at least 150-years-old to me at the time. So it was a learning curve with me and LIFE. The first question I had to answer before I could spin the dial was: Do you want to go to college? If I said yes, I’d start the game $40,000 in debt. Well, that just sounded ridiculous, so I decided to take my chances and skip higher education all together.

Once that decision was made, I drew two cards to determine my occupation and salary. Turns out I was an entertainer who made $70,000 a year. Now I’m assuming that by “entertainer”, the makers of LIFE didn’t mean stripper, so in my mind, I pictured myself with an acoustic guitar touring the country, singing and writing songs. And that’s when it started to get a little weird.

It was like I went into fantasy mode, creating this parallel life for myself. Let me tell you, it was FUN! I bought a cool two-level loft in a big city. I got married. I had a son. I adopted twins. I changed careers and became a cop who made $100,000 a year. I won the Nobel Peace Prize. And last but not least, I retired with $1.6 million. I gotta be honest, I didn’t want the game to end.

But end it did, leaving me to continue playing my own personal game of LIFE, where seasons change and people pass, where Sunshine Barbie and Debbie Downer hang out, where all I can do is move forward one square at a time.

Conversations to look forward to...

Taking care of business

Walking past the hallway bathroom the other night, I glanced in (because the door was wide open) only to find the MR. standing in front of the toilet…peeing. Rather than keep on walking, I actually stopped in the doorway and asked him a question about something random, to which he answered me by…farting. He thought that was pretty funny. I, on the other hand, did not. And that’s when reality hit me like a martini hangover: I was actually engaging in a conversation with my husband as he peed and farted. How the heck did we get here? And when the heck did we stop closing the bathroom door?

Now, to be clear, the door is shut when anything resembling #2 is involved. Thankfully that is still considered a classified situation. But if it’s a quick pee, well, we seem to have adopted an open-door policy. I’ll admit, I’m just as guilty as the MR. on this one. For whatever reason, that extra little step of closing the door just seems like a bother.

It wasn’t always like this. When we were dating and even when we were living in our first apartment together, we always closed the door. Always. Yet somewhere along the way in our 1620+ days of marriage, things changed. I remember the first time I left the door open and the MR. found me sitting so daintily on the pot. He couldn’t stop laughing and I think he actually said it was cute to see me so vulnerable. Funny thing about a lot of habits that seem "cute" when you're just getting to know someone is that they seldom hold their charm over the long haul.

One of the best things about buying a house is that we no longer have to share a bathroom. Our apartment in the city only had one teeny tiny bathroom and it was a challenge, to say the least. I think the lowest point came one night when I was brushing my teeth and the MR. sauntered in, lifted up the toilet seat and started…peeing. Now I don’t know if it was the smell of someone else’s pee or the random drop that splashed onto my cheek as I leaned over the sink (GROSS!) that did me in, but from that point forward I insisted that all potty business had to be done when the other person was out of the room. (Clearly, I forgot to also include a clause about closing the door.)

When we first moved into our house, the MR. was bummed about the idea of separate bathrooms because he said it felt like we were roommates. Truth be told, I also think he was a little bitter about having to share his bathroom with the cat. I don’t blame him, really. She’s one pretty kitty with one stinkin’ arse. But the master bath was way too small to share, let alone house the litter box, so there really wasn’t another option. Besides, I’d had enough of finding his nose hairs in the sink. And I’m sure, if he was honest with himself, he’d had enough of cleaning my long locks out of the shower drain.

If you think about it, there are a lot of names for that most sacred of spaces wherein the toilet lives. Bathroom. Loo. Water closet. WC. Lavatory. Commode. Privy. Shithouse. Shitter. Latrine. Crapper. Boardroom. Office. When I was in the first grade, a substitute teacher asked if anyone wanted to go to the “RESTroom”. Thinking that this was some marvelous hidden room where I could take an afternoon nap, I raised my hand. After all, first grade is exhausting, is it not? Seeing my hand in the air, the sub said loudly so all could hear, “Darrah, you just went to the bathroom!” And that’s how I learned that a bathroom is also called a restroom, much to my profound disappointment and embarrassment.

Speaking of elementary school, I can only thank my lucky stars that we didn’t have computers way back in the 70s and early 80s. Because, you see, on the earlier versions of Word (and potentially recent versions too), if you spell-checked “Darrah”, the first word that popped up was diarrhea. Can you imagine? I would’ve been Diarrhea Darrah for all of eternity.

As it turned out, the only nickname I had as a kid was Big Ears and it didn’t stick past 2nd grade. My next official nickname came in middle school when I was christened Double-D Darrah because I developed some rather large ta-tas before most girls. Living with that nickname was hardly a cakewalk, but I still think Diarrhea Darrah would have been worst. I mean, I can just imagine how the kids would have taunted me at recess.

“When Darrah’s slidin’ into first
and her pants start to burst
Diarrhea, diarrhea.

When her stomach really hurts
and she knows it’s the squirts
Diarrhea, diarrhea.”

The moral of the story? For the love of God, spell-check your favorite names before you give one to your kid. As a side note, you should also be careful what you wish for. I always let the MR. read my rants, raves and revelations before I post them because I think it's important that he feels comfortable with whatever I write about our personal lives. Funny thing is that after reading this particular rant, the MR. started closing the door every time he goes into the bathroom. And for some odd and potentially disturbing reason, I feel left out.

For more stanzas of The Diarrhea Song, go here or for a sing-along, go here.