A new life

“I’ve decided I’m not going to take note of today,” she said, mother of six, grandmother of 16, who shoo’d youngest Patrick to kindergarten and went to work for 50 years, mostly at 6 a.m. Said so in her jammies. Floppily slippered. Uncoiffed. But with an inviting smile.

She was responding to a simple question, which, since my culinary comfort reaches no further than toasting toast, I delivered with a mixture of humility and, since I had important things to do, urgency: “Breakfast?”

There never has been enough time in our days. You could call us, comically, a middle-class power couple, she more by dollar necessity, me more by choice. Both of us were always, always working. But here she was taking a day off.

Lifelong I emulated our American patron saint go-getter Benjamin Franklin, with a large desk calendar where I plotted chronologically a full schedule every day ranging anywhere from Little League, to PTA, to City Council meetings, and where I enjoyed tactile nightly ecstasy literally crossing off work done, jobs completed.

This aspect of my life can best be summed up in an anecdote that lives forever naked in family lore. Futilely trying to rouse my slumbered teen sons 8 a.m. of a Saturday morning, I cursed them to a future adulthood forever lacking peace and complacency, thundering “This day is shot” deep into their subconscious.

Such has been our long lives. I am 85, as you well know, she close by. Whirlwind. Merry-go-Round. Treadmill. Yet this day she was on Sabbatical, a self-confident, self-satisfied princess of poise and peace, saying, no, that will not be my life today.

Watershed moment. Made me ponder. I’ve had plenty of “doing.” But how about just “being”? But, especially, have I spent enough time “loving”? I wonder what the kids would say. But seems to me that now she opened a door to a new life. And, perhaps, one together. And, perhaps, before it is too late.