Cheers!

Cheers!: 15 May 2021

My knee resembles a small eggplant. That’s an improvement from the small grapefruit it resembled immediately after I fell on it Sunday evening. My foot caught the one-inch lip from our friends’ concrete driveway into their garage. It was so fast my hands weren’t hurt at all because there was no time to try to break my fall. My knee, and then my eyebrow, broke my fall. I finally gave in and went to a doctor yesterday just to make sure everything was okay. He asked if I’d dented the garage; said my knee looked worse than wounds he’d treated on football players tackled at 90mph. The purple has started to decay into green, not a great look on my two black eyes. I’ve worn more makeup this week than I have in two years combined. I’m not good at makeup. And the crowning glory: this was the first week in, oh, 61 weeks, that I had meetings and appointments every single day. But.

There was a fun event today hosted by my workplace, Upstate Fatherhood Coalition. We hosted a Stroke Awareness Event in our parking lot. Our nursing partners were there to check blood-pressure and talk about prevention. We had some testimonials from folks who were recovering from strokes and from folks whose loved ones had died. We did some funky line dancing. But the best part? Seeing people’s faces.

I am 15 days past my 2nd Pfizer vaccine and it feels amazing. I haven’t seen my co-workers’ beautiful faces in so long! They hadn’t seen mine—with or without black eyes. I saw smiles and dimples and freckles that I’d forgotten how much I loved. Not to mention some fly dance moves. And the hugs! Such good hugs. Like we’re all returning from different long voyages, which I guess, in a way, we are. I left buoyant.

That right there is a statement.

As some readers might know, I struggle with budgeting my energy. Some folks, for whom energy is a taken-for-granted normalcy, might be thinking, ‘budget energy?’. Most definitely. For me, energy is a commodity. I try not to live in a scarcity mentality, but I’m protective of my energy, because I don’t have the bottomless well energy that other people do. Moreover, I don’t receive energy easily. Some people gain energy from exercising or accomplishing tasks or having a great conversation. I enjoy those things and often feel proud or even righteous about them, but it’s rare that I acquire energy. It just feels like I used energy well. As opposed to energy drains—like arbitrating children’s arguments or waiting on hold for customer support or repetitive busywork.

So leaving an event with energy? Especially since I’m kinda shy in crowds? One for the record books.

I’ve told my children that if they burn through all my good will (read: energy) early in a given day, their requests are less and less likely to be met with Yes. I’m trying to be more Yes; I’ve been consciously working on it for several years. But I often remind Jack and Emma that my Yes comes more frequently if they put some effort into asking better questions. Ask me questions that are more likely to get to the Yes you want, instead of pestering me for loads of things you don’t actually want, in the hopes that you’ll wear me down to Yes for *something*.

Clifton Fadiman was an editor and critic who died in 1999 but was born today, May 15th in 1904. I love this statement of his: “When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.”

The same is true, I think, in re-reading myself from time to time.

I’m trying to be more Yes, but I’m also better about not letting a No set the tone for the rest of the day. I know how energy functions for me and am better about acknowledging when I need a break, or how I need to pace myself. Two black eyes and an eggplant knee (or, hooray! COVID) don’t need to keep me home when I can love on some long-missed friends.

I find myself, once again, immensely grateful for this life. Life lived with others again!

So, just for this month, instead of doubling down on this essay, I’m going to go enjoy life! I’m going to take us to a cookout with people we haven’t seen in more than a year. When we get home I’m going to let my kids run wild outside way past bedtime. And I’m going to rejoice in having my sweet out-of-town brothers come over for whiskey and cigars and laughter.

Cheers!