In August 2008, I suffered a concussion in an auto accident. Another driver — who told the cops that he was going 35 mph, but humans being humans, probably was going 10 mph faster than that —  T-boned the driver’s side of my car. I have read a lot in the news lately about concussions, particularly regarding collegiate and professional athletes, and I imagine that you have, too. So as a public service, I am going to tell you about my concussion.

First, a disclaimer. I am not a doctor, and I do not attempt here to give you any medical explanation. If I did, there is a 100% chance that it would be all wrong. The only “medical” thing that I will tell you is that the Mayo Clinic website defines a concussion as “a traumatic injury that alters the way your brain functions.” (That may not explain a lot about a concussion, but it may explain a lot about me.)

In any event, I certainly was not in the market for a concussion at 9:15 that morning. I had just dropped the kids off and was headed into work. The light turned green, and I accelerated, and then the car was no longer moving. I remember thinking, “This is weird. The car is no longer moving.” When I woke up, firefighters had surrounded the car, looking into the windows like I was an animal at the zoo. I did what any reasonable person would do: I reached for my cell phone. After many, many tries, I was finally able to dial the seven digits of my husband’s number. I gave him this reassuring message: “I am surrounded by firemen but I am not on fire. I repeat: I AM NOT ON FIRE.”

At this point, I had no idea that I had suffered a concussion or even that I had been knocked unconscious. Those realizations came later. All I remember was the corsage of pain spreading on the left side of my head. And a certain degree of mania.

Just as some athletes who have been walloped go into a “put me in, coach!” mode, I went into a spectacular display of 40 year-old womanhood. An hour and a half after the car had been towed away, I was sitting on a spin bike, hooping and hollering in an exercise class. I had no idea why I could never get the orange Gatorade to go from water bottle into my mouth, so my right shoulder stayed wet (and full of electrolytes!). After spin class, I walked next door to a shoe store and very loudly bought four pairs of shoes. (I am normally not a particularly quiet person, so if I remember being loud, it must have been something.)

And then I visited my co-workers. This is when the red flags began to wave. I learned later that I walked in and out of one friend’s office and told him the same story, in the same words and cadence, three different times in a 10 minute interval. (My grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and I remember similar conversations with her.) I recall suddenly finding it very hard to see, like a recurring vision brown-out. And I told another friend the whole part about waking up surrounded by firefighters in terms of the songs that I had missed.

Let me explain. That morning, and most mornings during that time, I listened to a CD called “Now That’s What I Call Party Hits!” (You can see the entire album list here.) I will mention as a side note that when I was growing up, my parents always warned me to wear clean underwear in the event that I was in an accident. (When I mentioned this to my husband, he told me that he never received a similar warning from his parents. I now have a gnawing fear that I was notorious in my youth for not wearing clean underwear and that this was my parents’ remedy. But I digress.) I wish that my parents had also warned me about listening to appropriate music in the event I was in an accident. Did everyone really need to hear Kelis’ “Milkshake” at the scene? Wouldn’t it have left a far better impression if I were listening to classical music? But I wasn’t, and thanks to the fact that I obsessively listened to that CD, I realized that I last remembered hearing “Party Like a Rock Star” and woke up to the end of “Run It!,” meaning I’d missed parts of those songs and all of “This is Why I’m Hot.”

My missing six minutes of music was enough for my very small but very determined co-worker to load me into her car and take me to the emergency room. I remember being a handful (which, again, is saying something), and I remember her driving by my house as I tried, without success, to open the door handle. When I arrived at the hospital, I fortunately had new shoes to show the all nurses and the ER doctor, and even more fortunately, I had a CT scan that came out negative. But I had a concussion.

Several things stand out about this time. My brain felt like a yolk rattling around the shell of my skull. When I would walk, it was like watching a film of myself walk. The movement worked, but I felt completely disengaged from it. My head hurt, but my teeth hurt even worse. I had trouble remembering words. And I had a bewildering meeting at a restaurant with a caring stranger — a tall, good-looking man who seemed to know a lot about me. What had I done? Alas, it was my neurologist, a fact that I deduced weeks later. (Although I felt bad at first, I felt even worse later: How many times exactly does this happen to a neurologist, to have all of these patients who have no idea who you are?) I will give you this advice, too. If your co-workers offer to take you to someplace like TGI Friday’s to celebrate your return to work, decline. It is sensory overload times a thousand. As I sorted through post-concussive syndrome over the next few months, I remember headaches, depression, insomnia, forgetfulness, anger, confusion, overwhelming anxiety, and lots of crying jags. I was a delight. An addled delight.

Fortunately, the concussion has left no lasting physical effects — well, at least no physical effects of which I am aware. Although I couldn’t remember my neurologist’s face, I remember well his advice: Don’t get another concussion. It is sound advice, but I can’t figure out exactly how to change my behavior to avoid another concussion. God knows I wasn’t looking for this one.

ALC

When we were eating dinner in our garden with friends Saturday night, I mentioned that I had struggled over the past two years but that I now was feeling much better and much more like my best self. They seemed surprised — apparently, I’d hid it well. And to be fair, it was not a spectacular struggle. There was no conduct befitting of a Lifetime original movie or fodder for a reality show or actions worthy of jail time. There was a contemplation aplenty, tears occasionally, heavy lifting in the thought department, making amends — all to the end of trying to figure it all out. (As a side note, I figured this much out: If someone tells you they’ve figured it all out, run — don’t walk.)

It was exhausting.

Fortunately, it was normal. Humans in their mid-40s are at their unhappiest. Seriously! When you finish this piece, google “U curve of human happiness” and read all about it. We all tend to bottom out before we settle in for the second half of our lives, and we all get rewarded with more peace, more happiness, more wisdom as we get older. In fact, “just get older” has been the advice I’ve given about 95% of the time lately. Not only is it true, it has the benefit of being easy to follow. Everything passes — including us — and there’s a lot to be said for the perspective that that realization brings.

But back to my own personal bottom of the U. Did I mention it was exhausting? I did, but it certainly bears repeating. I felt that my life was stagnant, and that I was scared, and that changes were in order. I would tell myself that this is the Year of Not Being Afraid, and I would repeat my own personal motto: When in doubt, balls out. (Sorry, Dad, I know you read this.) So I did a few big things like hike the Appalachian Trail with my son and drive hours to a concert with my daughter (where she fended off this dude who tried to send me — me! — crowd-surfing). But I mainly did a lot of little things to get reacquainted with my happiness. I returned to church and started singing in the choir. I started dancing again. I took better care of myself physically. I visited my family more often. I scheduled more lunches and dinners with friends. I began blogging. I talked to my husband more. I started walking and biking more places. I volunteered. And I bought a convertible. (Which really smacks of a mid-life crisis, but I prefer the U curve terminology.)

And with all of these little steps — I called it playing small ball — I charted my course back up the other side of the U. Except that there was a casualty. And that casualty was called my house.

For the two years or so in the bottom of the U, the amount of energy required to play small ball consumed me. I could only do so much, and apparently, only doing so much did not encompass gardening or weeding out or tending or maintaining. Lest you jump to more conclusions, let me set you straight: I had not reached the level of a special guest appearance on “Hoarders.” But everything started to look a little, or even lot, unloved.

It was exhausting.

So I decided that this was the Year of Getting Things Done. My new motto? Eat a snack and then attack. The snack is key, people. I have tried attacking without the snack, but I get resentful, cranky, tired, and (not to mention) hungry. But oh, a snack — an apple and cheese, a perfect orange, a graham cracker with peanut butter — a snack signals that I come first and that I need to take care of myself before I take care of anything else. A snack leaves me cheerful enough to weed a garden, enjoy the sunshine, and curse only mildly the invasive plants that a “friend” gave me. (Here’s a gardening tip: When someone tells you that a plant is a “little invasive,” know that it’s like being only a “little pregnant.”) Post snack, I’ve painted a front door a cheery yellow, slapped a coat of enamel on some urns, and made the entry more inviting. Roughly 412 snacks powered me to clean out the guest room and await happily the family who will visit this weekend. (The guest room — the house’s dumping grounds — had gotten so bad that it caused my daughter to make this shamefully true observation: This is where we put everything we don’t know what to do with, including you.) I have begun sewing for our bedroom, which will be getting a coat of paint soon.

And before you spend the afternoon snacking, don’t forget the attack. There have been a number of big projects — the guest room, the painting of a garage, the reimagining of a garden. But truthfully, I have become enamored of short projects. I often tell myself just to do something, because something is better than nothing. The effects of these somethings seem imperceptible at first — a cleaned light globe in the foyer here, a drawer emptied there, piled up magazines to the recycle bin another time — but they add up.  The light shines brighter, the drawer closes smoothly without a shove, the floors have no stacks. The burden lifts from the house, the fog clears from the mind, and once again, I’m in a place that I recognize. A place that feels like home.

Eat a snack and then attack. Trust me.

ALC

I have a dog of a certain age. I suspected as much in recent months: Buddy’s muzzle is turning white, he makes far less frequent trips upstairs, and he barks at the mailman from the floor, not his feet. But a neighbor confirmed my fears a few days ago, as Chris and I walked in the park across the street without the dog. “Where’s Buddy?,” she asked. It did not help that I replied, “Lying in a hole in the backyard.” It was a true answer — the dog was in his favorite spot, a deep shaded hole under the dining room window — but when I saw my neighbor’s face, I realized why she asked and what she thought that my response meant. When your dog’s absence is remarkable, it may be time to worry.

Anyone who has loved a dog will agree with me: A dog just doesn’t live long enough. The clock ticks from the moment you bring him home. I have been through it before with Harris, a knuckleheaded golden retriever mix. We got him because I believed that if I could raise a puppy, I could raise a child. And Harris exploded into our lives — eating arms off wing chairs, pooping on carpets, running away from home, never quite getting along with Chris. But he also clipped our late 20s/early 30s wings, bringing us home from work at a decent hour, getting us in touch with Friday night TV programming, forcing us out of the house to walk and meet the neighbors, making us care for a life beyond our own. I raised a puppy, and inspired by my good work, our son was born 16 months later, and our daughter was born 19 months after that. (I was terribly naive, by the way. Raising children has been a whole lot harder than raising a puppy.)

I will tell you my favorite Harris story. When Harris was six or seven, Chris decided to make a big pot of chili (with several pounds of meat!) and for the first time, elected to use dried, not canned, beans. Chris didn’t soak the beans long enough, and the chili was inedible. It had to be tossed out. Unbeknownst to me, Chris dumped the chili (with several pounds of meat!) in the lane behind the house, near (but not in) the trash can. At that time, Chris would let Harris out the door about 10:00 every night, and Harris would walk around the park, nap in the yard, and scratch on the door about 45 minutes later to be let in. Except that night, Harris made a detour to the lane behind the house. Harris’ lips were sealed about this little detour.

The next evening, we took a car ride to rendezvous with the kids’ grandparents; we were meeting them about three hours away down the interstate. Harris rode with us. About two hours into the trip, we smelled something terrible, and I asked our son to look in the back of the car, where Harris was. “What’s going on?,” I asked. And our son replied, “Mom, all I see is beans.” And for two more days, all we saw were beans, little projectiles expelled rat-a-tat-tat from the dog’s hindquarters. Chris called him “Beansie” for the rest of his life.

But pounds of dried beans couldn’t deter Harris, and he lumbered on. Until one day, he suddenly went blind. And six months later, he stopped eating. And a few days after that, he stopped drinking. And just before Christmas that year, it became clear that I had to perform one last act of kindness for an old friend.

Which brought Buddy into our lives. He was a rebound relationship, a mail-order bride discovered as I trawled the internet to try to stop crying. I had no intention of falling in love again, and especially of falling in love so quickly, but there he was. He was mine. Handsome, sturdy, freckled, no longer a puppy but a young dog. So I drove four hours to meet him; the heart wants what it wants. Except that my heart had not counted on nearly 100 pounds of untamed and unbridled enthusiasm. As I told the kind woman from the rescue organization that I would have to pass — the dog was just too big and too wild for me — Buddy wrapped the leash around my legs, sat on feet, and looked up at me.

How could I say no? I couldn’t.

Buddy and I, we have had a few misunderstandings — notably, incidents involving cookies, loaves of bread, cheese, and (last night) meatloaf. (Alas, no chili.) As the owner of a golden-St. Bernard mix, I really should be featured in some vacuum ad. (I swear he has three Pomeranians hidden in his fur, undetectable to the naked eye.) Hardwood floors are no match for him, and as he gets older, I swear his barking occasionally sounds like cursing.

But, oh, he is the dog of my children’s childhood, the one that they will tells stories of to their own children and the one that we will laugh about in years to come. They will remember the stories I made up about him when he came to us, where he introduced himself as Buddy Robicheaux of St. Bernard Parish, recounting in a bad Cajun accent life on the bayou. They can’t forget Buddy’s stuffed animal, Baby Buddy, a little dog who looks just like him. We will talk, too, about how his enormous skull housed the smallest brain imaginable, one that hardly seemed capable of powering such a large body. We will talk about how Buddy needed that large body to contain such an immense heart.

And right now, in the here and now, which is all you really have with a beloved dog (or anything you love, for that matter), I will walk him slowly, and brush him easily, and keep his bed soft and clean, and slip him the occasional bite of meatloaf. Buddy may not be very bright, but he was smart enough to hitch his wagon to my star. Buddy knew that there could be nothing better than to spend your days with small pleasures and with people you love. From his humble beginnings, ignored and chained to a tree by college students, to his current cozy arrangements, Buddy proves that it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. And he isn’t done yet.

ALC

At a party last weekend, I talked for a moment with two friends who read the blog. The talk turned from my kitchen floor to Cindy Crawford — a natural progression, to be sure — with the end result being a suggestion to write about imperfection. Since these two friends may very well comprise 50% of this blog’s readership, I decided to give the people what they wanted.

You may be wondering how a discussion of my kitchen floor led to a discussion of a supermodel. (Are both wooden? Are both in need of a scrub? I know one is.) But it arose because of a Facebook post. Someone asked me how the painted floor held up in a household with a large dog, and I replied that it was pretty beaten up, but that it didn’t bother me; the house was old, and the well-loved look suited it. My friend appreciated the honesty of that comment, which immediately led to the recently published photo of Cindy Crawford, wearing a bikini and without the benefit of photoshop. She looked like a very beautiful 49 year-old mother of two — that is, the Cindy Crawford without the 1988 Cindy Crawford Sports Illustrated midsection. I appreciated the honesty of that photograph: It made her seem more human. And that is the beauty of imperfection.

We are all imperfect people in an imperfect world. Is that really such a bad thing? If nothing else, it takes the pressure off. We try. We fail. We try again. Life becomes a dance of two steps forward, one step back — but we all keeping moving ahead. And if you think about it, our imperfections define us as much as, or maybe even more than, the things we do right. The learning experience of a mistake lingers far longer than the brief uptick of a comparable victory. More to the point, I always joke that my house would be really nice if I didn’t have teenagers and a dog — but then it wouldn’t be my house since the teenagers and the dog are part of what makes my house my favorite place in the world. If I hadn’t been a pudgy kid, I wouldn’t be a funny adult. Bad vision led to my trademark glasses; an inability to tan led to religious sunscreen use; rock-bottom frugality led to my current wardrobe. The older I get, the more I become convinced that there are (almost) no wrong paths — just different paths, each one forged by a series of small triumphs, poor choices, split-second decisions, sheer dumb luck.

And the imperfections bring me closer to perfect. As I vacuumed tumbleweeds of dog hair this morning, I thought about what a small price it was to pay for having a loving companion happy to sit at my feet. As I woke up early both days this weekend to take a teenager to different obligations, I thought about how happy I was to be able to be there for her. As I grow older and slower and more lined, I think about how grateful I am to have survived the years, gained a little wisdom, and gotten a whole lot of perspective.

I had a delightful Thursday afternoon, almost perfect because it was so imperfect. I had to visit a client in jail — an experience that usually makes me thankful for having had so many things go right in my life. I then took the back roads from the jail in Darien to my daughter’s track meet in Hinesville, without the aid of GPS but with printed (and often unreliable) directions. As I drove along, I didn’t pass another car for over 15 miles, but I saw stands of pine trees that reminded me of where I grew up. Hawks circled overhead. I felt slightly lost most of the time, but I felt equally certain that if I got truly lost, I could stop at a house and ask for directions. As it turned out, I did get lost in Hinesville, but other drivers and a clump of high school students were there to help. I didn’t get to see my daughter run — a ferocious storm came out of nowhere — but I did get to spend a very pleasant hour driving home in the rain with her, the intimacy of a small car magnified by the storm.

Note that I could also tell this story by talking about how smelly jails are and driving through little hick towns and getting lost and being frustrated by going out of my way to see a track meet and then having to drive home in the rain. But I didn’t. I suppose, too, that Cindy Crawford could complain about the loss of her flat stomach, but I like to think that she looks at it, looks at her children, and realizes that she came out way ahead in that trade. Because when you embrace what you have, however imperfect what you have may sometimes be, it feels almost perfect.

ALC

P.S. — Thanks to my friends who suggested this topic. I really enjoyed thinking about it.