One of the best things about being a blogger in a small southern city with literally tens of readers is the parties. I should mention here that the parties are not to celebrate anything that I have written. When — and if — that glorious day arrives, I will throw my own party, thank you very much, and I will celebrate by having an author photo taken. I do not know who takes author photos on the books that I read. But I do know that I, too, want a photograph that makes me look like I have taken a short break from supermodeling, catwalking, and cosmetics ads to write a novel. As it is, and as you might expect of a blogger in a small southern city with literally tens of readers, I look nothing like a supermodel and exactly like a brown M & M:

But I digress.

Savannah loves its parties, and I love Savannah’s parties, and in a happy turn of events, I was at such a party on Saturday evening. It was a party held outside under live oak trees on a perfect, unseasonably warm February night; a party with barbecue and a trio playing jazz, soul, and a little bit of funk; a party filled with people that I knew on a scale ranging from not-at-all to very-well-indeed. And under the stars and the silhouettes of the trees, a Bill Withers song wafting through the air, someone closer to the not-at-all end of the scale sidled up to me and asked, “Exactly why were you so unhappy a few years ago? Exactly what was wrong?”

And here we were. Squarely in the realm of Big Talk.

I first read the term Big Talk in a Modern Love essay in the New York Times a few weeks — maybe months — ago, and I love the notion. It is, as the name implies, the opposite of small talk, and the essayist (an actuary, of all things!) wrote about it both in terms of finding a girlfriend and having more meaningful conversations with strangers, acquaintances, friends. The trick is to move past comments on the weather, and perhaps one’s resemblance to a brown M & M, and to get instead to matters of substance — without becoming so intrusive or painful that the other party bursts into tears or threatens to seek a restraining order. To ask questions like “How did you meet your spouse?” or “Where is your favorite place to travel?” or, as it turns out, “”Exactly why were you so unhappy a few years ago? Exactly what was wrong?”

Exactly what was wrong? Both nothing and everything. In the nothing column: A terrific family, an important job, a lovely home, a cherished pet. The American dream, right down to the picket fence, the station wagon, the Golden Retriever. In the everything column: I felt like a stranger in my own life; aimless, discombobulated, and disconnected; weighed down by past slights and disappointments; afraid. But after a few years, I wandered out of the figurative woods and into the metaphorical daylight, and there they were: the terrific family, a (different) important job, a lovely home, a cherished pet. The same me. A different me.

I realized that the only person that I could reliably change with any degree of success was me. I thought of it as small ball, a focus on the fundamentals, from eating well to getting enough sleep to drinking rarely to exercising moderately. (If you are going to change yourself, you owe it to yourself not to self-destruct.) I tried to be a better daughter, sister, mother, wife. I started saving money like a fiend. I tried to talk more — a near-impossibility, it seems, for those of you who know me — and to talk more meaningfully. I worked on forgiving others and even myself, and I tried to make kindness my guiding principle. I reached out to old friends. I threw things out and started to travel. I read a suggestion to renew doing what you loved as a child, so I began to take art lessons and write and dance.

And if that last paragraph makes it sound easy, let me disabuse you of that notion. It was hard. Some days, the only thing that got me through was a small sign on an abandoned building at a dead end a couple of blocks from my house, a sign on which a graffiti artist had stenciled EVERYTHING IS OK. One day, the sign was gone — someone had stolen it — and I cried. Everything was suddenly not okay. And within a week, I ran across a small silver bracelet in a local store, also stamped with EVERYTHING IS OK. I wore it constantly, and when things felt bed, I stared at my left wrist. And at some point, everything was okay. I felt my face turn toward the sun, and I felt myself blossom, and I felt like my life was mine — even more so than it had ever been before.

On Saturday night, I told most of this to my acquaintance — my friend who is at her own nothing is wrong/everything is wrong stage right now. But I forgot to tell her this story, which happened to me a few months ago.

I went to the CVS downtown at Bull and State Streets, the drug store to which I steer countless tourists in search of aspirin and band-aids, photo processing and Flonase. It is the only store downtown that sells diet Coke tall boys, delicious 20 ounce cans of artificially sweetened goodness. On that day, there was a single one left on the top row in the very back of the cooler. Yes, there it was, so cold and so out of reach. I jumped for it repeatedly, like a small dog, but it eluded my grasp. I hit a crossroads. Did I leave? Did I seek help? Did I keep trying? Did I settle for something else? And as I jumped and thought, as I tried and got frustrated, a deep voice said, “Stop for a moment. Just stop.” So I did. A tall man reached over my head, plucked the drink from the back of the cooler, and placed it gently in my hand. “Enjoy,” he said and walked off.

It was a good reminder that we all make countless plans yet cannot plan for contingencies, that help may come from unlikely and unexpected sources, that we all need a hand. That occasionally we have to stop for a moment, be still. That sometimes, just sometimes, we are the beneficiary of a great good fortune that we must simply enjoy.

And I did. I did enjoy that diet Coke. I walked out of the store and onto the street, strutting like a supermodel on a catwalk, smiling at passers-by, happy to be happy, dumbfounded by my good luck.

EVERYTHING IS OK. I promise.

ALC

One of the best things about working in downtown Savannah is the annual Georgia Day parade, a collection of school children and a band or two celebrating the founding of the colony of Georgia. I always forget about Georgia Day generally, and exactly when it is specifically, so it was a moment of serendipity to hear unexpectedly a band, to look out the window of my office and see miniature colonists marching by seven stories below.

It is hard to be a lawyer during a parade. In past years, I have tried, but in the last few, I have abandoned that pursuit gladly and pursued the parade instead without any regret. So a few minutes ago, I sprinted downstairs and stood at the corner of Bull and East Saint Julian Streets, waved at school children, and yelled, “Happy Georgia Day!” back to the kids. (How could I not? They were all so happy, and no one else seemed to be yelling.) And through it all, there was music and laughter, marching children and waving flags, shouts and recognition, costumes and banners, noise and color.

It was ten minutes of sheer delight, standing on a corner with the sun on my face, throwing off the coils of age to remember my own children’s Georgia Day parades. It ended so suddenly, this impromptu celebration, and I was so very glad that I had not missed it.

ALC

This morning while my family slept, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I did the most romantic thing that I could think of: I mopped the kitchen floor. I followed up the mopping with vacuuming and dusting, emptying trash cans and decluttering. It may have been the best Valentine’s ever.

This would shock my mother. During my entire childhood, she prominently displayed a framed piece of red construction paper, stamped with my three year-old right hand dipped in pink paint, bearing this legend typed on a rectangle of white paper:

I use my hands to clean my room/And make the dishes shine/To show my mother every day/That she’s my Valentine!

Despite years of my mother’s meaningful pauses beside this handprint, the message never took. It seemed enough to shut the door to my room, to take my plate to the sink, to carry my laundry downstairs to the laundry room. No, I can’t say that I showed my mother every day that she was my Valentine; I think it is fair to say that I showed my mother every day that she was my mother, and that seemed fair enough to me.

And if we’re being honest here, you are probably glad that I am not your Valentine, either, if you had designs on roses and chocolates and jewelry, on more traditional notions of romance and expressions of love. I have had those notions in the past, too, so if I’m shocking my mother and puzzling you, I suppose that I should confess that I’m also little surprised by my choice of gift this year.

I read a book recently that changed my perspective on love. I am a reader, and with that statement comes some pride. I will happily hold forth on all of the weighty books that I have read in the past year, the National Book Award winners or nominees, the collections of lovingly crafted essays. I will tell you how, in a tradition began in the early 1990s, I begin every other summer by reading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Great Gatsby, in that order, two books that are often the same book, books that themselves speak to notions of love. I am less comfortable admitting to you that The Secrets of Skinny Chicks made a tremendous impression on my perspective on eating and exercise, and I am downright embarrassed to cop to owning two copies of How to Never Look Fat Again — a title whose split infinitive makes me shudder as much as its contents inform my dressing. But in this regard, I am encouraged by Malcolm Mitchell, a recent graduate of the University of Georgia, a wide receiver whose injuries led my SEC football-watching cell to refer to him exclusively as “the fragile flower,” a published author of a children’s book, a writer who recently attended the Savannah Book Festival, a man who came to college reading at an elementary school level, a reader who began a journey that culminated in a love of reading by reading children’s books. So if the fragile flower can tell the world that he, as a college student, read Dr. Seuss, surely I can tell you what I read.

It is a book called The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts. The author, a marriage counselor, begins with the premise that people speak in five different love languages — words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch — and that tension in relationships arises when one does not realize the language that their partner uses and does not try, from time to time, to reciprocate in that language. It is a book best read in a furtive sprint, and just as the Amazon reviews informed me as much as the book itself, you may have learned everything you need to know in the last sentence,

I am married to a man who cooks, a development that occurred two decades ago when he pushed away a plate of food that I had made and announced that he was taking over. His food now approaches gourmet level, and he runs his kitchen like a restaurant. (I man the salad station, and having watched far too many episodes of Top Chef, I refer to him in the kitchen exclusively as “chef” — as in, yes, chef. Right behind you, chef. In turn, he refers to me as “Just stop calling me chef.”) And despite a parade of perfectly cooked filet mignon, an ocean of flaky medium rare salmon, a truckload of deliciously caramelized Brussels sprouts, it had not occurred to me that that was how Chris expressed his love. I thought that he was just cooking.

And then I skimmed the book. And I thought about the food. And the tire on my car that runs flat that magically gets refilled. And the time he burrowed under the house to find the source of the bad smell (a dead possum, as it turned out). And I got overwhelmed. And for Valentine’s Day this year, I asked Chris to cook for me the night before. He did. So on Valentine’s Day morning, I mopped the kitchen floor. He noticed it immediately. The Murphy’s Oil Soap smelled as sweet as roses.

I tell my children that love is not just how you feel about the other person; it encompasses how that other person makes you feel about you. The book has been helpful in this regard. It has been like a science experiment for the non-scientist — topic: how can I make the people whom I love thrive and feel loved? — and topic: how can I recognize their gestures of love and feel loved myself? — and slightly embarrassing revelation aside, I enjoyed its invitation to think about things differently.

I had been talking with my friend Jerry recently about happiness, and he corrected me: Maybe what you want, and what we all want, is contentment. He is right, of course. Contentment covers satisfaction, gratification, fulfillment, pleasure, happiness. It speaks of an internal happiness divorced from external circumstances. Chris and I have had lovely meals in expensive restaurants. These have made me happy. But last night, as he cooked me for while I knitted in the kitchen, the two of us singing to old songs and laughing and wearing pajamas, I thought that this may have been the best gift ever. I felt perfectly content.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

ALC

I had the great good fortune this weekend of attending parties populated by women — the first a group of casual acquaintances and the second a group of close friends. I love hanging out with my girlfriends for many reasons: the clothes, the camaraderie, the loud talking, the laughing. But there is one thing that I don’t love about hanging out with women  — a thing that happened with both the casual acquaintances and the close friends, a thing that happens all too often when women get together. And that thing is the inevitable discussion of diet and weight.

So I make this plea: Stop. Just stop. You are better than that. Or to put it in a language that perhaps we can all understand: You are more than the sum of your Weight Watcher points — whether calculated under the old, more stringent system that you were used to for a number of years, or under the new, more liberal, less effective, too-many-points-for-exercise, and quite maddening system (as I have been led to believe).

Just stop.

And with this request comes an apology to both the casual acquaintances and close friends of this weekend. The casual acquaintances were younger women, complete with good knees and dewy skin and figures that reminded me of a conversation I once with my doctor. Do I need to lose weight? I asked Melissa, and she replied, I think you look great. But you never know what a cardiologist might say. They like everyone really skinny. If these women were overweight, they were overweight only in the cardiologist sense. There we were, talking about important things (decorating, clothes, men) when the cheesecake squares — those notorious (yet delicious) harbingers of doom! — caused one woman to remark that her dress hid a multitude of sins, which led another woman to discuss the aforementioned Weight Watcher points, which led another woman to talk about how she really needed to run more if she was going to drink that glass of wine.

They looked at me, and I knew that I was supposed to tell a tale of deprivation and woe, of hunger and pain. But all I could do was blurt out that I was a nearly 48 year-old woman who wore a bikini at the beach because half my lifetime ago, when I really should have been wearing a bikini everywhere, I had convinced myself that I was too fat. And I grabbed a cheesecake square and walked off.

I was not so kind two nights later when my close friends started traveling that familiar road. I have searched for the right turn of phrase to describe my behavior, and only one comes to mind: I went completely spider monkey. Here were women I love and admire, talking at length about what they were not eating and their plans to not eat some more. It genuinely upset me, and I made my upset known, and it was not pretty.

I have thought over the last few days why both encounters bothered me so much, and I have decided that it is because of both how I feel about you and how I feel about me. Let’s talk about you first. If I am talking with you and listening to you, chances are I find you engaging. I like you. I am not standing beside you wishing that you were 10 pounds lighter or thinking that I would like you even more if you ran a marathon to justify that four ounce glass of wine in your hand or wondering, in the deepest, darkest corner of my heart, whether you prefer the old or new points system. I want to know about you. And that doesn’t include whether refined sugar makes you bloat. (In all honesty, that may include whether you have been on a cabbage soup diet, for if you are digging into the bean dip or broccoli crudite, I will want to walk away — quickly — in light of my keen sense of smell.)

But mostly, I want you to like you, too. If you are talking about deprivation and what you can’t have, and if it comes off sounding like you want to punish yourself, it doesn’t sound to me like you like you.

And here’s the other half of it: I want to like me, too. Through no fault of yours, that is a relatively new concept in my life, and one that often represents a fragile pact between my mind and body, a conscious effort to view diet and exercise not as punishment, but as taking good care of something that I love: me. For most of my adult life, I have been on a diet. This has resulted in my being as small as a size 4, a time when I watched like a hungry dog every morsel that everyone put in her mouth, my own food bowl clinking with a few stray kibbles. It has also resulted in my being as large as a size 16, a time when I watched like a hungry dog every morsel that everyone put in her mouth, my own food bowl overflowing. At either end, I felt stressed and unhappy, probably because I was stressed and unhappy.

But a few years ago, after decades of dieting, after years of mentally counting calories and recording nearly everything I ate, I decided to try something new. I decided to eat when I was hungry. I decided to eat well. I decided to have a small bowl of ice cream if that was what I really wanted. I decided that the occasional glass of wine wouldn’t kill me. I decided not to run myself down, and I decided never to talk about dieting and weight ever again.

Do you see what I am saying?

I have worked so hard to develop a healthy relationship with myself. This relationship is often so tenuous that when you talk about what you don’t eat, I question whether I am doing things right. Should I, too, have a favorite flavor of shake? Is it time to find clothes to camouflage my shape? Would I be happier if I bid farewell to bread and wine and ice cream? Should I start another a diet in hopes of becoming a size 4 again? Can I really allow myself the pleasure of a meal absent the sacrifice of a grueling workout? The questions come like an angry mob, villagers yelling and torches blazing and pitchforks sharpened. And I am left with a small hoarse voice, practically a whisper, urging me to stay the course.

So please. Just stop. Talk to me instead about how delicious that cheesecake square was. How good the sun feels on your belly. How wonderfully tired your legs are after a run. How the wine makes you laugh. Talk to me about important things. Like decorating, clothes, men, and you. Always you, dear girl, always you.

ALC