When I began my time as a foot soldier in the trenches of how to be happy, I read a book that resonated with me: The Geography of Bliss. Eric Weiner wrote the book, and at times it was easy to see that he had been an NPR correspondent: The book liked itself a lot, got bogged down in the middle, and begged to be read in a somewhat exotic accent, which is to say with a New England prep school affectation. Minor quarrels aside, I have tried to take to heart its basic tenets. Family and friends matter. Cultivate strong ties to your community. Visit Iceland but not Moldova. Embrace experiences, not things.

Chris recently turned 50, a fact that pains him to no end, and to celebrate, we went the whole experiences-not-things route and took a trip to Manhattan last weekend. We did not go to the city until I was 40, and since then, we have been three times. On the first trip, I tried to look like a New Yorker, wearing all black, and I kept my mouth shut. On the second trip, people asked me for directions, and as the cab driver took the family to the airport to return home, he asked where we were going on vacation and when we would be back in the city. On this trip, I thought: screw it. I am just going to be me. Which is how I ended up with absolutely no black clothes in my suitcase.

One of the things that made the cut was a pink hat that I made from a sweater purchased at Goodwill for $2.14. (I can explain the odd price: Sweaters are typically $4.29, but it was half-price day.) I washed the sweater in hot water and dried it on high heat to shrink it. I carefully cut around the moth holes, used the sweater’s rib as a head band, and hand-stitched the entire thing. The sewing took about three hours late one Friday evening a few weeks ago, all to the end that I have a homemade beret that looks like the love child of a pagoda and an iced cupcake:

I ended up wearing the beret all over the city, where it sparked the occasional photograph and conversations about its provenance and construction with everyone. Homeless people. Tourists. Cashiers. Residents. And the employees of Mood, the fabric store pilgrimage for all fans of “Project Runway.”

I went to Mood because Chris woke up sick — terribly sick, not the sick you want on your birthday trip — on Saturday morning. I was apprehensive at first about being set loose in downtown Manhattan, what with my having learned navigational skills in a pick-up in Moultrie, Georgia, but a conversation with the desk clerk emboldened me. I asked him if I should take a cab to Chinatown, and he replied that that was what his mother always did, but the subway was easy enough. Although I was old enough to be his mother (and not in a teen pregnancy sort of way), name-dropping his mother was like dropping a lighted match onto my gas can of independence. I rode the subway — first to Chinatown, then back to Herald Square — and set myself in the wrong direction on foot until I asked a cop if I was going the right way. It depends, he replied, on whether you want to get there today or tomorrow. And nice hat, lady.

As I walked firmly in the right direction, it began to snow, and a detour for hot chocolate was in order. When I walked into Starbucks, Ignition: Remix came over the speakers, and whether you are at home in your small city or wandering around a large one, your jam is your jam. The word serendipity blossomed beautifully in my mind.

So with a warm belly and dry feet, I made it to Mood, and happily spent a few hours talking handmade hats and handling Italian fabrics. This was also my jam, and in addition to having one Mood employee outline (unbidden) a complete business plan for my making and selling hats, I came away with several bright cotton prints, some crazy fur cuffs, a bright blue piece of wool, and a healthy dose of encouragement, which manifested itself as an overwhelming desire to start making my own clothes.

Chris (mercifully) felt better when I returned from Mood, and over the next 36 hours, we saw people and lights and two plays. We ate more than people of our age sensibly should. We visited MoMA and the Met. And in the highlight reel of my life, the vivid memories of what I want to recall even when I recall little else, I want to remember walking with him last weekend, cold and happy, hand in hand through museums, with so many beautiful things to see, pink beret tilted jauntily to one side. But before I knew it, there we were again — two subway trains, the Long Island Railroad, the Air Train, the JFK Jitney — standing at an airport gate.

In the plane and during the week, I thought about what I would make this weekend. I gathered a few patterns and notions. I mentally sketched images. I read sewing blogs. And (more to the point) on Friday afternoon and all day Saturday, I did what I needed to do to have an unfettered Sunday. And as I fell asleep Saturday night, drowsy after night out with friends, I dreamed of the time I would have and what I was going to create: a skirt, perhaps, and another hat.

What I did not dream about was making a custom anxiety wrap for Buddy. What I did not contemplate was a merciless rainstorm and an elderly, terrified, overweight giant mix of a dog. Oh no. As I placed my head on the pillow, it never even entered my mind that I would be awake from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., cradling a 100 pound animal like a baby, cleaning up the physical by-products of his fear. But that is what I did.

A better writer than I could make it all seem comic, a big adventure, a lark. A better dog owner could tell you it was part of the joys of dog ownership.

Regrettably, I am neither of these better people.

Regrettably, there were times in the wee hours of Sunday morning that I felt positively unkind toward Buddy. And we’ll leave it at that.

With fuzzy eyes and a crippling lack of sleep and a veritable lump of coal for a heart, I began my unfettered Sunday looking at my patterns, my fabrics. And Buddy wandered into my sewing room and collapsed near my feet. For a few hard seconds I looked at my projects and my dog, back and forth, projects/dog, projects/dog, projects/dog, until once again I thought: screw it.

For It occurred to me that he is very old. That despite a successful cancer surgery, the surgeon could not implant the motherboard of a four year-old dog. That he can barely see. That he walks slowly. That things hurt. That he was very scared by the very bad weather. And that he probably needs me as much as he did when he was a puppy, a murky period of his life that occurred before he came to live with us. He has his own highlight reel — a simpler one, perhaps, but it’s there — and it needed to be filled overwhelmingly with kindness. I would like my highlight reel to be filled with the same.

That is why I pushed aside the Italian fabrics, the wool, the accoutrements of dress-making. That is why I grabbed instead some kraft paper and tape, some blunt-nose scissors and a Sharpie, a measuring tape and a few pins. I read a blog post about anxiety wraps for dogs, and I looked at listings and reviews of the Thundershirt. I resolved to make my own.

It is hard to get an exhausted dog to stand still to make a pattern. He did not understand the need for several fittings. He could not care less about Velcro placement or the right snug spot of the straps. Given his druthers, he would rather sleep or eat.

After too many fittings and adjustment of straps and tapering of edges, all with Buddy’s periodic collapsing onto the floor, I finally had a mock-up. I chose some old fabric, a black fleece with brightly colored monkeys, that my daughter selected a long time ago for a Snuggie that never got made. (And for a few dicey years, this fact was flown like a flag whenever it came time to itemize my (many) failings as a mother.) Finally, with most of my unfettered Sunday afternoon gone, my dog now had a bespoke anxiety wrap:

Buddy loves it. I am not certain if he likes how it feels or if he simply likes wearing clothes. I am certain that when I have taken it off, he happily gets swaddled back into it. I have contemplated a tartan for him; Chris suggested, much to my amusement and delight, a houndstooth. After watching Buddy’s anxiety, and after having had a little more sleep, I have thought about his fears and his wishes and his comforts. His family, his home, his bed. His desire for kindness. His newfound need to be treated as carefully and watchfully as a puppy despite his age. His love of walking, which I have resolved to indulge more, and of meeting new people with the safety of his old people beside him.

These are not too terribly different from my wishes, my comforts. And while I had no desire to make a custom anxiety wrap on my unfettered Sunday, it seemed like a fair use of my skills. It felt like what I needed to do. Good lord willing, there’s always next Sunday. The forecast is clear.

ALC

My father is a doctor, and when I got a scrape or bruise as a child, he would examine the wound very seriously and always reach a single conclusion: I think we need to amputate. I would then jerk back the afflicted limb and trot off, and I am pretty certain that my father would laugh. From that little acorn of threatened amputation sprang a mighty oak of never going to see the doctor, at least casually, and on a scale of 1 to 10 for seeking out preventative care, I would give myself a solid minus 8. Chris, whose father is an accountant, suffers from no such hesitations, and he has a primary care physician who has administered an array of stress tests and blood work, annual check-ups and screenings, all to the end that we are equally healthy. He just has the doctor’s notes to prove it.

But my knees tell me that I am not getting any younger, and Chris has not gotten any less insistent about my getting a  doctor of my own. To humor (and perhaps silence) him, I finally selected a physician. There was nothing but the most rigorous screening method employed, which is to say that I went on Google. After mere moments of looking, I selected a red-headed female family practitioner who is at least 15 years younger than I am, which means that she will be retiring about the time that I start wowing the assisted living circuit. Except for the roughly 57 vials of blood that the phlebotomist drew, the appointment was a painless endeavor, and the red-headed doctor was terrific. We talked about food and love and Vitamin D and working out and aging, and I mentioned that I had fallen a few months ago, which prompted me to work on my balance. The doctor asked me if I could name the the  number one predictor of a fall, and I responded, “Walking.”  Without even a courtesy laugh, she told me that the number one predictor of a fall was the fear of falling.

I remembered her words as I prepared for an oil painting class the next night. I read an article recently about “Superagers,” people who seem young compared to their peers, and one of the tips was to do things that were hard, whether physically or mentally. Crossfit is out (see: the knees). And Sudoku and crossword puzzles apparently are not enough: You really have to work and be engaged. Leaving a trail of misspent youth — if in no other sense than a youth riddled by anxiety, self-doubt, and impatience — and setting my sights on Superaging, I signed up for the class.

The class was $140 for four sessions, a price that seemed to allow me the luxury of simply showing up and mooching off the studio’s paints, brushes, canvases, and solvents. But no. As the time drew nigh, I kept getting supply lists. Among other things: The things I intended to mooch. And brush cleaner. A palette. A palette knife. Walnut oil. Paper towels. Squeeze bottles. Plastic containers. An art bin. Gesso (pronounced “jess-oh”), an acrylic primer for canvases. An apron. It all seemed too much, and with each new list and every new purchase, I became more and more discouraged, to the point I thought about canceling my class. I mentioned this to my daughter, herself a talented artist, and she diagnosed the problem: Spending more money and accumulating more things put a lot of pressure on me to be good at what I was about to do. Or, as eloquently phrased by a 17 year-old: You don’t want to spend a lot to suck at something. (Amen to that, sister.)

My daughter momentarily commandeered my preparations, foisting upon me some of her unused, and slightly inferior, art supplies. I found myself the proud owner of a janky tool box, one hinge working and the other almost, that apparently necessitated a lot of stickers. Stickers, said my daughter, were key to my credibility as an artist, and from under her bed, she retrieved her secret cache. After removing her favorites, she allowed me to choose from the remainder. (Take it from me: Nothing announces I AM A SERIOUS ARTIST like the image of the Pink Panther stuck next to I HEART FOXY, an ad for a local coffee shop.) She then placed into the art box three unused brushes, oil paints I had gotten for Chris that had sat unused, and a palette knife. Moments later, I found myself in possession of a jumble of rough canvases and a palette, again unused by Chris, and a suggestion that I purchase used brushes from a used art supply store frequented by creative types.

My excuses were dwindling, and $41 and two stops later, I could hold my head — well, not exactly high, but at least high-ish — in art class. And then we got to the introductions.

The oil painting class consists of four students, and we each had to introduce ourselves and tell about our painting experience. One student owns the art studio; she specializes in acrylic painting and wanted to learn something new. Another has had years of lessons, mostly in drawing. The third told a similar story. My turn prompted two thoughts. One: Should I mention that I won a second grade art contest, using that time-honored method of tempura paint on construction paper, to create what I now know is abstract expressionism reminiscent of Jackson Pollock, and that after a 41.5 year hiatus, I am back? Or two: Should I mention that I took 5/6 of an oil painting class three years ago, an endeavor so intense that I drug home exhausted and fell asleep over the five Saturday afternoons I attended?

So of course, I went with three: I told the class that I am an attorney.

Silence.

Well, this should be something completely different, said the art teacher.

And with that, we began.

The lesson focused on underpainting: You dollop either burnt sienna or cobalt blue straight from the tube onto the edge of a brush that has been dipped in walnut oil, and then you apply the mixture directly to the canvas. With this hazy orange or blue background in place, you apply to the wet canvas either a brush to quickly define shape and light, or a paper towel to create negative spaces to the same effect. The teacher told us not to think too much and to be bold: She had to do it in art school as a timed drill, first finding the shape within two minutes, then one, then faster and faster — all the way down to ten seconds. The trick was to step out of your brain, not question your judgment, and to simply process and record exactly what you were seeing.

Exactly what was I seeing? When I think of still life oil paintings, I think of vases of flowers and groupings of pears, nudes and craggy profiles of Dutch merchants. I do not think of, say, the curbside trash pick-up after moving day, yet that was what we were asked to paint:

Yes, really.

We really had to paint a cardboard box, a paper grocery sack, a wooden box, a globe, a few pillows, and a chair, all rather haphazardly arranged and sort of slung into place. I thought about excusing myself to the bathroom, which is really to say, I thought about walking out and never coming back, for who wants to try a weird method to generate something that resembles this? But I inquired instead about the ugliness of the arrangement — politely, in my best Moultrie voice, without actually using the word “ugly” — and the response was interesting. The teacher did not want us to be concerned with beauty, as we would be if presented with flowers, but with shape and form, dark and light. Now go, she said, start painting.

I did not remind myself that I did not know how to paint. I did not compare myself to the studio owner, the other two students with years of lessons. I tapped into the seven year-old with cotton string and tempura paint who created an award-winning abstract expressionist piece. I looked at the stickered tool box, the foolproof sign of a Serious Artist. I chanted as a mantra, “The number one predictor of a fall is the fear of falling.” I stepped outside of my brain, and I attacked.

Here is what I created, the orange wash still wet as I worked:

And when the teacher told me that part of painting was knowing when to step away and let the layer dry, I did just that. She said to move to the other side of the still life for another perspective and ripped in half her painting paper, with the blue wash that she had applied now dry. Try this, she said. It will be entirely different. And it was, as I erased and applied:

Neither of these paintings is perfect, and neither of them would win any art shows, second grade or otherwise. But creating them was such a joy. I was so engaged and thoughtful about my work — I really tried to capture what I saw. And at the same time, I was so careless about what I was doing — I had no idea what anyone else’s work looked like, and I kept my mind open and free from doubt about my abilities.

It was so nice to do something completely different, both the painting and the lack of judgment. And after I cleaned my (used) brushes and tried to get the janky hinge on the tool box to hold, my teacher said that she liked how my paintings had a certain energy. This may have been a euphemism for “your paintings really stink,” but I did not care. Even if I fell a little while ago, an event that scared me, and even if the visit to the red-headed doctor results in an array of stress tests and blood work, annual check-ups and screenings — things I had studiously avoided for these many years — I am so grateful that we had that whole talk about falling. It made a difference.

ALC

I had dinner late Friday evening across the street from the bus station, a statement that may conjure an image of my holding a fork like a shank while I sit on a padded stool at a slightly grimy counter, warily watching the door, a short and curvy water glass sweating in front of me, a slightly battered fedora beside me. This image would be all wrong. For one thing, Savannah has reimagined its bus station as the Joe Murray Rivers, Jr., Intermodal Transit Center, and in addition to the high-falutin’ name, it has embraced and enhanced the 50s modern style of its design. The bus station now looks like this:

And rather than being a good place to meet “interesting” friends and procure less-than-legal substances, the area around the bus station has been revitalized with hotels and restaurants. So on Friday night, rather than having a big-haired waitress in a frilly apron scratching our order on a small green pad, a bald hipster with impressive facial hair in a plain apron committed our order to memory. Chris and I were having dinner in the best French restaurant in town, for it was his birthday, and birthdays demand celebration.

Before we go much further in this story, I need to tell you that since it was a French restaurant, the menu included sweetbreads. “Sweetbreads” is my least favorite word in the entire world, for instead of getting cinnamon rolls and gooey pastries, a diner gets organ meat. Organ meat! I have long thought about printing T-shirts that announce SWEETBREADS ARE OFFAL, but other than my sister, I can imagine no other enthusiastic wearers.

Needless to say, I did not order the sweetbreads.

After the wine arrived, and as I raised a glass to toast the beloved man across the table, someone started talking very loudly about college football at the sedate wooden bar. This prompted a bit of an existential crisis for me, for how was I to focus on Chris when such a lively subject matter was at hand? I doubled down and made it through the tribute right as I heard the loud man ask, “So who was the greatest college football coach in history?”

“That’s easy,” I thought. For clearly the answer is Bear Bryant.

And as another man at the bar uttered, “That’s easy. Clearly the answer is Bear Bryant,” I glanced over my left shoulder to glimpse the original speaker, the very loud man, and it was not at all what I expected to see: He wore dirty blue jeans, a camouflage ball cap that never left his head, well-used work boots, and a hooded sweatshirt that shilled for “Off the Hook,” a restaurant in New Jersey. My immediate thought was that he had wandered off the bus. But then I looked at the meal spread in front of him — a glass of white white, a loaf of bread, a bowl of soup — and I heard him address the bartender by name and I listened as he commented that the music in the place (Ella Fitzgerald, Edith Piaf) was the best in town and I marveled as he made menu suggestions to everyone else sitting at the bar. And it hit me: He was a regular.

I love when people surprise me.

Because of that surprise, I eavesdropped more than usual and I particularly mulled over Off the Hook’s observation that Steve Spurrier was the greatest living college football coach, a statement that would have made me thrown my visor if only I’d been wearing one. And in between eavesdropping and thinking and not eating sweetbreads, Chris and I talked about the year almost behind us and the year almost ahead.

I did not ask Chris if he had any resolutions this year, because I already knew the answer: Chris would tell me, as he has told me for years, that he would try to be a better person. I used to find this answer maddening — an amorphous concept without any action plan — but lately, I have begun to see its elegance, for all resolutions have this at their heart. Perhaps part of my problem is that I have historically been a lousy judge of myself, with little clear idea of exactly who I am.

Take, for instance, the time in my 20s when I told a group of friends that I was laid-back. There was a pause, followed by uproarious laughter. Or a few weeks ago, having had a satisfying day of sewing, knitting, writing, and gardening, when I announced that all of this creativity was new for me. And Chris — who has known me since I was 17 — assured me that it was not.

The recent burst of creativity has helped me understand the whole “better person” thing. I took a metalsmithing course in 2016, and having a successfully soldered and shaped circle was only part of it. There was a lot of finish work — incessant filing, sanding, hammering, polishing, followed by even more incessant filing, sanding, hammering, polishing. I would create a bracelet, and it was very satisfying, that moment of immediate gratification. But I would try it on, and all of the burrs in the metal would become obvious. They would catch my skin, and they would scratch me. It was tempting to ignore them and continue wearing the bracelet nonetheless, and it required more discipline than I wanted to muster to remove them. But I did. And as I work on myself, I think about this often, the literal sanding down of the rough edges and how much easier that makes wearing the creation.

Knitting has helped, too, because there is one constant in that pursuit: I am going to screw up. Every single time. The stitches slip off the needle, a loop gets dropped, a knot gets tied imperfectly, a pattern is ignored. One of the beauties of knitting more is not just that I get better at knitting, but that I get better at fixing the mistakes I make and living with the mistakes that I cannot.

But as I sat with Chris at that table on Friday night, we talked not of resolutions or metal burrs or dropped stitches, but of our life together. It had been an eventful and largely good week: a trip to see family, a party, time with our children, even Christmas. There was his birthday. There was 2017 just around the corner. But in the midst of all of these very good things, I struggled with the death of one of my best friends from high school — a sweet, funny and kind girl, with a halo of blonde hair and big blue eyes. She had survived cancer and a bone marrow transplant, only to be felled by pneumonia on Christmas day. Thanks to time, distance, several moves, and a certain lackadaisical attitude on my part about maintaining the friendship, we had fallen mostly out of touch, but still in touch enough for her death to hit me hard and bring back all sorts of memories.

About a decade ago, I asked my friend Holly if she would be at swim practice the next morning. Holly — who was then about my age now  — said that she had no idea, that everything changed so much and so frequently that she never had any idea what the next day held. It may have been a throwaway remark for her, but it is one that has grown truer for me day by day. Things change. Things grow. Things get renamed, reimagined, reinvented. But fundamentally they remain the same: a bus stop, a restaurant, a friendship, a marriage, love. In the face of all of that flux, all that I can resolve to do is to try to be a better person. To work on smoothing the rough edges. To continue trying. To learn how to fix the errors. To be comfortable with the ones I cannot.

Dessert snapped me out of my reverie. Since I could not help but mentioning that it was Chris’ birthday, the restaurant brought out a celebratory dessert at my very favorite price: free. It was a chocolate mousse with two palmieres, accompanied by two small glasses of fortified wine. As the scent of chocolate wafted up and I raised my glass to toast Chris again, I heard Off the Hook droning on in the background, and I more than anything else, I felt overwhelmingly grateful — for among other things, I had not resolved to lose those pesky ten pounds.

ALC