I have read that in times of trauma, the body shuts off the brain to spare it the details. This was true for me: When Vance Parker ran a red light and T-boned my station wagon back in 2008, I remember a sudden, inexplicable stop and then waking to find myself surrounded by firefighters. Even with a concussion, I surmised that I had been in a traffic accident, but other than seeing the front end of my car rearranged in Picasso-like fashion, I had no idea of exactly what happened. That feeling has returned to me recently, for when people ask me about how I am faring from the events of Monday, January 8, I am utterly puzzled. What events? I respond. They usually tell me — or I finally realize —  that they mean the College Football Playoff Series National Championship Brought to You by AT&T and Dr. Pepper.

Ah, yes. The game where the Georgia Bulldogs lost in overtime.

That one.

I have memories of the evening: the wearing of the lucky jersey, the celebration with friends. I think that a sausage cheese dip was involved (which is always a safe guess when football monopolizes the television). There was a brief and shining hope that the country’s most beleaguered college football fan base — the Bulldawg Nation — would win a championship game for the first time since 1980. I even recall a passing moment of forgiveness for Ray Goff, Moultrie’s meager contribution to the pantheon of Georgia head coaches, and a moment of sadness for Mark Richt, the patron saint of Georgia, an all-around nice guy, and the recruiter of many of the young men on the field.

But I distinctly remember the final play in overtime, a touchdown catch by an Alabama receiver to win the ball game, and the feeling that all of the air had been sucked out of the room.

The game made me think about penalties, and how in SEC games,  three referees stand by in Birmingham to review the play and determine whether the ruling on the field stands.  I cannot help but think that this service would be really handy in marriage, to have detached observers review footage showing various angles of the play. Did Amy Lee overreact? Let’s check the tape, Chris. Then a neutral hand would toss in the ball, direct field position, and the game would resume as before, no hard feelings. I have tried lately to ask myself this question — Would I rather be happy or right? — with the understanding that I might not really be right at all. When I voluntarily elect happy, I am never disappointed, and I feel like my very own self-contained Birmingham review.

There were a number of bad and missed calls in the game, most of which went against Georgia. In fact, I have read only one article about the game, and that was press coverage about those calls. (I could recite some of the bad calls here, but if you are a Georgia fan, you know exactly what I am talking about. If you are, heaven forbid, an Alabama fan, you also know exactly what I am talking about.) As I read that reporting, it struck me that bad calls were just a part of life. It was easier to let it go — although with that dig against Alabama fans, I wonder if I actually succeeded.

I thought about the players themselves, and particularly those seniors who would almost certainly go on to the NFL. Would football ever again be as simple for them as it was this season?  They would trade professors for agents, dining halls for personal chefs, a roommate for an entourage. They would have mortgages, car payments, financial responsibilities. If their signing bonuses were enough, they would have people to negotiate and handle these things, but at the end of the day, the pads of adulthood would rest firmly on their shoulders. They would grow up.

At dinner the other night, our daughter announced that she really did not want to get old. I told her that the other option was not terribly appealing, and I asked her what she meant. The 12 year-old dog, our very own confused and elderly tyrant, has made growing old look very hard indeed. Apparently from the human end, there have been a few too many complaints about arthritis, middle-aged weight gain, diminished vision, fickle hearing. There was an inelegant ascent from the floor a few months ago that drove me to yoga class, where one spends an hour doing nothing but getting up and down off the floor. And the word “eczema” has suddenly and scratchily entered our lives, the subject of the dinner conversation that led to her remark.

I have done her a disservice, for bad knees and all, there is one word that springs to mind at this time of my life: Freedom. The crippling self-doubt of the last three decades was a terrible way to start my day. I find now that I much prefer eggs and toast. I feel bold. I feel comfortable in my wrinkled skin.

I am doing something now that I never thought I would do, but I was inspired by an essay — “My Year of No Shopping,” — by Ann Patchett, one of my favorite writers. This was the line that got me: Once I could see what I already had, and what actually mattered, I was left with a feeling that was somewhere between sickened and humbled. Ann (can I call her Ann?) set up her own set of arbitrary rules: Books were fine. Shoes, purses, and clothes were not.

I have similar rules. Books and art supplies are necessities, and not subject to the embargo. Shoes, purses, clothing are. I will sew through my fabric, and I will knit the yarn that I have. If I have your address, and you find a lumpy package in the mail or by your front door, it is from me. I have been doing this now for a few weeks, and the world continues to turn on its axis. It has been an easy rule to follow. No means no.

Toilet paper and food have made the cut, so that is why Chris and I found ourselves standing in Publix on Saturday afternoon. We are there frequently, for he is a really good cook, and one of the hallmarks of our marriage is that I am the public face of the corporation. As I wait in line and chat with all of the cashiers, he flips through magazines. I am extroverted, and I talk to everyone. (I do this so much that my children have a name for it: mom making friends.) The Publix employees all sort of know me, and I sort of know all of them, including the two teen-aged girls that rang up my order on Saturday.

The bagger said, “You got your hair cut, right?” And I told her that I had, to chop off the red as the grey grew down. She liked it, she said, even the color, and the cashier told me that I had hair like hers. I looked at her, and I saw what she meant: The first six inches of hair sprouting from her scalp were grey, and the last six inches were black. The cashier told me that I was lucky, because it cost her a fortune to get hers to look just like that.

I let her know that it had cost me a lot to get mine to look like that too: Fifty years, to be exact. She laughed, and I told her to wait, that all good things would come her way in time.

Some of my best — and most poorly received — parenting advice has been given in sports metaphors, where I needed only a whistle, a clipboard, and tube socks to make the moment complete. (By the way, those three things are included on the no-spending list.) Chris never speaks in sports metaphors — ever — so imagine my surprise when, apropos of nothing, he said, “Life is like a football game. You think you have plenty of time to make one more play, and then it’s suddenly over.”

He had heard it from a friend, and this little chestnut had flitted in and out of his mind until it erupted right there in the Publix parking lot.

And that is the trick: Keep making the plays. Of all of the things that the game two weeks ago taught me, I remember that the most. Before the game, did I think that Georgia would make a respectable showing against Alabama, the unofficial 33rd team of the NFL? I had my doubts. That is a school where the very presence of its head coach, Nick Saban, has raised academic standards. (Don’t believe me? Read this.) Did I ever think that Georgia’s losing the game at the last moment would not bother me too much at all? No. While I was disappointed at the outcome, the team played so hard and persevered through a physical game with a bruising opponent. They ran when they were tired. They blocked when they were battered. If they had one more play, they would have won, but it was suddenly over.

The course of life is not dictated by wearing lucky jerseys. It is the hard work and the scramble, the willingness to change up the tactics, the weathering of bad calls, the joy of the game. It is the offsetting of a barely missed field goal with the breathtaking Hail Mary. It is the sheer kookiness of lining up in Wild Dawg formation just to see what happens. It is the irrevocable commandment to attack the day.

ALC

A few nights ago I had a dream that Buddy had come upstairs to my daughter’s bedroom. I walked in and said hello to him. Buddy told me that he really did not want to sleep on the floor and that he wanted to sleep in her bed. He crawled in, and I covered him up and gave him a kiss, and as he drifted off to sleep, I realized that Buddy had been talking to me. He did not sound like I thought he would: I had imagined a comical, slightly overblown voice, like the love child of Fat Albert and Foghorn Leghorn. But no. He had a normal voice, and by the time I realized that he was using it, it was too late. I woke up.

There was something else wrong about this dream, too, for Buddy can no longer make it up the stairs, and his mobility — or lack thereof — was one of the things that prompted Friday morning’s trip to the vet. When the vet asked me, “Do you think that Buddy is in pain?,” I burst into tears, for Buddy cries a lot these days. He lingers at his food bowl and he cries. He gets stuck on the floor and he cries. If I am not downstairs by 6:45 a.m., he cries. My dog now constantly seeks the comfort trifecta: food, walk, mom. I thought that I had taken him to the vet for a prescription for arthritis medicine and antibiotic drops to treat the eye that looks like it belongs to a rheumy basset hound. Instead, I walked out with steroids and painkillers and a plan to make my 12 year-old dog comfortable if — and as long as — I could make him comfortable.

“Oh, Buddy,” I said. And then I cried.

It looks like 2018 will be the year of letting go. Overachiever that I am, I have gotten the jump on it. Hair color? Gone. I am going grey. It is a surprisingly slow process, as is accepting the fact that I am going grey.

Caffeine? Out. My last caffeinated drink was around 4 p.m. on December 21, and for three whole days, I wondered why Dr. Google warned of the ill effects of caffeine withdrawal from going cold turkey. I was fine. Absolutely fine! And then, for the next three days, I wondered if my head was going to explode at the exact same time that my stomach did. (Fortunately, neither happened, although I found myself practically fondling a can of Red Bull at a convenience store.)

My wedding china?  Now displayed in a china cabinet, no longer in use, to make way for plain white plates and dishes. Sure, I burst into tears in a strip mall parking lot as I helped Chris load the new boxes, wailing “It’s the end of an era!”

Spending? Duly curbed. I found myself yelling at my iPhone when I got this text from a fabric store — START YOUR RESOLUTIONS NOW! 50% OFF ONE ITEM. Usually, the words “50% off” fill my heart with glee, but this year, I am struck by the fact that I have too much fabric, too many things, too many projects to make. So I started that resolution at that moment, mentally texting myself: STAY OUT OF FABRIC STORE. <3.

And the night before last, I wondered this: If my near future holds letting go of a dog that I genuinely love, how hard would it be to let go of all of the crap in the two cabinets of junk in my kitchen?

The answer: Not hard at all. Give me an hour, several trash bags, and cleaning supplies, and I am golden.

I continue to be amazed by what I find in these purges. When I cleaned out my purse collection, I made money, found pens, octupled my lipstick collection. But I clearly had been hiding my treasures in the kitchen. There was the valuable: A tarnished Tiffany & Co. sterling silver key chain and a Waterford Balmoral covered box, still in the familiar grey box (which helpfully announced what it was). I have no idea where these two things came from, although I now have the fanciest Q-tip and cotton ball holder in all of coastal Georgia.

There was also a sterling silver mirror that I remembered well. My father gave it to me on a cold and rainy day in February 1985. He had just picked me up from the Altanta airport after I had ridden a small plane in a fierce thunderstorm from Albany, Georgia. I arrived sweaty and green, an (unused) air distress bag tucked in my purse. We were headed to Athens, where I had a college scholarship interview. I had looked for that mirror for at least a decade, and there it was. Behind now dead batteries, electric bills from 2007, light bulbs that no longer fit anything we owned, almost empty cleaning supplies. Where else would it be?

The cabinets also held the sentimental:  A 2005 birthday card from my sister, mailed two months in advance, and two postcards from my then 8 year-old son, sent from his first summer of camp. It was the only summer he went to Camp All-Star, which billed itself as a sports camp. We billed it as a sports injury camp, a name that arose after he got hit in the head with a golf club and required stitches. I recall the call informing us of this happenstance, for it began in the most worrisome way: a squeaky teenaged voice saying, “I don’t mean to worry you, but. . . .” It was all downhill from there. Beyond the memory, I especially loved one of the postcards, which perfectly captured the fact that our son was the Eeyore of small children. It ended with “Anything wrong in Savannah?”

I found the before and after photos taken by my son’s orthodonist, the before reminding me of the dental fork in the road that his teeth presented: either obtain orthodontia or move to Great Britain.

And at the back of the cabinet, I found my first dog’s red leather collar, the one that I had removed from his neck on his own last day at the vet. I cried again for good measure.

I am turning 50 this summer. That fact — unlike everything else, apparently — does not make my cry. It is good to live long enough to realize the sheer delight presented by living even longer. But I cannot live in the Museum of Amy Lee, admiring and grasping tightly to the relics of the past. I have to let go of what I do not need. I have to claim myself. I need grey hair and sleep. Streamlined routines and clean surfaces. Space — plenty of space. Room to create. Money to save. I need comfort and warmth and plenty of understanding as I let go of things both small and large. I need ease in times of great difficulty.

Settled and finally becoming more satisfied, a spare trash bag in hand for all of the other junk drawers of my life, that is what I resolve in this new year.

ALC