I have been approaching the holidays this year with a certain amount of fear. Last year brought calamity, a season between Thanksgiving and Christmas filled with dread, pain, uncertainty, and tears. At least there was that highly satisfying binge-watching of all seasons of “The Great British Baking Show.” If you are to be sick, and I hope that you are not, “The Great British Baking Show” is perfect: Everyone is incredibly kind, the plot is simple, and if you nod off during The Showstopper, you’re none the worse for wear. Plus, you have a solid set of new life skills, for you can dazzle slightly drunk people at cocktail parties with your recently acquired knowledge of pastry lamination and Genoise sponge.

But one of the real pleasures of adulthood is its ability to throw a calamity into the mix as a distraction from all other calamities. And so it was on the Sunday before Halloween, when I decided to take Emmet for a walk around 8 p.m. after a frantic evening of painting my son’s bathroom. Refurbishing his room was a project that was supposed to have happened last winter, and did not, and was happening now for good reason: The room had a mattress on the floor and little else, and if you ever wanted a poster child for “Love Doesn’t Live Here Any More,” you had but to look at his room. But dogs — even smart poodles — are not particularly gifted painters, and after several hours of my painting and his being told to wait (a command that dogs — even smart poodles — do not particularly understand), Emmet was about to blast off. I leashed him up, and stepped out my front door, and 30 steps later, my neighbor’s dog had broken free of his yard and was literally trying to rip off Emmet’s tail.

And by literally, I mean LITERALLY. As in, I will never use again the idiom “rip someone a new one.”

Because it was completely horrible, I will not say much more other than to say

1. Emmet had to take so much Tramadol that I became worried that he would develop a raging opioid addiction and that we would become the unwitting stars of some ghastly made-for-TV movie bearing the name “Tramadoodle.”
2. Giving a smart dog several medications at once over a three-week period is exhausting. Hot dogs work only a few times, and as I’m writing this, I realize I should have upped the stakes and considered a monetary bribe.
3. He has healed from the attack far better than I have.

But at least there was Elvis Costello — or to be more accurate, Elvis Costello in the rain. Chris and I met 34 years ago in a college cafeteria, and it was a relationship that spawned a lot of mix tapes — an endeavor that took a dual cassette deck and hours of pressing buttons at just the right time. A year or two after we began dating, Chris put “When I’m Sixty-Four” on a mix tape, and with that, the future started to take focus. Last week a law school friend, who had no idea of this history, sent me a You Tube video of this song, and I almost broke out crying at this part:

I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride
Doing the garden, digging the weeds
Who could ask for more

Chris’ mix tapes often featured Elvis Costello’s songs. This was one of my favorite lyrics:

Whenever I put my foot in my mouth and you begin to doubt
That it’s you that I’m dreaming about
Do I have to draw you a diagram?
All I ever want is just to fall into your human hands

So when I found out that Elvis was coming to an amphitheater in Saint Augustine, rain-or-shine, I bought fifth row tickets, and I made up show up early. The evening brought a land war: I sat next to a man who occupied his chair like a much larger man, apparently emerging victorious in numerous coach class airline battles and intent on emerging victorious that night. There was an older pot-bellied white-haired man who danced all night and had more fun than anyone. The couple behind us, over the decades of their relationship, had grown to look exactly alike. They wore matching red T-shirts with the iconic Elvis Costello photo depicting him in the mid-80s, a thin and wiry man, looking ironic as he sang into an old school mic.

Here is what I learned from the Elvis Costello concert:

1. He is no longer a thin and wiry man.
2. The sound engineer must have been a rank amateur selected at random from the audience, for that was how it sounded.
3. His voice sounded terrific on all of the new songs he had written, all of which were in a smaller, less ambitious range.
4. His voice sounded not as terrific on all of the old songs, which was what everyone came to see.
5. The audience helped him out on all of the old songs, and that was just fine.
6. I am glad that Elvis Costello had no expectations of me to be the same person as I was in 1985, for I am no longer a thin and wiry woman who sounds just like she did over 30 years ago.

Perhaps most importantly, I learned that if I ever become a back-up singer, I would like my name to be “Kitten,” just like the singer to the left. (Brianna (to the right) was pretty incredible, too, but really — she should contemplate a name change.)

There have also been trips to visit family, both mine and Chris’, and a contemplated return visit to his family that required some horse-trading: I have agreed to see his niece’s little theater production if he takes me to see a University of Georgia basketball case. It seems only fair. And then there was the story I told at my Dad’s house about the time I stayed at room 1214 of the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead, a trip necessitated by government travel and permitted by the low government room rate.

It was after midnight and the phone rang. The woman on the other end asked to speak to Jack. In my drowsy voice, I told her that she had the wrong number.

The phone rang again a few moments later, and the same woman insisted on speaking to Jack. Again, I told her that she had the wrong number.

And of course, the phone rang a third time. The woman was certain that she very much had the right number and that I very much knew Jack’s whereabouts. She told me to put him on the phone, for she was his wife.

Reader, I am no harlot. I was instead a tired government attorney who needed her sleep before court in the morning, so I asked, “What number are you calling?” And she replied 214-xxx-xxxx. I knew two things: 1) My father, who was living in Texas at the time, had a 214 area code, and 2) I was staying in room 1214. So I asked if she was staying at the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead. She paused, said she was, and asked me how I knew. I told her that if Jack lived in Dallas — and I was pretty sure that he did — she needed to dial a 9 to get out of the hotel switchboard. She apologized and hung up. And having saved Jack’s bacon, I fell soundly asleep.

I was in Buckhead the day after Thanksgiving, yet that was not the story on my mind. Chris and I had taken MARTA in from the northern suburbs, and as we left the station, I remembered some of my favorite times growing up. My dad would travel to Atlanta for meetings, and he would often take me with him. We stayed at a little hotel — the Terrace Garden Inn — across from Lenox Square Mall, and during the day he would stay there and go those meetings. But I would have breakfast in the hotel restaurant, which I would sign to the room, and a $20 bill in my pocket, which Dad would give me to last the day. And I was free until the time I was supposed to meet him for dinner. I would walk across the street to the mall, and just walk around in Buckhead, and take stock of all the people, the colors, the buildings, the stores. I had plenty of money for food, and if I was careful and saved, a little money for a treat, and when I was 12 and 13 and 14, I felt like I owned the whole place. There was so much freedom and so little care and so much trust bestowed in me. There were limits, to be sure, but I set my own rules. And as a 51 year-old woman walking through the streets of Buckhead on Black Friday, it all came back.

Thanks, Dad.

But then it was back to normal: the house, the job, the responsibility, the whole notion of being an adult. That included a grocery shopping trip on Sunday. While Chris lovingly scouted out the perfect olive oil, for he cooks, I not-so-lovingly scouted out the Publix-brand mild dishwashing soap, for I clean. (On a budget apparently.) My phone buzzed in my pocket, and a text said Craig passed away last night.

Craig was a friend of mine from my swimming days, and by everyone’s count, on the short-list for the title of the Kindest Man in the World. We live in the same neighborhood a few blocks apart, and even after my pool days ended, I would see him out walking. “You need to write that book!,” he would yell across the street. Or “My wife loves your painting!” or “It still makes her cry in happiness!” for he had hired me to paint a picture of their home as a Christmas gift. He was a constant ray of sunshine, Craig was, and a loving father whose girls flung themselves into far-off places, like the Czech Republic, where Craig would visit them (and no doubt, make a million friends).

If I had cancer, then Craig had CANCER, and while he never complained or even much talked about it, a story made the rounds. He passed out at work. There was a horrendous operation. He survived. He continued to work. He went to an event honoring him as Man of the Year while he was living in Hospice. And I suspect that he willed himself to make it through one last Thanksgiving so that he could tell everyone that he loved them, and was grateful for them, a final time. He was only 65. I miss him. So does everyone else who knew him.

And so I stand in the middle of this beautiful, sad, and funny life. I just finished reading Prairie Fires, the door-stop sized biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I came across one of Wilder’s observations: “Now is now. It can never be a long time ago.” While I know that it is true, sometimes I wish it were not.

ALC