There were two lines, and I was prepared to join whichever one moved fastest.

At my left, the customer’s voice was loud and sharp.  “Two dollars and nineteen cents for THAT?”  The cashier did not make eye contact, but politely repeated the total. 

To my shock, the customer flung the cash at the young lady behind the cash register.  She didn’t flinch, gathered the money, rang up the purchase, thanked the customer, and I was next.

I expressed my amazement at what I’d just witnessed, and the cashier informed me coolly that sort of thing happens quite frequently. She has been trained to remain polite and professional without tolerating abuse.

This incident kept coming to mind long after I left the store, so I wondered what I was supposed to recognize or learn about my own behavior.

Well, I like the “remain calm and polite and professional without tolerating abuse” thing.  I installed that program immediately, and have had several opportunities to simply remain calm while someone else is figuratively flinging cash at me.

But I’m also capable of behaving like the irate customer. The inappropriate placement of blame, the inappropriate treatment of a fellow human being, the arrogance of assuming a position of rank in the social hierarchy that allows us to maltreat another…oh, yes, all of these are present in me.

Like the angry lady ahead of me in line,  I have not always accepted complete responsibility for the price of my choices.

 Buddha says,  ’”Take what you want, and pay for it.” 

 And, I remind myself,  don’t throw the money at the clerk.

An intimate friend described what I write here as “revealing your underbelly.”

Yikes.  Is that what I’m doing?

A person of my acquaintance put so many details of her private life online that I had to turn away from the trainwreck. She overshared to the point of revulsion.  Apparently unaware that she was revealing her lack of integrity, character defects, and psychological problems, she thought she was being “honest.”  The revelations are forever in the public domain now. That underbelly is UGLY.

When I was a radio talk-show host, I had hours to fill every day, sometimes alone. If no guests were scheduled and the phones were silent, it was just me, blahblahblahblahing. 

One day, police arrested a man who had been doing something he shouldn’t have been doing in the parking lot across the street from the radio station.  They found in his possession a notebook in which he had recorded thousands of personal details about me, gleaned from years of listening to my radio show.  One fact here, one fact there, and he had assembled a dossier on my private life that was close to a definitive biography.

I am reminded of this now.  Does my underbelly look fat?

I didn’t realize I hadn’t been posting until someone wrote me and said she noticed I had taken a few days off from writing.

I missed an appointment today even though I had planned my day around it.  I got sidetracked and was lost in time.

It’s interesting to observe myself in this state, where time has little meaning.  I have no explanation, and I don’t need one.  I’m just being.

The family is sorting through the seemingly endless drawers and closets and shelves and boxes that contain…well, it’s hard to describe the accumulated material goods of several generations.

People kindly ask, “Is there anything I can do for you?”  I say, “Look around your house and get rid of a few things you wouldn’t want your children to have to clean out.”

I mentioned to my husband that we ought to keep that in mind.  He said, “Who cares? We’ll be dead.” That made me laugh.  I’m laughing again just thinking about it.

My first thought upon awakening almost every morning: “Where am I?”

I travel so frequently that until I open my eyes, I have no idea whether I’m in the United States or not, whether I’m in a familiar bed or not, whether I’m alone or not.

If I’m not alone, I’m with my husband.

Last week we were in yet another hotel room, and I was struggling in yet another unfamiliar shower, trying to find a comfortable balance of hot and cold.

“I am having a hard time getting the temperature right,” I said through the shower curtain.  ”Counterclockwise makes it hotter,” my husband answered from the bedroom. ”HOW WOULD YOU KNOW THAT?” I hollered over the now-perfectly-adjusted shower.

“Because,” he said, “I take into account that you are probably going to need some help with things like that, so I pay attention to the details, so I can tell you when you can’t figure it out.”

I am directionally declined.  There are lots of things I’m really good at, but directions? Not so much. I used to be ashamed of having directional dyslexia. Now I’m quite comfortable telling people that I can’t read a map* or that I got lost for 15 minutes trying to get from my hotel room to the lobby. 

Since I was a tiny tot, I have had a near-mystical ability to put clothing on inside out or backwards, even when I pinch the tag between my fingers to make sure that’s what’s going in the back on the inside. I amaze myself with this trait. I honestly don’t know how I do it.

That shower adjustment? I know YOU can look at the dial and see blue with an arrow going one way and red with an arrow going the other and say, “Any idiot could tell how to make it hotter or colder.” Not this idiot.

What I did not know was that my loving husband has been quietly noting, for many years, how to help his spatially challenged wife.  I stood there in the shower, washing away a tear or two.

When I got out, I wrapped myself in a towel and then wrapped him in a damp embrace. “Counterclockwise makes it hotter,” I said, “Might be the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Many of my coaching clients have complained that they are not being shown love or respect in a way that speaks to them.  I remind them that people show love in their own way, in the “language” that they speak. 

Maybe you’re looking for a dozen roses when your beloved is offering a bouquet you haven’t recognized as love in a different language. 

—————

*  The best money I’ve spent in years: the iPad with Google Maps.  It’s big enough to see, you can instantly zoom in and out, and for the first time in my life I have some sense of where I am when I hold it in my hands.  Also for the first time in my life, I can be helpful as a co-navigator.  Emphasis on “co.”

How late should I be allowed to sleep in on a Saturday morning the week of my mother’s funeral after I have crossed an ocean to say goodbye?

I thought I deserved to be undisturbed in the 7am hour, but a neighbor apparently thought otherwise.  She was hollering, as dog owners sometimes do, for her pet to “COME!”  It sounded as if she were yelling in my ear, but she was outside the bedroom window.

“Pet” peeve of mine: if you have an animal, you owe it to the rest of us to train that animal to respond to your commands the first time.  (Your kids, too, but that’s another story.)

Blasted out of bed, I staggered to the kitchen in righteous indignation. “How dare she,” I muttered, seeing I was not the only one who had been awakened by this assault on the eardrums. 

Then I looked out the window and saw a grey-haired woman with an empty leash in her hand, looking sad and troubled.

I melted.

Losing a loved one is,  if you’ll pardon the pun, a bitch.

Suddenly I was able to forgive the rude awakening and empathize with her need to raise her voice no matter whose Saturday morning was disturbed.  One never knows what grief and burdens are causing others to behave in a way that offends or irritates us or inconveniences us.  I need that understanding right now myself.

My husband put on some clothes and went to see if he could help her find the dog.  He was greeted by the yap-yap-yapping of the prodigal pooch.  I resisted the temptation to refresh my pique.

I forgive as I wish to be forgiven.  Instead of seeing an annoying stranger in the yard, I see myself.

I never saw the movie “Millions,”  but my friend Pamela saw it when it was released, and she told me the story.  Two young brothers have suffered a loss.  As Pamela told it, the older boy instructed his sibling in how to turn the tragedy to their advantage.

“If you tell them your Mum died, they give you things,” was the line I remember.

Well, it’s true.  When you tell people your mother died, even if you’re as old as I am, people give you things.  They give you sympathy, flowers, cards, food, and the most important thing of all:  a break.

Thanks to everyone who has given or will give me a bit of understanding and patience as I forget things and fail to do what I said I’d do before “me Mum died.”

I am mourning.

My mother died, and it is as if a bubble burst and the tiniest particles are visible for a moment, then gone.  That’s how I’m experiencing the vanishing history of me.  Driving around the old neighborhoods is surreal – the places and the people are dramatically aged or gone forever.

The links to what was, to who I was and how I became who I am, are evaporating like the morning dew. 

And now we begin the sad sad process of dismantling the elements of what constituted a family homeplace, even though none of the four siblings lived in our mother’s last house. 

There will be no more “home” to go to, no anchoring spot for our little family. The furniture from the 1940s that our parents bought as newlyweds is still in use here. There are three bedrooms in this house, and the beds are the ones we slept on as children.  None of us will be taking this furniture.  Poof!  Another part of our family history will disappear.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had this experience.  When my husband’s mother died, we closed the home that had been the gathering place for siblings, children, grandchildren, cousins, friends.  No matter how much the survivors may try to recreate a sense of a family homeplace, there’s something irreplaceable when the mother and father are no longer living and the house is sold.

It feels as if all the tears I never cried when I left home, when I moved away so young and so frightened, are coming now.  That girl is gone, and her past is vapor.

I passed a newsstand and saw dozens of headlines trumpeting the latest Mel Gibson meltdown tapes.

Is anyone really shocked to discover the latest antisocial behavior of this person with a history of substance abuse, religious fanatacism, racist and sexist rants, and failure to accept responsibility and make amends for his behavior? 

It’s obvious this is a person with mental health issues and I hope those close to him can convince him to withdraw from public life and enter a residential recovery program where he can spend at least a year learning to deal with his core anger issues and addictions.  This isn’t a man who needs another quick-fix rehab stint.  He needs long-term treatment.  His celebrity and wealth have allowed him to avoid this so far, but perhaps the time has finally come for him to accept his situation and get help.

Now, what about the rest of us?  My Hero Martha Beck , writing in O the Oprah Magazine, recently invited us to admit that all of us have a part of ourselves that would shock others, which we say “isn’t really ME.“  Oh yes it is.

I know darn well that if certain people in my life had been wearing the bugged earrings, you’d have heard me say a few things that would lead you to believe I need some help too.  Oh, but I wasn’t myself.  I could blame it on a hormone imbalance, a lack of sleep, a lack of food (I know at least two other women  – wait, make that two dozen – whose partners know that if she hasn’t eaten anything for hours, she has a tendency to snap) or some other circumstance.

But it’s me.  It’s just me, failing to live up to my own standards, forgetting everything I know about constructive dialogue, losing my temper, losing my composure, losing my mind.

When the Mel Gibsons and Alec Baldwins and Christian Bales are caught on tape in full rant, we’re shocked.  But we shouldn’t be.  Each of us knows a very nice person (maybe the man in the mirror) who loses it once in a while.

Sometimes I alter my behavior by imagining that I’m being secretly videotaped.  Would I say what I’m about to say if I knew it would be played for the public?  Whoops.

(I am playing that game while writing this post. My husband thinks I shouldn’t write anything negative about Mel Gibson because Mel is a sick man with serious mental health issues and it’s not nice of me to pile on.  I say, much more politely than I would have if I were not imagining our ‘discussion’ being broadcast, “I am trying to point out that he is mentally ill and needs help, and it’s not your blog, is it?”)

I have all kinds of trick for reframing a situation to prevent Mel-tdowns. I’ve pretended that I’m on a reality show and I’m trying to be seen by the audience as “the reasonable one,” and I’ve offered that suggestion to some of my coaching clients in challenging circumstances.  One of my sisters and I joke about “playing the role that will win the award as Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy” when faced with crazymaking situations.

In these times of ubiquitous cell phones capable of live broadcasts, of Twitter and viral video, of hackers and stolen laptops, whatever one says or writes or does is subject to being made public.

Maybe the tragedy of Mel Gibson can serve us beyond circus and spectacle.

And if I seem irritable to you, get me a sandwich, willya?