I have a friend and I swear she’s stalking me, though she would say I’m doing the same to her. I drive into Princeton to pick up a sandwich at Hoagie Haven for Will, and there she is, tooting her horn at me.
There she is again as I hit RedBerry in Plainsboro for the seventh time in as many days. Art, the owner, tells me he thinks I’m in there as much as he is. Not to get off topic, but the frozen yogurt is great, and now I no longer have to go to Princeton or New York to get my EuroTart fix. Plus, Art and his wife have hired just about all of High School North, and I believe in supporting a mom-and-pop operation that employs local kids and gives the community such a nice boost. The yogurt is simply the icing on the cake; and yes, they actually do have cake batter flavor.
I show up at the “barn” at the West Windsor Community Park to buy a Lightning Lacrosse Thunderbolt Tournament shirt for Will and there’s Ellen, my shadow. I’m joshing, of course, because it figures that she and I should be crossing paths. Our boys are friends, they go to the same school, play on the same teams, and enjoy the same foods.
Another quick aside: Lightning Lacrosse hosted the annual Thunderbolt Tournament on our home fields near WaterWorks, and what a delight it was to see all of our boys AND girls the week before play such fine lacrosse and show what true sportsmen/women they are. Coaches and parents from all over New Jersey praised the event as highly organized, well-run, and a whole lot of fun, and it was a testament to the hard work and dedication of everybody who is part of the Lightning organization. That the seventh grade boys were undefeated and took home the championship medal and that the eighth grade boys won their championship too was just — once again — the icing on the cake or to continue the RedBerry theme the boba and mochi on the yogurt. (You have to try those toppings to understand just how good they are).
Again, I digress. It’s not that Ellen and I are stalking each other. It’s that we could actually be the same people with the same backburner neuroses. For example, I live with the nightmare vision that all of the precious memories of my children that I diligently recorded on VHS tape are disintegrating minute-by-minute, even as I type these words. Those very first baby videos are now almost 22 years old, and I have not done anything to archive them. Part of the problem is that the format and technology keep leap-frogging ahead of my time and ability to keep up. VHS morphed into beta, which morphed into a different size beta, which morphed into digital. Do I put it on DVD, a flash drive, my computer, do I edit it? Acccccckkkkk! So many choices; so little expertise!
And then there is the hardware. I have a couple of large drawers and a huge basket filled with mystery cords and chargers of cell phones, camcorders, and other toys long relegated to the electronic graveyard. And yet, I am terrified to get rid of any of them because of course, the moment I do, it will turn out to be the one thing I need, and so they sit, year after the year in the purgatory of electronic devices because I lack the courage to make an executive decision. Ellen tells me she is haunted by the same problems.
I am light years behind on all those projects I meant to do while the kids were growing up. Put photos in albums in chronological order. Make scrapbooks of their achievements and put the most notable in frames to hang on the wall. Intellectually I understand that the value of something is diminished when there is too much of a good thing. But I’ve kept almost all of the papers that Katie, for example, has written over the years, even if it might be a scribble-scrabble from first grade. But now that she is about to graduate from college as a creative writing major, who knows what treasures might lurk within those piles, who knows what glimmerings of future talent those papers might hold?
Then there are the sweet frilly dresses that Molly wore with such wild abandon when she was about three or four. I still have boxes of those in the basement. I’m told I should give them away or carve them up to make into quilts, but it’s the dresses themselves that were a precursor to the fashion sense that she holds even today, a mix of bohemian, vintage, and an occasional sprinkle of J. Crew preppie, a style she pulls off with flair.
I think I have a sickness of sorts — the inability to let go of certain things. How else can I explain a drawer of almost-empty and half-full perfume bottles that I cannot bring myself to throw away? There’s the violet bottle of Ralph Lauren Summer that Molly was in love with that year, and one whiff can turn back time and bring back those sun-soaked days. And, oh, there’s the scent that Katie used that summer in Italy, and I can picture her in front of the Duomo in Florence.
How else can I explain why I’ve kept my original bottle of Chanel 19? (My brother gave it to me my senior year in college and it takes me back to the time when I was 21 and the world was still new.) I don’t have the original any more, but when Estee Lauder brought back White Linen, I went out and bought it because it took me back to HIGH SCHOOL.
Anyway, Ellen, I know you’re not stalking me as we drive across town, Route 1, and Worry Lane in our respective minivans. As I’ve noted before, idiosyncrasy loves company, so it’s good to know that I am not alone in my journey.
