Tag Archives: do we say enough?

SAYING TOO MUCH

Last Saturday, 5 days ago, I was driving in Ithaca, NY and stopped for a red light. I was feeling exceedingly pleased with the abundance of green leaves, red bud trees, and various beautiful flowers planted all through my fair city. (May has to be my favorite month of the year!) When I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw a couple wiry gray hairs sticking upright from the top of my head, and decided I must pull them out. As 76 year-old Shirley MacLaine writes, I am trying to get over my vanity. As I approach 65, I still muster a brunette head due to my mother’s gift of her genes, she being eighty with maybe a dozen gray hairs. I fool myself into wanting to honor her gift.

I pluck out one of the two 5-6 inch gray hairs and fling it out the window, followed by the second. It must have been a few minutes later, when I look left out my window and see these same gray hairs clinging to the window as I drive along. WOW! I say out loud, thinking the root must BE really sticky to be able to cling to the window as the wind blows it like a wave of the ocean, pounding the window. I am even more amazed when I am driving 40-50 mph toward my country renovated chicken coupe home.

Next to my bed, the window shelf holds 4-5 books that I am alternatingly reading, one being “The Art of Kissing,” picked up from a used book library sale, and that I have periodically opened, months, maybe years in between. That same gray-hair-plucking-Saturday, who knows why I picked it up again, admitting to myself this is a foolish, yet inviting book, as I have not been kissed, really kissed, passionately that is in months, slightly embarrassed to have been by a married man that I do love. This book states, “Kissing Tip…For talking and kissing, try the Chico Marx technique. When replying to his wife, who caught him kissing a chorus girl, he said, I wasn’t kissing her. I was whispering in her mouth.”

I notice that I feel embarrassed to be admitting these vanities; but then some of my family members tell me I say too much, when I write books about my personal journey, which of course includes them. Being a psychotherapist I value vulnerability like some value a multi-million dollar lottery ticket. Only my ticket is for the evolving-love train I wish to be on. SO, I must practice what I preach. I like to think I am like those gray hairs that continued to stick to my jeep’s window for another few days, even through a thunderstorm.