Sunny with a Chance of Meatballs

If breakfast is the most important meal of the day and I love Italian food and meatballs are an essential part of any Italian meal (as far as I'm concerned, anyway), then the prospect of eating a baseball-sized meatball for breakfast is the obvious explanation for the extra spring in my step today.

There are a lot of reasons for my sunny disposition this morning; the meatball simply iced my cake. I was reminded, yesterday, of how lucky I am: thriving children, great friends who are in it for the long haul -- no matter how nuts I get, a return to town of someone whose brief absence had been surprisingly difficult, and, yes, I sleep with the most handsome dog. The clouds of stress have scattered, at least temporarily.

I even chuckled yesterday when someone told me he couldn't wait to get home and settle in to watch Fox News. All news is leaning toward the ridiculous lately, as pundits puzzle for hours on end over our president's basic incompetence as a human being (as if there was ever a reason to think otherwise) while his extraordinary incompetence as the leader of the free world could very well turn us into an ash heap. Maybe I'll switch over to Fox soon too.

Needless to say, I am not always this chipper. (Who is?) In a moment of uncharacteristic insecurity and neediness the other day, I had asked my good friend to tell me how great I am.  Worse still, I even tossed some adjectives her way, helped her with the script. She obliged, even made the shamelessly begged-for compliments seem heartfelt by adding some examples. It helped, but I'm smart enough to know when a friend is just doing her job.

She added something, though. Something that had not occurred to me to solicit as I desperately sought some stroking of my fragile ego. "Finally," she said, "I’m still upright. Thanks in no small part to you!" My friend, whose world was shattered when she lost her oldest son almost two years ago to some fluky genetic glitch. My friend, whose world remains shattered and always will, while the rest of us are able to tuck the catastrophe away -- in varying degrees -- as we move forward with our lives and our petty and not so petty crises. For me, Adam's death remains raw and unfathomable, but it is not the first thing that pops into my conscious brain when I wake up in the morning. Sometimes it is, but today it was meatballs.

As the months tick by, my friend's new normal becomes, in some ways, better, but in some ways far worse. So, she bakes. Challahs for my daughter's wedding, cookies because she's coming to visit me, cakes that don't look all that pretty but taste spectacular.  Give me a meatball over a cookie any day, but when it comes to my friend's baked goods, I make an exception. When she bakes, she creates order out of chaos, makes sense of a mess, and it moves her forward, keeps her upright more than I ever could.

Sunny with a chance of meatballs for breakfast, maybe some cookies later. Climate change is real, but sometimes it's a guilty pleasure.