I suppose it's par for the course that I spent a good part of the wee hours last night mopping up diarrhea from the family room floor. (Manny's, not mine, smart guys; I'm not that old or out of control. Yet.) Anyway, it seemed a fitting end to a day that had started with a bucket of shit (of a different variety) getting dumped on me.
Which got me to thinking deep thoughts. The stench still lingers in my nostrils, and though I keep wondering what I've done to deserve all this crap, I think I have learned at least one simple lesson from it all. When your dog is begging, just say "no." Do not feed him green beans. Especially after your sixteen year old daughter -- who is perfectly able to ignore the dog's whining, just as she was able to ignore my near death bout with the flu, except to the extent it inconvenienced her -- has warned you that dogs cannot digest green beans. Ahh, from the mouths of babes, even bitchy ones.
After mopping up the doggy mess and tossing the mop and the bucket and the rags and the actual mess itself outside so I could deal with it in the morning, or maybe never, I was reminded that I must really look like shit. I went upstairs and took a good long look in the mirror. As I scanned my tired face, my nose still slightly uplifted in a very attractive crinkle in my continued effort to ward off the smells, I searched for the signs of evil that might make me such an easy mark for dumping.
I'm not really sure what evil looks like, other than a man with a funny little mustache and a cold stare, but that's so limiting. My daughter told me the school tennis team is evil, which is why so many of her friends have either quit or wish they had. Maybe she's on to something. She did, after all, know about the green beans. I always thought "evil" became kind of manic looking when it became threatened, kind of like the Joker in Batman. The tired, beaten up face staring back at me in the mirror looked anything but manic. Ugly doesn't qualify.
So looking in the mirror made me think of a news story I saw the other day on the Today Show -- a real scoop, I might add -- about a woman (we'll just call her Alice) who went on a mirror fast for a month. She hung drapes over the mirrors in her house -- creepy, just like we Jews do when somebody dies -- and avoided looking at her reflection no matter where she went, no matter what the occasion. I assume she has really good friends who would tell her if she had spinach in her teeth. Anyway, I watched the entire segment trying to understand the point, other than some woman getting her fifteen minutes of fame on television (at fast's end, naturally, so her makeup was impeccable). She said something about worrying that the mirror had made her too self-obsessed, and finding that a month without the nasty little demon had made her self-centered -- in a good way, I'm guessing, as in yoga. I don't know. It was a lot easier for me to grasp the green bean lesson.
Frankly, I am not willing to give up my mirrors right now, because the last thing I want is someone else telling me what they see. We ourselves our best equipped to see beyond the surface reflection -- the wrinkles, the age spots, the sagging necks (thank you Nora) -- to our heart, our core, and if we ever start to forget what's really there, the bathroom mirror can be a useful tool. Even if we sometimes need to dim the lights. Maybe Alice (remember Alice) did figure that out; maybe now that she has her looking glass back, she uses it wisely. Maybe that's what she meant by self-centered. One can only hope.
Which makes me think of rabbit holes, and bunny carrots, and, yes, green beans. If your dog's begging gets to you, give him a cookie instead.
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