The Jewish holidays – the “high” ones, at any rate – are
over, and my fate for the coming year has been sealed. I avoided going to
temple, choosing instead to spend the holidays by myself and make them a lonely and anti-social referendum on my life. For ten
days I have pondered all that has gone wrong, all that I have the power to fix,
all the ways in which I have failed to do so. Next year at this time, assuming
I have eked into the Book of Life, I hope my assessment of my situation will be a
bit more optimistic. Hope springs eternal. Or at
least annual.
Like a marathon runner, I’m pacing myself, starting out
slow. The other night I found myself solo at a holiday dinner, paired up – by
default – with a gay man. A decorator no less. I suppose I could cultivate the
relationship, use him to pretty up my double wide. I’ve always tried to avoid
men who are thinner and prettier than I, but if he can transform my life with a
little interior design, I’ll make allowances. The good news is he has no desire
to see me naked.
My gay date and I parted with a chaste handshake, and I
headed home to Manny, the one man who waits for me always, who never goes upstairs for the evening until he knows I am safely tucked in beside him. Again, pacing is key; I’ve got
an entire lunar year of work to do, and I certainly don’t want to peak too
soon. Pacing, of course, is one thing; moving backwards is quite another. A
good argument can certainly be made that parting ways with a human man who
happens to have impeccable taste and hygiene to go sleep with a fat, blind dog
is the opposite of progress, but I took the gay man’s incessant chatter about
his “partner” as a not so subtle hint that we would not be leaving together.
And he seemed less than enthralled when I struck what I intended to be a
seductive pose as I reached into my car to retrieve my phone. Nauseated
actually.
So when I woke this morning to the sight, mere inches from my face, of a tail
protruding from under the covers, and the dulcet tones of what
sounded like a fog horn emanating from a big lump in my comforter, I questioned
my capacity to ever move forward. But then I was listening to the radio and a
woman had called in to say that she thought it might be time to kick her
husband out of the house because this morning he looked at her and told her he
just didn’t want to wake up next to her anymore. Hmm, what’s her hurry? Anyway,
I bet she’d give anything to have a man of any species wake up next to her
tomorrow and gaze at her lovingly, no matter how bad he smells. Who knows? By next Yom Kippur, I could be happily settled in to the best decorated trailer in the state, and maybe, in the process, I'll have acquired a new male friend who loves to shop and gossip. As for my sleeping companion, there is something to be said for loyalty, and no matter how many new wrinkles I acquire, Manny will still "gaze" lovingly at me every morning, which is not the worst feeling in the world. Unlike the woman on the radio this morning, I will never have reason to throw Manny's belongings out onto the lawn. Or the asphalt, as the case may be.
And even though neither Manny nor the new gay man in my life could give less of a shit, I'm going to continue to shower and avoid the sweats. Some days.
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