Ah, this month is finally over. July always seems so much longer than any other month due to the heat. August can be hot but it is more bearable knowing that October is that much closer.
I rode 37 miles on my bicycle this weekend – divided into 12 miles yesterday with Jenny D. and 25 miles today with Elizabeth, Eric, and Karen. I think I over did it, but then it gave me a great excuse to spend the afternoon on the bed with my fluffy cat, Boo, reading Elizabeth Berg’s The Pull of the Moon. Elizabeth Berg is my new favorite author and I think I have read at least eight of her books in the past month. Most of her books are about women in their fifties and the joys of friendship and the losses that occur with age. I feel like I could be friends with a lot of the women in her books. There are some others, though, that I would probably want to thump on the head and say “get over it!” That is the thing, Elizabeth writes about women you can imagine as living in your neighborhood and you are not going to like every single one. And, the best part, her endings are not predictable nor do I feel that she is trying to make the reader happy. The endings are realistic. None of her plots are wrapped up with pretty pink bows. They are real.
The only word I can use to describe the luxury of spending the afternoon reading is delicious. It is something I often find myself wishing I could do and today I just did it.
This is totally off track, but I keep having this memory. I live down the road from a milk processing plant and every time I see the truck I think about the milk we used to drink when I was in first and second grade at St. Agnes Elementary School. We would walk down to the basement of the school to have our milk break in the same place we would need to go if someone found out the Russians had launched a bomb in our direction. I remember the “fallout shelter” sign next to the large stainless steel milk machine with the little levers on the side that dispensed milk into our paper cups. The milk was so cold that occasionally I would see little ice crystals on the top, but the best part was the foam. I don’t think milk tastes this way anymore. I think we have homogenized, processed, and fortified milk to the point that it no longer has that fresh cold taste that it had during those milk breaks in second grade. It is sad to think that my grandchildren have never tasted milk that good.
Another musing of late is wondering how many of us are actually doing what we wanted to be when we grew up. How many of us are doing something that wasn’t even a job back in the 50s and 60s? I know I wanted to be a teacher and, at times I am, but when I was growing up no one talked about domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse, so I didn’t know I could be what I am now. And would it have been something I would have wanted to do back then? Or did I have to grow into it, have my own experiences, meet the women I have known, and then be drawn to it?
I think about my granddaughters and their dreams for the future. Katie is sixteen and has wanted to be a veterinarian since before she could pronounce the word (she used to say “pet-inarian). She has spent part of her summer job shadowing at an animal hospital. Molly is fifteen and wants to be a teacher. She has spent her summer as a counselor in training at a day camp. I am so proud of them. Caleb, at nine, has not declared what he wants to be yet as being nine is enough for him right now. He is taking full advantage of his boyhood. Lizzie is five. I am pretty sure she will be something that no one has thought of yet. There will be a choice for her that doesn’t exist right now in the same way that personal computers and the internet did not exist when I was five. That is exciting and frightening at the same time. It would really be nice if there was no need for my job when she is grown. Some days I hope and other days I am not so optimistic.
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