By the end, we’d reached a point where we either had to do something or call it a day. Or, as my father so succinctly put it after seeing Jeff four Christmases in a row, “So, Jeff,” he said looking up from his third glass of scotch. ”Are you going to shit or get off the pot?”
Apparently, we were constipated. A few months later, we finally closed the lid and turned off the bathroom light. He wasn’t ready to get married. I’m not sure I was, either.
Oddly enough, he got married a year later. Around the same time I moved to New York. Another botanist. He also finally got his Masters and was currently heading up the Cacti and Succulent Wing at the Milwaukee Botanical Gardens. His wife just gave birth to their first child. A bouncing baby boy. I know all of this information because of a sick and twisted flaw in my character---niceness.
I’d made sure to establish a very public friendship with Jeff after the breakup. Not that we kept in touch all that much. An occasional email was about the gist of it. But I just happened to be a very nice person who went out with another very nice person and we’d always been very nice to each other so somehow it made sense to just continue being very nice. And this niceness, in the end, got me exactly what I deserved---a birth announcement with a picture of the bouncing baby boy.
A few months ago, as I sat down to write the note of congratulations, I felt like the biggest sap of them all. I even sent a gift. Sap. Huge major sap.
But I had no regrets. Dr. Prince agreed.
“So, what is it about this Nate guy?”
“I don’t know. I just like who I am when I’m with him. It’s like I’m having one of those dreams where I’m flying. You ever have those?”
“No. But I used to have this reoccurring dream that I stabbed my orthodontist like nineteen times and pushed him off the GW Bridge.”
“Good to know.”
As a child, I had flying dreams on a weekly basis. In my dreams, my special gift was being able to jump up and down really high and then suddenly, I’d catch the wind underneath my feet and become airborne. The ability to fly was such an incredible feeling that I would inevitably wake up disappointed when my superpowers didn’t extend beyond my dreams.
Not for want of trying, though. I spent hours jumping on my bed trying to recreate that high. Until the day my mother walked by my room and saw me jumping on my bed and shouting like Peter Pan, “I can fly! Look Mommy! I can fly!”
At which point I missed the bed and landed smack on the floor.
After we got back from the emergency room, she decided to try to contain my excess energy with skating lessons. “It’s the closest thing to flying,” she told me. And after one lesson, I believed her. Every Saturday afternoon, I took skating lessons in the park from an old Romanian woman. In fact, after the crushing disappointment of Patron Saint of Animals already being taken, I decided I would become a professional skater.
If I did well (and I always did) she would take me out after my lesson for ice cream. At some point in my life there had been a fairly decent work-to-reward ratio.
When spring rolled around, the lessons stopped. For years, I thought I’d done something wrong. It was only in my twenties that I got the courage to ask why I hadn’t been allowed to continue.
“Oh she died, honey,” my mom explained. “Well, first it was spring and there was no more ice. And then that fall, she passed away. She taught Sonja Henie back in 1924, you know. She was old. We didn’t want to tell you because you were such an emotional little girl. And by then, you’d stopped jumping on the bed and decided you wanted to be an archaeologist. So we bought you a shovel and let you dig up the backyard to look for dinosaurs. You didn’t find any, but you had fun.
“They got another teacher at the park the next winter, but I didn’t have time to be one of those skating moms. You were good, but it wasn’t like you were Olympic material or anything. Trust me, I asked Mrs. Tedescu. And she taught Sonja Henie, so she would know.”
“So, wha’cha doin’ tonight?” Timmy asked that day when he came to pick out his photos.
“Um…why?”
“One of my elf friends is a skating instructor at Rockefeller Center. He offered to get me on the ice for the tree lighting tonight! Wanna come with me?”
“Are you crazy? It’s going to be a madhouse down there.”
“I have passes to get us thru. And you could use some Christmas Spirit, Dorrie.”
And another car pulls up with the door wide open. Damn. Though if you look inside, this one seemed to have a creepy old man offering me candy.
Most New Yorkers avoid the tourist hot spots during the holidays---in particular, Rockefeller Center. The people you see on TV are all tourists braving the freezing cold, the pushing and shoving, and getting sneezed on by viral little children---or worse, by adults. At least children sneezed near your knee caps.
What kind of crazy parent would want to bring a child into that lion’s den? For what purpose? For what soul-fulfilling dream did they brave this inhumanity? But I knew Dr. Prince would be grilling me next week, so I decided to dive into the belly of the beast.
I was going to
