All the circuits are jammed in my brain.

Normally I can toggle between lobes—the right, the left, the drafting, the writing, the mother, the worker. The switch needs some WD-40, I guess, because I haven’t been able to do it for a while. It’s like trying to shift gears without engaging the clutch. “Grind a pound, serve a pound!” My mother would call when I was learning to drive.

It’s not all Miley Cyrus’ fault, but in truth, my engine started to act up around the time I saw that clip of her in the stuffed animal costume.

A few of my friends are musicians, and I’ve noticed over the years that they use their instruments to collect themselves. One has an office guitar that he keeps in a stand by the conference table. He plays a song or two between work blocks. “This one’s about counting cows out the car window,” he used to say when I worked in the same space. Another musician I know plays a few songs before bed to crowd out worry.

With these friends in mind, I asked for a ukulele last Christmas, and was lucky to get one. In just two months’ time, it’s become my B.F.F. At night after the kids are in bed, I take it into a scalding-hot bath, which probably means I’m violating all ten commandments of owning an instrument. I lay a towel over my knees so I won’t get the body wet, and try to tab out my songs.

I’ve learned some chords: A, A minor, F, G, and B minor. From the internet, I printed out a sheet of fret diagrams, which I should definitely laminate. C is my favorite chord. It’s just one finger on the bottom string, third fret. B, on the other hand, requires all non-thumbs, and I don’t know how anyone with man-hands can play it.

During the day, I’m not in the tub with my ukulele. My children and I have exchanges like this:

Kid: “Mom! It’s no fair! He liked the show I picked, but I don’t like the show he picked!”

Me: “I don’t have any control over what you like.”

They notice I’m not lobe-limber right now, that I’m distracted, and out-to sea. So they fight more with each other to try and pull me back to shore. Like a man-eating shark that is also a dingy. Trolling for a mother with a blown clutch and fried circuits.

“Everything’s ok, I’m just treading water,” I want to say to them. “Here in the tub. With a ukulele.”

From Barbara Younger 's blog, friendfortheride.wordpress.com

Author Barbara Younger wants to talk about menopause and mid-life. And she does it well, with informative, witty, and touching posts on her blog, Friend for the Ride.

I’m honored to do this guest post about taking up karate in my forties. Because I like wearing mouth guards so much. (And also, because I have to wear them so much).

 

U2’s lead singer, Bono, looked good arriving at the Golden Globes on January 12. He looked even better when he was up on stage and nodded towards Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay. U2 was collecting the award for Best Original Song, “Ordinary Love,” from the movie “Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom,” and took pains to credit Martin for his contribution.

I heard the song for the first time, on the car radio, just a few days before the awards show. The opening notes grabbed my ears and turned my face towards the sky, like a satellite craning for a signal. It made sense when I learned it bore Martin’s brushstroke. That’s why houses and trees glided by.

“It’s the water,” my friend M. said when my son was a newborn. He’d been fussing all afternoon, but stopped when M. turned on the faucet to wash her hands. His eyes blinked as he drank in the sound. His irises were bowls, like contact lenses placed wrong-side up, filling and spilling with the swishhhhhhh he recognized from gestation.

Recently I learned that a guy I grew up with now lives on the east coast, just a few hours from me. As a kid, he had all the physical attributes of a Hollywood-typecast bully, except that he was exactly the opposite. Agreeable. Smart. Never charged to let you check out his room (Mad magazines, black lights, Farah Fawcett posters). If I had a booking agent, I’d insist she put him on my world tour of We Should Have a Beer and Facebook. Though the guy and I weren’t especially close, he had Wacky Pack stickers plastered to his bedroom door. Things like “Cap’n Crud” and “Rice-a-Phoni.” That’s good enough for me.

We can’t fall any further
If we can’t feel ordinary love
And we can’t reach any higher
If we cannot deal with ordinary love.

There’s a place in the novel A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle called “CENTRAL central intelligence.”  It’s an imposing warehouse on the planet Camazotz, and inside lurks a nasty, bodiless brain that controls everyone’s mind. I laugh-cried when I read about it because my room (aka Central Processing-Attic-Office-Basement-Altar-Drive-Thru) is like that warehouse, but instead, it houses Lady Grantham’s proud smile, little Ricky Schroeder’s tear-stained cheeks, and Aunt Linda’s “Whaaaaaat?” That’s because all the physical mementos of my family’s ordinary love pass through my room on their way to the archive or the recycling bin. Specifically, they pass by and through me, like a time-softened Inspector 12.

Unearthed from the piles in my room, an unremarkable plastic ring is no ordinary thing. It’s a dismembered part of a toy my kids loved—the one that made that irritating noise. A unique set of criteria determines the fate of every object that awaits my review: love notes, outgrown clothes, insurance statements, drawings, and math worksheets. There are years in the piles.  And old pieces of candy. Which I eat. Houses and trees glide by.

“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to see that you yourself have altered. “   –Nelson Mandela

The oysters rode a wave of milk out of the saucepan and kerplopped into a mason jar on the stove. It was nearing 8 pm on Christmas Eve. My brothers and step-father sat in the idling Volvo in our driveway. They were waiting, as they did every year, for my mother and me to pile into the car with a day’s worth of cooking. Throughout the afternoon while we worked in the kitchen, our house had been visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Dads: the fathers of families we knew who delivered holiday delicacies made by their wives. I’d hear a rap at the door, brush the flour from my nose, and run to greet our visitor. Often there was no one there, just the rear-end of a Ford Country Squire fading in the distance. Left behind on the welcome mat were the annual treats we’d come to expect: the bottle of Glogg with its sack of raisins and blanched almonds, the pan of lasagna covered in snowy mozzarella, and the plates of cookies dusted with sugar.

As night fell, it was my family’s chance to reciprocate. I turned quivering loaves of zucchini bread onto squares of brown paper cut from Kroger bags, and bundled them loosely with string. My mother pulled buttery cakes from the oven, their tops split like burst zippers. Then Mom would break the seal on a jar of oysters and empty it into a saucepan. “Wonder if there’s a pearl,” she’d say, reaching for the onions and milk.

The baked goods we made were headed to the nearby homes of friends in the Highlands section of Louisville. The oyster stew, on the other hand, was bound for the across-town residence of our auto mechanic, G. My step-father had a penchant for used Scandinavian cars. Over the years, he’d become a frequent flyer at G.’s imported auto service. It was probably during a routine oil change/engine replacement that my step-father learned that G. liked oyster stew. So we started taking him a quart every December 24^th—our last stop of the night. During the drive, I’d hug the warm jar and look through the windows at the Christmas decorations, which grew more elaborate as we approached his street.

“You think G. takes the jar straight back to the kitchen and pours it down the drain?” my mother asked one Christmas as we sat in his driveway. “What if he doesn’t even like oyster stew?” She turned and looked at my brothers and me in the back seat. We pondered the possibility while we watched my step-father ring G.’s doorbell. The large gathering of family in the picture window turned, all together, towards the sound. “Oh, I’m sure he likes it,” I said. G. accepted the white quart and waved in the direction of the driveway. It was too dark for him to make out our faces. Maybe he was just waving to our car.

“Either way, you were born to kerplop those oysters,” my daughter joked tonight, after I told her the story of our Christmas Eve deliveries. “Yes, I was,” I answered. The closing scene of the film, “Smoke” came to mind, in which the paths of a Brooklyn tobacconist and an elderly, blind woman cross. The two strangers spend Christmas Day together, pretending to be kin. Usually pretending is dangerous business. But at Christmas time, the white lies we agree to believe are their own type of covenant. They make a fleeting place where Santa is real, where a gift arrives from the beloved teacher who never wrote back, and where jeans make your butt look small. Realizing this was the first Christmas miracle of 2013. The second was receiving not just one, but two Christmas Eve deliveries, for the first time since the days of oyster stew.

Prayers that invoke a spiritual entity by name have more oomph than those that don’t. Whether it’s “Heavenly Father,” “God,” or “Goddess,” specifying a deity gives the feeling of being heard, and perhaps, even answered.

I wasn’t raised in a formal religious tradition, so I’m more ‘Help me, Rhonda’ than ‘Hail Mary.’ Several years ago, my friend P. invited my family to Thanksgiving dinner. During the meal, P’s elderly mother referenced a prayer from the Bible. “What’s a Bible?” my kindergartener son blurted out, silencing the whole table. “We use the terms “Old and New Testament,” I said, choking on my turkey.

It’s hard to explain to a group of agape guests that my home-spun spirituality torques on the boundary between the mystical and the comical. That’s because as a kid, I felt a thunderous jolt of rapture whenever my divorced parents threw back their heads in laughter. Though they chuckled often enough, the times when my Mom and Dad really fell apart laughing were rare and beautiful—a bountiful feast from God’s own kitchen.

What could have been so funny to my parents, at their ages then, in the matrix of moving parts that made up their days? To my Mom one afternoon when she was forty-four, it was “bucket dog,” a mutt running around the neighborhood with a bucket over its head. To my Dad one evening at age fifty-one, it was me, impersonating an eccentric neighbor.  Now that I’m grown, I set the pieces of these memories on the table and try to assemble them. In hindsight, they don’t add up to hilarious. I know that to my Mom and Dad in those moments, though, the laughs were a rest in green pastures, and a walk by still waters.

But back to Rhonda. Though I wouldn’t exactly call her a saint, I regularly invoke her when my son’s completed homework disappears just before school departure, or when I’m late to an appointment and get stuck behind a backhoe. Sometimes the situation improves, and sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, I take myself a little less seriously as I press on.

Rhonda’s toothless colleague, Tammy, is similarly helpful in a pinch. Originally a crass, hardscrabble character created by my sister for some campy art videos, Tammy has become our family’s guardian against distressing news. At any time, we can herald Tammy to slam the brakes on a tough or disgusting topic. If a plain “Don’t go there” fails to end a family member’s monologue, we ratchet up to “Don’t go there, Tammy” for a 100% guarantee. For example, I might call upon Tammy if I sense my brother’s roadkill description is about to veer into the entrails. Or worse—if the details of an intimate relationship are getting too…intimate. “Don’t go there, Tammy!”

Even my seven-year-old son (to whom I owe some basic religious education), understands that divinity has a name, and is genderless. In his most tender moments, like when he’s recuperating from an illness, he’ll gaze into my eye-soul and say, “I sure do love you, Sir.”

A parable I once read tells of a child reciting alphabet letters in the forest. A stranger asks him what he’s doing, and the boy answers that he’s praying—that even though he doesn’t know the words, God understands what he’s trying to say. Perhaps the moral of the story is that faith is simply the bold act of winging it, however ridiculous the outcome. I keep this in mind as I lay the lattice on an apple-less apple pie. “Go forth and improvise,” urges Rhonda. Tammy pumps some devil horns, and hacks out a smoker’s cough through beaming gums.