Sorryful week

Sometimes I have days where the only word I seem to use is Sorry. Full sentences, even conversations, consisting only of this word.

sorry.

I'm sooooooo sorry.

whoa - sorry!

and my daughter's favorite - SAH-REE! (flip your shoulders and squiggle your eyebrows together)

This week was a "Sorry" week. You know it'll be a doozy when you start off on Monday morning with a 'sorry I burned your toast' AND a 'sorry there's no clean socks' AND a 'No, sorry, you can't dance on the table with the bread knife and the mustard spoon'.

So 'sorry' comes freely and truthfully to my tongue, and looking back on the last few days I see that I used it quite often. But it's also a feeling, a sense of let-down-ness, of 'ugck' in the pit of one's stomach, or a pause in one's breath.

I called a friend on Thursday evening, just for a chat. Her husband answered the phone and, to my "hey Kosta, how's it goin?" he answered that one of their friends, the godfather of their youngest daughter,

had died that morning.

He was 35. A fisherman, pretty fit, active, a really nice guy. He came home from the boat as usual, kissed his wife and kids, and went to bed. But never woke up.

"I am SO sorry" is nothing in the wake of such news, but it was the only thing I had to offer. I have thought of the family all week, with a catch in my throat and an 'ungck' in my stomach.

Last weekend another friend lost her father, and had to fly to Germany one day too late to see him.

And of course the riots (here and in Athens) have been on our minds all week, truly

a sorry state of affairs.

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I look up sorry in the online dictionary and the usual meanings are displayed: sad, mournful, expressing regret, a bad state of being. Those references all take me to "source materials." Hoping for some insightful quotation or archaic philosophical clue, I click -

and the Amazon website comes up with about 500 books on word origins.

Commerce, one is relieved to know, will always find a way.

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Just now I got off the phone with my friend. After a long day of post-funeral coffee making and cake-serving she managed to get back to her own family just in time for her angry relatives (they had been watching the kids) to scream about why she was so late and how they'd never make it back home on time now with the rain and all.

I hope she just looked at them, and didn't say sorry.

thank you

I think we spend a lot of time whining. and complaining. and generally being dissatisfied.

I noticed this evening that it's been a really long time since

WAIT.

-- see? I was just about to complain! --

OK.

start over.

Every year around the holidays, we hear endless stories and testimonials from folks who have decided (instead of falling victim to the great Capitalist Christmas Machine, hereafter known as the CCM) to direct their money, time, and etc. to a Good Cause.

the SPCA.
Doctors Without Borders.
Soup Kitchens, Charity Auctions, Rotary, Big Brothers, Clinics in Nepal, Housing in New Orleans, AIDS in East Oakland, Refugees in West Thessaloniki.

Well, this year for Christmas I don't have much extra money (and what there is is going to my kids). And I certainly don't have much extra time. So while I'd like nothing better (and this is really not an exaggeration) than to grab a white coat, a water bottle, and a thousand vials of quinine and take off for Darfur, I can't.

Last year at the Mavericks surf contest a spectator mom was quoted "Yeah, I'd love to do that! But I have a family, and someone has to make them lunch..."

Yup. Me too.

This year for Christmas, I will try to give myself, and my family, the gift of thanks, and the gift of grace. I will try to put aside my reactive, crabby, self-righteous self, and instead revel in the smell of my son's freshly-washed hair while he squirms in my grip and smears honey on the sofa. I will watch my daughter in dance class and marvel at the miracle of her perfect timing and intuitive movements. I will laugh at the 10 euro Parachute Santa who turns somersaults in my living room window and sings a canned "Better Watch Out!" while my son sits awestruck below. I will see my daughter's homework as an opportunity to learn something from her, and not the other way 'round.

I will try to.

I will try to actually enjoy doing the dishes and the laundry and the shopping and the cooking.

I will try to.

I will try to say thank you and please only when I mean them and not as the prelude to a demand or criticism --

will you PLEASE put your clothes away before I step on them again!

---

We are so fortunate. The luxury of complaining is the greatest measure of wealth, and the greatest waste of life.

OH MY GOD, I"M SO BUSY. - be thankful you are working.

EEEEEEW - gross! CHICKEN AGAIN? - be thankful you aren't hungry. really hungry.

TIMEOUT AGAIN!! - be thankful your children are able to go a bit wild.

---

This Christmas, I will try to say thanks to the world, and my family, and my friends, for the fact of my existence. For all the strange and beautiful and funny and mundane moments which fill my life now, and which will make up my memories later on.

I will not complain.

I will say thanks.

OOPS

oops.

I love this word. I love the way it can cover just about everything, with a slightly sweet, disarming twist that makes whatever happened seem not quite so - well, so SO.

oops?!

(raised eyebrows, slight upturn of the mouth)

oops, uh, oops?

(shrug shoulders and hunch down all at once)

oops!

(giggle nervously, and hope the others join in)

Children are the undisputed masters of oops, but I confess to employing it many times a day. That letter you thought got mailed 3 weeks ago?

oops...

the accidental defrosting of the fridge?

oops?!

the face of Mother Teresa lovingly and faithfully drawn in strawberry yogurt on the back of your freshly ironed shirt (well, you should have put it away in the closet where it belongs!!)

ooo ooooo oooooops.

hmmm.

the fact that I've been too busy to blog in over 6 months?

yup -

oops.