In which none of it matters

An unearthed notebook reminds me that whatever I think is urgent, really isn't. Plus some great summer reads and not-frumpy dress shoes.

When I moved to my beach rental last year, I bought myself a pair of Beats headphones, because I was going to “hot girl walk” all over my new town. Inspired by videos I saw on social media of younger women taking to the streets wearing headphones and fanny packs strapped across their chests, I was planning to follow this trendy new exercise fad.

I went on Amazon and bought a pair of rose gold headphones because that was the only color I could find? I’m questioning it because I don’t really remember how I got stuck with that color. I am thinking I NEEDED them the next day and they were the only ones available. I cannot wait for anything, a personality flaw that has bitten me more than once over the years.

My children always give all the technology and small appliances I love to buy the side eye — probably worried I’m going to go broke and end up living with them one day. So when my younger daughter questioned the need for the Beats, when I had perfectly good Airpods, I explained I was just trying to hot-girl walk.

And she approved.

My younger son and I started talking about my new headphones a little while later, and I told him it was going to be my “hot girl summer.”

“Don’t say that, Mom,” he said, and I asked him why could I hot-girl walk and not have a hot-girl summer.

“That means you’re, like, hoeing out,” he explained.

Duly noted.

This is what happens when 50-something women spend too much time on TikTok.

After we moved into this beach rental last July, I started putting on the headphones (and fanny pack if I didn’t have a pocket to slip my phone into) and walking to the beach every day. It’s a quick walk up my street — about 15ish minutes — to the boardwalk, and now I can’t think of a better way to start my day.

Whether it’s July or February, I love looking at the clouds and the sun and whatever mood the sea is in that day. Whether the sun shimmers a path across calm water or if waves are smashing on the stone jetty, the water spraying into the air. In the winter, the town had unrolled strips of wooden fencing that stretched along the beach in an effort to keep the sand from mounding under the boardwalk. But now in summertime, the fences are gone and the beach beckons in all directions, dotted by bright blue recycling cans and tipped-over lifeguard stands toward the surf.

The bummer of having a dog is that he’s not allowed on the beach or boardwalk during the summer season. From May to October, we need to walk on the sidewalk that runs alongside it. But that doesn’t stop me from climbing the steps (most) every morning to stand for a few minutes and look out over the railing and survey the day’s situation.

Throughout most of the year, it’s just me and a few walkers on the boardwalk. I can usually spot a surfer of two bobbing in the waves. You can generally count on seeing someone fishing and inevitably, someone walking with one of those gadgets that detects treasures lost in the sand.

Now that we’re in the throes of summer, there is a lot of activity by the time I get up to the boardwalk each morning. Walkers galore. Bikers cruising down Ocean Avenue in their helmets and windbreakers. A daily yoga class on the sand. So. Many. Dogs. My dog would really like to be the only dog on the planet, so it makes for a hard life, having to share the earth with all those other canines out walking every day.

I had forgotten the early morning summer bustle as I wandered around all winter, having the place all to myself. One of my daily loops is going up to the boardwalk and instead of walking back through town, I make a loop around a little lake that separates my town from the one next door.

“Lake” makes it sound like a lot more than it is. It’s a skinny thing that stretches about five blocks east from Main Street, almost to the ocean and its banks are home to half of North America’s geese population. Or at least that’s how it feels some days when I see all the poop they leave scattered across the street and sidewalks.

I was in the middle of my morning loop in May and noticed a spray of water coming from the middle of the lake. I stopped to watch the plume erupting from the generally placid water and its two counterparts off in the distance and thought about how I’d forgotten they even existed. Someone had turned off that switch in the fall and I never even noticed it, despite walking past the lake at least once every single day.

***

In an organizing frenzy this weekend, I unearthed a notebook I had used when I was starting to make all the lists as I was getting ready to sell my old house and move into the rental. It’s a cute little teal spiral number from Target, with shiny gold polka dots and inside there are lists of furniture I needed to sell, items I needed for the new place from IKEA, diagrams of how I was going to try to jam my king-sized bed into my tiny new bedroom (alas, it did not work).

There were food shopping lists and holiday menus. Lyrics from a Paul Simon song. Two pages of notes of all the lovely and funny things that happened when my daughters and I went to Aruba together in November. A block of a scribbled description of the courtroom I found myself in last summer and how it had been updated since I had been in it a dozen years earlier on another sweltering hot day to get divorced. How the room had lost its To Kill a Mockingbird vibe and the county had replaced faux wood paneling on the walls with sheetrock and TV monitors to accommodate our new remote way of doing things (which I guess now includes ending marriages).

Even though all these things happened just a year ago, I kept getting surprised every time I turned a page of the notebook. I had completely forgotten about all those things I had to let go of when I moved. Things I swore I’d NEVER part with. A couch I’d had reupholstered in a minky velvet or the bookcases in my office that had been stuffed with books and pictures and knickknacks. It was so painful to part with all those things and yet today, I don’t even remember any of it. Same with that trip to the courtroom — I’d totally forgotten it happened even though at the time, I remember standing in the hot parking lot and talking to my lawyer when it was all over and breaking down in tears, bursting from all the stress it brought to my life.

It's just such a reminder that none of it matters. Truly. All the things I find myself clinging to — the things and the stories. None of it matters. You do your best, and then you move on. That’s it.

During all my early morning walking, I like to listen to podcasts to keep me company as I stroll past rows of hydrangeas and the majestic shore homes I now get to see on my daily walks. This week, I listened to a podcast where one of the hosts talked about being in intensive therapy to try to figure out why she is the way she is. Who was there to blame (GIVE ME SOMEONE TO BLAME)? And she said it’s like getting to the end of a Scooby Doo episode and you’re the detective and when you pull the hood off the villain, you find out that that is you as well. You are both the good guy and the bad guy.

It's me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me.

The good thing about this revelatory notebook is that there are still a lot of blank pages left to fill. I also had weirdly just decided I needed to get another notebook for all my list-making and stop having a kitchen counter full of Post-it notes with one or two things jotted down on them. Sticky notes are scattered all over the kitchen and stuck to calendars and computer monitors. It’s like I’m the Michael Keaton character in the 1980s movie Night Shift, who uses a tape recorder to capture all his brilliant ideas (“Feed the tuna mayonnaise.”).

Now I have a dedicated outlet for all the thoughts and ideas swirling around in my busy, busy mind. All the things that right now, seem so damned important.

Let’s see if I remember any of it by next summer.  

sunday shares: read + watch + cook + buy

A reading roll: This week I read not one but two books. It helped that I spent a lot of the 4th of July weekend sitting on the beach with my daughter reading. As usual, my fiction genre of choice is Dysfunctional Families, and I found two good ones.

Talk about people who can’t let go of the past. I was alarmed by how much I identified with the oldest daughter (and not in a good way) and actually underlined a number of passages in Anne Tyler’s latest book. I also really liked listening to this interview she did with NPR (I love hearing about the author’s thinking process).

Okay, number one: tell me the setting is Cape Cod or Maine, and I’m in. Add a complicated family, and I won’t want to put it down. Am about to start reading her memoir from a few years ago. There’s an interview with her if you’re a weirdo like me.

Missing The Bear already? I know me too. Aside from rewatching season 2 (which I totally plan on doing), you can listen to the soundtrack on Apple Music (there’s one on Spotify, too).

Pretty soon, I won’t cook at all. For the last year, my meal strategy is that if I can’t cook it in an air fryer, I am not interested. But now, I don’t even want to clean that little drawer up. The solution? Paper liners, like big coffee filters. They pretty much work for everything but don’t leave one inside the air fryer cooking or it will go up in flames.

Going anywhere fancy this summer? I am heading to a wedding and needed something cute that could accommodate all my podiatric issues. Sexy. But these little heels from JCrew Factory really seem to fit the bill. I mean, I haven’t actually worn them yet other than to walk around my bedroom, but they seem promising and really are cute and not frumpy.