I wanna do right, just not right now

image

As I lay in bed this morning, I wondered what life might be like if you were always positive in your thoughts. Every response, to every action, would be a 'silver-lining' one. For example, when waking up and seeing the grey skies (while hoping for sunny skies, of course, on this particular day), instead of saying "oh crap, what a drag", you would say, "Oh, isn't it pretty outside? I love the rain." Or, something to that positive effect. Rather than moaning about how you can't stand your co-worker, you'd muse aloud, "She's probably had a tough life and the least I can do is just go with the flow." Maybe when you hear the garbage truck doing a pickup at 7am on a Saturday, don't blurt out, "JEEZE-louise! Arrgh! I just want to sleep!" Think instead, "I'm glad the city is still picking up the garbage around here."
I wonder what that would do, how that would affect your life...

I don't know. Hell, I'm not saying I can do it. I was just thinking that it could be an interesting experiment. Would it totally change your life? I can't imagine that it wouldn't. And I consider myself a pretty positive thinker.

A little later this morning, I had the urge to call my old friend, V.
She's one of the first people I ever called by just an initial. For the first few years, I called her Venus. But that's not her real name either. Her name is Inez, pronounced like Enis, rhymes with penis. Or, at least that's what I first told her.
It made us instant friends.

V. lived across the hall from me when I moved into my first, and only, New York City apartment. I moved in on a Saturday in the summer. It was sweltering and she came out to the landing in her bra, wondering what all the racket was. Of all the years I spent in new york, I spent some of the most quality, memorable times with V. She was born and raised one block over from Carmine Street and when she married her husband, they moved to this apartment building. She raised two daughters in this little box we shared. She lost her husband, her daughters grew up and grew away and there we were, years on in her life having a drink in her packed little apartment, at a table filled high with mail, laughing and crying and complaining and celebrating. She saw my life as just beginning and gave me advice at every turn. I looked at her as the historian of the incredible city I was so dang lucky to be living in. I spent my Sunday evenings regaling her with tales of my life and she would squeal with delight before she'd inevitably say, "oh, just keep having fun, my little molly, she's just having a good time..."

When I called her today she told me she was 80 years old.
I'd had no idea. We'd never talked about her age.

And she did two things I'd remembered so clearly about her: she referred to me in the third person while she was speaking to me, "my little molly, she's a teacher now, yeah, she's teaching and she's good and her hubby is good. Oh, my little molly..."
and,
she kept coming back to the positive, the kind of positive I know I can do. V. has this great attitude toward life. She can bitch and scream and holler and complain about something, but she always comes back to, "but what're ya gonna do, molly? you're gonna do what you're doing and you're gonna keep going on. that's what you gotta do." She's a real, if-it-happens-it-happens-if-it-don't-it-don't type.

She told me it made her day that I called her.
But the way I've been looking at life all day today, through positively rose-colored glasses, I shoulda told her it's the other way around, too.