Time-Honored Traditions

When I go to Ponderosa, no matter how little room I have left in my stomach, I always make an obligatory stop at the sundae bar. The custard dispensers, the tub of fluffy whipped cream, the chocolate and rainbow sprinkles, the ladle that you can use to drizzle chocolate syrup over all of it. . . a trip to Ponderosa would not be complete without that.

I noticed lately, though, that I wasn't getting as much enjoyment out of my sundae as I'd anticipated. Nor was it just because of the absence of sticky caramel sauce (which, alas, this Ponderosa did not have). The ice cream just didn't taste as good as I love to remember. I wonder if anything ever tastes as good as it did when you were a kid. I don't know if it's possible.

When I was small, my grandparents would take me and my sister to the Ponderosa near their house for dinner. It felt like such a big deal -- the kind of occasion I'd look forward to all day. After all, for kids, it just doesn't take all that much. Everything seems new and fresh and magical when you're that age. I liked the paintings on the walls. I liked the little corridor that led down to the restrooms. I liked the exhilaration of standing in line at the counter and gazing up at the vivid, colorful pictures on the posted menu. I loved the plump, buttery rolls at the buffet and -- of course -- the sundae bar to cap it all off. It just seemed to me like a perfect experience.

Most of the time, I don't look at the world that way anymore. There comes a day, you don't really know when it happens, but you stop looking at the pictures on the menu and start eyeing the prices instead. You pick up one of the juicy rolls and mentally calculate how many minutes of jogging it might take to burn this baby off. Maybe you even grumble about the crowdedness, the service, the wait, the fact that the table is way too close to the swinging kitchen door.

It's not a totally hopeless situation, though, this whole "getting-older" business. I like to tell myself that, anyway, because when I go to Ponderosa and glance around, I get short-lived, glimmering flashbacks of the person I once was.

Maybe that's why I still insist on making the sundae bar a part of my rare Ponderosa visits. It means something to me today because I loved it all those years ago. It represents something I'm not ready to give up just yet. I suspect I'm eating a sundae more for the memories than for how it actually tastes. And maybe, just maybe, on those days when everything else seems routine and rushed and easily taken for granted, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.

Loss of Tolerance

I gave up Diet Coke a few weeks back. Grabbed a glass of it yesterday, just out of desperation, just because it was convenient and I was thirsty. Well, boy, did I ever regret it. Within minutes, I felt as if I'd ingested poison. I think there's a point to this story, but I'm too tired to tell you what it is.

15 Dollars Exquisitely Spent

I think I have a weird notion of just what an adventure is. For some people, it might be skydiving, skirt-chasing downtown, or traveling all around the globe. For a rigid, routine-oriented person such as myself, an adventure is any slight deviation from what I typically see, do, or say.

An adventure, for me, is taking a shortcut that shaves a mile off my commute home. It's clenching my teeth and NOT compulsively leaning over to pick up the purse that just fell off the passenger seat of my car. It's having a conversation with an important person and slyly injecting a word whose pronunciation I've not yet mastered. It just doesn't take all that much.

I'm feeling refreshed and pleased to announce that I had an adventure today. Maybe not the kind I'd originally planned. . . but, then, aren't those the best ones?

I was supposed to meet up with some people at a campsite by a specific time. Lo and behold, I drove for two hours and couldn't find the place to save my life. My map from the Internet was totally different from what I actually encountered. I lacked the initiative to stop someplace and ask for directions. Instead, I kept turning my car around, searching, searching, and searching some more, but invariably hitting dead ends all over the place.

Eventually, that "specific time" for meeting up was merely 10 minutes away. I looked at the clock and sighed. They'd be leaving their tent and going boating or swimming at 1:30. My persistent calls to their cell phone went unanswered. If I ever made it there, I'd still never find them in the maze. Since I was tired and had a headache, anyway, I figured I should do an about-face and just go home.

Then, I realized that an attitude adjustment was in order, because this attempt might not have gone to waste, after all.

I stopped, slowed down, "opened my eyes," and really observed my surroundings. Here was a chance to view a part of the state I'd never seen before. At the charming, old-fashioned ice cream shop where I stopped for a snack, the service was friendly and languid. The mountains around me were awash in majestic beauty. I was getting a healthy dose of fresh air, sunshine, and time to myself. Heedless of the destination, this was an opportunity to escape from the mundane and clear my head of any stressful thoughts whatsoever.

I've said before that tea tastes a million times better when I drink it from the antique family teacups. . . the kind that my mom brings out only for Thanksgiving or Christmas or huge birthday celebrations. Well, in a similar sense, my good old CDs sounded spectacularly fresh when I played them amidst this scenery. For once, they weren't the backdrop for mindless errands in busy neighborhoods. Today, I could give the melodies a focus and an appreciation that they'd possibly never received.

Deep down, I craved that. Wasn't it something I always wanted, anyway? To pack up my car, be alone with my observations, and just drive. . . drive somewhere with no goal in mind. . . drive away from the everyday, and fast? Again, it may not have matched up precisely with the intent, but I was still living some sort of dream on a small scale. Might as well recognize the value in that.

While this cost me half a tank of gasoline (hence, the 15-dollar reference in the title), that didn't faze me. I suspect that the insights and the level of fulfillment I reached were worth every penny. At this point, I may have gotten something I needed above almost anything in the world.

(I'd ordinarily regret the inclusion of "almost" in that sentence, but there are some days, such as today, when "above almost anything" is truly good enough.)

On Names You Never Can Give To Your Children

You know how it feels when you associate a name with some painful memory. . . maybe some person whom you didn't particularly like, or who unintentionally reminded you of something you couldn't stand, maybe even something in yourself?

Well, this doesn't happen to me too often, but a certain female name does carry unpleasant baggage and make me flinch when I hear it. Fortunately, I almost never do, because it's not a common name by any means. I've stumbled upon it only three times in all my life, and all three times have, for vastly different reasons, signified something deeply negative. Stranger still, while the first cringe-inducing encounter was a decade ago (and was enough of a deterrent in itself), the other two occurred lately and within a couple of months of each other.

Now, that was the proverbial icing on the cake. Those were the two incidents that really drove me over the edge and made me say, "That's it. I never liked that name in the first place, but now, I absolutely hate it. I never want to come into contact with it again. I'd cross it out in baby name books, but that would be somehow acknowledging its existence, and I can't give it the luxury even of that."

Is this all a big coincidence? Or is it just destined to be an unspeakably toxic name to me in general? I'm leaning towards the latter. I suspect things could work in the other direction, as well. In past years, I've liked three guys who had the same first name and very similar personalities, almost precisely the same qualities that appealed to me, all across the board.

Feel free to laugh, but honestly. . . even while I don't pretend to understand the intricacies, I'm thinking there could be some kind of psychology to it.

(P.S. I can't believe I almost forgot my shockingly consistent experience of envying Melissas. Ohhhh, man, Melissas. Got a half-hour or so?)

Weirding Myself Out

I just wrote 1,150 words about a high school classmate with whom I've never spoken in my entire life. I wrote about his tall, skinny build, his luxurious voice, his spiked blond hair, his unconventional good looks, and the dreaminess of his hazel eyes whenever he leaned back against the wall. I wrote about everything he symbolized to me that I could not even begin to understand until eight years after graduation.

Am I the only person who had one of those, or did you have one, too?

An Exercise in Paranoia

The problem with your wedding night is that it's one of the few nights in your adult life when hundreds of people are dead certain, or at least reasonably well-assured, of what you are doing.

It seems paradoxical that it's supposed to be this intimate night behind closed doors, a time so sacred to you and your spouse. . . and yet, its events might as well be public knowledge. Almost a cliche.

Whether or not others care to admit it, they're all somehow in on the festivities. Maybe they're single, bitter, and envious. Maybe they're having flashbacks to their own long-ago wedding nights and calculating exactly when the honeymoon ended. Maybe they're cringing and struggling not to picture it because they don't think you're so great together. Or maybe they're coming home from the reception in a drunken stupor, mischievously nudging each other and snorting, "I'll bet I know what the happy couple is doing RIGHT AT THIS VERY SECOND."

They couldn't say that on most other nights. They weren't saying that on, for instance, your prom night in high school. Oh, maybe they could speculate, but it wasn't so concrete. What kids do after their proms seems like a cloudy, hazy abstraction. Sure, they might go to the all-night party up at the lake. . . or they might be so wholesome as to go to Denny's and then crash innocently on a couch at home. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't.

Your wedding night, on the other hand, isn't like that. No matter who you are, wholesomeness will never stand a chance of winning out. People figure that you're pretty much guaranteed to have raunchy sex. Perhaps they're even imagining the details while you're doing it.

Your in-laws, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, siblings, and the officiator at the ceremony are all aware that it's obligatorily one of the most X-rated nights of your life to date. Just you take a minute and try to wrap your mind around that one.

You check into the honeymoon suite at the hotel. Don't think you're particularly good at keeping that grin off your face. Don't think the guys behind the counter are going to be clueless about your red-hot, scorching intentions. At this point, it's official: Nobody with half a brain is.

Granted, that may not necessarily be a bad thing. In fact, for the spotlight-hungry types who enjoy bragging and advertising their every encounter, it could seem like just the opposite. Whether I myself would love or loathe this situation remains to be learned. And, ya know what. . . if I denied my eagerness to step into the eye of the vortex and find out the answer, I'd be the biggest liar this world has ever seen.

Watery Themes

Lately, I'm profoundly attached to the riverfront. I must have gone there at least half a dozen times in the last month. Before waking up this morning, I literally had three different dreams about it. I just can't seem to stay away for long.

Make no mistake about it, the riverfront will be the setting of my next date with myself. . . myself and NOBODY else. Maybe I'll pencil it into my calendar.