Where the Anxious Things Are
I like to think I have an active imagination, but my daughters say the technical term for what I have is “anxiety.” For the record, I think my daughters are rude.
Why is it cute and book-worthy when a kid in a wolf costume has wild daydreams about adventures in the jungle and not when a middle-aged woman sees a mysterious box tied with a bow on the beach and wonders if it could be a portable meth lab?
I sense that this example might have you siding with my daughters, so please let me explain.
Back in 2015, my husband righted a wrong that had been stuck in my craw since our engagement in 1991. At that time, we had shopped together for my ring and – had the man known me well enough to be proposing to me – should have become engaged that same night. Alas, he had no plans in place, so I spent the next two weeks anticipating it at every turn. “Do you want to play tennis after work,” he asked one day. How perfect! We love to be active. A sporty engagement is sooo us. Turns out the only love on display that night was in my score. “Let’s go get dinner Saturday night,” he offered a few days later. Mhmm dinner. So romantic! Surely, this will be it. He drove me to a Chili’s and, no, I didn’t find a ring at the bottom of our basket of fries.
After two weeks of this, I couldn’t take it anymore. We were sitting on the back patio of the rental house in Sunnyvale that he shared with his Chicago roommates, which was affectionally known as “The Beach” since they filled it with lounge chairs and tried to get a tan out there in February in sunny California. Exasperated, I started crying and said, “Will you just marry me?”
That was it. That was our story. To add to the chafing, whenever people asked us our engagement story throughout the first 23 years of our marriage, Russ would declare with a smug smile, “We got engaged at The Beach.” That S.O.B. always left off the air quotes. Ironically, whenever I bothered to add – oh, I don’t know – some truth to his telling of the story, I wound up actually having the interesting – though surely not romantic – story I always craved.
In 2015, Russ made his move. He planned the sweetest surprise by asking our friend to go to the beach – the actual one that requires no air quotes – to place a big box adorned with a ribbon on the sand and then hide in the distance to take pictures of his proposal.
Russ and I arrived at the beach and headed down the shoreline for a stroll. He guided me toward this box by pulling my arm and leading me gently toward it. I resisted. Then, I stopped. “I wonder what that is,” he asked with a mix of curiosity and delight. And then I said it: the most damning evidence in the court of mental health mediation. “Woah, don’t touch it,” I warned. “I saw on the news last night that they’ve been finding some portable meth labs inside backpacks in Walmart bathrooms. This could…”
“Shana, it’s for you,” he interrupted. Inside that box was a hand-drawn flipbook that he drew and colored himself titled “A Better Day at the Beach.” It showed a couple walking up the beach and the gal who was me opening a big white box with a big red bow and then a redheaded love of a man getting down on one knee and proposing to her, a blonde-headed girl who definitely wasn’t thinking she was going to die by meth by opening that box. Then, in real time, Russ got down on one knee and, to cover his bases, also gave me a fancy necklace just in case it wasn’t only a good story that my soul was after.
Don’t I have the most adorable imagination?
Fast-forward seven more years and my man and I are sitting poolside in lounge chairs in the cool grass in Maui. I look up and see the likely poop of a small dog and alert Russ of it. He offers that it could be from one of those feral cats we’ve been seeing around the island.
Apparently, he was awaiting my response and watched me as I suited up in my wolf costume and headed back into the jungle to conquer beasts. When I came back to the present he was intrigued and asked what I had been thinking about.
I paused. Do I really say it out loud? That his mentioning of the feral cats reminded me of the lei memorial and rest-in-peace signs for one of the island cats that I saw along the walking trail that morning? That, from there, it occurred to me that the memorial had to have been created by locals since tourists are only here a week at a time so how could they have been the ones to know the cat’s name was Rusty? That, then, off I went to wonder if Rusty died of natural causes or if someone had found him mauled? And that finally, I wondered, if he was killed, was it by a human? Of the thousand tourists currently staying in this area, how many, statistically speaking, would be sickos?
Back at the pool, I had a decision to make. Would I lie to him and say something normal like, “All that talk about animals was making me miss our dogs” or risk the truth and allow myself to be the verifiable imaginative person I am?
