Resolution Road

I believe in signs.

Sometime back in the last millenium, when I was a wee college student, my dad was driving me across the wilderness of northern Wisconsin late one night to his home in northern Michigan. I say "his home," because I never officially lived there. After the kids were gone, he and my mother left town and built their Dream McMansion in another state. The state of relief, no doubt.

Those were the days when kids left home after high school. Before they started living in the rec room until their 40th birthdays.

There we were, cruising between the pines down Highway 2, headlights slicing the darkness, when I looked up through the passenger window at the staggering universe overhead and asked for a sign. It seemed like a good idea at the time. You know, dark windswept night, lonely highway, dashboard lights aglow. No sooner had I made this silent request, than it appeared: there in the clouds scudding across the moon, the face of God. I figured it was God, who else would it be? I was in college, God was still a possibility.

For years I held this "vision" close to my heart, believing I had been revealed in the very heavens. It beat seeing the face of Jesus in a zucchini.

Now I think it might have been my own face I saw. Or maybe my husband's, who I wouldn't meet for another lifetime or so. Or maybe it was the face of the guy I rear-ended a couple weeks ago out on Central Entrance, when I momentarily lost focus trying to deflect the cloud of Nuclear Attitude wafting my way from my daughter's side of the vehicle. I blinked one nanosecond too long, Ka-Bam! My second Traffic Incident in less than three months. This guy gets out of the car with his head folded over to one side, and I'm thinking, Fuckenay, there goes the flat-screen television.

Ain't nobody's fault but my own.

That, and injuring my rotator cuff shoveling a tunnel to the outhouse. And losing the diamond out of my engagement ring. Not to mention a plethora of other mini disasters. Well, the writing was on the wall: Change Your Life.

How appropriate that it's also the start of a New Year.

So. In honor of an Old Friend, whose New Year's mantra for decades was always the same -- Tomorrow I'm going to quit smoking and quit drinking and lose fifty pounds!! -- I offer my list. The people who know about such things caution us to keep our lists manageable, case in point being Old Friend, whose annual resolve wavered in tandem with her hangover. Be that as it may, here's mine:

1. Quit smoking (I already did! Twenty-five years ago! Score one!)
2. Quit drinking (er, as much)
3. Lose fifty pounds (I lost ten times that amount in English currency to the guy with the folded-over head)
4. Attain Enlightenment

I have my work cut out with #2. Regarding #4...

When I looked down at my left hand and discovered the diamond was missing from my engagement ring, I went into a swoon. I was sure I was dreaming. I'd had the same feeling when the front bumper of my car connected rather abruptly with the rear bumper of that car in front of me out on Central Entrance. And I've occasionally felt something similar when I've looked up from some task to find my daughter scowling at me from across the room.

What was it my mother used to say? Land o'gosh, this can't be I!

But here's the thing: I found my diamond. I actually found it!! On the carpet below my computer, when it could have been anywhere. And then, when I raced downstairs to show my husband, there were two fat deer standing in our backyard -- our fenced backyard -- snow up to their haunches, breath like tiny clouds swirling. And not only that, when my daughter came home from gym one night last week and found me reading on the couch beside the fire, she picked up her own book and walked over and curled up beside me and folded her head onto my shoulder.

Let me repeat: my thirteen-year-old daughter leaned up against me and began to read.

Like I said, I believe in signs.