I Miss You When I Blink: Essays by Mary Laura Philpott

Author:Mary Laura Philpott [Philpott, Mary Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781982102807
Google: T9aLDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07GNW5TKB
Goodreads: 40539018
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2019-04-01T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

I started small. Before I ventured into school volunteering, I tried neighborhood volunteering.

Green Ladies Garden Club members, mostly women in their late twenties and thirties, were inducted by fellow neighbors. Did I care about gardening? Not really, but this group was right there in my own backyard, and it had monthly meetings. Structure! Organization! Unlike some hoity-toity clubs that demanded proof of pedigree, the only requirement for this one was that you live on one of eleven streets that formed our neighborhood. By joining, I agreed to cohost one informational session about flowers per year. Cohosting duties included booking a speaker, making a casserole and a salad, and opening your home to the fifty or so people who attended. A few times a year, the club held fundraisers to pay for horticultural improvements to the neighborhood. Bake sales, wreath sales, that kind of thing.

I don’t remember if someone asked me to chair the Pumpkin Patch Extravaganza or if I raised my hand and offered. I do remember thinking we could revolutionize the whole thing by selling not just pumpkins on the first Saturday of October, but advertisements on the promotional flyers that went into mailboxes in September. If we got local businesses to pay to have their names on the flyers as sponsors, we could raise even more cash for seasonal flower plantings! I presented the idea by showing off a sample flyer at a meeting in someone’s kitchen one night. If I do say so myself, it was adorable, bedecked with little pumpkin drawings.

The assembled neighbors oohed and aaahed as they passed it back and forth over bowls of chips and salsa. Then one woman held it up with a derisive chuckle. “Cartoon pumpkins?” she said, rolling her eyes. “So this is what you do all day?”

What I DO ALL DAY?

Has there ever been a more loaded phrase? I don’t know what the right answer is to the “What do you do all day?” question. Maybe the right way to spend all day is hand-mashing organic fruit into baby food with a mortar and pestle. Maybe it’s training for a marathon. But apparently it’s not drawing cartoon vegetables.

I knew better than to care. I should have blown it off.

But I was tired.

And I was proud of my pumpkins.

Under my breath, behind a tortilla chip, I growled, “No, I screw your husband all day.”

The woman who asked the question didn’t hear me—thank God—but the friend sitting next to me did, and the tale has entered our book of friendship legends. Once every few years, someone brings it up. I remain extremely horrified (and slightly proud) of myself in that moment.

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