The Short List

I have a short list, and you do too. The people you can call and tell funny and horrifying and completely absurd things to who will make something that was just really great in your head become transcendent because now its both in your head and out in the world. The people who will equally enjoy the nuttiness you're telling them, as much as you're enjoying the nuttiness. The people you can hang up with and either a. never speak of it again or b. sit on it for a really long time and then bring it up in a very funny way at an inappropriate time or place. The people you talk to in your head when you're not together.

I can call my brother with lots of very obscure and wistful impersonations of foreign men with indiscriminate accents consumed with longing. I can call my friend D. with any observations regarding female anatomy, mine and others. She knows and teaches me all the good nicknames. Cookie! I never would have thought of cookie, and its perfect. I can call C. and egg her into a tirade and then just relax and enjoy the phenomenal show of wit and sarcasm (hers, not mine) that ensues. I can call D. and report just about anything in a Bill Cosby voice and be understood: why it needed to be said, and why it needed to be said in a Bill Cosby voice. Just about 20 years of the Bill Cosby calls in the Bill Cosby voice. Honestly, it makes me know the world is good and my life, if it ends today, has been blessed, lucky, full, and plenty. Plenty.

I was thinking all this because I was noticing this evening in the shower that my breasts are having the best day of their life. This day, 5/28/2013, at 10:25pm. They are at a particular kind of fullness due to impending hormonal events that must be interacting with a certain kind of moon or tide because they are glorious. Glorious! Perfect melons, peaches, every fruity cliche. I want to take a picture of them, and I want to go downtown and take them out because they are so magnificent this evening that they should be seen in the moonlight, reverently touched, gently kissed with the most feathering of kisses. Is it just me? Is this happening all over the city, like werewolves, only better? For one night, can we all take our fantastic breasts out of their hiding places and congregate out in the dewy air and stay up all night and just love them?

Its too late to call D., who is my short list person for this kind of thing (as teenagers, we did a certain amount of naked dancing in the rain). This could all be over by the morning, but I don't want to forget it. I have never had these breasts before, and I may never have them again. Its a beautiful visitation and a lovely reminder of just how wonderful the human body is, particularly the female form, and mine included. I'll write it here, to remember, to come back and visit. To maybe remember to remember and call D. about it tomorrow. Or maybe not.

The short list, I think, brings out your best voice. Your honest voice that says the truth. Candid, honest, authentic. How and who you really are. The gift is not in the personal liberation or the freedom of that, but rather something more modest: the simple opportunity to enjoy yourself. A funny side effect of AA, I think, is things just like this. When in my life have I ever had the pleasure of consistently hearing so many different people say so many different kinds of things, but all from the heart, honest and true? You can wait months to find your next great book that has a voice you want to keep talking after the last page. Go to an AA meeting and you're going to hear someone saying something at some point that you just don't want to stop.

You can also not go to AA, ever. I went to the playground today, and had a conversation with my friend K., who has very large and lovely breasts. Its a defining feature for her, and she mentions things about them in conversations the way you would about how your kids are doing in sports and in school. They have a presence and a life a little bit of their own. She was meant to bake brownies this afternoon, and made mention of the fact that for the past 25 years she has softened every stick of butter she's ever used to bake something by sticking it in her cleavage. And that brought me joy, to know that, for her to say it, and to share it with me. And it inspires me to follow her example and share my own breast joy tonight, out loud, without edit or particular caution, in my own honest voice. Just this night, while its here. It may be long gone by the morning.

I let K. know that I have had to settle for putting sticks of butter and occasionally baby bottles in my armpit. Nothing to be advertised to the recipients of my baked goods or mothering.

A good day is a chance to experience something, narrated in my own voice in my own head, that is worthy of expression to any one of the individuals on my short list. A good day is a day with even one thing that was really, really funny. Or joyful. Or absurd. Or simply honest. A good day is when I notice something great, and get to tell the story to someone who understands it and likes it too. Or even when I just get to tell the story at all.

Like about my breasts. My one-day-only, rounded, luminous and lovely breasts. Because saying that one, out loud, or just here, might also be one-day-only. Its honest and absurd and funny and true and on this day that works great for me.

Today was a good day.