Ooohhhhmmmm….no

Some years ago, a friend of mine talked me into joining her in taking a meditation class. After much convincing and finally offering to pay my “tuition,” I consented. When we arrived at the center, we found a bunch of chairs arranged in a circle. Circles are bad. Circles mean ‘sharing.’ I hate circles. And I’m not real fond of ‘sharing,’ either. Sharing usually requires getting in touch with something. If I get in touch with anything else, well, please, God, let it be aliens from another planet, because I’m circled to death.

Social work circles, as I like to call them, have a place. Group therapy…that’s the place for circles. The kindergarten classroom circle is okay, too. But college classroom and office meeting room and pretty much everywhere else in the world are not the places for social work circles.

Our first class meeting, the instructor/facilitator person said, “Let’s go around the circle and share our names and a little something about ourselves that others don’t know. Tell us also why you decided to try meditation.”

Yep. Social work circle. ‘Circle’ and ‘share’ in the same sentence. Please, God, just shoot me. The main reason we have things other people don’t know about us is because we didn’t want them to. In fact, some of us downright covet our privacy. I glare a hole into my soon-to-be-ex-friend across the CIRCLE.

We are going in alphabetical order. Since I do not hyphenate, I am registered under ‘Conway’ and not ‘Rush.’ There is not a single ‘A,’ ‘B’ or early-alphabet ‘C’ person in the bunch.

“Martha?”

“I’m supposed to be hyphenated, so I should really be an ‘R.’ I shouldn’t go first.”

I really shouldn’t go first.

“Come on, now, you go right ahead.”

I glare a new hole into the person formerly known to me sitting across the CIRCLE.

“My name is Martha and I like to study serial killers in my spare time.”

There’s nothing like an apparent morbid fascination with the dead to help people respect your personal boundaries.

“That’s great, Martha. Very interesting. And why did you decide to try meditation?”

“Meditation? I thought my friend said ‘medication.’ I guess I’m in the wrong place.”

Well, honestly, if I’m going to exert the effort to do the therapy, I think I might like the drugs that go along with it.

“Oh, that’s really very funny. Really, though, what were you expecting to get out of this course?”

Do group leaders all read the same book or something? Must they all ask the same questions? Call me crazy (many do}, but when I signed up for a course entitled “Intro to Meditation,” I thought I was going to be introduced to meditation. My bad. I expected to have an hour of peace and quiet once a week for about four weeks. Silly girl.

Another friend told me recently that she was thinking about beginning meditation but was a little anxious. Smart girl, I say. But the next time someone asks me my thoughts about meditation, I think I’ll just respond “Prescription, or over-the-counter?”

Reprinted courtesy Eagle Newspapers, Syracuse.

Mission Im-’possum-ble

Every now and then an experience comes along that makes you question traditional parental wisdom. One such experience presented itself during a car ride with my mother-in-law early in my marriage.

After a day-trip to Pennsylvania to visit relatives, my husband, his mom, his sister, our baby and I were headed home. The weather in the Tompkins/Cortland County areas had turned nasty while we were gone. Hubby drove, his mother rode shotgun, I sat behind him, my sister-in-law sat behind her mom, and the baby was tucked into his infant car seat between Nancy and me.

“Oh, my goodness,” Mom said. “It’s getting terrible out, isn’t it?”

After several refrains of the mantra, my husband responded through gritted teeth.

“It’s not that bad,” he said.

Detecting he wanted to add “…and if you stop saying that, you might live through the drive…,” I gave him my best ‘be-nice-that’s-your-mother-you’re-speaking-to’ knee in the back. We were creeping along a tree-lined mountain road, cliff to the right of us, mountain to the left, when we rounded a bend and felt more than heard the two thumps.

“Oh, I can’t believe we hit it!” Mom said.

“Hit what?” I asked.

“What did you want me to do?” hubby asked his mom. “Swerve off the road or risk hitting someone head on?”

“Well, no, I guess not,” she said.

“Hit what?” I asked.

“An opossum,” hubby said.

As I was conjuring up the worst possible road-kill scenarios, Mom spoke.

“Well, you are going to go back there and take it out of the road before it makes a mess, aren’t you?” she asked her son.

I never realized she had a death wish.

“I need to find a safe place to turn around,” he hissed.

I concluded I had married into a family of lunatics. I wanted to get home. We’d been in the car - WITH A BABY - for what felt like eons, and these nuts were talking about turning around. We returned wwwaaayyy past where the incident had occurred to find nothing in the road because we had to find another safe place to turn around toward home again.

We were all silent as we approached the bend and the scene of the crime again. Suddenly, there it was, right in the middle of the road.

“Be careful,” I said, images of oncoming cars careening out of control and premature widowdom looming in my head.

Thinking he would pull over and get out of the car, imagine my astonishment when he pulled up alongside the critter and opened his door. I should probably mention at this point that said vehicle was a Toyota Celica. Two-door. So when that huge door swung open, there we were, eye-to-eyelids with the little guy. Hubby, apparently thinking he could remove said beast from the roadway without leaving the car, reached out to push it out of the driving lane.

The opossum, reared up, hissing, slashing and teeth gnashing. Hubby jerked himself back into the car and stared in astonishment (think ‘deer-in-the-headlights’) at the rodent now standing about six feet, 13 inches tall. Pandemonium broke out. I was frantically trying to grab my baby and crawl over my sister-in-law who was trying to crawl over her mother out the passenger side of the car.

“Shut the door!”

“AAAAaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggghhhhhh!!!!!”

“Oh, my goodness! Oh, my goodness!”

Hubby slammed the door and just about doubled over in laughter. We took off down the road, our hearts in our throats, eventually arriving at home in relatively the same condition in which we’d left, leaving us to ponder the evening’s events. I decided the ordeal was a learning experience. I learned my mother-in-law was off her rocker and that “playin’ ‘possum” ain’t just a catchy phrase.

Reprinted courtesy Eagle Newspapers, Syracuse.