This is the bull that attacked me yesterday when I was out walking in the fields west of Springville.

Okay, clearly I’m still alive so I’m lying, but really, he was racing towards me, stopped only by three teeny strands of barbed wire.  I about died of a heart attack.  I didn’t even know where I was so I couldn’t call anybody to come get me. 

So I did the next best thing.  I kept walking, and walking, and walking.  Those farm blocks are loooong.  Finally someone came along and picked me up and returned me safely to my car.  I was about two minutes away from it by car.  But I walked FOREVER before that.

Okay, not forever.  But it felt like it.  

Write it down! Now!

I’ve been on a journaling binge lately.  I do this occasionally so I can remember that I actually can think.  Otherwise I become just a chore monkey.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love a good list of chores to check off. It’s just that when you’re old you tend to make stupid lists of stuff that doesn’t really need to be done.  Have you ever asked somebody who was old to do something and they’ve said they have to clean the house?  What’s to clean?  Two old people creeping around?  The worst that’s going to happen is the remote getting greasy from potato chip fingers. 

So, while I still have giant list of chores everyday, the list includes a lot of stuff I used to blow off. 

Writing in your journal is a great way to “get in touch with yourself.”  And if you’re a person whose heyday was in the seventies, you’re compelled to search your inner soul.  Just like you’re compelled to wear granny dresses and hiking boots and flowers in your hair. 

Studies show that if you write in your journal about a positive experience it lets your brain experience it again. So in theory, if you have an awful life, you could make things up and live a perfectly fine “pretend life.”  Then you could live more easily on your Social Security check because you’d have all that free fun.   

My goal is three pages of writing a day.  Of course, a lot of it is blah, blah, blah, but while I usually don’t have to make things up, it does make me pay an inordinate amount of attention to detail. 

For example, pets seem to lead such interesting lives because it doesn’t take much to make them happy.  I spent about twenty minutes yesterday taking pictures of my cat watching the shadows of the birds in a tree through a window shade in our bedroom.   Then I came back an hour later and took the same picture because he hadn’t moved, but I was able to write about it and thus it became a significant experience. 

I’ve also discovered how much I like my neighbors.  Not that I was going around hating them, it’s just that it occurred to me, when I sat down and thought about it, I really like this group we’ve got around us.     

You absolutely cannot whine when you write because it sets things up like a bad perm.  It’s like gas in a small room, it just fills the space.  You think about it all the time and it turns into the pen and paper version of muttering to yourself.  It’s like the verbal dry heaves.  Once you start you can’t stop. 

Writing does help you remember what you did yesterday, the bane of the after-fifty set.  You sometimes have to start with the one thing you CAN remember, locking yourself out of the house, and then connect the dots forward and backward so you can reconstruct the day.  Game therapy.  Like those squares where you have to move the numbered blocks around until they are consecutive.  1, 2, 3, 4, 5.  

If you do start a journal, I guarantee you’ll find yourself writing more and more.  You become your own best bud, unless you have a dog.  Then you can be your own second best friend. 

You’ll find you love to listen to yourself.  You won’t have to call the kids so often or make suggestions to strangers at the grocery about their purchases. 

Trust me, it will be a real blessing to everyone around you.  

A new plan for running our house!

We’ve been watching Downton Abbey on PBS and now I know what’s wrong with our life.  WE HAVE NO SERVANTS! 

And I want some.  The idea of having someone obsessed with getting my hair right every day?  And oh, my heavens!  Having it be their job to make my bed and pick up after me? 

And my job would be to go to dinner every night and sleep until 10 and come down for a great breakfast someone else has made.  It sounds like Embassy Suites, my favorite hotel.  Of course, I’d have to sit down everyday with cook and plan dinner, but I love sitting down and planning things.  And I’d have someone to drive me around all the time.  Doesn’t that sound relaxing? 

Our servants would be smart, nice people like the Downton Abbey servants, and they would love working for me and want my family and me to be happy and have our house look great all the time. 

You have to admit, this has its appeal.  I wouldn’t want to be cursed with a social conscience during all this and start to feel like they should sleep in the guest room when they have the flu, but I wouldn’t mind sending one special boy, perhaps the son of our widowed cook, to a good school because he was brilliant and have him come back and marry my daughter. 

As long as he was really handsome, don’t you know. 

I also want one of those low, calm voices the upper class women all have in these shows.  And be terribly brave when there was really no danger because the chauffer would throw himself in front of a speeding car for me. 

I’d also like to be able to consider everything that doesn’t affect me as unimportant detail.  Like last night, one of the characters was missing from his World War I regiment and everybody kept saying he was going to be fine except for the ditsy cook’s helper.  “Don’t worry, Daisy, there could be a hundred others reasons the war office has declared him missing in action in the first modern war of our age when thousands of soldiers were left dying on the battle field.” And sure enough, he showed up during a concert they were giving for wounded soldiers at the Abbey, which has been turned over to the Army to be used as a convalescent home. 

But then a couple of weeks ago, a substitute butler, who was suffering from PTSD, dropped some gravy on milady’s yellow chiffon and you would have thought they’d cancelled the monarchy.  It’s a completely warped sense of values, but you know, kind of enviable. 

I think I’d have to call a halt at being called “Milady” all the time.  That would be where the fiction ended for me.  I’d have to say, “For heavens sake, call me Liz” at some point. 

Then they would look shyly at me and say, “Well, all right,…Liz,” kind of tentatively.  And then they would go right on doing my hair and making my bed and driving me around and cooking for me because they think I’m fabulous. 

And then I’d wake up. 

Is it Judgment Day already? I was just getting started!

I hope when I die my Judgment Day moment will turn out to be like those pictures of me in ninth grade when I thought I looked so horrible, and in retrospect turned out to look pretty much like all the other ninth grade girls in the world.

Not The Ugliest Ninth Grade Girl In The World, which is what I thought I was.

That’s all I’m hoping for, I just don’t want to stand out as a sinner. I’m hoping that in comparison to say, Jack the Ripper, who hopefully will be right in front of me in the Judgment Day line, they will say, “Good job. You don’t have to spend the next ten thousand years shoveling coal,” or whatever it is St. Peter's helpers say to Moms Who Didn't Do All the Things The Other Moms Did When They Compared Themselves To Other Moms Who They Thought Were Perfect, Which They Did Constantly. (If that's a category, which it should be.)

I’m thinking about this because it’s my birthday and I have a physical coming up soon and, honestly, I feel like I’m getting ready for the Judgment Day. I don’t want to say how old I am, but when I was born, Americans were still thinking of themselves as people who won wars for people who needed their help.

The other day I almost said, “I don’t feel that old inside” to someone younger than me, and I stopped myself in the nick of time. When old people used to say that to me I would think, “Ohmygosh, how could you NOT?! How can old people be surprised that they’re old?"

Well, let me tell you, we are, and you will be too.

Inside of me there lives a moody sixteen-year old listening to the same four songs over and over while waiting for the future father of her children to come by and honk in his father's mint green and white Ford Fairlane. At the same time, I'm still a hugely pregnant thirty-something wondering if this will be my last baby, and a confused fifty-year old trying to figure out where my dad’s insurance policies went.

But I also categorize people as always having been the same age as they are now, forever. I look at my old lady friends and in my mind they were always the same old ladies they are now. It’s hard to imagine them as giggly teenagers nervous about their first crush. And the young moms in our neighborhood will always be “the young moms” and kids will always be “the kids.” Like they will never change.

I also think about how much I don’t want to leave this earth to these upstarts who are taking my place.

Right now, I love my current dog of the five or six we’ve had, my current car of the I-don’t-know-how-many we’ve had. I don’t want to leave the beautiful blue sky above me or my grandkids or my neighborhood or any of my life. I am sooo not ready for any version of Judgment Day—particularly with my doctor.

But if that means it’s my turn to be The Old Person, I’ll deal with it.

As they say, “It beats the alternative.”

Looking at a new year in a new way

This is a column about fear, cream, and New Year’s resolutions.

A very wise woman once said to me…actually it was a teacher in a class I went to with a friend at a graduate business school in France, just outside of Paris. Which, of course, is another story entirely.

Anyway, she said you should never make a business decision based on fear.

So let’s say you want to open a candy shop, but you’re afraid your candy isn’t good enough or that you won’t be able to market it well enough. Or your friends might think you’re an idiot to go into business for yourself “in this economy.” Or, or, or, or.

You should really decide whether or not to open a candy business based on what kinds of candy you make well and what you think people will want. You should have confidence that you can make a good business plan and follow through with success, or that you have the good sense to recognize where your plan should be tweaked to make it a success. Maybe you should sell rainwear, for example, because you live in Seattle and people buy more boots than chocolate.

Anyway, I’ve always thought this was good life advice in general, to not make my decisions based on a lack of confidence or on the fact that I was just plain scared to try something. I can recognize that at my age and athletic ability, maybe it’s not the best time for me to finally learn to parachute out of a plane, but maybe it’s not such a bad time for me to join one of those old lady cheer-leading groups if I wanted. Which I don’t, but I’m not going to not do it because I’m scared of high kicking.

But now for the cream and resolutions parts.

I love New Year’s resolutions. More than fireworks, more than George Clooney movies. And every year I make a new resolution to lose weight. This goes along with my resolutions to be on time, listen before I talk too much, and get Christmas done before Thanksgiving instead of December 23^rd.

I worry about being late not because I don’t want to miss anything, but because I’m afraid people will get mad. I want to get Christmas done early because I hate Christmas shopping.

The lose weight resolution is usually followed by twelve months of eating diet everything and never losing weight.

One of this year’s resolutions is to listen to people because I enjoy them. To stop and listen to my whole life more and to appreciate it.

I’m not going to make my resolutions based on fear of what might happen if I don’t do certain things, but on what I want to accomplish because I believe I can do more. I haven’t gotten all of my resolutions written out yet, but one of them is going to involve the words “first melt a half pound of unsalted butter,” or “whip a pint of cream until stiff peaks form.”

Then I’m going to hope for the best.

A Perfectly Bad Example of Grandparenting

I’m coming right out and saying something about myself as a grandma that my kids have long suspected. I fed three grandkids cookies all day one day last week. I wanted them of my hair and we’d been out of town and there wasn’t a fruit or vegetable to be found anywhere in my kitchen and I was trying to get cookies ready for the neighbors.

So there. Now their parents know for sure that what they suspected all along was true. I’m a bad influence.

I also kept them up late, and I mean REALLY, seriously late two nights and let them sleep in until 10:30 the next morning.

It couldn’t be helped. We had Christmas parties and we were having fun and it took awhile to home and get jammies on.

(I almost said it took awhile to get their teeth brushed, but that would be a lie.)

I know, the fires of heck are waiting for me. I don’t know how I raised five kids without killing them all. I’m a bad, bad person.

On the bright side, no one was hit by a car. Partly because they were inside watching cartoons. But still.

I didn’t take them to Las Vegas and lose them at cards. Or to McDonald’s for Happy Meals, which is worse.

As most of you who are grandmothers recognize, I have hit the trifecta of bad grandmothers: junk food, cartoons, and up past bedtime.

There’s a possibility that these children of mine also experienced a few days of junk food, cartoons, and late nights, which is probably why they are so dead set on perfect parenting. But somehow, they are basically alright now which they seem to have forgotten.

I think it’s good that my grandkids know what it’s like, for just one day of their lives, to eat cookies all day. It would probably be better if the cookies had made them sick but they didn’t. The lesson might have come home a little clearer then.

But unfortunately, everyone felt great the next day and we were all so tired from staying up late that no one was hyper that night. We all just dropped like little sugar-packed flies.

And they absolutely LOVE me. What’s not great about loving your grandmother?

I have to admit that after a couple of days even I felt guilty and took one of the kids to the store to get apples and carrot sticks.

After this week, going back to school may even be a relief to them. Deep in their hearts they must know that hanging out with me is walking on the wild side. On the bright side, it will teach them to stay away from bad companions when they’re older. They’ll know to stay away from people who feed them cookies all day, metaphorically speaking.

Except they won’t. We all felt great the whole time. And I’d do it again next year.

And so would they.

Thanksgiving, It's not just a cliche,

This week I’ve been trying to think about what I’m grateful for that isn’t a total cliché.

Yes, I’m grateful for autumn leaves and snowy air, living in America AND Happy Valley, a double whammy of goodness. Hot chocolate brownies covered with vanilla ice cream. Cough drops when you need them.

I’d be more grateful for a dogs and cats—except our cat left a dead mouse under my husband’s pillow and the way I discovered it was I rolled over to snuggle his pillow, he has a great pillow, after he got out of bed and I SMELLED something awful. Euewww.

I know you’ll eat anything when you’re hungry, but this guy told me one time about visiting a country where they offered him something on a plate that was still crawling. I’m just saying right now, I’m grateful I don’t live there. You can’t tell me there’s not some little girl there screaming, “Please, Daddy, don’t make me eat the worms!”

I’m grateful not to live in China where I hear the language has a component of tones to it. That would mean in China, I would always have a speech impediment of some kind and kids would laugh at me and I’d turn to drugs and have to write a memoir about it.

Boy, I am surprisingly grateful for the things I’ve said no to. In a world where we’re counseled to “Say YES to life!” there are some good things to say no to.

Like sports cars. I wanted a sport car once and had the chance to buy it and I said no. It wasn’t until afterwards that I realized I couldn’t get anything or anyone in it but me, so I would have been lonely and I would have had to make ten trips to the grocery store every week to bring things home in separate bags for my many children. Like those people who own Smart Cars don’t seem to be smart enough to figure out.

I’m grateful I went on vacation with my family instead of walking across the bridge at BYU to graduate from college when I was 49. I would have felt so ridiculous. It’s one thing being the oldest graduate, it’s another thing entirely being the “in the middle” graduate.

I’m grateful my sister was the pretty one. So many social situations I could have never figured out how to handle.

When I think about what I’m grateful for, it’s surprising how few of the downs in my life I remember, just the ups.

I’m grateful for so many ups this Thanksgiving.