This Place is Just Amazing

I watched Sandra Bullock's Oscar acceptance speech on YouTube while I put handcuffs on the baby. (Her choice of toy.) I thought, wait a minute, Sandra Bullock is having my life. Winning an Oscar, making an acceptance speech, skinny, hilarious, with a good solid core.

So I go shopping with the baby and even though I only have to pay 1.50 for a basket of blueberries at our wonderful Sunland produce, I am irritated that I am not a movie star. Not even the star part, movie star writer would be perfect.

I unload the groceries into the car and there's an old guy loading an even older lady into his car next to me. We are surrounded by abundant and affordable fresh fruit, in an ashpalt parking lot on a cloudy day on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He says to me, just standing there in his Henry Fonda fishing hat, a total stranger, and he grins, "Isn't this place just amazing?"

And I have to say, it is amazing. So I do.

Then the baby and I go to the library where I pick out movies and books and music, and she makes me sit on the floor in the empty and colorful kids area and sit on giant stuffed dogs. "Hold them here," she instructs, and I grab my dog by the ears. "Now go like this," she says, and tips over backwards, pulling her dog over with her. So I do. Then we read Curious George, on the yellow carpet, with the alphabet all over it. Resting on our dogs. She's in her footie pajamas with no diaper.

By the time I get home, she's eating noodles and I'm stuffing everything in the fridge from the produce store. My husband calls, whom I haven't seen in months even though we live together. His voice is actually present, and he seems to have found humor out there in the real world. "Everyone's crazy," he tells me.

I tell him about feeling bad I'm not a movie star, and there was a life I saw that I wished I was having. She was making movies, and I was making lunch. Then he became Barry, the man who says exactly what you need in times of crisis. He said "What you're doing is important." He told me that the job I'm doing is impossible, the everydayness, the stability, the loving, the being there - it's so important. It's everything. I said, "It seems so much better to be doing something where you get to stand in front of a stadium full of people clapping for you."

He said, "I'm clapping for you."

(I'm accepting my Oscar. His name is Barry.)

Yes, this place IS amazing.