My Olympic Commute

This may be a sign that I'm watching too much olympics coverage. This morning, like every other morning, I drove to work. But in my head I couldn't stop imagining how it would sound if the commentators from various olympic sports were broadcasting my commute.

SNOWBOARD
"Sweet! What a drive! That was a combo double-lane-change-McTwist / right-on-red. Super-hard to do and he nailed it! Flaming pistols of awesome-sauce!"

CURLING
"Dan, as we watch Ryan curl away from the house, I think we should remind our viewers how difficult this is. I know driving to work looks easy but it's harder than it looks. It really is a sport. Really."

FIGURE SKATING
"Peggy, notice how the song on the radio crescendos perfectly in time with that acceleration to the on-ramp. So hard to do and Ryan pulls it off with elegance and longing. You can really feel the emotion coming through here. He's forlorn and disconsolate. It's almost palpable. I think it's a reflection of his father-wound."

LUGE
"Well that run was three-one-hundredths of a second slower than his last commute, and I don't know why. Let's watch it again on replay, after which we will still have no idea."

CROSS-COUNTRY SKIING
"Ryan is driving uphill now! Uphill! Look-it! Uphill in the snow!"

CHRIS COLLINSWORTH
"I've been to a lot of sporting events. I asked Ryan if he was nervous about this commute. He looked cool and calm and said he has done this thousands of times. He's ready. Also, I've been to a lot of sporting events."

BOB COSTAS
"Was that a turn signal? I can't tell. I can't see anything."

A Wife Who Wants Beauty - Conclusion

Lisa signed a check and touched the pen to her crooked lips. From the window in her office, she could see the picnicking lunch crowd in the park across the street — couples on blankets, nannies with children, puppies, frisbees, smiles. In half an hour, Harold would arrive with chicken salad sandwiches in a to-go sack, and they would take their place amid the flirting summer breezes. Lisa smiled and her smile ran downhill, toward a deeper sense of things. She glanced away from the window to the Matilda Thacker Award.

The award had arrived in the mail and she kept it on a shelf above her desk. It reminded her why she started the agency. Since that December night when the hotel valet thought she had lost her mind, Lisa's charity had grown to a national powerhouse. Macy's Mirror had provided counseling, career assistance, play therapy and plastic surgery for nine hundred women and girls, free of charge.

Macy was the girl with the newspaper bows. She had become Lisa's first client. Two weeks after Lisa had run into the street to retrieve Macy's bow — to pull a tattered, dirty symbol of beauty from the gutter — Macy was enrolled in school and shopping for uniforms at the department store with her name.

There had been no acceptance speech for the Matilda Thacker Award. In fact, Lisa had never again appeared before any crowd, nor in any plastic surgeon's office, nor, for that matter, at her own office at the newspaper. She had quit her job over the phone on the way to Macy's.

The war was over. Her cheek showed the broken lines of defeat. But her eyes told a different story. She kept the award on a shelf where every visitor to her office could see, propped up next to a photo of a homeless girl, a ribbon of newsprint, and an eyelash curler.

A Wife Who Wants Beauty - Part 8

The girl was seven, eight at the most. Even from across the street in the dim, pulsing lights of the city, Lisa could see her eyes — bright and eager and knowing. She wore a dress, which was impractical in her position, with torn pink stockings and black tennis shoes. There was a park across the street from the hotel where Harold and Lisa stopped at the valet stand and made one last check of clothing and makeup on their way into the banquet. Lisa noticed the girl right away. And the newspapers.

She sat on the ground in front of a green metal park bench which supported a mass of ragged clothing and shopping bags that looked to conceal an adult, lying down. Over the mass was a layered array of newspapers serving as a quilt. The girl was taking selections from the quilt, choosing them carefully for her purposes, and tying slips of the newsprint into bows. Three already adorned her matted hair, tossing in the December breeze in unison with the edges of the quilt.

It didn't help. Lisa wondered if the little girl knew that her bows didn't look pretty; they only served to make the scene she occupied more pathetic. Lisa saw her as a gawker sees a Monet. She stared at her idly but intensely and absently shook her head. Something told her she shouldn't think of the girl as an exhibit, as if the valet might become a docent and point out the detail in the girl's bright green, threadbare scarf. But she couldn't help it. She saw her from across the street, but she knew the scene perfectly.

She knew the most minor details — the endless arrangement of strips of pulp that never seemed to align just right; the frailty of the bows; the way they seemed less pretty over time; the gnawing awareness that the bows weren't working; the drive to ignore that awareness; the little girl's fear of looking at the fluttering heap of newsprint behind her because she knew what she would see. She would see someone she didn't understand. Forces larger than her, cosmic and random and unexplained and unfair. Regret. Rejection in the form of charity. Ugliness.

One of the bows blew away from the girl's fingers and both of them watched it tumble down the street, then crash and crumple into the gutter.

A Wife Who Wants Beauty - Part 7

The fifth surgery was a mistake, a step backward. It would take a sixth to undo the damage of the fifth. She only hoped the seventh would move the cause forward.

Harold had long since given up on dissuading her. He called from the closet to ask where his tie was. It had been years since he wore it — probably since the fated Christmas party of which they had stopped speaking.

Lisa was in front of the mirror again. She labored there for hours each day, either putting on or taking off various modules of her public face. Tonight, she started a half-hour early. She was going to stand in front of people tonight — hundreds of people — and smile and receive an award.

Ten months before, after stumping through hundreds of storefront businesses and scores of networking lunches, Lisa had landed an account that would set her for all of the surgeries she wanted. Grand Properties managed more than one hundred apartment communities, with more on the way. They would advertise for years to come. Grand had also provide other introductions until, on this night in December, Lisa was primping for a banquet where she would receive the Matilda Thacker Award for the paper's top salesperson.