Dear Navel Diary, Are You Listening?

Author

Prologue

Two bouts of pneumonia have ruined my formerly fabulous navel. All that coughing transformed it from a stunning in-ey to the peculiar looking out-ey it is now. I was not prepared for this. It’s not the only thing that I wasn’t prepared for. I’m starting to look and feel my age. What’s wrong with that, looking and feeling my age? Absolutely nothing, but it’s taken this diary to start to convince myself of it.

I’m grieved and peeved and on the verge of being radically irked. I’m grieved by the navel protrusion and getting shorter, getting gray. I’m peeved by the wart on my face and by the social construct of aging. I’m on the verge of being radically irked that no one told us, no one talks about it, no one celebrates the emotions or physicality of maturity.

I have to talk myself down from the perilous ledge of self-pity, bemoaning lost youth, and start birthing new potentials.

Wake Me Up before It’s Over

One of my worst nightmares has come true. I got a horrifying job performance review. I get reviewed from every direction, top down, sideways, and bottom up. The higher-ups in the organization come after me with charts and a numeric rating scale. My lateral reviews come from my peers in the pyramid, once a year. The actual stakeholders who experience the outcome of my job performance also have a say. Since my workplace is the classroom, students evaluate me at the end of every semester. This process generates a lot of paperwork, which is gobbled up by the institution; numbers and charts are crunched, and if the outcome is deemed positive I might get a raise, if the budget can stand it.

I got a horrifying job performance review. One of my students offered this nugget: She’s an adorable little old lady. In the interest of clarity, I parsed the phrase. Maybe it’s true? Am I adorable? It is true that I’ve gotten shorter, and indeed I am shorter than some of the students. Old is a relative term, and it’s true: I am older than the students. My classroom decorum is stellar, and, in that regard, I am a lady. I still don’t feel any better about this. The phrase is a denigrator, a negation, a minimizer of all that I do, of all that I am. In my field, on my turf in the classroom, I am a genius, a force to be reckoned with, a role model worthy of respect and emulation. If students pull their heads out of their phones, pay attention, and diligently do their assignments, they have a chance to leave my classroom with knowledge and life skills that will serve them well. Which arrogant, wet-behind-the-ears student has dared to call the queen an adorable little old lady?

I was shocked by the assessment, stunned to see it in writing. As my mind ground through the gears of outrage, it drifted into a turn and I found myself thinking about that woman from Pasadena. I realized that we have a lot in common. Lucky her—she lived in a climate where gardenias flourish outdoors. I also like gardenias. I know the petals are easily bruised so the blooms can look rather tacky as they age, but in their prime, gardenias are a sight to see—waxy white and shiny. Not only are they beautiful, they’re blessed with that wild fragrance. Some folks find the aroma too sweet and cloying, but anytime I encounter a gardenia at the greenhouse, I just want to turn into a small insect, roll around in one of those blossoms, and inhale deeply. The garden of the woman from Pasadena must have been glorious.

Here was a woman of considerable economic means. She owned and maintained a most enviable muscle car. Here was a woman with skill and cunning, by all accounts unbeatable in the quarter mile. Hmmmm, I wonder what she looked like? I never had the chance to form my own mental picture of her. It was given to me in those few words. She was a little old lady, a granny. I think she deserved a lot more respect from the youngsters who challenged her. She won every race, and yet she is forever immortalized, minimized, as a little old lady. I propose a toast to her, to a champion, to a woman who loved fast cars and knew how to drive one!

I also love fast cars. I never owned one, but I dated some boys who did. Sometimes I was the passenger. I have felt the raw thrill, lolled in the passenger seat, and seen the speedometer of a Chrysler 440 Hemi buried at 140 mph. WOW! Sometimes I was the driver of a boyfriend’s fast car. He taught me how to take it through the quarter mile. Our challengers got suckered into races thinking they could beat us if I was driving. Too bad for them. Keep an eye on the tachometer and an ear on the engine, work that four on the floor and shut ’em down. That’s how it’s done. I’m not saying any of this was smart or safe. In the penultimate display of teenage stupidity, we’d head for the blacktop road outside of town, at night no less, where the quarter mile had been surreptitiously marked with white spray paint. Other stupid teenagers lined the roadside as spectators. Apparently, parents had no idea this small-town Saturday night Daytona scene existed or surely they’d have put a stop to it. Thankfully, no tragic event ever occurred out there. Credit a teensy amount of driving skill augmented by the grace of God.

Yes, it was dangerous and thrilling and STUPID and I’m not sorry I did it. I love fast cars. That drag racing thrill can’t be re-created, though, and in the rest of my ordinary life I’ve always been a safe, law-abiding driver. (Well, sure, like the rest of you, I’ve driven above the speed limit once in a while.) I’m an even safer law-abiding driver now.

Time changes things. Yep, I used to have a stunning navel, a stunning rep on the small town racetrack, and 20/20 vision. Time changes things. I developed an autoimmune condition and so became visually impaired about twenty years ago. For a long time, I was the only one complaining about how dim elevators are, or the size of print on menus. The rest of my generation is catching up, though. We know how awful it will be if we ever have to give up driving, if we ever lose the sense of independence an automobile brings. We hope it never happens, but meanwhile we develop an even more cautious persona when we take to the roads.

I loved fast cars, but now I don’t even want to be in one as a passenger. I loved fast cars, but at this point I don’t see myself as a competent freeway driver. It’s a rare trip when my speedometer tops fifty miles an hour. I find the back streets and invest more time than the freeway would require for me to get to where I want to go. Look, I already told you I’m visually impaired. Do you honestly want me on the freeway with you? Sometimes I do still have a little fun on the road. I have a race with other traffic, like a car in the lane next to me— an imaginary race. It’s a head game, nothing dangerous, but sometimes it allows me to say, Nanny, nanny, nanny! I picked the right lane and you didn’t! Now, I’m one car ahead of you at the stop light. I WIN!

Time changes things, sometimes in an instant. One moment everything is fine, the next moment something happens that can alter the situation entirely. Not long ago, my husband had that kind of experience. He was minding his own business, preparing to make a left turn through a very busy intersection, when something changed under the hood and the car stopped—didn’t give any warning, just stopped dead. In an instant, he became the cause of a traffic disaster, a clogged, honking back-up that stretched for several blocks in all directions. Really? If honking was enough to fix a stalled vehicle, auto mechanics would be out of business. The frustration and impatience of all those other drivers spilled onto the road along with two good citizens who risked life and limb to help push the car out of the street and into a parking lot.

Two hours later, a tow truck driver with alcohol on his breath showed up and rescued the car. I rescued my jangled husband and drove us home, where we reassured each other that the instant of danger was over.

Time changes things, sometimes in an instant. Something can happen that will alter your life immediately and forever. A car wreck, a stumble over a shoelace or a tree root and a bad fall where the ground comes up at you with lightning speed, a gunshot, a stroke … the list of instant life-changers is long.

I want to put the principle of instant-ness to better use. There are some beautiful things that happen in an instant, too fast for our eyes to see them. It takes still or slow-motion photography for us to be able to see the beating of a hummingbird’s wings. It takes time-lapse photography for us to be able to see a rose unfurling its petals. Growth happens an instant at a time but may go unnoticed until we see the end result. Many instants preceded our awareness of the tip of a blade of grass emerging from the earth, and in each of those instants the blade of grass was minutely altered.

Change happens in an instant. I can choose change in an instant, faster than a souped-up car blowing through a quarter mile. Why cling to a bad mood or harbor a grudge? Why wallow in a fit of indignation because someone put words on me that irritated me? Why stand in a puddle of pity over the demise of my navel?

I don’t know why I do that to myself. I know I can alter my life outlook, step into and over any challenges that come my way. I know that time can change me, and I can change my attitude—in an instant.

Where Are Funk and Wagnalls Today?

I love crossword puzzles! They mystify me, though. I always wonder how they get made. Sure, now we figure a computer makes them up, but I remember crossword puzzles before there were computers. That means that somewhere there was at least one human who knew how to construct a crossword grid and come up with clues. I wonder if any of the puzzles we see today are constructed by an actual person? One other thing about crossword puzzles that intrigues me is the thought of them in other languages, especially in languages that use painstakingly drawn symbols for concepts rather than an alphabet. I only speak one language, English, so of course when I solve a crossword puzzle it’s always in English.

I’ve always loved them, and now I can do them guilt free since they’re supposed to help me keep my mind sharp. That’s a worthy goal, that sharp mind. Usually every puzzle teaches me something, but recently a crossword puzzle clue totally astounded me. The clue was omphalos. I filled in as many of the Across spaces as I could and moved on to the Down spaces, and that’s where I got a big surprise. At first I didn’t believe it and had to go back and check the spelling on every one of my Across answers before I was convinced.

Now I know I have an omphalos. Isn’t that just the coolest word? Saying it out loud several times is bound to make me laugh. My first impression was that it should be something in a circus or some kind of primitive musical instrument that makes a sound halfway between HONK and OM-BLOOP. It’s not. An omphalos is a navel!

I went and looked it up just to be sure. No, I didn’t use any online resource. Sometimes I don’t trust the credibility of the Internet. Not everything you find there is true, so I opted for a good old-fashioned dictionary with paper pages. Darn it all anyway, I had to get my magnifying glass to read it, but it’s the principle of the thing. Here’s a book that was around before the Internet and was, therefore, carefully scrutinized by scholars, editors, publishers, and committees of librarians, all of them vouching for the verity and integrity of the information there. So, I can say here and now that it is true—an omphalos is a navel, second definition—a hub, a central point, a focal point.

In fact, an omphalos sounds like something that should stick out. A hub, a center of activity and importance. I’ve gotten a little more accustomed to the look of my navel anyway, and this just reinforced my comfortability. I don’t feel quite as hateful toward it for betraying me and losing its youthful in-ey-ness. I’m aging, and I have an out-ey now. I have an omphalos that’s important enough to stick out, and so it does, and I almost like it again, just calling it something important like that.

Furthermore, while Iwasreadingthedictionary, Idiscovered that there’s a related word—omphaloskepsis. That’s the practice of navel contemplation as an aid to meditation. Nothing bad about contemplating, thinking deeply about something deep: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my relationship to everybody and everything else that’s here? I have to say I took a lot of umbrage at the second definition of omphaloskepsis—inertia.

No, no, no, that’s not what this stage of my life is about. I am not inert. Life is my laboratory and I’m in it to love it. I am in a constant state of energized flux, experimenting, tipping the scales this way and that, one iota at a time. The search is on for Homeo Sweet Stasis, that perfect balance of all systems, nothing out of kilter.

It’s all about a question of balance. Which benefited me more: having a tight little in-ey just for looks or surviving the pneumonia-cough that outed it? Which enriched