More people have been calling me “ma’am.” I’ve noticed this lately. More people have been offering to help with my groceries. I’ve noticed that lately, too. Of all the milestones and markers ticking off the years – having a colonoscopy, or being called “grandma” by a mouthy kid – this gradual, notable, not-objectionable uptick in the kindness of strangers hits me as the weirdest.

First: Because I’m not that old. I’m only 51! Gimme a break! It’s not like maggots are crawling up my nose! Sheesh! Second: Because, and I say this with some pride, I am actually pretty darned good at carrying groceries. If you saw me unloading my latest supermarket haul from the car and up the porch steps and into my house, gracefully juggling ten bags of Empire Apples and twelve jars of Nutella totaling fifteen tons from each of my mighty hands with their grips of steel, you’d say: “HoooooEEEEEE, girlfriend! You got some serioso muscles on you! Will you carry MY groceries?” Yes. You would say this. And you would not call me “ma’am.”

Third: Whatever age you think I am, I’m not. Inside I’m a 12-year-old. Inside I have always been a 12-year-old, and if you need proof, I point to the previously mentioned megatons of Nutella. At the same time, and this is going to sound well and truly bananas, I have always been an octogenarian, maybe a nonagenarian, possibly even a centenarian. At some point I may actually be an octogenarian, maybe a nonagenarian, possibly a centenarian, and if and when that happens, I give everyone around me express advance formal permission to carry all of my groceries anywhere they like.

But the old lady is in there, and she always has been. The hidden senior buried within me has perked up her lively and opinionated head at regular intervals, such as those moments in my youth when folks around me were super-high or super-drunk or some super-funky-and-adorable combo of both, alternately munching and puking away, and I inexplicably turned down the opportunity to be and do same. Not because I was moral or mighty or opposed to munching, but because I just wanted to go home and drink tea while watching “Magnum P.I.” with a blanket on my lap. I still have this urge, though I no longer watch “Magnum P.I.” Tom Selleck now bugs the crap out of me. But the tea-and-blanket impulse remains.

So maybe this is why young people (HAVE I REALLY STARTED CALLING THEM THAT?) are now addressing me as “ma’am.” It has nothing to do with my actual chronological age. When that kind bagger at the supermarket last week hefted the last of my groceries and asked if I “need help with those,” she wasn’t suggesting I couldn’t carry them myself. Nope. Of course not. She sensed mighty hands and their grips of steel. But she also sensed my urgent wish to sit down and blob with a hot beverage in front of the tube. It wasn’t the gray hair or the baggy smudges under my eyes or the unmistakable fog of exhaustion that tipped her off; it was the spirit of tea within me.

not a walk in the park

Life isn’t what you imagined it would be when you were in your 20s.

You know what I mean? I mean it isn’t some walk in the park. When you’re 21, barely at the post-pimple stage of development, graduating college and brimming with youthful gumption, you look ahead to the next one or five years to a job or traveling or grad school or the Peace Corps. And then you look beyond that and see independence and an apartment and a commute to a work, Starbucks in hand, on the first stage of your directly rocketing arc to career success.

And then you look ahead even further and see love and marriage and a tidy house and a gurgling baby and a bigger job. And then you look ahead and see more gurgling babies and older adorable children and an even bigger job and then, down the line, you envision turning a little gray with your spouse. And then you look ahead and see you and your by-then-silver-fox life-mate schlepping your kids to college, and then you look ahead again and you imagine them graduating college, holy shit, just like you, barely post-pimple and full of youthful gumption, crossing the stage to rousing toots of mediocre Elgar, clutching diplomas in their hands and long, linear, productive, predictable, mistily imagined and neatly cinematic lives occupying their noggins.

But life isn’t like that. It’s not linear and cinematic; it’s a dadaist mess, marked by pain and complication and exhaustion and kinkiness beyond all expectation, and by that I mean not sexually depravity but crookedness, knottiness, twists. The fooking thing never goes in a straight line. The trail is WAY WAY WAY too steep and rocky, gnarled with too many roots and too much dense growth, for a head-on ascent. It’s all switchbacks, stumbles, detours as we make our way through This Bloody Disappointment (we get dizzy, step off the trail) and Those Sucky Losses (stop, dig for tissues, weep) and That Goddamn Illness (we trip, fall down, bleed).

We can’t see all that when we’re 21, and thank God: My trail, so far, has been pocked with grief, and noooooo way would I have wanted to see any of it in advance. Of all the superpowers I might enjoy in some fantasyland comic-verse (flying, for one), I’d never want the gift of prognistication.

This wild path I’m on is also strewn with beauty, and I never saw that coming, either. Though I imagined gurgling babies, I couldn’t have predicted the soul-consuming joys of loving children and the head-exploding awe of watching them grow. Though I imagined falling in love, I couldn’t have predicted the boom-bang-POW! of precipitous passion and the softer, lazier, lovelier conviction that This Guy’s It. I couldn’t have seen all the friends and joys and tiny victories. I couldn’t have seen this blog, for instance, or the book that inspired it; I couldn’t have known that the years following the worst horror I’d ever known, my husband’s suicide, could be so active and fruitful; I couldn’t have anticipated laughter in the strangest settings, light in the darkest, or the way my own sense of self had altered and grown, making me looser, battier, maybe just a little better at being alive. I couldn’t have seen how much I’d have getting older.

No, life isn’t what I expected it would be when I was in my 20s. It’s scarier. Crazier. More mystifying. Harder on the joints. More tiring. More beautiful. And better.

A couple months ago, one of my offspring (names have been removed to protect the guilty) confessed to eating too many cupcakes. The exact worry involved nutrition. “Cupcakes aren’t healthy enough. I should be eating healthier,” this person with DNA similar to mine said recently.

After discussing cupcake consumption with Said Descendant, as well as all the other, more nutritious foods being consumed regularly to offset the uptick in baked goods, I issued some brilliant maternal reassurance along the lines of “the cupcakes won’t kill you.” Then, in an effort to clarify this point, I repeated one of my Favorite All-Time Made-Up Principles, or FATMUPs, which amount to my system of rationalizing more or less everything in my life. The FATMUP governing housework, for instance: Sweep the floor when it crunches. The FATMUP governing cars: Buy a new one BEFORE a wheel falls off. (This is a long-held FATMUP of mine. Yup. Learned it from my mama. Yup. Baby-blue 1981 Chrysler K-car. Piece of shit. Yup. Right rear wheel. Clunk. Route 203, New Milford, Connecticut. Just like that. Yup.)

The FATMUP governing cupcakes, and all other forms of gustatory happiness in need of constant and hardcore rationalization, is one of my favorites. Simply put: Some foods have spiritual value. Some foods have nutritional value. Some have both. And some have neither, although these don’t merit FATMUP coverage and I have no idea, really, why such foods exist at all in our earthly realm. (Hello, God? This is Amy. What’s the reason for microwaveable breakfast sausage? Houseflies I can understand. And knee design. But why Jimmy Dean?)

Cupcakes, needless to say, have great spiritual value, containing the banked-up, baked-up, super-amazing power to make us happy, at least until we get high on glucose and then crash in an exhausted, sobbing heap 20 minutes later. Quinoa has great nutritional value, and while I am pro-quinoa, don’t you DARE suggest it has any kind of spiritual value comparable to a cupcake’s, because we both know it doesn’t. Some foods do, however, boast spiritual and nutritional value both: fresh blueberries, for instance. Roasted garlic. Dark chocolate, and don’t you DARE suggest it doesn’t have any kind of nutritional value whatsoever, because we both know it does. (Hello? Antioxidants?)

Which reminds me, I have a FATMUP governing dark chocolate specifically: Eat it while writing. And there’s a corollary: Eat it while not writing. My father owned two sets of pants, one pre-book, one post-book, because he always pounded away at his ding-a-licious manual typewriter with a stack of Hershey’s bars at his elbow. I don’t do manual typewriters. Or stacks of Hershey’s. I do a bar or so every few days, and it’s always the bitter stuff, 60 percent at least. Also, unlike my father, I have no need for two sets of clothes, BECAUSE I’M NEVER NOT EATING CHOCOLATE, SO WHAT WOULD BE THE POINT.

But seriously, folks. We shouldn’t belittle the import and impact of minor joys, because it’s often the minor joys that keep us going. The major joys are awesome: the ecstasy of romance, the miracle of birth, the parental love that fills and fills and fills us. But let us not diminish the power of the cupcake. Small things that bring us pleasure can help us make it to the big ones.

In his recent profile of the philanthropist Heinrich Medicus, my colleague Paul Grondahl wrote my favorite sentence all year: “He credits his happiness and longevity to wine and chocolate.” Go, Heinrich.

Sounds like a FATMUP to live by.

a couple of public domain crickets i met on the internet

I have a cricket. Just one. It’s in my kitchen. No idea where. Its KRRRIP KRRRIP KRRRIPs emit from somewhere in or around the cabinets, or behind or under the stove, or maybe somewhere inside the radiator, unless it’s hiding under the sink. Originally it was in the basement, where I first heard it while doing laundry the other night. It shut up as soon as I walked over to the washing machine, as though it just noticed the intrusion and suddenly turned coy and shut the hell up. OH NOOOO, the cricket said to itself, I DON’T WANT THAT WEIRD LADY TO NOTICE ME.

I didn’t stop to wonder why a cricket was in my basement, because, first of all, crickets are always welcome here. I have a pro-cricket policy that goes back to my girlhood on a lake in rural Connecticut, and I suspect this liberal reputation of mine has trickled through the cricket population over the years. The other reason why I wasn’t surprised to find a cricket down there: because my basement is a lake. It’s so wet, I can actually swim in it.

I mean this. There are fish. Large ones; I have the teeth marks of an angry Northern Pike on my left ring finger to prove it. I even dock a boat down there, and not just some pathetic excuse for a dinghy, either. I mean a speed boat, the kind that growls and thud-thud-thuds over the waves. Sometimes, whenever I can rope one of my kids into taking the wheel, I water ski. You should see me jump the wake! Whoo-hooo! I’m telling you, I totally kick ass in that basement. And you know what else? Surrounding the lake down there is an entire nature preserve. With woods. A swamp, even. Wildflowers. Water birds. Stinging things. Bears. Bigfoot. A whole ecosystem.

So, no, finding a cricket there was not a shocker. I am not sure what induced the leggy stridulating insect-man to come upstairs, unless he was lonely and looking for some hot cricket mama, and yes, I just gender-assigned my cricket. No “it” for this big boy any longer, hubba hubba. Did you even know that the chirping crickets are generally male? See, I didn’t. Not until Google told me. Google tells me lots of things. You don’t know half of what Google tells me! Neither do I! That’s why I need Google! And that KRRRIPPING you hear is the sound of me digressing.

But. Back to my virile little cricket. When I heard him, my first thought was OH NO! THE CRICKET IS UPSTAIRS!, followed by my second thought, AN INSECT HAS INVADED THE PRISTINE SANCTITY OF MY KITCHEN!, which was quickly replaced by my third thought, SINCE WHEN HAS MY KITCHEN BEEN PRISTINE?, which then gave way to my fourth thought, SINCE WHEN HAVE I BEEN ALL WUSSY ABOUT INSECTS?, soon to be supplanted by my fifth and final thought: AFTER ALL, I GREW UP IN KIND OF A BUGGY HOUSE. Which was true. Minus the “kind of.” Back in those happy halcyon days on old Lake Waramaug, insects invaded my childhood home on a fairly regular basis.

And not just insects. Animals, too. We used to hear squirrels in the attic, though we never ever ever saw them in the attic because we never ever ever went up there, not once, not in my entire childhood, and don’t bother asking why, because I DON’T KNOW. We also used to hear squirrels in the walls. Sometimes, after they died, we used to smell them in the walls. And not only that: my mother once accidentally threw her dentures into a mouse hole in the kitchen, never to retrieve them. This time, you’re allowed to ask: HOW DOES SOMEONE ACCIDENTALLY THROW DENTURES INTO A MOUSE HOLE? And I am allowed to answer: By losing your grip while scrubbing them clean at the kitchen sink, then lurching after your teeth in an effort to catch them but somehow sadly propelling them across the room at blazing speed.

So. Really. A cricket is no big deal. I welcome him. I speak his language. I Google his nomenclature (the family Gryllidae, and did you know that he chirps more rapidly as the temperature rises?). I sing his song. KRRRIPP.

I have a question I always ask phlebotomists, and I always get the same response.

As the hospital worker tightens that rubber snake around my arm, swabs my popping vein with alcohol and preps the needle for insertion, I ask: Who faints more in your experience, men or women? And the phlebotomist replies, “men.” And then we discuss the reason this is so. And the pair of us always stop short of saying, Well, if women fainted at the sight of blood, they’d be unconscious for several days at a stretch on a monthly basis! And wouldn’t that suck! HA HA HA HA HA!

Friday morning, I was having a routine (non-scary) blood draw. The phlebotomist was a lovely young Indian woman with a kind and comprehending face. As she strapped and swabbed and prepped, I asked my usual question, and she answered the usual way. But then the conversation took an unexpected turn toward the profound.

In a jokey mood, I said: Women can’t be squeamish, can’t we?

The phlebotomist smiled knowingly, then slid the needle into my arm, inserting a vial.

I added: What with childbirth, and everything. There’s no passing out, or we’re in trouble!

She smiled again. “We are lucky,” she said. “When we give birth, when we have a child, we have a second life.”

A second life? I hadn’t thought of it that way, I said. But you’re right. Our lives expand when we give birth.

“Not just our own life any longer. When we have a child, we have a second.”

Swapping out the full vial for an empty one, she added: “We have many lives. Sister, mother, wife, daughter.” And again: “We are lucky.”

And sitting there in a large teaching hospital, tourniquet on my arm, red stuff spilling into a little plastic tube, I almost wept. I didn’t. But almost.

I know what you mean, I said. I have so many lives. With each new person I love, I have another life.

She nodded. I kept talking. I couldn’t shut up.

I have three kids, I said. My husband died a few years ago, but my life didn’t stop. I didn’t stop. Because I had my children’s lives, too. Not just mine. Theirs. And everyone else I love, too. It just keeps going. It just keeps growing.

She slipped out the needle. Whipped a piece of gauze into the crook of my arm. Taped it over.

I watched her, thinking about the gift of loving another person. Each instance of love, whether it yields a baby or a bond of friendship or a quiet act of charity, takes us out of ourselves. It gives us something better, something bigger, than just those endlessly navel-gazing disconsolate selves. It gives us others, their ways of seeing and feeling and being, and we learn to see and feel and be with them. And that’s the best and only rebuttal to death and its scruffy wayward cousin, fear of living.

“Always, new life,” the phlebotomist said.

Always.

God doesn’t like being rushed. I haven’t discussed this with the Almighty, but I’m certain of it. Why? Two reasons. First, because no one likes being rushed; have you ever seen that brief flicker of annoyance on a wait-person’s face when you express dismay, even politely soft-pedaled dismay, that your plate of kimchi has taken 38 minutes to arrive (and counting)? I’ll bet you have, even if you’ve never eaten kimchi.

The second reason I’m certain that God doesn’t like to be rushed: because nothing worthwhile in my life has ever happened overnight. If God were in a hurry, I would have been pregnant for 48 hours per baby, not a whole nine months, which I’m here to tell you IS A VERY LONG TIME, especially when you’re so freakin’ huge that total freakin’ strangers come up and ask about your triplets, then laugh uncomfortably when you swear up and down it’s only one freakin’ baby (no really ha ha ha ha ha no way how many babies is it really ha ha ha) . I couldn’t even see my feet after the eighth month. No. Seriously. It’s worth repeating: I couldn’t see my feet.

One of the more fascinating aspects to getting older is my new relationship with time. I’m just as impatient with life, just as flummoxed by God’s propensity for lolly-gagging, just as hungry for good things to happen Now Right Away Last Week Stat Chop-Chop Toot-Sweet Snap To It. But I’m also profoundly more aware that I don’t have as much of it left in the bottom of the corn flakes box as I did a decade or two ago, and I’m determined — at least, in the infinitesimally small portion of my left cerebral hemisphere that dictates rational thought — to savor every bite.

I wish I’d savored every other one more. All of those spoonfuls I choked back in a hurry; why didn’t I slow down, chew 20 times, swish the feel and flavor around my mouth a little longer? I think about my children. Everyone’s children. When they’re born, people tell you: “Enjoy it! They grow up so fast.” But of course you’re too sleep-deprived, and too absorbed in the blitzed-out ecstasy of new parenthood, to hear (much less believe) anything anyone tells you. And when your kids are babies, it’s impossible to believe they’ll ever grow up and talk back and run out the door and away into their own lives.

My youngest is about to start high school. My middle child is about to start college. My oldest is about to spend a semester abroad. If I close my eyes and venture back a day or two — not my days, but God’s — I can hear their little voices chirruping in the bathtub, I can see their little diapered bums waddling across the floor. If I venture back another day or two, I can feel them kicking and socking my ribs; I can put my hand on my taut enormous belly and feel the rise of an elbow or a heel as it dents my stomach wall and leaves, I’m sure of it, a footprint.

I shouldn’t have been in a hurry then. I’m glad God wasn’t.

As I write this, I’m sweating sheets in my attic. But I am not going to complain about the heat. I am not. This is summer. And not long ago I spent way too much time complaining about Not Summer, otherwise known as the Longest, Snowiest and Most Pissily Irritating Winter of Recent Memory, to grant myself the freedom to now complain about its opposite. I cleared so much bleepety-bleeping snow this winter that I actually broke my shovel. No. I’m not kidding. Just like that. Snap.

As I said to coworkers today, anyone who hears me gripe about the weather this summer is encouraged to just walk up and punch me. Except of course I don’t really mean that; I don’t want to be punched. I am speaking figuratively, which is the opposite of literally, which most people no longer use literally, preferring to abuse and distort this poor, maltreated, misunderstood morsel of English verbiage until it resembles one of those dirty pink splats of bubble gum on a New York subway platform.

This is what I mean literally: I love the four seasons, and when I say I love the four seasons, I mean I love not just the poetic aspects so oft and softly celebrated by more sensitive souls than I (the passage of the days! the crinkling of the leaves! the cyclical nature of life in this evolving cosmos!), but I love especially the way time behaves in the throes of each. It halts in the middle and just sits, sits, sits, squatting with an emery board to buff its nails, la-dee-dah-dah, while the rest of us flap our mouths to complain about it. WINTER, GET UP OFF YOUR ASS, YOU ARE TOO DAMNED COLD, we howl in frustration. Or WHAT THE HELL, SUMMER, MY HEAD JUST MELTED OFF MY NECK.

But then the wackiest thing happens. Time speeds up. The season doesn’t just change; it gets up in a hurry, drops its manicure kit in the middle of the road and bolts all bananas-like to the opposite end of town. And in its place comes the next season, plopping itself down and making itself comfy for a nice, long, leisurely stretch while we bitch and moan about its presence.

But not me. Not this time. I’m not going to fight it. I’m not going to kvetch. Instead I’m determined to just be in the summer, to surrender to the warmth, to drop down next to it and into it and jostle its elbows and smear sunblock on its back and maybe, if I’m feeling adventurous, lick the salt off the back of its hand. So long as I’m not shoveling anything, I’ll be happy. I’ll shout it to the heavens. I’ll kick up my heels and dance the Cha Cha naked with my hair on fire. And no, I don’t mean that literally.