Winding the Clock

Los Angeles, California

Our lives revolve around routines. We all practice daily rounds, like eating our meals, brushing our teeth, going to bed. We are creatures of habit.

In my home, I have concentric circles of routines, such as when I switch bed linens from winter to summer weight. I like to celebrate seasonal holidays with certain decorative items like kitchen towels and the color of flowers in my home. And I have a clock that needs to be wound, more of less, weekly. It is a regulator clock, with a pendulum that keeps time and a chime that rings the hour and the half. It was a wedding gift from my husband's parents which we picked out at a local clock store. And when I wind it, hearing the sound of that winding, I am reminded of my late husband, as he was the one who always maintained it. I would hear him winding that clock, even if I was in other rooms of our home.

Somewhere between the annual routines and the daily routines, is a special monthly routine. And that is the visit of my closest friend, Lynnette. We book it on our calendars at least six months in advance and make other plans around it. She comes to visit for three nights. It used to be two, but that was never enough. Now the scheduled three nights feels just as brief as the two used to feel. We use our time well.

I have always felt it was important to spend extended time with the women in my life. The summer between eighth and ninth grade was spent either at the home of my best friend Dayle, or at my house. We literally jumped back and forth from one house to the other, spending days and nights together, and most of it in our families' swimming pools during the day, then playing five hundred rummy or Tripoly at night.

For over a decade, I spent a week or more every summer on cruises with my mother and sister. And, once I began renting a house in Carmel for the month of January (and sometimes September), I spent time with a series of different girlfriends. Another time, best remembered, is the week I spent with my favorite person on our planet, my late, great friend, Sandra, namesake of this blog. We stayed together in the guesthouse of their lakefront home in Tahoe while commuting daily to South Lake Tahoe Community College to attend an immersion Spanish class held each summer: The Intensive Summer Spanish Institute. Women need women. And if you can spend that kind of sustained time together, you realize how very essential are those gatherings.

Lynnette and I started these frister breaks after she moved away from Los Angeles to Orange County. In the beginning, she would come and help me with a lot of house stuff. I was recently widowed, thus handling a lot more things by myself. For the most part, and not without some trepidation, I somehow got a handle on a lot of it.  She still comes along with me as I run the odd errand during her visit. But we devote the rest of our time to conversation, meals, and game-playing. Somehow we manage to have the most enjoyably inane conversations interspersed with the more meaningful ones. I will point to something on the street while driving: What do you think that is? To which she will respond: I don't know. Continuing: Do you think it's always been there? And back at me: Maybe. I think one of my favorite exchanges was when we were simultaneously watching the movie Gone With the Wind while texting each other, and commenting on Scarlett's behavior and the color of Leslie Howard's hair. Do you think they dye his hair that color? It's pretty red. I think they call that strawberry blonde. Like the movie, the one with James Cagney? After these exchanges, I often comment on how hilarious people would find our conversations if they were ever heard or read by anyone. An example of how we relate to each other can be found right here on this blog (for free!) in the post: The 2:00 Miracle.

When Lynnette was visiting last month, I completely forgot to wind the clock so it was stuck at ten minutes to six for most of her visit. As if time matters. Our time was spent at The Farmer's Market, where we ate fish tacos at Gott's Roadside and shopped at World Market Cost Plus, looking for furniture for my new deck. We also went to Costco (somehow we always end up at Costco!), Trader Joe's, and FatBurger for "baby" FatBurgers and, most importantly, the "fat" fries. And we played one game of Ticket to Ride and twelve games of Yahtzee over the three evenings we spent together.

By the time I woke up on Sunday morning, Lynnette was long gone, having left the guest and bath rooms in perfect shape (when we go to bed each night, the kitchen is always spotless, thanks to Lynnette). I skipped Mass that morning, and ran a few loads of laundry. There were plenty of leftovers from our take-out Indian and Mediterranean dinners that worked with a little augmentation for dinner. It was a good day following three fun days spent with Lynnette in conversation, laughter, and games. Oh, and, before I went to bed Sunday night, I finally got around to winding that clock.