Oui, je regrette beaucoup

Getting married — at any age I expect, but especially for the first time after fifty — causes massive rushes of retrospection. I’ve come to believe that anyone who says they have no regrets about anything in their life fell off a different turnip truck than I did. As I sift through the karmically connected collection of life-altering choices I’ve made in my half century, I find a few that stand out as monumentally bad… the ones for which I would mortgage my soul for a Mulligan, even knowing a do-over would change the trajectory of the rest of my life.

Here are the Top 6 things I would do differently:

If words could kill…

What shall I write about? I asked. The smell of rain. Thirty minutes in your journal, someone said. Haven’t journaled in a long, long time, I thought. Not since I accidentally on purpose left my diary in my mother’s room and she read it and got her feelings hurt, which was predictable because I was really mad at her at the time and wrote about that, but I wasn’t really mad at her, just frustrated because I was twenty-four and trying to get her to tell me about who my birthmother was and she was taking that all personally and poor-poor pitiful me, plus I had my first girlfriend and really wanted to tell my mother, but had no clue how to do that, and when I wrote down my feelings, it all sounded a lot like me being mad at her, especially since I accidentally on purpose left it for her to find, I guess. And she read it all. And then she died, so I decided it was the journal’s fault – that it had killed my young fifty-six year old mother sure as taking a sledgehammer to her heart and breaking it in a million bits. I wrote my last secret words in 1982 because secret words kill people.

The rain smells a lot like that.

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” – e.e.cummings

P.S. Never put in writing anything you don’t want to see on the front page of The New York Times.

Rolling over in their untimely graves

I was adopted when I was four days old by two of the smartest, coolest, funniest, did I say smartest?, people on Earth. In almost every way.

I still miss them all the time.

My father died in 1977 at the age of 56. I was 19. My mother died in 1983 at the age of 56. I was 25.

What’s in a name?

Today a Facebook friend wrote, “How come women use multiple last names?”

What a sweet way to say, “Alice, what the heck is up with all your names????” Funny thing, if Facebook didn’t have length restrictions, it would’ve been longer. But since they do, my profile name is Alice Thoman Melott Robertson.

So just between us friends, the answer to the multiple names question is — Witness Protection Program.