so our new place has a patio...

My coffee and I sit and listen to the birds, waiting for drops to finally sink away from the bloated clouds overhead, changing our morning party into something else entirely.

Fat Riley, my cat, stares intently through the windowpane, carefully eyeing the teasing finches perched on the swaying bird feeder. His puffed-up tail shakes in a seizure-like manner, and I imagine he is making the spastic clicking sound he produces when in full-on hunting mode. Occasionally, Trash Can Sam, our 12-pound rescue puppy who no amounts of expensive human shampoo can make pretty, jumps hyperactive circles around him, a beckon to play.

Aesthetically, Sam is something between a disheveled Fraggle and Kramer from Seinfeld. Once homeless, he used to run around outside the classroom where I teach, until I finally took him home. People said things like, “He may be ugly now, but he’ll be so cute once he’s had a bath.” And those who continued to know us both undoubtedly feel awkward when they see him again; as it turns out, that was just the way Sam looked.

Riley has no interest in playing, so Sam cheerily humps him, the one thing that always gets Riley’s attention. Finally, the birds are free to snack in relative peace as Fat Riley and Trash Can Sam are engaged in matrix-like war-fare on the other side of the glass.

I'm a genie in a bottle, baby.

My mother, who had me at 19, said that when I was in-utero, she carefully developed two life goals for me, two very important blessings she felt she had never had. Goal #1: May fetus grow to have longs legs. At 5 feet, 1 and ½ inches, she had apparently grown weary of standing on her tippy-toes and of walking two steps for everyone else’s one. And, she thought, it would be endlessly easier to shop for jeans.

Trite by some standards, but undoubtedly superior to any self-unattained goal I might have concocted had I been approaching parenthood at 19…Content-wise, that is; the goals themselves would have been top quality, by my most pop-psychology standards at least. By then, I had taken and dropped enough community college classes and watched enough Oprah shows to know that goals must be specific and framed into discrete periods of time.

For example: May said hypothetical child learn to shotgun cans of beer without turning nostril into power hose, by the age of 19. Very good goal, and I can tell you from unglamorous experience, very useful. Imaginary love-child goal #2: May said hypothetical child drunk dial, in hysterical Britney-esque fits of laughter and singing, less than 4 ex boyfriends between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m. on the average Saturday, by the age of 19. Definitely blessed with A+ goal-making abilities; really should have kept showing up to class. And it’s a good thing I never got pregnant.

Mom must have rubbed the right Genie’s lamp -or whatever they’re calling it these days- because her wish was granted. Atop painstakingly painted and then thoroughly worn and neglected nails and french-fry toes I happen to think endearing are two long legs, stretching up to my insidiously descending butt.

Unfortunately for mom (and some might say me), she neither took nor dropped enough community college classes by then to know about the specific and time-frame rules. If she had, she may have reframed her long-legs goal like this: May future child have consistently shaven size 4, 6 or 8, long slender legs, with less than 20% body fat and less than ten bruises and scars per leg, every day, forever- not just on the yo part a yo-yo diet.

The second goal was for me to be independent, but that is a whole other King Midas story.