I took an invigorating 2.5 mile walk with Rigby today, in the bitter cold. We were both bundled up, so we didn’t feel the frigid temperature. (Actually, I have no idea whether Rigby felt it, but he didn’t seem to mind, maybe because he’s a dog.)
We were out for over four hours, which gave me a chance to clear my head before it gets crowded with a gazillion details once the “work week” begins.
We walked most of the way on Madison Avenue so I could window shop, one of my favorite pastimes (at least on Madison Avenue, it is.) I noticed a preponderance of orange on the clothes the mannequins modeled in the windows: Orange with purple, orange with red, orange with green, or orange all alone. Bright, clear orange is my favorite color. Actually, my youngest sister adopted it as her trademark color long before I did. Although orange has been showing up all over the fashion industry for a few years now, it seems bigger than ever, maybe because it’s a happy color. And we all need as much happy as we can get.
A man I overheard talking on the phone, in the shoe department at Bergdorf Goodman, could have used a dose of orange.
“What do I want?” he said to the person on the other end, sounding somewhat agitated. “What I want is to find out if you’re okay, if you’re alive, if you need anything,” he said, immediately after repeating the question the person on the other end had obviously asked.
“Why can’t you just ask me when I call: ‘How are you doing, Dad?’ Why do you always assume I want something?” he said to his child (I couldn’t tell if he was talking to a boy or a girl child, but it really doesn’t matter. They’re all generally the same when it comes to their complete and utter inability to understand that their parents are people with feelings, that their parents care about them more than anything in the world and really do like to know how they’re doing.) Our kids don’t care how we’re doing. We’re irritating them with our calls and that’s that.
A close FOF friend has given up calling her 26-year-old son, a graduate student, because he never answers his phone. So she’s decided to just text him, his preferred mode of communication. “I swear he wouldn’t know if I was dead as long as someone kept making believe she was his mother and continued texting. “This could go on for years if he didn’t come home for the holidays,” she said. “Even then he might not notice.”
Orange is a hot trend now. Kids who hate to talk to their parents on the phone don’t constitute a trend. They’re a fact of life. By the time they’re FOF, most of them start to develop feelings for us. Hopefully, we’ll all live that long!
