A Slice of Orange

FOCUS
by
Geralyn Ruane

Focus? Focus on what? I think I’ll try focusing on those silky moments in life that make me tingle with an awareness that something beautiful has happened. These are the moments that make me go mmmruh.

One day during the recent long weekend, I sunk into an unintentional nap. Just laid down on the bed for a sec, and drifted off near an open window. The breeze rifling through the branches outside reminded me of ocean waves lapping onto shore. And I was transported – to the windy beach where I fell asleep years ago. Nothing amazing happened – no half-naked Navy Seal washed up on shore or anything – but I recall that drowsy afternoon as the most relaxing of my life. Mmmruh . . . it was just so nice to be reminded.

Hours after my glorious nap, I was talking to a woman I know in her kitchen. Her husband came home, walked in through the kitchen door, and touched his wife’s hair at the nape of her neck in way of greeting. Mmmruh . . . the contact was so simple, so intimate! After over twenty years of marriage, he’s still touching her hair, still looking at her with a sweetness that made me blush.

Another day this same weekend, I heard the song “Eternal Flame” by the Bangles. How I loved that song when I was in high school! The song was popular just around the time when suddenly I had such a crush on this kid who’d been in all my same classes for ages. And mmmruh! I remembered that tingly sensation you can feel when out of nowhere everything in life is new, different and unspeakably wonderful.

Now, here’s what I haven’t told you about this wonderful holiday weekend: I worked four fourteen-hour days in a row and I actually fell asleep at the one party I managed to get to by 10pm. The nap I mentioned earlier? It lasted about five minutes and happened while I was waiting for my cat to get done in the litter box so I could scoop before I left for work. The happily married couple? Parents of a student – I saw them while I was reviewing geometry with a sixteen year-old and both of us wanted to be anywhere but studying on a gorgeous Memorial Day. The song I heard? In the car driving between one student who lives in Camarillo and another who lives almost 100 miles away in Diamond Bar.

But the nap was still delicious, the couple still sublime, the song still incandescent. These are the moments I want to remember about that weekend.

Shakespeare once wrote, “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Too often, I tend to think about the BAD stuff. And I TALK about it. To anyone. It’s as though I’m trying to one-up any competitor with a tension-riddled tale of my own. I can become intensely poetic about the fff-ing traffic, the annoyances of work, the incompetence of . . . well, the world in general. Do I think this way and talk about this stuff because I’m cranky and I need more sex? Or do I always feel so beleaguered because I think and TALK TALK TALK about pervasive ickiness? It’s a modern day chicken-egg conundrum, and nobody cares what the miserable answer is.

So from now on, I’m going to think about, focus on, and TALK ABOUT the mmmruh. Instead of bemoaning the traffic jam that made me late, I’ll wax gleeful about this week’s Hero of the Week lauded on news radio (like the local teacher who said she’d shave her head if her students raised a certain amount of money for books for the school. Her bold declaration provoked them to raise triple the stated amount, so she shaved off her beautiful mane of hair to jubilant cheers, laughter and clapping). Though I won’t forget the depressing report I watched chronicling how the US let bin Laden escape (he just walked to Pakistan, supposedly), I’ll fall asleep remembering instead the jubilant choreographer who danced his way on stage to accept his first-ever Tony. Though I sometimes feel my father has just never understood the me-ness of me, I’ll remember instead how after a week of working two jobs, he still found time on weekends to coach my basketball team, my softball team, my soccer team. No matter the season, he was always there. He still is. It’s on this that I’ll focus – and all the things that make me go mmmruh.

Geralyn Ruane’s had a crush on MacGyver since the middle school, and these days she channels all that fantasy energy by by writing romance, chick lit and women’s fiction. Last year her short story “Jane Austen Meets the New York Giants” was published in the New York Times Bestselling anthology The Right Words at the Right Time Volume 2.