By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to absolute perfection. I’ll be flawless. Impeccable. Exemplary.
You see, it’s almost the new year, and I’ve made all sorts of promises to me, me, me.
I will, for example, be living on carrot sticks and celery sticks and an occasional grapefruit. I’ll even count the calories in squash and lemons, assuming I allow myself such treats.
That’s because in 2015, unlike all the others in my adult life, I will begin — and stick to — my incredibly sensible diet.
Within days, I’ll hardly be recognizable. My hollow cheekbones will be like Julia Roberts’ and my thighs will go from gelatin to steel.
But that’s just the beginning.
By late January, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be deeply immersed in several projects:
• I’ll be reading all the works of Proust and Tolstoy. I will not be reading something trashy from the supermarket check-out line or Glamour magazine or any more articles about makeovers or how to apply eyeliner.
• I’ll be whipping up healthy but utterly gourmet meals in my totally reorganized kitchen, the kitchen in which the junk drawer has finally been purged of mysterious stray objects and the refrigerator is no longer a repository for other mysteries best left unspecified.
• I will have answered all the emails that leer at me whenever I look back to my “Old Mail” file.
I will have answered them thoughtfully, wittily and wisely. Which will allow me to tackle the lopsided pile of printouts that resides as a permanent fixture on my desk.
I will be a paragon of patience and understanding to my three daughters, despite our less than glorious history of harmony.
When Jill calls to say that she can’t return the antique vase I lent her because her large and loping dog, the irrepressible Maggie, somehow threw it down the stairs, I’ll be a study in compassion.
Amy’s failure to return eight phone calls will allow me to display only gentle forbearance, never irritation.
And when Nancy is late to her father’s birthday celebration, I will greet her with hugs, not with muttered hisses.
I will never again spoil our grandchildren. Rigorous discipline will he handed out instead of cookies when they are in my care, and I will never sabotage their bedtime curfews, allowing them to stay up unconscionably late just so that I can be with them.
In this glorious new year, I will exercise daily, uncomplainingly and with enthusiasm.
I will conquer my fear of math, learn exactly where Asia Minor is on a blank map and take a course in something mind-expanding.
I will also become the ideal wife almost overnight: perky, positive, understanding, adoring, non-neurotic. I will never criticize. I will only encourage and support, just as I promised to do in our wedding vows.
And when my husband eats more than he should, does less around the house than I had hoped he would or fails to give the right response to “How do I look in this dress?” I will simply smile adoringly at him and remember that it’s a brand new year and a brand new me.
There’s just one hitch.
All of this has a vaguely familiar ring, the kind of familiar ring that comes from repetition. These are, in fact, almost identical to my resolutions of not only other years, but since the millennium, of another century.
And that points up an immutable law of life and time:
January is the one time of the year when hope does, indeed, spring eternal. ••
