Living On The Edge

Ever feel precariously balanced?

Like you’re hanging on for dear life? On the precipice of personal catastrophe? About to plummet to certain doom?

Only you are not a Mountain goat?

And the edge is not so much a cliff as the gravel driveway you are trying to navigate in seven-inch platform clogs without spraining your ankle?

Or the supermarket you are trying to get out of without succumbing to the Pop Corners and Dark Chocolate Almond Bark screaming your name from their respective aisles.

There is also the garden variety of social edges.

Dinner guests, for example, who view conversation and political monologues as synonymous. Random acquaintances that confuse polite chit-chat for an invitation to share the constipation they are enduring as a result of upping their anxiety meds.

Here is my absolute all time favorite social edge in which my dear friend and come-back heroine, responds pricelessly.

She is parked in front of our town’s wine-store. The storefront is an enormous plate-glass window from which she can see her 5-year old daughter in the backseat. The car is turned off, windows unrolled. The weather is in the low seventies.

She is inside for under five minutes.

When she exits a woman stops her and says finger-waggingly: I don’t think you should be leaving your daughter in the car while you shop for wine.

Her instantaneous reply, head tilted slightly, exuding extreme regret, “I don’t think someone with a figure like yours should be wearing a jog bra without anything over it.”

Pure genius.

She is like the Matriarch Mountain Goat of what to do in the face of bossy-pant socially smug know-it-alls. I wish she hired herself out for consultations on wicked responses to bullshit comments.

My problem is I don’t even know when they when they’re happening. I would have guiltily replied: You’re totally right. I shouldn’t have.

Idiot.

Seriously, what kind of lamo doesn’t tell them to blow it out their ass?? I get all tail-between-my-legs about my lack of wtf do you think you’re talking about attitude.

But I’m getting better about moving from self-deprecating judgment to self-celebrating appreciation.

It’s true: My ability to traverse treacherous social ledges is sketchy at best.

BUT, my ability to intuitively negotiate emotional mountain passes is quite skilled.

It’s easy to say where we would surely fall. And it’s certainly good to know. But the more useful question to ask is…

Where AM I a Mountain goat?