Humor

Things I wanted to Be Good at But Wasn’t

Self-pity smarts

More than anything I wanted and still want to excel at something. From where I’m sitting, it doesn’t look like this is going to happen because of one lousy unmoveable obstacle called FAILURE.

First, I wanted to play the guitar well enough to accompany my teenage friend Jeanie. She said it was easy since I knew piano. She gave me one lesson, I learned two chords and never touched a fret again. That was a serious failure because now I was stuck with a fairly large instrument that gathered dust in the corner of my bedroom. I eventually sold it. It was either that or use it for firewood. and we didn’t have a fireplace.

Another “wanna be” was having beautiful nails — the kind that my sister spent hours digging at the cuticles, filing, and applying 20 different shades of polish. I didn’t get those long nails or the slim graceful fingers that come with them.

I got the fat stubby digits, and when I let the nails grow, most of them had ugly white marks all over them. Then the nails broke every time I pounded the typewriter, and some nail pro told me to drink gelatin. It would make it all better. Well, he lied, and the nails didn’t strengthen. In fact I got nauseated drinking that gelatin stuff wound up chewing everything down when my boyfriend broke up with me. End of story.

Another notch on my make-believe “gonna getcha” gun was wearing a bikini and looking good in it. I never even got to the stage where you scout out five different stores in search of the “perfect” bikini. The reason? I never got the body thinned down to anorexia size Zero so I could take that congratulatory walk from the boardwalk down through ten tons of sand to the water’s edge.

I also never got that well-deserved look of awe that makes you feel like you’re a Penthouse centerfold. I didn’t get to sing that crappy ’60s tune with the well-known chorus, “She wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka -dot bikini.” Come to think of it I’ve never seen anyone with a polka-dot anything. That design blimps you out. I think it would go well with a jeep, though. Interior. Just a thought.

Then I went through a period where I wanted to b e the perfect wife, daughter, and sister. That’s when family meant everything to me. It didn’t last long, thank god. Now the relatives are all dead or nasty, so family doesn’t mean as much as it used to. Do I sound bitter? I am.

But there were a few things other than being a perfect fill-in-the-blank- relative that grabbed me. In my intellectual phase I wanted to get a perfect 800 SAT score and graduate from a prestigious college. I did neither and no, I’m not going to tell you my score except to say that the verbal component was way better than the math part.

During that same phase I also wanted to learn to speak a language, any language, fluently. Hebrew was a no-go because I never went to Hebrew school, but so was Spanish because I couldn ‘t roll my r’s. No one can speak Spanish convincingly without rolling their r’s so that was that.

French? Yeah, maybe if I didn’t have a sister who was a snotty bitch, went to a prestigious college that I’d never get into, and spoke French fluently even though she never went to Paris and climbed the Eiffel Tower. A French teacher, her accomplishment intimidated me. Besides, we weren’t twins.

I could have tried another language like Italian or Urdu, but Italian has too many words that I associate with food (like tortoni, spumoni, pasta alla vodka) and I would have put on too much poundage just learning the conversational part. So I deleted the fluency thing and went with eating.

Next was my “I love my dog and even his asshole” phase when I wanted to become an obedience pro and/or champion a dog. It didn’t happen. I was lousy at obedience the way I was lousy at discipline when I taught school. Seems that dogs and kids both didn’t give a shit about what I threatened them with. I remember when sending kids down to the office actually scared them. Course that’ was when I was a kid. But nowadays kids — at least the ones I taught — were not intimidated by that threat. They pretty much stared at me and smirked. And that was third graders, mind you.

The dogs I obedience trained — and we’re using that term rather loosely — did nothing productive. I’d say sit and heel and get a big fact Zero along with a canine grin. Not even treats that I clutched in my sweaty palm ever got those animals off their asses. On the plus side they were fabulous with the long stay when they could get down on all fours and nap for five minutes.

And no, I never “finished” a dog’s championship myself. But the pandemic was partly to blame for that. One judge took pity on me and gave me a ,major, so all I needed was another stupid judge or a judge so taken with my couture and hairstyle that he never paid too much attention to the dog’s inability to walk a straight line and smile prettily while I held out a treat. If truth be told, I didn’t think I could find another judge dumb enough to ignore my gaffs and reward the dog.

I’d like to say that I gave up all these “wanna be’s” because I grew older and wiser and with wisdom came more important goals like honor and truth, but speaking of the truth, I still want to excel at something. I don’t think it’s going to be humor writing even though I get a few yuks from the crowd at Medium because the editors at The New Yorker haven’t dialed me up yet. I don’t even think they’ve looked up my number.

I’m holding out for two possibilities, though. I can either save a person’s life or save a dog’s life. Either way I should know CPR so I’m dusting off my Red Cross certificate and getting out the anatomically-correct dummies.

The dogs, they’d probably roll over, give me a no-confidence vote, and settle for reincarnation. “I don’t want another go with her,” they’d say. “She can’t even master telepathy so how is she going to talk with me at the Rainbow Bridge.”

As for saving people, from what I gather you don’t have to bother with the two quick breaths anymore. I guess more people died from halitosis than heart failure. Luckily I don’t hang around with people who require CPR on a regular basis, so I’m hoping to just save my own life. Metaphorically speaking, that is.