You Get What You Get

Got into the Raleigh-Durham Airport fifteen minutes early and slightly buzzed from a very bumpy flight and the attentions of a male flight attendant who must’ve thought I looked real cute, because I got some first class treatment way back in aisle 18 along with a complimentary and very strong cranberry and vodka.

“You should probably just go ahead and down that,” were his directions to me as he pressed the drink in my hand with a wink. So I just shrugged and followed his directions. They are in charge up there...


While I was bumping along on the plane I read this collection of short stories by A. M. Homes that I need to write a review for called, The Safety of Objects. The first short story in the collection is called “Adults Alone.” I think it has in it just about the funniest line I’ve read: “Porno is not a gift.”

Even you have to admit that it probably wasn’t just the vodka that made me laugh so hard when I read it….



I got a new best friend yesterday. And I’m her Number One Best Friend out of four. I come right before her doll and two friends from school, one of which is a boy she has a crush on and who likes her back now that she let him have her lollipop.

She’s five and is my other best friend’s little blonde doppelganger, although for the six hours before her eight-thirty bedtime today, she was more my Mini-Me than anyone else’s.

We sat next to each other for dinner at this awesome Mexican place, where she let me try some of her cheese dip because "friends share." We looked at hamsters and cats before picking out some new fish together at the pet store. We did homework together. We read together in her room while Carrie and her fiancé entertained his parents, just in from California for the big wedding on Saturday. After we read, Little Carrie went to have a popsicle on the deck but kept coming in to check on “Miss Paige” while I was resting my eyes on the bed in the playroom. I opened my eyes again to her whispering, loudly, “I want Miss Paige to read to me while I’m taking my bath. She’s so beautiful.” Awwww.

So, I did. Then I dried her off, we giggled together about her wrinkled fingers and toes, and we combed her hair and said her prayers. And, by golly, there was a little Carolina-accented “And God Bless Miss Paige,” in there, too.

I’m blessed.


Over dinner, my new best friend shared some of her wisdom with me. It stemmed from a dilemma she’d recently encountered in the lunchroom. She didn’t get enough ketchup on her plate for her French fries. When she brought this shortfall to the attention of the management - the lunchroom monitor, Miss Karen - she was told, “You get what you get.”

So, now this is Little Carrie’s answer to everything. Literally. I love it.

And isn’t that the truth? You don’t have a bit of choice sometimes, in what happens around you, what comes your way. But you do get to choose what you do with it.

She’s a wise girl, my new best friend.

And I think I got pretty good.