Rom-Coms with Real Mess, Real Magic, Real Heart.
This morning, you handed me my fortune.
“All your hard work is about to pay off.”
Okay. I could look at this one of two ways.
1. Oh goody, my time has finally come!
2. This fortune is six months old. You found it
at the bottom of my hot pink purse, which you
emptied because your Zhu Zhu pets needed
a fashionable home.
Is there a warranty on fortune cookies?
365 Days of Living Deliberately
How insignificant we seem; how trivial our troubles become, when our world is seen from high above the clouds. We are but a small speck in the palm of this great galaxy, yet each of us leaves our mark on every living creature we touch, talk to, type to— even Tweet. Every new day holds promise—it’s up to us what we do with that promise.
Sometimes, I feel so much pressure, so many To-Do’s, so overwhelmed. I squeeze every minute out of the day, until I’m running on empty. There are times I don’t even remember how I lived it—or if I lived it.
I’ve come to realize that the moments that matter the most to me—the ones I hold closest to my heart—were not full days or full weeks. They were mere moments. Minutes with tiny wings, fluttering by like fragile butterflies. If I’d blinked, I’d have missed them.
I don’t want to blink. I want to take each new day and hold it in my hand. Not like the tight fist I make when I’m frightened, or cold, or just being stubborn–but a wide open palm, welcoming a butterfly to rest its wings there for a while.
I want to experience each day fully—good and bad. To live in the moment, then let it go.
The first time our young daughter caught a snowflake on her tongue. The look on my father’s face as we danced on my wedding day. My mother singing along to Bon Jovi, inciting our feisty toddler to reply back, “No, it’s MY life!” My husband giving up his airplane window seat (and holding my Starbucks coffee for me) so I could capture images of the sun rising over the Rockies on the first morning of a new year.
This is a promise to myself to stop and take more careful notice of something or someone in my life, every single day.
Don’t blink, or you’ll miss it. I hope you’ll join me on my small adventure.
“Your friend’s on T.V.”
“My friend?”
“Your friend whose name I can’t pronounce.”
“Ohhh! My FRIEND! Mr. Sitcom Actor!” I squealed, and ran from the kitchen, where hubby and I had been making dinner together, to the living room. It was three years after the Crazy Phone Call, and since that time, not one restraining order had been placed against me. Wait, that didn’t come out right. I have never had a restraining order placed against me. Seriously. Please, keep reading.
Mr. Sitcom Actor had, in fact, recently told me I should refer to him as my friend, “even though you’re in Montreal and I’m way over here in L.A.” It never surprised me when he responded to my emails—he’s a dear-heart like that—but I knew it was a rarity for a famous person in Hollywood to give a rat’s ass about someone who could do nothing for them. I enjoyed our rare yet lively e-conversations.
I caught the tail end of the ad that was on for his series, but it was enough to get me jumping up and down, clapping, as I always did when hubby told me my friend was on our TV screen. Our one-year-old was sitting in her high chair, and started clapping along with me.
“Dat? Dat dere?” she asked, big eyes blue and wondering.
“That’s my friend. Mr. Sitcom Actor. He sends me emails from L.A. Well, not really.
I email him, and he’s sweet enough to email back.”
“Nice haih, dat,” Monkeydoodle mumbled through her peas.
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. He really does have great hair.”
I’m going to stop typing immediately and clarify something before I get deluged with excited emails from you, dear readers. This is a fun game to play, keeping you guessing about all the parties in my story, but no, I didn’t get emails from McDreamy in my in-box. Patrick Dempsey wouldn’t return to our TV screens, set my heart racing, and make me put extra mousse in my husband’s hair until a whole year later.
As I finally sat down on the sofa, dinner plate on lap–this has got to be one of Murphy’s Laws–our daughter’s face turned beet red, and she announced an event to us for which anyone with an operating olfactory nerve required no announcement:
“Poop!”
I laughed, and was reminded of an email Mr. Sitcom Actor had sent me a few weeks back. We’d been comparing diaper duty–he’s quite the hands-on Dad and had admitted he and his wife were “knee-deep-in-it” –and, having read some of my poems, he’d told me I should write a Mommy Rap about changing diapers. “That would be hilarious!”
I never did write that rap. Life gets in the way; or perhaps that’s just not how it was supposed to happen. If I’d started practicing my rapping when Mr. Sitcom Actor suggested it, maybe I’d have learned to sing on key and sound bad-ass enough. But then I wouldn’t have earned my “The girl can’t rap, but she sure can write” t-shirt sent to me by The Sex People, along with a delicious strawberry cheesecake, delivered to my door.
Who the hell are The Sex People? I’m sure that’s what the cheesecake delivery guy wanted to know, with every inch of his being, since I wasn’t expecting him, and had answered the door in leggings and the new black stilettos I’d been modeling for my girlfriend Artsy Mommy. He must have thought I was running a very different kind of home business.
Back to The Sex People. The simple answer is I met them online when Mr. Sitcom Actor joked with me tongue-in-cheek, “Yes, Heather, let’s be friends, officially,” when I’d asked him if that was really him on Facebook—as if you have to be on Facebook to make your friendship official. He soon posted a link to a discussion board led by Mr. Screenwriter, which I thought looked quite interesting, so I joined.
Before I knew it I was online every day with a bunch of friends I’d never met, chatting about the in’s and out’s of screenwriting, sex in the movies, baseball, and our messy, beautiful lives.
It was the stuff movies are made of.
Read how this story started:
Prologue: The Fine Line (between persistence and stalking)
1) a-The Fine Line: “Do What You Want”
Read the NEXT CHAPTER: The Fine Line: I’m Afraid to Ask, but What Is Poking?
“You’re getting wrinkled.”
“It’s not that hot,” I coughed through the steam.
“You’re getting drunk.”
“It’s rosé. I’m pretty sure you can only get tipsy on the pink stuff,” I laughed. Still, I decided he was right. It was time to get out of the bath. At 31 years old, this newlywed was already a little too wrinkled for her liking.
Hubby handed me a towel. Before he even got a word out–typical, really–I looked up at him and asked him one more time:
“Do you really think I should do it? I’m gonna do it. Should I do it?”
“Do what you want.” He smiled at me, then walked into the other room.
“What are you doing? Hey!” I hated when he did this. Leaving decisions up to me was a very bad idea. And yet, he did it all the time. His philosophy is, so long as no one gets hurt, I’m a grown woman, it’s really all up to me. Once, I e-mailed him from the 27-floor building where I worked, saying I hated all the bureaucracy, hated the tediousness of the work, and wanted to quit. Could we afford it?
He typed back: “Do what you want. Do what makes you happy. Do whatever doesn’t involve jumping out the window of a high-rise building.”
I finished getting dressed, wrapping the towel around my head like a turban. As I walked out of the bathroom, I found Bill standing at the kitchen counter, pouring me another glass of wine.
“Here you go,” he smirked, handing it to me.
“What’s this for?”
“Liquid courage.”
“See! I knew you knew I was gonna do it.”
“Of course you’re gonna do it. You’re showing off how good you are at finding phone numbers on the Internet. Show-off.”
“Do you think I’m crazy? I mean, it’s probably not even his phone number.”
“I’ve always thought you’re crazy. This just makes you crazier.”
I didn’t even stop to stick my tongue out at him. I took a quick swig of the wine, picked up the phone, and started dialing.
One ring. No one was going to answer. Come on. It was his home phone number in New York. How the hell did that end up on the Internet? Two rings. Did this mean I was a stalker? It just popped up on my screen! It’s not like I’d even been looking for it! Three rings. Someone was answering. Holy hell, someone was answering!
“Hello?”
“Um, Mr. Sitcom Actor?”
“Yes. This is Mr. Sitcom Actor.”
“Wow, I didn’t think you’d answer. I’m Heather. In Montreal.”
“Hello, Heather in Montreal.”
“I, er, um, I just wanted to call and tell you how much I’ve loved your work in movies and television. I’ve watched it all.”
“Hey, that’s really nice. I’m about to go to dinner with my girlfriend and my Mom…”
“No, no, I’m married, Mr. Sitcom Actor. He’s right here, actually. I’m just outgoing like this. I just felt like you might need a pick-me-up. I had this gut instinct that I should call. It must sound crazy.”
“No strings attached? Really? Wow, that’s really sweet. I’ll tell my Mom!”
“Cool. Have a good dinner.”
“I will, Heather in Montreal. Thanks so much for the call.”
I hung up the phone, turned to hubby, and performed a jiggly-jumping-up-and-down-quick-spin-around-“Oh Yeah! I did it! Oh Yeah!” ritual that I would come to refer to as my Heather Dance.
“Ha! He answered! And he was touched!”
“Or maybe you’re touched.”
I laughed and clicked my wine glass with his.
And that was how it all began.
So, as you can see, clearly, it’s all my husband’s fault.
Prologue: The Fine Line (between persistence and stalking)
Read the next chapter here:
The Fine Line: Emails from L.A.
Heather Grace Stewart 