Estimates Vary

You are welcome to estimate me. I won’t say under or over, because that might imply we are dealing with numbers.

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Bring out your measuring tape. Count my ceramic cats and file a report on my exclamation points. Catalog the hair ribbons that turned age-inappropriate ten years ago. Inform appropriate authorities of my inability to scramble eggs or shut up. Initiate the inquest into the upper limits of cardigan ownership. Issue a position paper on women who remain best friends with their mothers at age forty-three.

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I will not fight you if you invoke the faceless throng. It may well be that, if you called an emergency session of one hundred reasonable people, ninety-nine would call me naïve. From behind the cloud of prudence, Toms and Helens may agree that I should wear a jingle bell to warn those who would otherwise miscast me as formidable. Let them call me Sweet Little Angela.

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Let them coo themselves hoarse. I will be writing a birthday card to my neighbor who peeks out sideways from his eyebrow canopy to ask if he really looks eighty. I will be raising money for a cat shelter that is actually a bomb shelter that is actually a sanctuary. I will be laughing out loud that I hold a Master of Divinity, ninety credits of prying my fingers off the controls.

I will be sending essays to literary journals for which I am unqualified. I will be pursuing God in the costumes of Bruce Springsteen, my mother, and the garbage man who bends his fingers into the shape of a heart when he sees me. I will be caught in the act of calling people titles they have not earned. I will be giving thanks as fast as I can, smuggling it onto back porches while it grows faster than August zucchini.

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I will be begging for validation like a bowl of Spaghetti-O’s, then stretching it into hula hoops large enough to share. I will be planting parables on asphalt and forcing dreams like February forsythia. I will be telling wrinkled people they are worthy until we both believe me. I will forgive my ex-husband and the scowlers across the aisle and the person who put a hard-boiled egg in the dorm washing machine.

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I will be calling the radio DJ who turns the metropolis into a town. I will be hiding breakfast bars and love letters under windshield wipers. I will be listening for stories inside words. I will be responding to rejection with benediction. I will be asking for forgiveness from my mother and my God and every Tom and Helen bruised by my elbows. I will be making myself macaroni, daily dough bent into a smile. I will be too sweet to be little. You are welcome.