When I was seven years old my mother did something completely reckless and insane. She handed me the Avon Christmas catalogue and told me to pick something out.
So! Beautiful! They should...have sent...a poet!
I picked out a white plastic Frosty the snowman ring. When you clicked it open the head swung away on a hinge to reveal cherry-flavored chapstick. I loved that thing, I wound up scraping out the last of the chapstick with my fingernail and my mom showed me how to smoosh the contents of another chapstick tube into the empty hole. Oooh! Refillable. I wore it so proudly you would have thought it was from Tiffany & Co.
It was the start of a twenty-eight year love affair with chapstick, and catalogues too. Go figure.
I gave up the snowman ring for the infinitely cooler Maybelline kissing potion in the glass tube with the rollerball applicator within a few years, and the Sears Wishbook and Speigel catalogue held my interest far longer than Avon ever could. Now as an adult I have settled on Labello chapsticks and eleventy hundred different shiny lip glosses but will spend a large portion of each day looking for a tube, or applying the stuff liberally. A full-fledged addict, without shame.
On Sunday evening I asked Jake if he had a tube on him, or if he could go and buy some for me, or remember to even bring some from home.
No, Bridget.
What? Why not?
You have a problem.
It's chapstick, Jake.
Exactly. I've eaten so much of it I'm soon to be know as the Wax Preacher.
So don't eat it.
But then I can't kiss you.
Oh. Point taken.
So you'll cut out the chapstick?
Sure, I can do that. (she says hesitantly.)
But then that sort of blows the whole dream I have had for years of tucking my chapstick and my cellphone in my pocket, jumping into my 1971 VW camper bus and hitting the highway.
Because now I have no chapstick, but more importantly, I don't own a 1971 VW camper bus. It's just one of those silly dreams. An escape, like having a tropical destination poster on the wall in your office. You look at it or think about it and your brain takes a mini-vacation. Or at least it's something to shoot for.
Something a little more exciting than driving to the drugstore in your 1971 VW camper bus and buying a dozen of your favorite chapsticks and going somewhere in disguise to apply them. Over and over again.
Because that, well, that's a really dumb dream.
