Seriously... I'm Kidding

nephew in a frame that says “Our precious boy.” And by the fall people aren’t regifting anymore. They’re just emptying their basements. If your birthday is in October, you’re either getting a Ping-Pong paddle or an infant’s car seat. “Happy birthday! Maybe you’ll adopt one day, Grandma!”
    Maybe we put too much focus on gift giving. It shouldn’t be about a gift or about who gave you what. We all know what it should be about. Money. Why isn’t it acceptable to just give cash? That’s what we all want. Let’s cut to the chase.
    No. Well, yes, but that’s not what life is about. I do genuinely enjoy giving people gifts and seeing their faces light up when they open them. I once brought a box of wine to a dinner party at Oprah’s house and the look on her face was priceless. And that feels good inside.
    So I guess what I’m saying is it’s better to err on the side of being polite and giving gifts for all occasions—birthdays, holidays, Flag Day. And you know what makes the best gift of all? Books like this. And things made out of money.

Pondering

    O ne thing that always makes me happy is being out in nature. I love nature. I love trees, I love flowers, I love those hedges that are shaped like giraffes. I don’t know how they grow like that, but they are magnificent!
    I spend a lot of time outside every day. I love doing yoga outside. I love to meditate outside. Sometimes I even shower outside. What I’m trying to say is, I lock myself out of the house a lot.
    I just love being outside. In the mornings, I take a cup of coffee out to my koi pond, plop myself down right next to my life-size garden statue of Helen Mirren, and do what one is supposed to do by a pond—I ponder.
    I ponder all sorts of things. I ponder life and our infinite universe and how lucky we are to find ourselves surrounded by incredible forces of nature every single day. And then I ponder other stuff like how do mermaids always seem to find seashells big enough to wear as bras? Whenever I go to the beach the biggest shell I can find in one piece is the size of a Skittle. I’ll still make it into a bra, but it’s very, very tiny.
    I ponder that expression “You’re a big fish in a small pond.” Do the big fish in my pond know that expression? Do they swim around and try to make the smaller fish feel bad because they’re so small? Or do the small fish know the expression “Good things come in small packages”? Maybe they swim around knowing that even though they’re small they have a lot to offer, like quinoa or an Olsen twin.
    I can sit and stare into my pond for hours and hours admiring the stunning reflections of the sky and the clouds and the birds. We have so many different kinds of birds near our house. They’re always chirping away, and I imagine them saying things like, “Oh, that Ellen—she’s so connected to nature. That’s so rare to see in a human.”
    “Yeah, she seems so laid-back and cool. Look at her sitting on that bench drinking her coffee,” I imagine another bird saying.
    And then the first bird chirps back, “I bet it would be so fun to hang out with her. She reminds me so much of Claire. Such a nut, but so sweet.”
    And while they go back and forth saying the nicest things about me—I mean, it’s just so humbling—I start to think about what it would be like to fly around with them all day long, looking at our Earth from way up above, circling and gliding through the air with complete freedom. Sometimes I get so lost in the moment, I start running around my yard, flapping my arms like a seagull at the beach. A lot of times I’ll even start to squawk. Usually right around the third or fourth squawk is when my neighbor starts screaming at me to pipe down. He’s always like, “Quiet down, lady! And put on some pants!” And I’m always like, “YOU put on some pants, sir!” because in the heat of the moment I panic and I can’t think of anything better to say. Of course, he’s already wearing pants, so it doesn’t pack quite the punch I want it to, but the bottom line is he’s clearly not as connected to nature as I am.
    Anyway, we have a lot of different kinds of wild animals on our property. We’ve seen bobcats and deer and wild boars. One time Portia was convinced she discovered a whole new species behind our house. She saw something she had never seen before that had tiny eyes and a hairy face. At first I assumed it was my cousin Nancy, but it wasn’t her. Portia said