Marotta:

Geeze, Lighten Up Already!

One day last fall while flying through air so bumpy people's tray tables kept leaping up to sock them on the chin, I decided to tell my husband David the truth: "Husband," I said. "You need to lighten up." Because there I was, during that whole period of pre-landing turbulence, keeping up a dandy little stream of perky talk.

"Wow! This is like a ride at Six Flags!" I cried. "If the plane goes down and we die, do you think the kids know where to look for the important papers? Hey, maybe we’ll crash on the desert floor! Then it would be like that movie "The English Patient" if you lived and I died, that is. …But let’s say both died, WOULD the kids know where to look for those papers do you think?"

"No! I don’t know! Could we NOT talk about this now?" he finally hissed at me.

That’s when I had to give him the bad news about himself.

But the next day, well, danged if that certain saying didn’t pop into my mind about how every time you point the finger of blame at someone, there are three other fingers pointing back at you. Which means that my accusing David of not knowing how to lighten up actually says that I’m the one who can’t relax into things and just chill for once.

Which might just be true.

Because that patch of desert we finally landed in was Las Vegas, Nevada, playground of the west; and there I was 18 hours into our stay there, still holed up in our hotel room, obsessively answering emails and eating my standard little monk’s mix of browning bananas and day-old milk.

"Have you even BEEN outside yet?" David asked when he called from his meeting at noon—this was a business trip for him. "Leave the room, for God’s sake! It’s Las Vegas!"

And so I did.

I walked through the indoor universe of that hotel casino, thinking unkind thoughts about everything I saw: the story-high billboards showing super-muscular guys naked but for their bow ties and little diapers; showing near-naked women with lampshade-fringe trimming their push-up bras and tiny underpants. When I squinted my eyes, most of the clothing disappeared and I thought how much like baboons humans look from a distance.

I ducked into the hotel spa and saw dazed-looking women in bathrobes and crazy hair, fresh from their massages and waiting to have hundred-dollar nail jobs. In the casino itself, I disapproved of every person I saw hunched over those silly slot machines on such a lovely day. I walked out on the strip and met a man who tried to get me to take off my diamond so he could clean it for me.

"What kind of fool does he take me for?" I thought after declining.

And in the very next minutes had my answer, in the person of a woman just approaching me in a T-shirt that parodied that famous whispered confession by the ghost-seeing child in 1999’s film "The Sixth Sense." Only it wasn’t the dead that the wearer was telling the world about.

"I See Dumb People" her shirt said, and it made me laugh right out loud. Because I had managed repeatedly that dazzling autumn day to choose fretful solitude over breezy companionship, snobbish judgment over open-hearted kindness. I thought I saw dumb people all around me and pointed the finger at them accordingly; when all the time those three other fingers were pointing right back at me.

Write Terry at tmarotta@comcast.net