Worry Wart

I'm a worrier.

My Grandma, who lived next door to me from the time I was eight, was this upbeat, hilarious woman with a piercing voice, a razor-quick mind, and not a mean bone in her body. She sang at the drop of a hat, funny tongue-twisting big band ditties from the 30's with crazy lyrics guaranteed to make you laugh. She cooked like a fine chef, kept an immaculate house, ironed my Grandpa's briefs, for Gawd's sake, and watched an inordinate amount of Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin, but no soaps. She was constantly entertaining, and I don't mean she was always throwing parties, although when she did there was nobody who could make a stranger feel more at home - loved, even - but I mean that she had something bright and funny and interesting to say about everything, and kept the chatter going from the moment you walked in the door to the moment you left. She was entertaining, like Selma Diamond on Merv, or like Moms Mabley on Mike Douglas. She had stories - - - ahhh, did she ever have stories! Great big hilarious stories about growing up in New Yawk and the roaring 20's and the boarding houses she ran and the time Gertrude Stein spoke at her Ladies of Haddasah meeting.

And she was a worrier.

First and foremost, she worried about my mother - about her weight problem, about her unhappiness (clinical depression is what we'd label it nowadays). She worried about Nixon. She worried about my cousins Katy, Carol and Patty - there was always one of them in the throes of some sort of crisis that Grandma could gnaw on. And there was me to worry about, of couse. "Poor Steve." So smart, so talented, and so fat. So effeminate. So destined for some sort of humongous unspecified disaster.

It was like the worrying was the default position. Channel One. She could be completely distracted by telling me some big story about the diving horse at Coney Island, and I had a knack for prodding her for more details, more stories, but in the end her brain jumped back to fretting. It never seemed to get her anywhere. I saw that. I saw how the worrying never lead to some sort of conclusion or resolution. It just existed, a way to fill the time.

Of course, I was a worrier way before I lived next door to Grandma. My mother's sometimes erratic and withdrawn behavior had me in a constant state of anxiety - "Why doesn't she love me? What did I do? What can I do to change this?" I was also worried about my limp wrists and my high-pitched giggle and my fat face and my next piano recital and a foreboding sense that I could never be the normal kid everybody expected me to be.

But once Grandma appeared as a worrying kindred spirit, things really took off. Whatever incipient proclivity I had for worrying was well entrenched after ten years of hashing it out with Grandma. We worried about everything. We talked, debated, analyzed, assessed, predicted, and proposed solutions for a million and one issues, yet they never went anywhere. They were about things that were out of our hands. Katy's boyishness. Carolyn's crossed eyes. Patty's freckles. Cookie's weight.

I think we both used worrying about others to avoid getting down to business and doing for ourselves. It was like I was in co-dependent grad school, going after my doctorate in fretting.

I operate under the false delusion that spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about something will lead to a revelation or a resolution, that suddenly a light will go on and the worrying will pay off because it produced a brilliant idea that solves everything. So I take whatever's uppermost in my mind and chew on it. Sometimes the plate's so damned full that I have a hard time choosing the worry of the day.

Right now, of course, I'm worrying about my job, about the future. About the Middle East.

The thing is, I do the footwork. Man, do I ever, as far as the job search is concerned. I send out two or three applications every day. The resume is honed to perfection. There are six basic cover letters allowing for infinite customization. I've trimmed the nose hairs and fought back an incipient cold sore with copious amounts of Lysine. Honey, I'm ready for anything.

So why not stop worrying? Why do I love it so much? What is it about worry that (apparently) gives me comfort while giving me angst? Is it just because it's familiar, as habit-based as a dog chewing on an old slipper? Am I using uncertainty to distract me? Or is it just the conceit of the brain run amock? Why not drop it, you know?

I do the footwork in my life. But I also do the fretwork. I think it's time to let go of it.