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are trustworthy and you’d trust some people less because of your experience with them. Maybe this time around you wouldn’t treat each day as cavalierly as you have in the past.
    As much as we’d like to do a better job the second time around, the truth is this is it . Whatever regrets we have now are going to go with us into eternity unless we take steps now to change them.
    I have regrets I need to deal with.
    I regret the time I spent waiting for the other person to call when I had the power to pick up the phone myself.
    I regret not verbalizing my opinions instead of verbalizing my frustration with not being able to verbalize my opinions.
    I regret not keeping more journals. I had plenty of blank books but usually forgot to write in them. Journals are not meant to remain blank. A blank journal gives the impression you’ve had a blank life. Nobody leads a blank life. Even if it feels blank some days, it’s really not. If you woke up on Wednesday morning, May 14, that’s noteworthy. If you didn’t wake up, you wouldn’t be able to write that in your journal; in fact, it’s the only viable excuse for not writing in your journal.
    I regret not trying out all the recipes I tore out of magazines. What was I saving them for?
    I regret the time I wasted wishing I had more time.
    I regret not standing up to the bullies who crossed my path. It takes a lot of courage to confront a bully. That courage never came easy for me.
    What I don’t regret is the time I’ve spent with my family and friends. I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done that might in some small way have had an eternal significance in someone else’s life. And I don’t regret dedicating my life to God at the age of six and the fact that I am still trying my best to honor that commitment today at age . . . well, you know, somewhere over forty.

    We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.
—Winston Churchill

19

The Gravity of the Situation
    I doubt if I’ll ever forget it. It was one of those images that burn in your memory like a scene from a low-budget horror film. I couldn’t sleep for days, and if I’ve ever been certain of anything, I’m certain of this: I never want to see it again.
    It was early in the morning, an ordinary day—nothing much planned except a business meeting I had to attend in about an hour.
    I curled my hair with my curling iron just as I do every morning, then began to brush it out. Having read somewhere that brushing your hair upside down gives it more body, I decided to give it a try. Fat hair should be everyone’s goal in life, right? So I bent over and brushed . . . and brushed . . . and brushed. I could feel my hair thickening with each stroke. Not being able to resist the temptation, I turned my head to the side and peeked at the mirror. I caught a glimpse of my hefty hair in all of its glory all right, but I also saw something else. I hadn’t bargained for this. It was a complete shock. To this day it sends shivers up and down my spine.
    What the ‘‘Ambassador of Obese Hair’’ forgot to mention about upside-down brushing was the fact that a woman over the age of forty should never look at herself in the mirror with her head down. If you’re over forty and you bend over, all forty years bend with you, believe me. Gravity kicks in, and every fold of skin that has ever thought about becoming a wrinkle suddenly gets its wish. Your hair may look great, but your face looks like Methuselah’s mother on her second week without sleep—during allergy season.
    This is why when an older movie star is interviewed she tilts her head back in an unnatural position. Notice this the next time you see one on a talk show. Her head is tipped back so far you could give her a sinus exam. No doubt she’s had the experience I had the day I bent over and then looked in the mirror. Stephen King may have gotten his inspiration for his last three novels after doing this himself.
    I don’t recall this