Stick-to-it-iveness

We received a wedding invitation in the mail the other day. Included in the attractive nuptial announcement was a magnet bearing the theme colors of the future event. How clever! Now we can stick the invite on the refrigerator with its own sticker-on-er! Mind you, we possess enough magnets to festoon every fridge in East Oreland, but the more the merrier!! 

Things that can stick to other things have been a lifelong source of fascination for me. I recall the drawings I made in childhood that I always anointed with gobs of Elmer’s glue. For some reason I preferred to draw on one side of two different pieces of paper, then attach, rather than just turn one piece over to decorate. My few surviving masterworks from the Early (Crayola) Period are therefore quite lumpy and bumpy. I also LOVE utilizing Scotch tape, rubber cement, staplers, paper clips, ribbons and string—in short, anything that joins one item to another. I do defer to my hubby when it comes to his copious use of duct tape in prop-making (you should see the Town Crier’s horn in Cinderella, made out of a funnel taped to a tube taped to a kazoo!) But otherwise, I’m the Stickum Queen of the household. In the kitchen, I find all binding agents deeply satisfying (flour, cornstarch, etc.) as I use them to join butter and milk to form a magically thick sauce. I love making sticky buns, and eating sticky rice. Hanging random stuff on walls with Command strips? Yes, please!

Young Peter seems to be following in Nana’s fingerprints. Give that kid a pair of safety scissors and a glue stick and he’s happy for hours, cutting paper into itsy bitsy pieces and then gluing the snippets together. Makes perfect sense to me.

I have been told on occasion that I am “the glue holding the family together,” which I don’t believe, really—I think the Seyfried clan does a pretty darned good job maintaining themselves as a team. But of course it’s flattering to imagine that I am THE necessary ingredient, with my home-cooked and needlessly complex meals, my frequent, overdone displays of affection and incessant chatter, and my various neuroses. Someday, I muse, when I’m fully “retired” to that 55+ community in the sky, my children will gather to mourn and reminisce about dear old Mom. “Remember how she’d always freak out over nothing?” they’d recall, tears in their eyes. “And she was afraid of EVERYTHING! Driving, the dark, thunderstorms, driving in thunderstorms in the dark…” “It’s a wonder we weren’t completely screwed up.”

Wait a minute, this is not how my musing is supposed to go.

But seriously, connections are vitally important to me. I love making a new, or deeper, connection with someone else, binding over shared taste in movies or books, or finding a common friend. I love feeling that, deep down, we are all interconnected in so many important and wonderful ways.

Ways that don’t even require Elmer’s glue.