A Look On The Lighter Side: It’s not exactly a gift of gab

Judy Epstein

Did you ever say something in jest, blurting out the first words that came into your head only to realize too late that they were eerily on target?

I seem to have a gift for this sort of thing — if gift is what you would call it.

The first time I noticed this I was preparing for a scan my doctor had requested to see if a tiny surgical procedure might be able to help clear my sinuses.

I had been suffering from a seemingly endless infection, which had kept me miserable and in pain for months, and which laughed at every course of antibiotics I took.

Endoscopes had shown nothing useful, so here I was changing out of my street clothes and putting my glasses away for the MRI machine.

Lying down, I felt like a giant gingerbread woman, waiting to be shoved head first into an oven.

At the very last moment I sat up. “This is crazy!” I said. “Why am I even here? I need this like I need a hole in the head.”

The attendants all stared at me as I realized that that’s exactly what I was there for. I canceled the test, got dressed and got out of there. Fortunately, with a few more months of various treatments, the infection eventually cleared up.

Another example of my, um, gift, occurred most inconveniently at a fancy dinner party in the city. My younger brother was visiting from out of town, so I had taken him to work with me that day before he ended up as my “plus one” at this party.

“So what do you do?” someone had asked me. Eager to impress, I listed my recent jobs.

“I do freelance production and writing for a wide variety of shows at public television station WNET/13,” I said. “Some of it’s for local air, but mostly it’s national, for news and documentaries. Some of the time I’m even in the control room, making sure the right things are put on the air.”

“What about the beg-a-thons?” my brother interrupted.

“You mean the pledge breaks?” I said, airily. “Oh, you couldn’t pay me enough to watch those things!”

Just then, one look at my brother’s surprised face made me realize that’s exactly what the station did! Worst of all, it hadn’t taken much money to be enough either.

The years went by, and I stayed in the metro area. Still at WNET, I worked my way up the ladder to a full-time position on a national program staff.

I had a job I loved; I had a great bunch of friends; and after years of sublets, I had snagged that most important of accomplishments, an apartment of my own, with my name on the lease. Best of all, it was rent-stabilized. People have probably killed for less.

But I also had a boyfriend, whose job was somewhere out on Long Island. I couldn’t be bothered with where exactly; all I knew was that the drive took him most of an hour each way.

One day he worked up the nerve to suggest that we move to Long Island. That way, he explained, we could be together while he also cut significant time off his commute.

I looked at him blankly. “Long Island? You want me to move to Long Island?” I said. I was currently right at the center of the universe. Moreover, I had a geographic objection. “I could never live on an island!” I told him emphatically. “It would give me claustrophobia!”

He looked at me, then down at the ground, then up at the World Trade Center’s twin towers, which back then loomed like a mountain range at the southern end of my Greenwich Village street.

“You do realize that you’re already living on an island?” he asked me.

Darned if he wasn’t right! So, Reader, I married him… and moved to Long Island.

TAGGED: judy epstein
Share this Article