Time passes. My husband and I go to New York. I drag him to the Cartier store on Fifth Avenue “just for fun.” I try on a watch with diamonds (like this one on the left). My husband notes that this watch isn’t me – which I consider a rather tactless reference to my daily life that includes yoga classes, combating roaches on the home front, writing on my computer, and sharing intimate details of my life with our cat. I stare at the watch, wanting to protest that – if necessary – I can become the diamond-watch type. But no. He’s right. It isn’t me.

The next day, my husband otherwise preoccupied, I stumble into Saks Fifth Avenue. It seems they have a jewelry section. It seems the jewelry section has a space devoted to Cartier. I see a watch I love (that’s it on the left, except mine has a gold face). I ask whether there’s any play in the price. There is – and not only that, as a non-New Yorker, I don’t have to pay sales tax.

I think about it. After all, life is uncertain. Maybe I’m “just” 58 and technically ineligible for a 60th birthday present. But just think. I might get mowed down by a bus tomorrow. Don’t I want to die happy? Sold!

After we get home, I email my friend Margo Howard, who writes an advice column for Yahoo. As I suspected she might (what are good friends for?), Margo backed me up on my purchase.

“How wonderful that you found something you knew he’d like to give you!” she wrote. “I, too, wanted a fabulous watch, which I finally got, after lobbying for it for only 16 months. I would do subtle things like leave pictures of it on his computer. And I think you have clearly upgraded the old saw about always wearing good underwear, lest you get hit by a bus and the hospital personnel see embarrassing undies.”

In the meantime, I’m staying on the alert. Life presents you with many occasions – significant and insignificant, birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s and Mother’s days. I want to be prepared.

That’s what happens when you’re all about other people. You have to be relentless.

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