Almost my birthday, and all I want is death

This post is a barely-edited version of an email I sent this morning. It's funny how trains of thought actually seem to create their own tracks and destinations.



Forwarded message to a best friend TEO...


"When bitching about a sweater gets REALLY dup and profiend.

Sometimes, being a writer is weird."


-----Original Message-----
Original email to Mr. X
Sent: Tue, Feb 6, 2018 8:06 am
Subject: Yep nope

The quest for the right wardrobe never seems to end. I bought a sweater maybe three months ago - it was definitely "recent" - but am deciding today, it has got to go. Which is especially irritating, as it's a GAP and I usually have good luck with GAP. (One red/black damask print v-neck has lasted me like six years now, it's woooooonnnderful.) But this simple blue rib knit: I'm not into that whole Marie Kondo thing, but this sweater is NOT GIVING ME JOY.

Which, ugh. This sweater made me use THAT phrase. This sweater sucks.

The thing is - it's really comfortable, it's the length I like, and the color is great on me. It is also pill--tastick (yes, with a K - like your name, it needs the consonantal emphasis), the "inseam" tag sticks out (and no, I don't cut out care tags because lord knows I'll louse up the laundry at some point), and the front hangs really weird at the bottom. Gah.

So, though I've worn this probably not even half a dozen times: I need to get rid of this thing.

Life is too short to wear unflattering (and prematurely RATTY) sweaters.

It's just a shame I happen to be wearing the thing NOW. On my fake-Friday, and family day. And with good jewelry, too! Blah.


Tonight is steak night at mom and Stepdad's. The filets from Christmas, which we didn't eat because everyone came down with the flu.

This'll be the way to spend some family celebration time with Step, but leave Wednesday free for me and mom. He's been in bed a couple days, and says he might not eat with us (he'll almost certainly eat with us, but how he'll be feeling today overall is up in the air). Sigh. Poor S. He just can't seem to die.

Bro and I were talking about him this weekend. He said it was something of a shame we came to love him after he lost his mind - I think there's a feeling akin to guilt, for Bro - but I feel like it's a blessing. We LOVE him. Neither of us felt like that was a possibility twelve years ago, and okay, it took dementia to loosen S up and give him this sense of humor we treasure. But he's loosened up. He is funny. We love him. That is enough of a blessing, and dementia is enough a part of life, I feel like it's worth just being grateful for the love and the blessing.

This is the power of a sense of humor, really. Laughter is so elementally *human*, I think, that the bonds it creates can't be trivialized. I mean: look at the way I talk about your face, broken up with laughter. It's in no way a small thing, the way that is beautiful to me.

It's in no way a small gift: S's immense grace in his sense of humor.

They always say there's no comedy without pain. I'd have to agree; that's fair. S's wit has come at such a price. Life itself, arguably. But his funny-ness has made all our lives just that much more wonderful. And just saying that squeezes my heart, and all but breaks it.

And as much as I am grateful for the incandescence of S's impishness and his smile, G-d I wish it could be taken from us all. I wish he could die. Because as long as we have his brilliance with us, HE has to endure such hideous, unbreakable pain. It is so unjust - and I know life is not fair. But nobody should ever suffer this. I would not even wish this on a Trump.

And even with all that, to feel *guilty* about loving his humor would be to waste it, and to negate the blessing it is. I just have to pray it is some amount of blessing for S. It looks like it is. It looks like, even if only a moment at a time, it takes him out of the pain. Even as selfish as it is: he takes *us* out of it. He invites us out of the reality he can't escape himself.

I've never seen grace quite like that. S is something so special.

Cookbook Memories

Yesterday, I spent a good while looking through old cookbooks - the Betty Crocker, of course, but also the little binder style book my mother-in-law gave me, complete with several of her family recipes and into which I've put decades - generations! - worth of my own grandma's recipe cards, old magazine recipes, a couple sheets of paper with my dad's handwriting; the bread I used to make, but haven't since he died.

Fourteen years goes by ... well. Not fast.

And yet ... there he is. Right there; my dad, his egg salad. His handwriting. His mother's gingerbread; like velvet.

Cookbooks like this, or recipe boxes, are in their way perhaps even more evocative than photo albums. The memory of food is so strong, so meaningful. The fading handwriting. The stains, and the little notes about special tricks with this icing or that casserole.



Wishing you and yours the sweet - and savory - memories of the season. May we all be blessed, and enjoy a time of peace ...

Lord, Have Mercy and Heal

For this city, for every city and community, and for those who live in them, let us pray.
Lord, have mercy.

Defend us, deliver us, and in thy compassion protect us, O Lord, by thy grace.
Lord, have mercy.

For all the departed, let us pray.
Lord, have mercy.

For deliverance from all danger, violence, oppression, and degradation, let us pray.
Lord, have mercy.

Creator of Adverbs ... and Porpoises

Brad Parks' prayer was an excellent appetizer for the weekend:



I really hope Mibi will watch this.  And maybe use it in church.

Quotes from the Bemused Writer

Thanks to a certain Sarcastic Broad for some thoughts today:

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life.  But there was always some obstacle in the way.  Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid.  Then life would begin.  At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
   — Father Alfred D’Souza 

Finish each day and be done with it.  You have done what you could.  Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.  Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
   — Ralph Waldo Emerson 

The second one reminds me of a favorite prayer.

...

This.

Last Week

For the most part, I try to stay sanguine when I talk about Mr. X, but several thousand miles and several years do take their toll from time to time.  This past Sunday, in church, I prayed and just gave up.  I could call it giving it up to G-d, but I just gave up.

The next day, the conversation started.

And today, I am blogging from the hotel in another state, where almost three years ago I last saw X.  Where we met up yesterday for our first date since, and laughed and had a good time.

At first, the thought was that I would come down and help.  He's here unexpectedly, attending to a family issue.  But sometimes when someone is sick, or afraid of how sick they might be - and they don't know - they need the family and nobody else.  So I can't really help ... except to be here for X.

There are times it annoys me how self-sacrificing my relationship with him may appear.  Whatever the choices look like from the outside, they have been mine, and whatever the relationship may or may not be is ours to worry about.

I worry.  If I didn't, I wouldn't give up before G-d Himself.

But nearly ten years on, X and I are here together.  There are many (most) who don't have that much.  And for whatever it is, I have always been grateful.

Dovetailing

The conversations I had last week were the culmination of many weeks' anger and confusion.

They weren't the result of these things.  But they were an almost too-tidy culmination of the effects of forty-four years' self-censorship, anger, fear, and hideous frustration.

I'm unaccustomed to living in a state of anger, so to find it in myself - as suddenly and overwhelmingly as I did, when it came - was confusing in the extreme.  I didn't understand its source - I understood its trigger - but not its roots, not the depths from which the anger sprang, and grew.  And so I had to search it out.

Erick's been the only person I could talk with about the full panoply of everything that went into last week.  He didn't even point the way; but just something about his brain works with and against my own in a way that seems to stimulate mine.  He makes me work in ways I could not, before I knew him.  And what that has given me, I'm so grateful for.



The harasser resigned this week.  He had another offer.  So I know this isn't the result of my painful decisions.

I still did the right thing.  He can't take that away from me.  It *is* a shame the next employer may be exposed to the risk his behavior represents (I know I was not the only person he upset).

But mine isn't.  And my employer is the one who matters - and not only to me.

And, however it dovetails - or absolutely doesn't - the risk is removed.

Not eliminated.  I'll pray about that part.

But removed, and from me.  Interesting, that.  I'll pray I don't take credit for it, but give thanksgiving anyway.

Lord it is night.

Lord, it is night.

The night is for stillness.

Let us be still in the presence of God.

It is night after a long day.

What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done.

Let it be.

The night is dark.

Let our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives rest in you.

The night is quiet.

Let the quietness of your peace enfold us, all dear to us, and all who have no peace.

The night heralds the dawn.

Let us look expectantly to a new day, new joys, new possibilities.

In your name we pray.

Amen


***


With thanks to Mary.

Tonight

Today is my mother's birthday, and I have hardly gotten to say hello to her.  Tomorrow is the day we (begin to ... ?) find out whether my friend is dying of pulmonary fibrosis.

My grandmother died of PF.

My dad did.

It is simply, literally beyond my comprehension that a friend I have known since I was a twelve year old girl ... could die.  I love her so very much.  She has been a friend like none of my others; winsome and silly and all the things we naturally love - but her heart is unnatural.  It is wide and kind and utterly loyal.  She has for a husband a man with one just like it.  Her friendship is a gift I have been thankful for, has spanned across thirty-one years now.  We were little girls when we met.

We still are.

She is a woman of a depth of generosity I have always admired; she is brash, and wonderfully crass, and has a mean streak just as wide as mine.  She is pragmatic - and romantic.  But for her friends - and I am one of the oldest - she is the deepest well.  She was there for me when dad died.  I can hardly bear the thought of being there for her when she does.  Of being there for her husband, who is also, so truly, so deeply, my friend.

Please pray for peace.

Pray for my beautiful, bitchy, batty, and beloved friend.

Pray

It's less than a week now to the next surgery on someone I love. And this is the biggest one. And it's someone I love very, very, very deeply.

*Prayers*