Thoughts and prayers. You know the drill. Second Amendment . . . Guns don’t kill . . .
“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
My empathy is gone for such a monster and obviously at least one person agreed.
Julia came home from The Price Center on Thursday with two pieces of news. First, that she had gone to the YMCA with peers. She got on the van and spent the morning on the stationary bike, if she is to be believed. I am not sure she spent the whole morning there, but when she goes to the gym with me, mostly on weekends, she can do 40 minutes on the stationary bike. The big part of that news is that she was willing to leave the building! She has gone on a few community visits, like the zoo, to help with watering plants, but that was of high interest to Julia—she loves zoos, loves watering. I know there is a lot more going out into the community that she can take part in.
Fingers crossed that this is a beginning.
Working on specific projects — this Sunday’s service at my church, the writing prompt for next week’s meeting of my new writing group at FUUSN, and the agenda for the writing class I’ll be facilitating at HILR in October. Both the writing groups are called Letters—In the Company of Writers.
I need to say that this was not the way I intended to spend my summer—I had “simplified” my usual routine and intended to be editing the “big” memoir all summer. I had blocked out days that were not going to be for anything other than writing/editing and had given up any wish for leaving town for any length of time.
Fifteen years is a long time. I can tick off who has grown, where and how we’ve lived, who has come into my life and who has left, what I have learned and some of what I have forgotten, what new toys I have acquired and what I have let go of. It feels like a lifetime of change and it feels like a moment.
Fifteen years ago today, around lunchtime, David died. I still miss him. I can almost imagine sitting down and having a conversation with him. I have so much news and so many questions. At the same time, however, I cannot imagine it at all. He is too far in time and space and changes away.
Time seems to have wiped away, wiped clean, the most painful missings, the heart-wrenching grieving, leaving in its wake a sweetness, a place from which strength could be built. I know the pilings on which this life I now live rests.
Today is my parents’ wedding anniversary. They were married in 1948, 77 years ago. In August, it will be 45 years since I was married. Two weeks from now, it will be 15 years since David died. And two days after that, I will have known Ed for 3 years.
Timing is not everything, but it is something.
Julia is on a respite weekend, and so, the house, with just Ed and I waking up, is quiet. I slip out of bed, pour some ice coffee previously made, grab my bed shawl (the one Cindy made for me), and open the laptop.
I make lists all the time. Impossible lists of tasks related to everything from researching supported housing for Julia’s future to finding a literary agent to trying a new salad dressing. It is a long list.
Before the beginning of summer, I felt that my plate was too full—too many tasks on my lists. The very list meant to facilitate action was paralyzing me. And so, I simplified—trying for a summer of 5 goals which grew into 7 and sprouted to 11, still less than the list I usually answer to. Am I too old for a truly simplified summer?
Perhaps.
This weekend, I got to one thing! Painting the old china cabinet.
This apartment that I live in does not have enough storage. Not the worst storage I’ve lived with, but far from the best. To supplement what I have, just a bit, I kept the offered china cabinet that was in this apartment before I moved in. My landlord told me it belonged to his mother, and I accepted that; however, since he is younger than I am, I expect his mother was younger than mine. This china cabinet was certainly not my mother’s style, much more like the one of my paternal grandmother owned. And I vaguely remember that my maternal grandmother had one as well. From this I conclude that the cabinet probably belonged to a grandmother or great aunt and passed down to my landlord’s mother. I will have to ask him.
The cabinet is from the turn of the last century, made sometime before the 1930’s. It is near 5 feet tall, made of dark red wood. It is plain and sensible, with a glass door in the center. The door is closed and locked with a little key that also served as a knob. It was the same with my grandmother’s. Alas, the key is lost. I keep the door closed with a thin piece of cardboard shimmed into the space between the door and frame. My grandmother’s cabinet lost its key a few times during my early childhood, usually found on the floor under the edge of the carpet. Once that key was found in the vacuum cleaner bag when it was emptied, and once my bother took it upstairs into our shared bedroom.
I have thought all these thoughts, remembered all these rememberings as I have painted this weekend. From dark red wood, the cabinet will be a grey-green on the outside and a creamy white inside. The second coat of the outside is drying right now. Soon, I’ll rip off the masking tape, touch up what I have missed, perhaps add some highlights (although I’m not sure about that), and wait a few days for it to dry. Then I’ll wax it, and it will be finished.
And I will have finished one of my summer tasks and check it off my simplified summer tasks list. It is very good to have a listed item that has the real good possibility of completion.
Home. I have chewed on the concept and the actual location of the place for a long time. I have lived in places where I never felt at home, sometimes gradually finding enough of my people in those places to hold on and not wither away. I lived in places that felt like home, left them with every intention of coming back, never to return. There are places in-between—places where I felt some connection with the air of the place and made important friendships. Boston is one of those places. I moved from Jersey to Cambridge in the middle 70’s to live with David. He had been at Brandeis, dropping out to play in the pit band of the show, Lenny, and then just staying on. I liked the city then and the neighborhoods in Somerville and Cambridge where we lived. I was willing to move back to somewhere around here after we finished our degrees. David wanted NYC as home and very certainly, I fell in love with NYC and had no regrets.
We never returned together to Boston, and when we left NYC for the midwest, I forgot that I had feelings for Boston, the place.
And I did not quite realize, when I lived in Madison for twelve years, how much that had grown to be a home. It was a hard place to leave. Not the home that I came from, I will never be a midwesterner but the place with the people who supported me, and Julia, those first years of her with us and all the years after David left.
We are going to be in Madison for a few days very soon. If any of my dear Madison peeps are going to be around and available, I’d love to see you. Please let me know!!!
We’ve been at the Hynes Convention Center at the anime convention for almost three hours and it is finally worth it. The registration process was not friendly—multiple lines, down long hallways. It took a long time to get a print out of the schedule for the day. They say we should be using an app, but I cannot download the app, I wanted Julia to have a paper schedule to choose from, and after being turned down by a few “officials”, I ask at the accessibility desk and insist. Finally, someone admits that this is the first year they are not providing paper schedules. I insist again, like the mother bear that I am, and a paper schedule is put in our hands but by that time, I am pissed off and grumbling and deliver a lecture on what accessibility means. I’m not going to say it was not needed but I could have been nicer about it. Not a proud moment.
But now . . .
Julia is learning a dance in a k-pop dance workshop. In a ballroom with at least 75 (maybe 100) other young men and women, mostly women. Two women teach on a slightly raised stage. They are clear and good at breaking the dance down into manageable chunks and repeating. The actual singing group, Bebe performing Stay C, is projected on a large screen beside the two teachers. The dance is repeated at 50% and 75% of the speed of the song over and over. The dancers learn small chunks and dance. Every few learned chunks, the teachers review by going over everything that has been learned.
I’ve left breakfast dishes in the sink this morning. On purpose. If I was my mother I would have washed them as soon as Julia left for the day. If I was myself ten or 14 years ago, I would have washed them as Julia got into the van. Back then, I needed to control something and washing dishes was a doable task. An easy success. And I needed success.
Now, I am willing to let them slide. To let them wait until . . . . until later. I will wash before I go to bed tonight. So, okay, I still have some need of control.
Instead of washing, I poured a glass of clean water, taped off a page of my sketchbook and spritzed the water colors. I am trying to paint. I am painting. I cannot seem to sit in meditation these days. I wander, I obsess, I plan. I slip too easily into past and future. I bring my mind back time after time, but I am not patient with myself, with the practice that I’ve had for years.
I brought my laptop to Julia’s year end recital at Berklee. Berklee Institute for Accessible Arts Education. I will not get much time to sit and type but I was pretty sure I would want to get it out as soon as I sat down. I do and we have some time until recitals begin.
This year the musical step taken is that Julia will play her cello without me sitting with her. This is the step forward after a few taken back. Back in Madison, when Julia was playing with Martha Vallon, she always played without someone sitting with her; however, when Julia emerged from Covid shutdown, she was not willing to be on the stage alone, not willing to do her own counting or take full responsibility for what she was playing. I see some change now. It has been a long way back.
Chasing Joy 