Today I went to my second exercise class at the senior hall,
this one a Stretch and Flex. I thought it would be easy but I’m finding out how
out of shape I really am. I don’t have the agility I should have and my balance
is shot. Standing on one foot for 60 seconds? Forget it! Not to worry, those are things this and the
Balance class I took earlier this week are designed to help. The only thing I
excelled at was eye hand coordination which sounds impressive but just means I
can throw tennis balls into a basket from various distances. Near the end of
the class today the instructor put on a CD for one of those guided relaxation
things. You know the drill, “Close your eyes. Relax the muscles in your face,
your hands, your feet…” yadda, yadda, yadda. “Now visualize yourself in a place
that brings you peace and happiness. It could be on a beach or maybe in a
wooded place. Where ever you go that….” Oh-my-God!
I don’t know where they came from but tears rolled down my
cheeks and not just a few. I was struggling to keep from sobbing out loud and
bringing everyone out of their descending down to a relaxed state of mind. My
mind I was anything but relaxed. I was running though places that I could
visualize and all that did was remind me of things like the last time I was at
the beach I left some of Don’s ashes behind and the last time I was under the
towering pines up north Don was with me. I had no place to go! It even crossed
my mind that maybe the cemetery would have to be my new place to visualize when
doing visualization exercises which, of course, seemed ridiculous even to me,
the person who dreamed up that dichotomy. Before the CD ended, I wiped my eyes
and face dry while the others still had their eyes shut and after class was
dismissed I didn’t stick around long for fear someone would notice I’d been
crying. The lingering loneliness of widowhood bit me good and I still don’t know
why/how my emotions could turn so quickly. It’s been months since I’ve shed a
tear and even longer since there was sobbing involved. I want to go back to the
Stretch class again next week but as sure as hell is hot I’d better have
someplace lined up to visualize for the last ten minutes. I don’t want a repeat
run of my knife-less, Madame Butterfly-like drama.
I also got news that the antique mall that I moved
into last spring is going out of business when their lease is up in November.
They will let us out of our leases early if we want to go so I have a new
dilemma to think about. I was there Thursday to restock and start running some
targeted sales and so far, they say, only one person is leaving early. I took
some photos so I can place some Craig’s List ads hoping to generate traffic
towards some big items I don’t want to haul back home. At this point in time
I’ll stop bringing anything new in and start rotating 40% off sales on
different categories of stuff each week, with a goal of doing a booth wide 50%
off sale the last month. It’s a nice little mall and I’ll be sorry to see it
go. But all good thing must come to an end. “Put that on a sampler and hang it
in your kitchen.” That’s a line out of Stephen King’s Joyland and I love it
almost as much as I love another line in the book: “When it comes to the past,
everyone writes fiction.” We widows are especially good at that, aren’t we. We
gloss over, we polish, and we minimize and inflate. We build our stories from
whole cloth but in the end, nothing changes. All good things came to an end and
our kitchen sampler isn’t big enough to give equal space to the
blandness left behind.
Recently I’ve had several people remark that I’m keeping
very busy and by their tone of voices I can tell they are saying that with
approval or something akin to admiration…or even mild jealously. This is going
to sound priggish or ________ (fill-in-the blank) but those remarks are
annoying me for reasons that make no sense. (Or maybe they make too much sense?) I want to snap back, “My being busy
isn’t taking the edge off my boredom! I still eat all my meals alone and the
only one who leaves dirty socks on the floor is me." What makes the widowhood
induced sense of emptiness come and go like it does? It’s been two years and
seven months since Don died. How long is long enough? I hate the poor me
feelings I’ve been fighting the last few weeks. I guess I should try to be more
honest with people, let them know that “busy” doesn’t translate to “happy.”
Hey, that brings up another Joyland line by Stephen King that I identify with: “I was raised
by my parents to believe that barfing your feelings on other people was the
height of impoliteness.” So I don’t. Instead, those feelings go in my blog/diary. Dear
Diary, today I cried in Stretch and Flex class….. can you help me feel better in the morning? Boohoo, diary! ©
