The Love and Laughter Memories...

For most of January I've had three posts in my blog scheduler at any given time. I was on a writing jag which has its good and bad sides. Good because I like it when words freely flow down from my brain to my fingertips and magically appear on my computer screen to send out into the world. That a human can do that is a miracle, isn’t it, and it started back in ancient civilizations when they developed language followed by the written word. The miracle continued with the invention of the typewriter and computers followed by the development cyberspace and the blog platforms that I love. Having spent 12 ½ years watching my husband struggle with language disorders after his massive stroke makes me truly appreciate what a complex thing it is to communicate in any form. I won’t get too deep in the weeds regarding the damage the stroke did to the communication center of his brain but for anyone new to my blog I'll just say that his aphasia, agraphia and apraxia speech issues were comparable to a car that has a functioning motor (the brain) and wheels that work (the lips and tongue) but the transmission in between the two is shot thus the car can’t go/the speech and written words can’t flow.

A new month is beginning soon but I'm ending January by torturing myself with CDs. The impeachment trial in the Senate has been on my TV but for large parts of my days the volume as been turned down so low I can’t hear it. I’d listened to every minute of the impeachment inquiry in the House and was pretty sure I wouldn’t be hearing anything I didn’t already know. Still, I wanted to be counted by the powers that be as a household that is ‘keenly interested’ in the coverage. The decision to listen to CDs came with complications. It had been so long since I've done it that I had to google my Sony player to figure out how to use it. But before I could do that I had to get out the magnifying glass and a flashlight to find the model name and number. But before that, I had dug through my downsized folder of small appliance manuals and I couldn’t find the one for the CD/cassette and radio. It must have gotten accidentally thrown out during my filing cabinet purge and I blame that evil Marie Kondo for that! Ever do that? Decide you want to do something and it turns into a big chain of steps that makes you wonder if you really want to do what you thought you did in the first place? 

My husband was into music more than I ever was and one of his favorite recording artists was Joe Cocker. So the torture part of my day came when I put on one of his albums. Unchain my Heart: track one. Then it came, track two, the one that never fails to bring back sweet memories of a playful romp in the hay, as they say. “Baby take off your coat. Real slow. And take off your shoes, I'll take off your shoes. Baby take off your dress. Yes yes yes. You can leave your hat on.” I had come into the house one afternoon just as those words came blasting out of Don’s office and as I took off my coat, he sang along with Joe, “You can leave your hat on.” Our eyes locked and the slow striptease began as the song's chorus repeated and it ended next door in the bedroom. And, yes, I kept my hat on the entire time.

I have no idea how often a couple who’d been together for 42 years has sex or makes love but my memory often picks out four times to replay in my head from time to time, right down to the minute detail. If I’m being honest here I’d admit there are more times I could recount down to the nitty-gritty if I set my mind to it but I’ve got too many things to do and places to go and day-dreaming won’t get them done. And I question if I should even be sharing the top four in a public forum but here it goes, fresh out of their lock box. One of those top four memories I already wrote about up above. Another was outside under the stars at Lookout Park…memorable because we both got covered with poison ivy that we passed back and forth the entire long, hot summer. We both ended up regretting that romp au naturale but it was wickedly fun at the time. The third memory I take out of its place of honor from time to time happened on the evening of the day I label the happiest day in my life. It also happened under the stars but on the bed of our pickup truck out west. Our mamas didn't raise any fools. No more rolling around in unknown vegetation for us after Lookout Park.

The fourth time was actually the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh time all rolled into one night and it was straight out of a romance novel. The kind of love scene/s that starts out hot and sexy and leaves you breathless and spent, then after a while to recover it progresses into deep, passionate sex that leave you in awe of how deeply it makes you feel, followed by a bonding and wordless kind of love making that leaves you both with tears in your eyes, and ending the night with a slow and gentle pairing that comes with whispered words when you both know you've found THE ONE. 

I once read a book on how to writing romance novels that said couples who don’t have those four different kinds of experiences over a short time span might stay together happily but they aren’t bonded together for life in the same way as couples who do experience that kind four-for-the-price-of-one kind of "imprinting" on one another and I suppose that explains why some widows and widowers can jump back into another relationship after their spouse dies and, others like me, find that idea laugh out-loud funny or repulsive, depending on the mood I’m in. ©

From Memorial Day to the Bachelorette Season 15

A few years ago I wrote a Memorial Day post and in it I said, “From personal experience I know that raw grief dissipates over time, but a tiny piece of my heart also goes back to grief from time to time in the form of wistfulness for what might have been.” I’ve been feeling a lot of wistfulness the past few months and I can’t decide if t comes from watching too many Hallmark Movies or if I’m watching them because I’m wistful. I miss love! I miss eye contact and hugs and the kind of conversations that happen without words because you’ve known the other person so long you can read each other like books. Your gestures, your body language, and the way your eyes turn different colors when you are happy or mad or sad. You can’t fool someone who has known and loved you for years. Sure, Hallmark Movies are formula driven but one could argue that actually falling in love and maintaining that love for years, is formula driven, too.

Speaking of formula TV, let’s talk about the new season 15 of the Bachelorette with Hannah, the former Miss Alabama. She started out with 30 guys to pick from and on the second show she had them in speedos walking a pageant runway. Do women these days really pick out their life partners by the size of their packages? In her case, it might be true. She sure has been doing a shocking amount of the full-body making out for so early in the show. I have a love/hate relationship with the Bachelorette and Bachelor franchises. They and American Idol are the only reality TV shows I watch and every year I say I’m not getting caught up in the “B” shows. But half the time, I still do. Maybe I'm pretending I get to pick from the 30 guys and, trust me, this season I wouldn’t have ANY trouble knocking 8-10 out of the running because of their “careers.” What is a ‘car bid spotter’ for example or a ‘roller boy’? The ‘pro-surfer’ plus the unemployed guys would be out the door by the second rose ceremony as well as the guy who just professed that he’s "already falling in love" with Hannah and “you can trust me.” 

If I was to wake up tomorrow young and beautiful like Hannah and was in her place, I’d make quick work of that show. It would have ended already because I’d pick 28 year old Tyler G., a psychology graduate student working towards getting his PhD in psychology to become a clinical psychologist. He has a side business in Dream Therapy Analysis and you know how much I like my dreams. All these guys have profiles on the Network’s fan page and his reads: “Tyler G. is a very laid-back guy with a go-with-the-flow kind of attitude. He avoids clubs at all costs and would much rather spend time reading, going to Soul Cycle or relaxing on his boat. Tyler considers himself a modern romantic and is looking for his equal match, who he says is a confident girl that isn't afraid to lay it all out on the table and is one that can make him laugh.”

But Hannah eliminated him this week, on the third show, because behind the scenes he was accused on a message board by a high school girlfriend of being "extremely misogynist" which just goes to show I make bad decisions based on first impressions and/or in this age of social media teenagers can never outgrow their past miss-behaviors. Hannah, however, kept the psycho-stalker last night when she threw Tyler to the curb. Go figure. There’s always a psycho-stalker type on these shows. A woman or man who cuts into other people’s time and who stirs up trouble because psycho-stalker can’t play fair in the sandbox. Am I invested in this waste-of-time show or what? And it's only week three!

I would argue that show (and Hallmark Movies) are not really a waste of my time. It’s a mindless diversion from watching too many political shows. It’s an opportunity once a week to throw popcorn at the TV screen (which the dog cleans up) and to remember what it was like on the dating scene before I met my husband. Not that the show is anything like clubbing was back in the ‘60s but reading the body language of these guys and trying to figure out if they are handing Hannah a line or if the producers are manipulating everything, or not, keeps me watching. She graduated magna cum laude with a degree in communications, she’s not stupid but Hannah sure seems too shallow at times. Her platform for her year as Miss Alabama was to “advocate for those suffering from depression and anxiety, something she battled with during her teenage years.” I once dated three guys at the same time and that filled me with anxiety and she’s trying to ‘date 30 guys at once? Nothing like jumping feet first into an active volcano.

Back to Memorial Day. It snuck up on me. The weather has been too cold to think about the beginning of summer which this holiday weekend usually signals. Or maybe that’s just an excuse for wanting to avoid going to the cemetery. I was there a month or two ago and it needs work, sod was taking over the stone. But I wasn’t exaggerating about feeling a lot of wistfulness and I’m not sure I want to pair that wistfulness with spending time digging up sod around Don’s grave marker. I’ll go but I want to do it on a nice, warm sunny day and if that warm day doesn’t come until July? I’ll probably not be able to find the darn stone! ©

We're Born and Then we Die---What's the in Between all About?

A good friend of my niece’s just passed away this week while on a trip to Hawaii. He was only 65. I knew him slightly back when he was a college student working part-time at a large wholesale/retail flower shop and greenhouse where, at the time, I was working full time. But over the years I’d read and heard a lot about him as his career path took him from being a fourth grade teacher to a district reading coordinator to the principal of the elementary school where he and my niece both recently retired from. He was also active in the Michigan Elementary Principals Association but the kids at his school, perhaps, will best remember him as Zero the Hero, a red tights and swim goggles wearing guy who was passionate about getting each and every child in his school fired up about reading. It’s hard to lose a good friend. I could be wrong but I think this is the first time my niece is experiencing that unwelcome life experience. He was the best man at her wedding, a golf buddy to her husband, a fellow member of their long-standing poker club and far more than just her principal.

Other than my husband, I can’t even say that I’ve experiencing losing a close friend and especially to something as unexpected as a lethal heart attack. Before Don died, I had occasionally wondered who would be the first in my circle of friends to die and I even recall thinking after he passed that I didn’t need to wonder anymore. It was Don. He was my first friend to die. We are acclimated to losing older members of our families and can console ourselves that the person who died lived a long life filled with many blessings or joys. Widows in my age bracket can even console ourselves by saying the same thing about our spouses. With a person like Zero the Hero I know many will be consoled by his life-long history of giving his all to his passion projects. At his retirement party Zero the Hero said of his school, "I feel like I've taken more than I've given with this job. You just can't have a down day here. There's just too much positive energy all the time." But from what I hear tell, he wasn’t giving himself enough credit for having created and maintained that positive energy for so many years.

When someone we respect dies and the dust settles, even someone we mostly knew through someone else or through the media we can’t help looking at our own lives and taking stock of what we’re contributing to the world. Have we fulfilled our legacy, made our tiny piece of the world a better place? Have we accomplished enough things on our Bucket Lists? Have we had enough fun, given enough, loved enough? And I keep coming back to the sentiments expressed by Burt Bacharach’s song: “What's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live? What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?” Theologians have been working on that for centuries and think they have all the answers, and perhaps they do. We grow up learning about good versus evil, free will, the concept of God, the soul and the afterlife. And we like to think we are a part of something bigger than just waking up every morning to a new day, a new start. What is that something bigger than ourselves? A minister once told me: “The secret is there is no secret. Life is about love. You can interchange the word ‘love’ for ‘God’ and ‘God for ‘love’ and that’s all there is to it. We are here to love one another.” If that's true, then people like Zero the Hero left this world full-filling his mission. He was loved deeply and he loved deeply. 

I can’t image what it’s like growing up not knowing love. As a widow and a person who lost both my parents I still struggle with feeling like there is no one left on earth who loves me. Intellectually, I know that isn’t true but in my heart I miss hearing the words. I have one niece-in-law who never misses saying it at the end of a visit or phone call but that’s all. I have friends who have a pact with their spouses to say “I love you” at the end of every phone call. Something about wanting that to be the last words the other hears if one should die while they’re apart. It seems strange, sometimes, to hear one side of a phone call where heated or tense words are being exchanged but they still end their call with, “I love you.” But then again, maybe that’s exactly the right time to say it. I’ve read a few widow blogs where the writers were racked with guilt because they’d been fighting just before their spouses passed away and they wish they'd gotten the chance to say, "I love you." I got to say that to Don a few minutes before he died and to hear him say back, “love” which was the very best his aphasic brain could do and that was enough. I hope Zero the Hero’s family also got to hear the three most important words in the English language. Note to anyone still reading this, please say them today to someone you love. ©