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. ©

Forgiveness in Fiction and Real Life

Weather wise, we’re having the weirdest January in years, and the forecast for the foreseeable future is a rollercoaster of rain by day and ice by night. Boohoo, nothing keeps me at home more than weather. I thought I’d get out of the house today for my book club but it got canceled due to ice and here I was looking forward to a lively discussion of The Sandpiper by Susan Lovell. She actually lives nearby and set her book in places along Lake Michigan where I’ve been. That was fun. She even leads a book club through the local OLLIE program but, geez, each meeting costs $17.00. I can’t imagine paying that when free book clubs are all over the city. But then again there are people who’ll do anything to rub shoulders with published authors. Been there, done myself a few decades ago.

The themes in The Sandpiper---alcohol addiction, infertility, a dysfunctional sister’s relationship and forgiveness---were well written but not all that interesting to me. The plot of this story hinged on a misunderstanding and withheld information where one little conversation could have prevented ten years’ worth of pain. Do people really do that---not speak up for themselves when one sister wrongfully assumes the other sister was having an affair with an older man when she was actually raped by the guy? I suppose they do. Don’t you feel sorry for authors? We pick apart their plots, settings and characters and every detail in between. On the other hand, authors have the power to make us think. In the case of this book, think about anyone we’ve forgiven or need to forgive.

In my own life, finding forgiveness for someone who’d done me wrong took five years. He was a former friend and employee of my husband’s parking lot maintenance business who, after Don’s massive stroke, wanted to buy the business. I had the equipment appraised, we made an agreement and he promised to pay in 45 days when he could withdraw some investment money without penalty. Without a nickel down gave him all of Don’s bidding and contracts information, helped him write bids and assured the mall owners the guy would have the needed equipment. (You can’t bid big places like that without a verifiable list of equipment.) With my help, he got contracts with all the places where Don had done work for years. But when it came time to pay for the equipment, he strung me out for another two months, making up one story after another on why the money was held up. Two days before the storage yard needed our frontend loaders, etc., moved off their property, he finally admitted he’d been buying equipment piecemeal and he was reneging on our deal. 

I’d never felt so used in my life and mad at myself for helping him procedure thousands of dollar's worth of contracts. Had the guy been up front and honest about what he was doing, at the very least I could have sold the equipment months earlier saving me a summer’s worth of liability insurance and storage, not to mention having to pay big bucks to have the equipment moved to a heavy equipment auction site because I no longer had the option of selling it where it sat. It hurt to have a so-called friend do that to us, especially at a time when Don was still in a rehab facility fighting to get some quality of his life back and I was having major cash flow problems.

The forgiveness finally came when I was planning Don’s ‘Thank God, I’m Alive’ party on the 5^th anniversary out from the stroke. Don was not aware of the fiasco outlined above---he’d lost several years of comprehension---and he wanted to invite the so-called friend to the party. I invited 50 people, 67 showed up including this guy who I had hoped would have the decency not to accept the invitation. As I watched how happy it made Don to see the guy, I decided it wasn’t worth holding a grudge against a guy who was too stupid to be ashamed of what he did.

The last chapter with this guy came a few years later when he stopped by because a faith healer was coming to his church and he tried to talk Don into going. Don had a working vocabulary of twenty-five words, a forth of them swear words and he used them all that day. Nearly a year of therapies---physical, occupational and aquatic---plus 6-7 years of speech therapy couldn’t take away the repercussions of the stroke, but a faith healer praying over an agnostic was going to make him walk and talk again? Every time Don swore the guy “joked” about fining him for a “swear jar” which only served to make Don even madder. It would have been a funny scene in a movie but I was seriously worried that Don would have another stroke. The guy had recently found religion and had a come-to-Jesus spiel that rivaled any street corner preacher yet he never did understand the concept of doing onto others as you would have them do onto you. Hint: You don’t torment a stroke survivor with words when he doesn’t have the vocabulary to fight back.

Forgiveness. Sometimes it comes easy and other times you just have to shake your head and keep chanting, “Stupid is what stupid does.”  ©

Politics, Lady Parts and Renaissance Fairs

 

As a person who love politics and blogging, after the first debate in this year’s election cycle it’s been hard to keep these two areas of my life separate. But I try to do it because my “blog branding”---I hate term, but it fits---is that of an older widow navigating her way alone after spending decades in a world built for two. People who come here don’t expect to read an old lady Monday morning quarterbacking and dissecting the line-up of Republican candidates who graced the stage last Thursday. So I sat on my hands the last few days but the itch to cross my self-imposed line started and obviously I couldn’t resist scratching it. I promise to be brief.

After watching the early bird and prime time debates, the follow-up analysis afterward on two cable channels and following Trump’s Twitter volleys late into the night, I just have to ask: Why he is polling so high? Really, the man as much as said FOX moderator Megyn Kelly was mean to him because she was having her period! In his Don Lemon interview post-debate he actually said the words, “She had blood coming out of her eyes. She had blood coming out of her---whatever.” My mouth literally dropped up and in that moment I wanted to paraphrase a Taylor Swift’s song: “All you're ever going be is mean. Why do you have to be so mean?” Then I laughed. From now on I no longer have a vagina, I have a “whatever.” The Donald was just being himself---crude and rude and living proof that money can’t buy class.

Election time was always fun when my husband was alive. We both enjoyed watching, reading and discussing all things related to politics. I miss that. Who am I kidding? That’s not all I miss. This past week has been especially void of human contact. And wouldn’t you know it, Saturday when I went to the grocery store and I looked forward to have a “conversation” with the cashier only to discover I got in the line of a deaf mute cashier who couldn’t say a single word. My store hires a lot of handicapped people so I wasn’t surprised to find him checking out my groceries but I was surprised that he wasn’t wearing a tag that said something like the card my husband carried: “Hello, I have a language disorder that prevents me from speaking but I can understand everything you are saying.” I spend six years of my life observing group and individual speech classes at a language disorders clinic and I recognized the cashier’s language disorder right off but I worried that others would think he was being rude or “moody” and in turn they wouldn't be nice to him. It actually gave me a chill to see the look in his eyes when the transaction ended and he gave me the “thank you stare”. Once you’ve seen that earnest, begging-for-understanding look you don’t forget it. As a widow, you can think you’ve move on but there is always something pulling you back into Tear Zone City.

Neighbors on both side of me have been gone the past two weeks. The younger couple are probably on their honeymoon and the family with two small children on my other side went to an out-of-state Renaissance Fair. They are deeply into all things medieval and she has the hair to prove it---it’s down past her butt. He takes part in jousting tournaments and they have costumes for various stations of medieval life. Often on Mondays in the summer you’ll see an oval shaped, white tent drying in the sun before they pack it back up again for the next fair somewhere around the state.

There was a time in my life when I would have loved taking part in my neighbor's passion-hobby. It involves so many crafts including knitting, tatting, sewing, weaving, cooking over an open fire and even blacksmithing and other guy things involving leather and chain-mail. In the winters they are busy planning and organizing events. I have never understood people who don’t have a passion-hobby. With so many interesting things in the world to do, collect or take part in, it shouldn’t be that hard to find something you love---be it politics, boating, handwork, collecting objects, jousting or collecting visits to state capitals. The latter was a goal of my oldest niece that she and her husband accomplished in their travels a few years back. That being said, my passion-hobby of politics is a mixed bag this election year with my other half gone. And the debate just made me miss him more. ©