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September 30, 2005
easy for you to say
Entries in your journal for the last several days have mused on the state of your relationships. Reading back over the last few pages, you
1. Realize many of your significant relationships need work -- forgiveness, attentiveness, fullness -- and you commit to doing something about it through therapy, increased communication, or whatever it takes.
2. Think it's time to move on to another topic.
3. Discover you're doing a fair amount of complaining about the state of things; you decide to write more about it to figure out why.
How about all of the above?
I was taking this on-line quiz, called Are You Ready to Reinvent Yourself?, while Moo, having been forbidden to watch television, got around my edict by instead fooling around on his Mac, typing and getting it to read in a number of voices, "I heart boobies." He laughed maniacally, which made me laugh, which made me feel guilty for laughing and encouraging his use of the word "boobies," which made me wonder if reinvention is truly possible if you are amused by things you know are wrong.
This morning my boss was in my office and he and I were talking about wine and wineries in our area, and one in particular that he and his wife had visited; they had stayed at a bed and breakfast nearby. Perusing the vineyard restaurant's on-line menu and looking at photos of the inn's guest rooms I thought, "We could go there and spend a Saturday night." And then I thought, We?
This has been the hardest thing to stop doing: to stop thinking of myself in terms of two. It's not even like I thought "The Husband and I could..."; no, I just thought We. I guess I don't really need reinvention, I just need to pare down the guest list.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2005
Diehard
It's official; we're in a drought. When Moo and I go down to the lake to bail out the sailboat we notice that it's laying half in water and half on mud. When was the last time it rained, really rained? We can't remember.
It's almost the end of September. I think about how I so looked forward to the change of seasons starting last fall and I wonder why, and then I realize it's because I hoped for something else to change along with the weather; I hoped for my life to change, hoped The Husband would change--even though, hello, he'd changed--hoped for things to go back, reverse, be what they were only better.
Instead what happened was that the seasons changed and The Husband stayed gone and things stayed the same, except not exactly. Because in spite of myself I changed, I changed. What happened was that it's a year later and things are different, but different in a way I hadn't anticipated: I stopped waiting. What a relief, to stop, when I thought I never would. To think Today, Tomorrow, Next Weekend, Next Month without also thinking If Only, Maybe, I Want, Suppose That, What If I... all right.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 27, 2005
Tuesday
There are televisions in the elevators in my office building now, on the wall above the call buttons. Very small, with lots of information on the screen: the weather, stocks, headlines, commercials. It’s ridiculous but I can’t help myself: I get in the elevator in the morning and my gaze is hooked. I stare at the screen for the entire eight-floor ride in the morning and again when I leave for the day. I stared at the screen during the ride down to the lobby to meet my friend C. for our daily 15-minute lunch break walk. So far I haven’t ever seen anything that made me glad I was looking, but I don’t stop.
It’s a beautiful day and the air is dry and clear, the sunlight so bright that it’s hard to believe it had to travel through atmosphere to get to us—it seems unfiltered by pollution or by layers of ozone and water vapor, and it is fall for real. I wish C. and I could walk for a while, but she is short staffed and today we had even less time than usual for our perambulatory activities because she’s got to get back to the office.
But I don’t mind, because in a few hours I’ll be home, standing on the deck with a glass of wine and the sun on my face, the cat winding around my ankles. I feel better today than I have in what seems like a very long time, and I don’t even mind that my afternoon is going to be spent reading a document that is basically little more than numbers strung together by articles; or that this morning I discovered I’d rendered my favorite pair of pants unwearable by ignoring the Dry Clean Only label and laundering them, complete with dryer cycle; or that I haven’t heard back from my mechanic about what’s wrong with my car, which disgorged the contents of its radiator onto the driveway a few days ago and then stubbornly refused to keep anything down after that; or that my lunch hour is over and this is the end of
Posted by JudyLa at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)
September 25, 2005
redux
... when I am
all body and no mind...
when I am only here and now and nowhere else—-then, and only
then, do I see the crippling power of mind, the curse of thought,
and I pause and wonder why I so seldom find
this shining moment in the now.
DAVID BUDBILL
The predominant state of the partner's mind is utter confusion. Even the most basic relationships ... remain bafflingly obscured ... The partner no longer knows what is true and right and what is wrong and forbidden.
SAM VAKNIN
Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
September 24, 2005
and the color is black and the number is none
Moo, Herself and I got to the city at 2:00 and wandered through the National Book Festival's tents before being drawn to the crowds across the street, down the sidewalk past the drumming, chanting, marching lines of people and on to where the music was, and we stood in front of the stage for five hours waiting for Le Tigre to perform. For my children, Jello Biafra, Joan Baez, Steve Earle, Al Sharpton and all the rest were merely Previews For The Coming Attraction. "Are they next, Mom?" Herself would ask after each clump of speeches, looking up at me wearily, from where she had finally sunk to a sitting position after the first hour.
Maybe Le Tigre was next, but at 7:30 it didn't matter any more. My back hurt, Moo was snappy, Herself was cold, it was dark, the dog was waiting at home to be let out to pee, and there were the thousands of people to thread through, the Metro to find, the drive home.
It was a Saturday, and we went to the city, and we came home. There's no way to describe the day that will do it justice, describe what it was like to be a part of something, something huge. I'd forgotten what it was like to believe in Power to the People. "This is historic," I said to my children. "Can we order pizza when we get home?" replied Herself.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2005
on which the world hangs
"Mom!" As I walk in the door after a long, long day, Moo meets me in the kitchen. "Hey, guess what? I figured out what people mean when they say 'I love you.' "
Uh oh. Let's see ... he's almost 15 ... listens to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson and Tenacious D and Offspring and... constantly sings, under his breath, the soundtrack to Rocky Horror Picture Show (the punk version) and ... reads Ayn Rand and ... well, he lived with his father and me for almost fourteen years. I put down my stuff, sigh. "Yeah? What do they mean?"
"They mean 'You aren't alone.' It's how humans say that to each other. 'I'm here; you aren't alone.' "
Ah. Well, there is that. He looks like a crow, all in black, standing on one leg and leaning against the counter. There is that.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 21, 2005
this is where the party ends
Spike has decided that he likes spending the night in my room, which means that I wake up and wake up and wake up because he is walking on my pillow or licking my wrist or jumping from dresser to armoire or purring and kneading his claws into my blankets. This morning at 3:45 he leapt up and nipped my hand as it hung off the bed while I slept, and that was the end of sleep. After a while I got up. The moon was like a floodlight and I walked out onto the deck with my coffee to have a look at the black-and-white world on the very last day of summer.
I went to Herself's back-to-school night yesterday; sat in her little desk and looked at her books, paid attention to her teacher, explored the classroom with the other parents. When the evening was over I fetched Herself from the gym where she and some other kids were watching a movie, and we went to the cafeteria for a preview of the school lunch menu and a snack. There was something floating in my lemonade and my chocolate chip cookie tasted neither like chocolate chips nor, for that matter, like a cookie, and I threw it away as we left the building.
"Did you see the lunch samples, Mom? Did you see the taco salad? Didn't it look good?"
"Actually, not really. I thought all the food looked brown. It was weird."
"Mom, there were other colors, too: White. And tan. And red. And brown. Oh, you already said brown."
I haven't been having a very good week. I'm paying for Saturday night's party: four hours of fun with The Husband have so far cost me fifty in regret. The world has crowded me in and everything I feel is congealed, has lodged someplace in my chest so that it's hard to breathe and makes me anxious. Tears constantly prick the backs of my eyes. It occurred to me yesterday on my way into the city that I went from being desperately unhappy and married to being desperately unhappy and alone--only I think that I might have been just as alone when The Husband lived here, it's just that his basic indifference to me--no, not indifference, it isn't that ... it's that he is able to set me aside, somehow; to put me away, shut me out, think of me in the abstract, so that I am the idea of a person instead of me, the me of messy, irrational, inexplicable feelings and needs--this ability of his was harder to see with the veil of "we're married" covering my eyes and, duh, my overwhelming desire to believe that my love was enough to make what I wanted into what was.
And now I'm trying, and failing, to justify what I'm doing to myself. My inside voices are dark and faintly sinister: they say "why," they say "don't do this any more," they say "people die every day"; I think, "sleep," and with every walk against a traffic light I dare myself, and summer is ending.
Posted by JudyLa at 05:36 AM | Comments (0)
September 20, 2005
the unfathomable universe
What's stopping you from getting what you want is the other thing you want ... your desires are in direct competition with each other. Figure out which you want more, and give up all things opposing that desire.
Oh, is that all.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2005
and furthermore,
Saturday night I went a party and got home late and a little tipsy, and happy, and Herself was still up waiting for me.
I slept until almost 8:00, got up and read the Sunday paper and drank coffee with Spike. I put a load of laundry into the washer, got dressed and went to the gym. I came home from the gym, changed, put clothes into the dryer and another load into the washer. I made and ate breakfast, cleaned up the kitchen from the night before, turned on the dishwasher.
I raked the front yard, swept the back decks, and with Moo cut down the holly bushes next to his bedroom window. I raked the back yard and put the leaves--last year's--into bags.
Herself and I went to Lowe's and got some mulch, then we went grocery shopping. When we came home she went out to play and I unloaded the groceries, put the mulch down in the bare spot the holly bushes had left. I folded the clothes and put more into the dryer.
Then I sat on the back deck in the shade, called friends, and read until Moo came home at 6:00 and it was time to make dinner.
It was a beautiful day--just one more in a series of beautiful days that have made up this beautiful summer; the last day of a pretty good weekend and I was busy, and happy to be busy, and grateful that Herself had a friend to play with and I had a couple of hours to myself. I like the book I'm reading, it makes me laugh, and the late afternoon sun made me sleepy and it was quiet out--just the birds and the neighbors' air conditioners for background music. And while I sat in the sun, looking at the lake and the trees, I waited for the phone to ring. In spite of myself, and in spite of knowing that it wouldn't, I waited for the phone to ring. There's the respect that makes calamity out of so long life.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
September 17, 2005
greensleeves
It's been hot all week, and muggy, but it's hard to take seriously because fall is just around the corner. The leaves are starting to change colors and they fall in little piles along the curbs so when Herself and I walk to the bus in the morning we shuffle through them. Moo is waiting for that smell, the sharp odor of decay, that for him is quintessential fall. Yesterday morning when I went outside to get the paper the air was heavy with the scent of something burning, chemical, plastic. There was no breeze and almost no sound; I couldn't even hear the traffic on 95. Overhead the storm clouds towered and threatened, but it was all a bluff since they sailed on, leaving us thirsty.
Summer is still here but it staggers on to its inevitable conclusion. Fall is Moo's favorite time of year. It is my favorite, too, but it still makes me sad. The days getting shorter, the light getting thinner. The changing of the guard, from green leaves to brown. Everything shutting up, turning off, going inside, burrowing underground. Me, too.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2005
but I’d rather be whistling in the dark
I’m sitting in traffic, stopped in traffic, on my way into the city in the morning. I turn off the book I’m listening to so I can think about what I need to do today. Right now it’s a juggling act at work, but that’s fine; I like being busy. And at noon I am meeting The Husband for lunch. “I have a meeting at the Mayflower Hotel,” he said. “We can meet there.”
A few years ago on my birthday he asked me to meet him at the Mayflower for lunch and when I arrived he took me upstairs; he had rented a room. We had champagne and shrimp and chocolate-covered strawberries and it was a quite different agenda from my usual afternoons. This morning, remembering that birthday, I think suppose he does the same thing today. Suppose when I get to the Mayflower he’s gotten a room. Suppose when I get there at noon he takes me upstairs. Suppose he opens the door to the room; we go inside. We stand and look into each others’ eyes; his hand goes to the back of my neck and he pulls me close to him. He kisses me. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. I was wrong; I don’t know what happened. I love you. I want to come home.”
An impatient driver behind me taps his horn. Traffic is moving again.
I meet The Husband at noon at the Mayflower. "Let's get a sub," he says, oblivious to my vivid fantasy life and impervious to memories. We walk to the Subway in Dupont Circle. It's 91 degrees out; too hot for the park, where the late summer grass is mostly dust and crunch. We sit at a little table next to the restroom. I have an upset stomach so I watch him eat, and then I walk back to the office.
When I get home from work at the gym I decide to make a cake. Herself sits on the counter in her pajamas. It's almost her bed time. She is watching me and talking about her day. She's quiet for a minute and then she says “Mom, do you think Daddy will ever move back home?” I am scraping the cake batter into the pan, making sure I get it all, or most of it, and then I hand her the bowl. “No,” I say.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2005
"mom dies, but clemens plays"
The Undeniable Pressure of Existence
I saw the fox running by the side of the road
past the turned-away brick faces of the condominiums
past the Citco gas station with its line of cars and trucks
and he ran, limping, gaunt, matted dull haired
past Jim's Pizza, past the Wash-O-Mat,
past the Thai Garden, his sides heaving like bellows
and he kept running to where the interstate
crossed the state road and he reached it and he ran on
under the underpass and beyond it past the perfect
rows of split-levels, their identical driveways
their brookless and forestless yards,
and from my moving car, I watched him,
helpless to do anything to help him, certain he was beyond
any aid, any desire to save him, and he ran loping on,
far out of his element, sick, panting, starving,
his eyes fixed on some point ahead of him,
some possible salvation
in all this hopelessness, that only he could see.
Patricia Fargnoli, from Duties of the Spirit
Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
September 13, 2005
It's all happening at the zoo
I wake up at 4:15 this morning with my neighbor's light shining into my bedroom. They moved in a couple of months ago and one of the first things they did was install a spotlight on the back of their house. They leave it on all night long--why, I'm not exactly sure. I don't really understand their need for constant illumination. Maybe it's the light = good, dark = bad theory ... or maybe they are afraid of the raccoons, or afraid that burglars will swim across the lake and break into their house unless they've got enough candlepower to erase all chances of anything slinking up to their back door. Erase all those pesky shadows.
Whatever the reason, I hate that light. I like it to get dark, and I like--or liked, anyway--looking out of my bedroom window and seeing only the shadows of the trees, pretending my bed was in the middle of the woods, like camping.
I try and fail to go back to sleep, so I get up and write my neighbors a note, asking them to please turn off the spotlight. I try not to sound crabby, which I am because I haven't had a whole lot of sleep in the past week or so. I try, in my note, to say how wonderful I think it is, or has been up to now, to look into the night, to smell the lake but to not be able to see it through the darkness, and I try to do this in as few words as possible so that I don't come across as weird, which I guess I probably am. Then I put the note in their mailbox.
I go back into the house, feed Spike, have a cup of coffee, and read the paper, and there is this brief article: Sheriff's deputies found 11 children locked in cages rigged with alarms in a house about 60 miles west of Cleveland. The children, ages 1 to 14, were in cages in the walls of the house and had no blankets or pillows ... Mike and Sharen Gravelle are adoptive or foster parents for all 11 children, officials said. The Gravelles do not have a listed phone number. No listed phone number, but they probably have a big ol' spotlight hooked up on the back of their house.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2005
watch me while I gravitate
The patients remind him of a horror movie called The Night of the Living Dead. They all walk slowly, as if someone had unscrewed the tops of their organs like mayonnaise jars and liquids were sloshing around inside.
Stephen King, The Woman in the Room
But when they played the tapes back, they found that ... other items had intruded. Someone speaking, fast and urgent, in what might be Polish. A twittering, like small birds in a wood ... Once, a woman's irate voice...
Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black
The Husband suggests the design of my blog should be "a single tear drop." We are sitting at a table on an Alexandria sidewalk when he says this, having lunch with Moo and Herself and taking a break from the art festival we've been wandering through. He is having a Corona beer and I am having a margarita, and it is a muggy Saturday afternoon and we are having a pretty good time. At the table next to us is a middle-aged couple, sitting with their little girl and next to their table is a buggy covered with pink netting: their new baby is inside the buggy, asleep. The mother and I start talking to each other the way mothers will, telling stories and comparing, and I am halfway through a story when I reach a point where I can either say that The Husband and I do not live together, or I can change one tiny detail so that we--Moo, Herself, The Husband and I--so that we remain, for the length of the conversation, a functioning and cohesive Unit: a normal family, on a normal family outing, on a normal weekend, in our normal life together. I hesitate for just a second, and then finish the story.
I understand that The Husband's remark is meant to be taken facetiously but not really, since he is not in favor of how I write my blog, which is to say from the point of emotion, which is to say that many of the entries sound like I am sad. He doesn't realize that when I sit down to write I might have a very different outcome in mind but something happens when my fingers are on the keyboard and how I'm feeling tends to leak out--but often I don't even realize "how I'm feeling" is how I'm feeling... it's almost like being a medium, channeling somebody else's impressions/emotions/ life, holding it in or maybe not picking up the phone until I sit down and I look at the computer screen and I think, maybe "I'll write about what I had for dinner" but when I hit Preview and read what I've written there's not one thing on the page that remotely resembles a story about meatloaf.
Posted by JudyLa at 03:30 AM | Comments (0)
September 08, 2005
falling scales
It's funny--well, not funny, exactly, but interesting--how wrong a person can be. How wrong I can be, especially when I feel, quite strongly, that I am right. Take yesterday, for example. When I wrote yesterday that I thought The Husband probably felt jumping out of a plane together would illustrate something about our relationship and how we feel about each other ... "I want to do this with you," he said ... what he meant was, actually,"When adversity gets you down, a parachute jump will give you a whole new perspective." Or something like that. It wasn't an "I love you" pep-talk, it was something else entirely.
Yes, this is the type of thing that keeps me up at night. How I can be so wrong, so much of the time, and still insist to myself that I'm not wrong. Why I think that things are what they are not. Why I think that things are not what they are. How it is that I can fool myself into thinking what I am doing is the right thing, when it is not. And why I can see what is the wrong thing, but only after ... only after I feel like this. Only after being forced to see.
Oh, today was a bad day.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
September 07, 2005
into the great wide open
For my birthday, The Husband wants me to jump out of a plane with him. He tells me this as we walk along Connecticut Avenue, past the cordoned-off sections of street and the black limousines and the police and the trucks with satellite dishes on them and the news cameras and the crowds gathered to see what they can of Rehnquist’s funeral. We pass all this on our way to DuPont Circle, where we will eat lunch in the park on this warm, sunny September mid-afternoon.
The Husband tells me about jumping because when he mentioned just now that he had something planned for my birthday I replied that anything was fine “so long as it doesn’t involve jumping out of a plane.” “That’s exactly what it is,” he said.
Immediately I felt a wave of fear so strong that I half-thought I was going to have to lean over the gutter and vomit into it. After the fear, or should I say after the urge to hurl, passed, I had the weird, unpleasant feeling yet again that The Husband has no idea most of the time who he is dealing with. Who does he see when he looks at me, I wonder. Because he thinks, or seems to think—he is positive, in fact—that I am a person who would enjoy jumping out of a plane, or taking the helm of a sailboat on windy day, or bungee-jumping, or skiing. And he is wrong.
About the jumping, I think perhaps The Husband feels that our leaping from a plane together and free-falling thousands of feet will make A Statement about our relationship, and that we love and trust each other and that we’ll work through these things that are so hard right now, work them all out in space before landing on solid ground.
As we walk toward the park and he talks about how wonderful this would be I think, why is it that a near-death experience will say to him what regular life hasn’t? Why, for him, will my being willing to be terrified past terror say “I’ll be here” in a way that my not filing for divorce hasn’t? If he wants a statement that says “I’m not leaving,” why can’t he just look into my eyes and see it? If he wants a statement, a promise, something meaningful, something like jumping from a plane thousands of feet above the ground, hoping the parachute will save us instead of, perhaps, stubbornly refusing to release, hoping it will let us land whole, complete, still us, still breathing, instead of smacking us against the face of the earth after all, dissolving our bones and flesh—if he wants something like that, the fear and the promise and the hope and the terror, then here’s my suggestion: let’s get married.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2005
moo: beast of burden
"What do you want me to put next to your picture?"
"Electric chair's not good enough for big lazy bums like yourself."
First day of school.
Posted by JudyLa at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2005
bonjour, tristesse
It's the last day of summer vacation. Labor Day weekend weather was perfect; mostly, in fact, the weather was perfect for the entire summer break. But as far as Moo and Herself are concerned, summer is so over. School is here and so it's fall, even though fall doesn't really arrive for another three weeks. Still, this afternoon we brought the chairs up, and brought the rafts and floats up from the dock and let the air out of them. Good-bye, summer. We went to DQ and had ice cream cones after dinner because it's a summery thing to do. But it's 8:20 in the evening and dark already. The windows are open to the cool air. Moo is wearing his backpack to "get the feel of it again," trying to figure out what he needs to bring tomorrow, his first day of high school.
Herself and I went to the beach this afternoon; she said the water was warmer than the air, which might have been true. I lay down on a towel to read and instead closed my eyes and began immediately to dream, dream without really falling asleep--that is to say I could still hear all around me the summer beach noises of kids and lifeguard whistle and conversations while in my head a kind of story played out. "I took a picture of you" said Herself, after I opened my eyes. The last summer picture.
Occult, she discovered, meant hidden. She was beginning to feel that everything of interest was hidden. And none of it in the obvious places; don't, for example, look in trousers.
Did you have a good summer? I ask them late in the afternoon. "I had the best summer!" says Herself. "It was okay," Moo opines. Just okay? "Nobody was ever home," he says. As if it mattered, seeing as how he was unconscious all day, every day. As for me ... my summer was just okay, too, though I was grateful for the hot weather and the sun. My favorite part of summer were the times when I sat on the dock and listened to them talk and watched the sun and wrote letters and smelled the lake and felt a kind of optimistic relief being around children, who still have it all ahead of them. My least favorite part of summer was my fifteenth wedding anniversary: everything about it I regret; everything about it was the wrong thing, wrong.
But the best of times and the worst of times of the summer are past, like summer vacation itself is past, and after I finish this sentence I'm going to go upstairs and say good-night to Herself, set the alarm for the first school day of the new year.
Posted by JudyLa at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)
September 04, 2005
the next voice you hear
At 4:00 in the morning only Spike and I are awake. He slits his eyes at me when I turn on the kitchen light. I move him from my chair to read the paper; when I get up to pour a cup of coffee he moves right back again. Okay. He has spent the past couple of days in sullen acceptance of his fate: ball-less, harnessed; and while he was at the vet's I put down new cat litter (made from orange peels), which I like but he hates. He leaves me strictly alone in the mornings now; no more purring and rubbing my face with his, and no chase-the-bottle-top game. I'm sorry, Spikey, but what could I do?
Moo and I watched White Noise the other night, which is a not-very-good movie about (more or less) recording the voices and images of dead people on tape and video. In the movie, the afterlife is crowded and noisy--a kind of huge, featureless waiting room out of a Kafka story. Nobody seems very happy and they're all jostling each other, waiting their turn for a crack at the microphone so they can say "fzshzpblpt xvcwqmntmp."
Anyway the movie made me curious about dead people talking, EVP, and so I went to some sites to hear what the dead have to say. Not a lot, as it turns out. Or at least nothing that I would like to hear, such as "Hey, the afterlife is cool!" or "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens," or "Here be monsters." No, the conversations of the dead are mostly as mundane as they were in life (although probably a lot shorter), and they are disappointingly open to interpretation and almost universally impossible to make out, consisting of mumbles, or screeches, or two- or three-word phrases, as if the afterlife's population consists entirely of teenagers trying to remember the words to the songs they knew back on earth.
In White Noise the voice of the dead wife of the main character is clear--she doesn't really even need the tape recorder--and she speaks in complete sentences (more or less). Her husband neglects the rest of his life--job, child--and spends all his time staring at video monitors and waiting for her to talk to him from The Great Beyond. I wondered if he paid that much attention when she was right there on the same astral plane with him. Probably not. Maybe what he really needed to hear, and what everybody listening to the dead needs to hear, is "Go live your life and stop eavesdropping."
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 03, 2005
well it's a pretty good day; I'm looking forward to tomorrow.
I've thought about writing this for a week and still haven't come up with anything. But I want to mark this date out loud because a year ago on September third my life changed in a way that I could not have predicted, or did not predict, or chose not to predict--yes, that's probably more accurate, I chose not to.
"We need to talk" said The Husband on the phone, and I said back "Yes, I know" but I didn't know, exactly, or it was my choice to not know, more likely. When I think of the evening of September third of last year I still think "before and after."
Before The Husband said "I guess you know what I'm going to tell you," and after.
Before I started to cry, and after, when I thought that there was a real possibility I might not ever stop.
Before I found the text messages and the voice messages and the e-mails, and after.
Before I looked for text messages and voice messages and e-mails, and after.
Before I knew I needed to look, and after.
Before, when I thought that The Husband would never lie to me and after, when it seemed to me that every word had been a lie.
Before I knew about The Other One, and after.
Before The Husband left, and after.
This is still After, and it's always going to be After. After, I fell apart for a year--I mean really, I fell completely apart. It might have seemed that there was a person here, but there wasn't. It was all just emptiness and the wind whistling through the caverns and it might be silly, or it might be presumptuous, or it might be self absorbed, or it might be conceited, but I really want to say to everybody who has helped me through the past year by talking to me,
and listening to me talk,
and taking me out for drinks,
and driving me home after drinks,
and saying "I love living alone" and meaning it,
and writing to me,
and saying "come stay with me" and meaning it,
and inviting me over for Thanksgiving dinner,
and listening to me sob,
and answering the phone,
and still liking me,
and telling me it would be all right eventually and meaning it,
and saying "it's not you" even if I didn't believe it,
and saying "I understand"
and saying "let me take the kids for you,"
and not rolling your eyes when I said the same thing over and over and over,
and making me live my life even when I didn't want to,
and being my friend,
and making me laugh,
and helping me even if you didn't especially feel like it,
and not saying "no"
and waiting--patiently or not patiently--for me to turn back into somebody,
thank you.
I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 01, 2005
on little cat feet
Spike sits at the front door meowing at us when we take Jack for a walk. So Moo, Herself and I went to Petco and bought him a harness and a leash so he can come with us; and the other night when we took Jack out, we hooked up Spike and brought him outside, too. It was dark out, evening comes on so much earlier now that it's late summer.
We brought Spike into the front yard. "Come on, Spike!" Herself said in a Won't This Be Exciting! tone of voice. Spike ignored her, crouched low, then stretched out and lay down, made himself boneless on the sidewalk. "Come on!" Herself said, tugging a little bit at the leash. Spike lay still. Finally she picked him up and brought him out to the road where Moo, Jack and I waited. She put him down. He lay down.
"Come on, Spikey!" she said and pulled the leash. Spike let her. She pulled again, dragging him a little bit. That was fine with him; he allowed himself to be dragged down the street with no protest, a black shadow on the blacktop. He obviously had no interest in going for a walk, or even in walking, for that matter. "Okay then," Herself said, and kept pulling until we made her stop.
"Spike, you have to learn sometime," she said sternly. Spike ignored her and her tone of voice, preferring to crouch motionless wherever she put him down, so for most of our walk with Jack, Herself carried him in her arms, every once in a while saying "Watch Jack! Do what Jack does!" As far as I could tell, Spike wasn't watching.
When we got back to our street, finally Spike stood. He started to walk. Actually he started to run, toward home. Herself ran with him, holding the leash. Thinking this was a game, Jack ran, too. But when he caught up to Spike, Spike turned on him, hissing, growling low in his throat, as if he didn't know who Jack was--and maybe he didn't, harnessed and leashed and outside in the night for the first time ever. So the walk was over and we had to bring him inside, trembling with indignation.
I guess walking on a leash is not what Spike had in mind. Maybe what Spike has been meowing about when we all leave has nothing to do with really wanting to be with us or be outside; maybe what he's been saying all along is "Don't hurry back."
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)