I was awakened when the day was just breaking by the beep-beep-beep of construction trucks backing up. I have a hunch they wanted to get in some work before the snow got heavy, though it never really did. The good thing is that they were fixing the sewer lines, so it wasn’t something I had to pay for, at least not directly.
Although you can’t tell from the photo, snow was falling lightly when I took the picture, and it continued most of the day. Temperatures hovered around freezing, so whatever snow fell melted right away, leaving mud and puddles behind, which made walking to work a real adventure.
Although it’s only two blocks to my client’s house, there was no way to get there without making a mess of my shoes, unless I wanted to walk several blocks out of my way. The sewer dig went straight down the alley and across the street (they’d had a machine out here a week or so ago that chomped up the tarmac, leaving the strip unpaved). Because of the snow and the digging, that ten-foot-wide strip turned into pure mud. Just as bad, the way they do the storm drainage around here is to hump the middle of the street, creating a ditch on either side of the road, which fill with water because it was an inefficient concept for drainage. The good thing is that I was able to wash off my muddy shoes in the puddles. The bad thing is that my socks got wet, and I didn’t bring a second pair of socks as I usually do during wet times. (I can’t blame myself for forgetting the socks because we’ve had so little wet weather it was easy to forget my wet-weather routine.) I did remember to bring dry shoes, a sweater, and my lunch as well as all my regular staples such as phone, water, and a variety of small emergency items.
With all the stuff I bring, you’d think I was going on a major expedition instead of a mere two blocks!
I mentioned yesterday that when I’m at work and the client is asleep, sometimes I read, but sometimes I also play games on my phone. I get tired of the one I have (a word game where you unscramble a bunch of letters to form words of various sizes). I deleted most of the other games that came with the phone because they seemed boring, but it would be nice to have another game or two. The game I have inundates me with ads for other games, but although some sound interesting, I don’t have a clue what to get. Do you play a game on your phone? If so, do you mind telling me what it is? (I hesitate to ask because the games we play seem so personal — they tell more about us than we might want others to know.)
Luckily, the weather will improve for a few days to let the mud dry out, so I only have one more hazardous walk to deal with until the middle of next week when icy weather returns.
***
What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?
A fun book for not-so-fun times.
Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.
Stitches of Togetherness
January 30, 2022 — Pat BertramSmall talk — conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters — is a staple of my life now. When I visit with friends, we talk about small town life, ourselves, their pets and children and grandchildren, people we know. The only time I have a conversation about something more vital is if I know they more or less feel the same as I do because I simply have no energy to discuss anything anyone feels passionate about. Their passion for their beliefs about the “issues” of the day exhausts me.
For many years, I didn’t engage in small talk. At least not that sort of small talk. Jeff and I talked about everything that was important, both in our lives, in history, in health, in myth, in the world. We generally agreed, and if we didn’t, we’d discuss things, listening to each other without interruption, until we came to a middle ground. Mostly, though, through the decades, we formed our ideas in tandem. These ideas weren’t based on feelings but on in-depth reading (thousands upon thousands of books) on a multitude of subjects, including many things we didn’t necessarily agree with but wanted to know more about.
Then there was the other sort of talking we did. Small talk so small it wasn’t really small talk, more like the stitching that holds two lives together. You know the sort of thing I mean. Things said more or less in passing: “We didn’t get any mail today.” Or “I saw so-and-so today.” Or “They were out of something at the store today.” Or “I’m home!” Nothing of importance beyond the moment.
Several years ago, I wrote that one of the collateral aspects of losing a life mate was having no one to do nothing with. Although Jeff and I worked and played and talked for more than three decades, we often did nothing together. We were just there, a presence in each other’s lives. I’ve found other people to fulfill some of the roles he played in my life, such as someone to do something with, but I have no one to do nothing with.
I’m now realizing it’s the same with talking, and why I so often talk to his photo. I have people to talk with, both small talk and sometimes larger talk, but there’s no one around for the smaller than small talk. If I am sad or lonely, I can call someone, or I can go to the library and chat with the librarians while they check out my books, or I can do any number of things. But there’s no one around for the sub-small talk. I can’t call someone to say, “I didn’t get any mail today.” Just the effort to call would turn the idle comment into something it wasn’t meant to be and would give my not getting mail an importance it didn’t deserve. And yet, a shared life is made up of these passing comments, these “stitches” of togetherness.
Those stitches are another of the many things no one really notices until they are gone. In my case, other things were so much more overwhelming — not just the pain and angst of his being dead, but the silence of my life, the yearning for one more word or smile from him, the lack of someone to do nothing with, the stark aloneness of being alone (it’s completely different having alone times in a shared life than being alone in an unshared life).
When grief started leaving me, I became engrossed in other activities, such as dancing and traveling, moving from place to place and trying to figure out what to do with my life. So many of those activities are no longer a factor. I’ve bought a house and moved to my perhaps final home, so now the subtler and more permanent aspects of living alone after the death of a life mate are making themselves felt.
And apparently, this lack of “stitching” is one of those aspects.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.