I'd like it here if I could leave and see it from a long ways away.
I'm fucked up about family in the usual boring ways, and there are a lot of reasons why I find myself living at least six hours away from the nearest relative, but when my dad's brother called tonight to update me on the dead and the living, I hung up with a smile on my face. I don't know if getting older has made their ways seem less strange to me, or if our dwindling numbers have made me cling a little tighter to whatever tribe remains, but it was the first time my uncle didn't seem to hassle me endlessly about looking after my mom (I'm trying, though I'd prefer to do it from a distance of a thousand miles or so) or whether I'm taking good care of my money (I'm not)or any of the other things my family hassles me about.
Anyway, there are two fewer of us now. My grandfather's 94-year-old brother, also a former professional ballplayer, passed away today of heart failure and old age. My grandfather's former wife, 13 years estranged from the rest of us because of some bad feeling while my grandfather was dying, died on Saturday. I was thinking of her today, and of the things that keep you from talking to people for long after you feel mad at all. Now it is too late, but I probably would never have done anything about it, anyway.
I'm going to be 38 years old in two weeks, which in my head equals 40, and starting to worry about how my life will be changing. For one thing, you can't job-hop with the same alacrity at 40 as you could at 30. The bad habits that have marked the first 40 years -- sloth, gluttony, an absence of approachability more days than not -- will not be going away.
Anyway, there are two fewer of us now. My grandfather's 94-year-old brother, also a former professional ballplayer, passed away today of heart failure and old age. My grandfather's former wife, 13 years estranged from the rest of us because of some bad feeling while my grandfather was dying, died on Saturday. I was thinking of her today, and of the things that keep you from talking to people for long after you feel mad at all. Now it is too late, but I probably would never have done anything about it, anyway.
I'm going to be 38 years old in two weeks, which in my head equals 40, and starting to worry about how my life will be changing. For one thing, you can't job-hop with the same alacrity at 40 as you could at 30. The bad habits that have marked the first 40 years -- sloth, gluttony, an absence of approachability more days than not -- will not be going away.