It is Friday
This is the last day of my vacation. I took a week now because next week is Thanksgiving and time begins gathering speed once the tryptophan is out of the system, rolling inevitably toward Christmas and the new year, and frankly I need a break.
This is the weird interim period between it's-been-two-months and it's-been-three-months since Dad died. Until that two month mark it was easy to count time. Every Thursday racked up another number, another explanation for why the day had gone wrong and my guts were turned inside out and I was more snappish than the worst PMS symptoms could explain. December 10th will make it three months, and I find that I can't count weeks any longer. I can look forward and I can look back, figure out the way time works again, but I can't label the Today portion of things. Okay, maybe it's that I don't want to.
When I go back, they'll ask what I did with my week away, and there are honest things I could say, and reasonable evasions I could use that would not be lies but would not tell all of it.
Will I say that I've been reading Anne Lamott's Grace (Eventually) and leave it there? Or will I mention that single lines of that book have sent me into weeping fits over the course of the past five days? I was tired of weeping yesterday, so I picked up another book, lost myself in the pages for more hours than reasonable--and still I cried. So, it hasn't been Anne Lamott's fault at all. When I mentioned the crying and crying to Mom at dinner on Wednesday, she said that that's why we read books on grieving, to have something that draws us to the point where we can reach our emotions, so that we can cry. Frankly, that was why I'd been avoiding any and all of the grieving books she's had out in the living room. They were meant to do that; I'd thought that Grace would kind of sidle me around the requirement.
Will I tell them that Grandma stayed in the hospital what seemed like forever this second time, so that we were all worried we would lose her, too, this year, and she maybe thought the same thing? The dogs noticed the quiet of the house and were sweet, and Pokey submitted with some grace to her baths and the medicine that will quiet her itching and allow the fur to regrow under her chin. Patch shamelessly enjoyed not having baths or medicine but still getting peanut butter because Pokey was getting peanut butter.
Will I mention that I decided it was a good time to have my tires rotated and the oil changed? Not for the car--I kept forgetting to call my garage and set up an appointment for the car--for me. Monday was a dental checkup, which was OMG (yes, OMG) fortuitous, since I had a filling fall out Friday afternoon following a tasty ice cream treat shared with a friend and then a second filling fell out as I was flossing before heading over for the appointment. Really. I'd decided I might as well pop a thread between the teeth involved in the missing filling, and the next thing I knew, a little wedge piece had flung itself from my mouth onto the bathroom counter. Even more fortuitous than losing these two fillings prior to the appointment was that it was a slow filling day for them and they were able to give me an appointment for the re-fillings later in the morning. I went ceramic this time, because of the not-tooth-shearing feature involved in bonding the stuff to the teeth in a way the silver amalgam never can. Those two molars now look naked, though. I can hardly tell it's my own mouth when I open up to admire them. And yes, I do that more than once a day. If I'd been born a bird, I'd be a parrot or a parakeet, and I'd stare in my cage's mirror all day, fascinated by the pretty girl that I am. Tuesday was the oil change and traditional PAP smear, complete with menstrual cycle and sexual activity questions from the male assistant and a long discussion about exercise and nutrition and weight loss with the nurse practitioner. Also a renewal for my inhaler prescription. Because, yes, the wheeze is still there or back again, and I do have the pleural rub, and that's just going to be my life.
Maybe I'll leave some of that out. Like, all of it.
Safer by far is to talk about the intarsia class I took over the first weekend. Considering I had to completely restart my project late on the first day, I got to a pretty good place by the end of the 2nd day. The scroll saw is still in the trunk, the project is still not complete, so I won't have a show-and-tell to wow my friends and frenemies with, but I am not ashamed. It was a very weird time, though, spending those two days in the instructor's garage workshop. Dad and I had planned for years to learn intarsia together. However, before we could start, I needed to learn to use the scroll saw, and we both needed to find the time together. And that went the way of most things you believe you have all the time in the world to accomplish. It was only critically important once he was gone. Suddenly the time is there, the instructor is holding the classes, and all that's missing is Dad. Only, the instructor knew him, and so did a couple of the people in the class--there's a woodworker's club Dad had joined--so we talked about him, and the instructor said encouraging things and nice things, and told me again and again that my dad would be proud of me. I like that idea.
This afternoon, I go to a memorial service for my aunt's mother. She died this past weekend, quickly but not unexpectedly. There has been so much sadness this year, and I don't know how it's all supposed to work, except that it does, that this isn't a new thing for the world, and other people have gone on just fine or at least have been okay after a while.
This is the weird interim period between it's-been-two-months and it's-been-three-months since Dad died. Until that two month mark it was easy to count time. Every Thursday racked up another number, another explanation for why the day had gone wrong and my guts were turned inside out and I was more snappish than the worst PMS symptoms could explain. December 10th will make it three months, and I find that I can't count weeks any longer. I can look forward and I can look back, figure out the way time works again, but I can't label the Today portion of things. Okay, maybe it's that I don't want to.
When I go back, they'll ask what I did with my week away, and there are honest things I could say, and reasonable evasions I could use that would not be lies but would not tell all of it.
Will I say that I've been reading Anne Lamott's Grace (Eventually) and leave it there? Or will I mention that single lines of that book have sent me into weeping fits over the course of the past five days? I was tired of weeping yesterday, so I picked up another book, lost myself in the pages for more hours than reasonable--and still I cried. So, it hasn't been Anne Lamott's fault at all. When I mentioned the crying and crying to Mom at dinner on Wednesday, she said that that's why we read books on grieving, to have something that draws us to the point where we can reach our emotions, so that we can cry. Frankly, that was why I'd been avoiding any and all of the grieving books she's had out in the living room. They were meant to do that; I'd thought that Grace would kind of sidle me around the requirement.
Will I tell them that Grandma stayed in the hospital what seemed like forever this second time, so that we were all worried we would lose her, too, this year, and she maybe thought the same thing? The dogs noticed the quiet of the house and were sweet, and Pokey submitted with some grace to her baths and the medicine that will quiet her itching and allow the fur to regrow under her chin. Patch shamelessly enjoyed not having baths or medicine but still getting peanut butter because Pokey was getting peanut butter.
Will I mention that I decided it was a good time to have my tires rotated and the oil changed? Not for the car--I kept forgetting to call my garage and set up an appointment for the car--for me. Monday was a dental checkup, which was OMG (yes, OMG) fortuitous, since I had a filling fall out Friday afternoon following a tasty ice cream treat shared with a friend and then a second filling fell out as I was flossing before heading over for the appointment. Really. I'd decided I might as well pop a thread between the teeth involved in the missing filling, and the next thing I knew, a little wedge piece had flung itself from my mouth onto the bathroom counter. Even more fortuitous than losing these two fillings prior to the appointment was that it was a slow filling day for them and they were able to give me an appointment for the re-fillings later in the morning. I went ceramic this time, because of the not-tooth-shearing feature involved in bonding the stuff to the teeth in a way the silver amalgam never can. Those two molars now look naked, though. I can hardly tell it's my own mouth when I open up to admire them. And yes, I do that more than once a day. If I'd been born a bird, I'd be a parrot or a parakeet, and I'd stare in my cage's mirror all day, fascinated by the pretty girl that I am. Tuesday was the oil change and traditional PAP smear, complete with menstrual cycle and sexual activity questions from the male assistant and a long discussion about exercise and nutrition and weight loss with the nurse practitioner. Also a renewal for my inhaler prescription. Because, yes, the wheeze is still there or back again, and I do have the pleural rub, and that's just going to be my life.
Maybe I'll leave some of that out. Like, all of it.
Safer by far is to talk about the intarsia class I took over the first weekend. Considering I had to completely restart my project late on the first day, I got to a pretty good place by the end of the 2nd day. The scroll saw is still in the trunk, the project is still not complete, so I won't have a show-and-tell to wow my friends and frenemies with, but I am not ashamed. It was a very weird time, though, spending those two days in the instructor's garage workshop. Dad and I had planned for years to learn intarsia together. However, before we could start, I needed to learn to use the scroll saw, and we both needed to find the time together. And that went the way of most things you believe you have all the time in the world to accomplish. It was only critically important once he was gone. Suddenly the time is there, the instructor is holding the classes, and all that's missing is Dad. Only, the instructor knew him, and so did a couple of the people in the class--there's a woodworker's club Dad had joined--so we talked about him, and the instructor said encouraging things and nice things, and told me again and again that my dad would be proud of me. I like that idea.
This afternoon, I go to a memorial service for my aunt's mother. She died this past weekend, quickly but not unexpectedly. There has been so much sadness this year, and I don't know how it's all supposed to work, except that it does, that this isn't a new thing for the world, and other people have gone on just fine or at least have been okay after a while.