Ex-Wife Syndrome

I have always been afraid of sounding like an Ex-Wife.  You know what I mean.  There are so many of them, and they all say the same thing, roughly: "I loved him, I trusted him, and I married him; he used me, he betrayed me, and he lied to me; men are all scum, and who needs them!"

Since I always feel the Ex-Wife lurking in the back of the room when anyone asks about my Ex-Husband, I have always been unwilling, afraid, self-conscious about describing life with him.  No-one, I think to myself, is going to get it.  Everyone is going to assume I am exaggerating, am twisting the story, am making him sound worse than he was, even if just for the pleasure of a well-rounded story line.  I don't think that any of my friends, with the exception of my sister Ruth, will one-hundred-per-cent-ed-ly believe what I have to say.  They will, privately and kindly, reserve judgment.  Because, well, after all.  I am the Ex-Wife.

So, therefore, and because of which, I do not.  I use vague phrases which everyone will get the gist of, and say things like -- "Well, he used drugs, and he was abusive to me, and he cheated on me, and he spent all my money," and let it go at that.

But I was just reading another blog post, written by a young man -- well, a man about my age, I guess, -- who had worked for Michael at the Art Museum.  While Michael was holding his brief position there.  I remember him too, vaguely -- but I don't know his name, so let's call him Chip.

Chip had been fired, at Michael's behest, and he had also been the "ringleader," albeit reluctantly, for the guards, in their protest against the treatment they were receiving from the management at Michael's hands.  And he is both a humorous man, (though fairly self-absorbed, but hey, it was a blog.  Where else are you allowed?) and a good writer.  And Chip had written a careful, detailed and lengthy description of what working for Michael was like.  And it was remarkable to read.  Both for its power to bring back those memories, which I have not put in the player for years, and for the degree to which he saw Michael.  He spent some time thinking about him -- and why not? -- and he got him.  (He was still making the mistake I made, and that is, attributing these behaviors to an imaginary fundamentally normal man.  And that is the thing.  Michael is fundamentally abnormal, and sees the world from a different vantage point than all the rest of us.  In Michael's view, it is Michael's World that he sees.  We all live in Michael's World.  Not in The World.)

In spite of that, however, he also saw Michael from the point of view of someone who was used to bad behavior in people.  Used to people who drank too much and misbehaved, who used drugs and saw the world through them, who broke the law and might get caught.  (Very different from me and my silly, wide-eyed, love-is-a-many-splendored-thing viewpoint.) And even from this viewpoint, from this place in the cold, hard world, Michael stood out to him as a Bad Guy.  Michael hadn't stolen from him, cheated on him, kept him awake for hours in the night yelling at him, but he still recognized that Michael was a Bad 'Un.  He hadn't had a gun shoved up against his head, while Michael loomed over him, weeping and grinding his teeth with fury and sweating great drops onto him, but he still saw Michael as a Bad Man.  This I also found remarkable, and very comforting.  Very.  And not because I don't believe it myself, or doubt my own point of view, or anything like that, good heavens, no.  But because I know I cannot describe it in any way that people are going to absolutely get.  Because I am the Ex-Wife.

And I believe this is where I came in.

I can WRITE and I can also READ

You know, I gotta say, I am getting more and more annoyed at the symbols instead of words on any kind of sign.  Though even as I write those words I am assailed by a feeling that I may merely be getting older.  Old people don't like things to change.  But just now I opened my blog page to write an entry about something completely different, and found that since my last post (which, admittedly, has been about a month -- bad me!) the directions on the page had changed, so that I looked bewilderedly about and settled, gingerly, on the picture of a pen.  Which in my past experience with this site, is the symbol used to denote "edit".  So how do you now symbolize "edit", oh, Great Blogger?  Is this the way of the world?  Is EVERYONE assumed to be illiterate, even the people who are WRITING things?  Do you feel the need to let the WRITERS know, by pictograph, (in case they can't read the word "write")  that this is where they do their writing?  I object!  I don't mind if every sign on the dang-nab street is symbolized all to hell, but when you are showing the WRITERS where they do their writing, you might just as well use WORDS!

(pant, pant)

And now I have forgotten what I wanted to write about.  You see what you did?

Chocolate -- sort of

It is after one, and I am alone in the office, as I have been all day except for maybe an hour this morning when Doug was here.  It is Friday, howev, and summertime, so you can see why.  Lovely day, too, warm, but overcast, with a bright white sky and buoyant quality to the air.  I am not feeling at all lonely, but instead enjoying those things which make the office a good place to be, to wit: a rapidly-moving computer, with a clean, smoothly finctioning keyboard;  fresh, hot, strong coffee (yum!) made by me; Pandora playing Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (at the moment) and a comfortable (mostly) chair.

I've just stopped trying to eat a Brownie Parfait (made by Fred Meyer) which one of the agents brought me.  She started bring me a cupcake anytime I called her and told her she had a commission check waiting for her.  Today she sprang for this confection, surely more expensive than even a dozen tiny cupcakes, but truly, quite inedible.  I've been trying to imagine the sort of person who could swallow this whole thing, and the mere thuoght of such a person, their tastes and history of eating, is making me feel sick.  Possibly this requires thinking of this on top of a stomach already protesting about the one-third of this dessert I have been able to consume.  It brought to mind the feeling I have always had about the prevailing school of thought in modern American cooking/eating, which is, put simply, if this is good, than more is better.  It's the sort of thing that caused me, years back, to decide that I only really liked cheese pizza.  Because if a ham sandwich is good, than a ham-and-cheese must be better.  And a ham-and-cheese-and meatball must be better yet! 

This Brownie Parfait consists of the following, all commercially produced, of course: first a large dollop, maybe a quarter cup, of chocolate frosting, in the bottom of the plastic cup.  On top of this is chunks of brownie, about a cup's worth, interspersed with chunks of semi-sweet chocolate.  On top of this is what passes for chocolate mousse in the Fred Meyer bakery, about a third of a cupful, and chocolate sauce drizzled over all.  So five types of chocolate, with almost no difference in flavor from bite to bite, although intensity of sugar gives way to greasy slickness on the tongue.  Brrr, shudder.

...Waiting / for a change in the weather / I'm waiting / For a shift in the air..

And yes, I realize that is not Frankie Valli, but you must see that it took me at least a song's worth of time to type the above.  That is Alphaville.

Happiness is a hot cup

I am quite happy just now, even though my eyes are acting up.  Have been for about a week, in that same old way, but today they have reached the swooping-vertginous-carnival-ride stage, which is very annoying, and makes me feel as though I should be angry with someone.  But, oddly, I am not.  It hasn’t been bothering me on a personal, emotional level at all this time.  For which we are devoutly grateful.

But.  I am happy.  I can feel my happiness like a glowing ball, like gathered light in a Harry Potter movie – “Expecto petronum!” or something like that.  I can gently hold it in my upturned hands.  And it seems to be centered in my cup of coffee.  Not caused by, since it is also a lovely grey and delicately damp morning, but at least exemplified by.  This is a fabulous cup of coffee.  Fab-yoo-LUSS.  Hot, strong, perfectly flavored, faintly magical…really great.  I am drinking it in large sips, and then grimacing with the sharp but not-bothersome pain of drinking a liquid which is hotter than even my mouth can take.  It is nearly gone, and then I will get another cupful before the flavor changes.

It is also caused by the fact that I am alone in the office.  No one here yet.  I can hear laughter and chatter faintly through the wall from the hair salon, and the light rolls of thunder of running children’s feet from the physical therapy office upstairs.  But I think the phone has rung once all morning, so it is only me.

 And by the fact that I have been doing genealogical work, and have tapped into an unknown and un-thought-of vein of good hard facts, which really pleases me.  It’s like sturdy brickwork, constantly strengthening the framework I have already erected.  Which gives me great pleasure.   I mean, there are people’s family trees and all, which are only slightly better than nothing, and sometimes much worse, but this is a cluster of censuses.  Makes me feel very good about this bastion of the family tree.

So.  I am really very happy.

Extraneous decks

Okay, my next door neighbors, about whom I have spoken before, have recently built a large deck in their backyard.  It is very well-made, has a staircase attaching it to the upstairs deck which already existed, and is easily accessible from both floors of the house.  Has a railing about waist high around it, and a two-step stairway stepping down to the yard in front.  I have yet to see them using it at all, which causes me to wonder all over again if they are merely living in this house while beautifying it to re-sell.  Their pile of lawn chairs stays in a pile, and there is nothing on the deck at all, no chairs, tables, candles or tiki lights.  


So, why, I ask you, has the next thing that the young man has been working on been a sort of pseudo-deck-beside-the-deck?  He worked on it for several days without me paying much attention, although I could hear him clinking and chinking his way through a pile of used bricks, tapping off the mortar clinging to the edges, to make sure that it was square enough to fit in the place he was going to put it, you know what I mean.  He dug out a long narrow rectangle beside the deck, and floored it with this brick, and then used the brick to build a dry-stone type wall alongside, where the ground rose up.  It now has a chair and a tiki light and a small table and a decorative fish made of rusted metal on a long pole stuck into the ground next to it.  And it is quite lovely.  And totally extraneous.  So what the heck?

Power Outage

Because of my white night on Sunday, I went to bed early last night, hoping for a long and restful sleep.  When I pressed the start button on my recorded book, I only heard about a paragraph, so apparently I went right to sleep.  But then I woke at about three a.m.  Something woke me, perhaps a distant crash, or something, but as I opened my eyes, I saw the flashing lights on my clock radio, so I knew that the power was out a split second before I saw the sudden pale blue elctrical-looking flash that spread out horizontally before vanishing again.  Probably some drunken resident driving into a power pole.  And then silence fell.  I lay and listened to it with enjoyment.  No sounds of the woman downstairs and her all-night-movie.  No buzzing of the clock-radio.  No humming of the refrigerator.  Not a sound.  But not the absence of sound one gets from the fingers in the ears (although that always magnifies the interior sounds) but just a pleasant quiet so that the movement of tree branches and the drip of occasional raindrops could be clearly discerned.

I thought about getting up and taking a picture off the deck, since the enormous Pietro's Pizza sign and the bowling alley sign, as well as all the other neon signs that keep the area beyond the trees lit all night, would be off.  But I realized something before I got up, and that is, that to take pictures, you need light.  Makes it hard to document the way things look without it.  So I got up and went to the bathroom, and then got back into my soft warm bed, in my cool and quiet room, and went to sleep.

Bet they had rhubarb

The Farmer's Market in a delicate springtime rain!  What could be better?  And early enough in the season (this is the second of the year's markets) that everyone is in a good mood.  There were a few people making help-help-its-raining-on-me faces -- you know, twisting their heads sideways and sort of raising one shoulder, as though Mother Nature would get the hint and stop.  But for the most part, everyone was smiling, kids were calling to their parents -- "Mom, Mom, look, tor-TEE-yas!"  "Oh, Daddy, it's a lit-tle ti-ny pie!"  -- and the smells and colors were a brightly fragrant kaleidoscope of springtime glory.  The music group was playing bayou-style rock-and-roll, and I was NOT the only one singing along "...it was a teen-age wedding, and the old folks wished them well...dee deedle doodle doodle doo..."

Also as a result of the earliness of the year, the booths were very carefully arranged, and very colorful.  I took a few pictures of the heaps of orange carrots, for example, and the buckets full to overflowing with deep blue iris and vivid tulips.  Didn't buy anything, since I am absolutely stony broke, but there also wasn't much in the way of appealing offerings for me.  Vegetables, while pretty to look upon, and all, are not appetizing or appealing to me.  And it's a little early for fruits just yet.  Bet they had rhubarb, though.