One Small Bite

Simultaneous coincidental gifts (one by mail) of some marvellous dark roast coffee beans from two loved ones yesterday. One is called "Toothless Shark" out of Nova Scotia, the other "Roma" out of Italy.

This is one of the toughest lessons of my life. Not that I haven't had tough lessons in the past. When you begin training for a walk around the block when you're carrying massive extra poundage and graduate to a marathon a couple of years later, there's some serious learning curve in there. And I did that.

So sitting down and reflecting and bemoaning the fact that I have only two speeds - full tilt and reverse - I decided to map out my days differently. Into tiny bites, not tubs.

So if I have, say, a grocery pickup, the dishes can lie down for a while, the library can wait. Groceries require carting a huge distance with my trolley in tow and then need putting away. Action for the day is done just with that. I am wiped.

If I am visiting or going out, showering is enough. The bed can stay unmade that day. Who's to see it? Also dishes can continue to lie, they are going nowhere.

I am such a MORE person, always tweaking more out of life. This has to stop. I can't cheat my limitations and meddle with my mental health and outlook.

Today I managed some work and a Zoom meeting which I hosted and doing up dishes. End of. No more.

It was ENOUGH.

I am fortunate in that I have meals for 3 days in the fridge and more in my freezer.

An enormous sense of relief descended over me when I realized that I was fooling myself badly with the amount of energy I thought I had and the pathetically little standing I can manage.

It was playing havoc with my outlook. If I have to take the garbage out - this is a ginormous trek - that's it for action for the day. No going on to visit or a side trip somewhere.

It's ENOUGH.

A belated wee birthday party for me yesterday evening.

I've got a little list, I've got a little list

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a mad fan - and one time performer back in the ancient Cork City days before interwebz and kidlets and emigration - of Gilbert & Sullivan. You could sing their ditties off key and standing on your head and I would fall in love with you. Then again, That was a mistake lesson I made twice in my life.

Mistakes are lessons learned. I try not to use the word mistake. For if I don't try something how will I ever know I will like or dislike it? I know. Some people are cautious. But I prefer to err on the side of trying anything once or twice and learning the lesson and then moving on or staying and enjoying the result.

I was doing a survey of lessons in my own life. And seriously, I am very glad I made them. Even when I was engaged to two young men at the same time. Seriously. How ready was I for marriage? Harumph. I confessed the dilemma to my dad. Who made like a sphinx. I think he had apoplexy. His face went purple. He lost his voice. Completely. And when he regained it, he told my mother to "take care of your daughter, she's out of control, again." But I wasn't. Or was I? I learned my lesson. I wouldn't say it was the wrong man I married. I don't like the word wrong when applied to human beings. Maybe we were wrong for each other. Fire and water. I remember one of my dear friends who would come from her travels all over the world and nestle into our family home in Toronto for a while and observe us. "WWW," she would say, "I've never known a more mismatched couple. Your horizons are so wide and T----'s are so narrow." Well played, R, well played.

But I learned a good lesson then. I don't think I'm meant for marriage. Fine for me to say you'd think after messing about so much. But we have to try and learn, don't we? And how else to learn but by messing about and experimenting? See, I'm not one to run home and make you supper. Or wash your knickers. I'd forget. I'd get involved with my music or my book or my writing or my knitting and feel resentful if I had to interrupt myself to take care of you. You can see what I mean? Marital duty 'n all, that doesn't sit well with me. Though if you were to change the oil in my car or deal with the lesson I've learned from Cara the caravan, now that would be nice.

So yes, I was dealing with a list today and managed to strike off many items. Hence, the post....which could go on and on but I'll shut up now.

Some Lessons

Favourite and rare blue fog outside my front door, May 2013

My father was a cautious, careful man. A man who didn't take risks. A man whose boundaries were very clear. A man formed by his own childhood, for aren't we all? It took me years to understand him. Another few years to toss out the stuff from him I didn't want or need. Another few again to sort out the chaff from the wheat. One of the most startling things of all was when I asked him (in my own middle age by then) what he would have done with his life if earning a living was not a priority and he said: "I would have bred roses". It was a side of my father he had rarely made visible.

We take from each of our parents character traits that are helpful or not. I don't like the words "bad" and "good". For that is too subjective, truly. What works for some doesn't work for others. It's neither bad nor good in my mind.

This thought process was rolled out by a simply marvellous book I just finished about a mother and a daughter - "Amy and Isabelle." by Julia Glass. There were many great lines in it. One of the most profound (among many), I found, was this one:

"Bewilderiung that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while you were being careful, conscientious."

As I slip and slide into the more serious elder years I share more of my inner with my loved ones. My ongoing struggles with procrastination. The changes I make in the behaviours that do not serve me well - like procrastination. In my own case I tend to get overwhelmed when there is too much on my plate. And it's not about the "too much on my plate" at all. I finally see this. It is in the way I manage it.

So for now, today, I strike one item off the list. And I feel accomplished.

And most important of all, I do not look at the rest. Until I pick another one from the list tomorrow.

Lessons

A time of reflection in the last few days, away from the whizz and bang.

(1) More than you would think really despise this season.

(2) More than you would think absolutely adore it.

And it has nothing to do with family or friends or being alone or not.

Now that I am older I censor myself more, do you find that? Less revealing to those younger than me. More revealing to those my age or older. I tamp myself down when talking with family, conscious of being boring with same old, same old or forced cheeriness. I would observe this phenomenon in elders as I got older myself. A contrived jolliness, less revealing, more dismissive of aches, pains, heartbreaks. Even though the heartbreaks hurt worse as I age and they get swallowed down. For fear of...more. It must be just fierce to be old and all one's peers gone. No one to talk to. Fear of being abandoned by those younger as too much of a downer? Perhaps. So one would have to remain secretive, unrevealed. A friend is doing this now. She is 84 and doesn't speak the truth like she used to. No more worries, no more cares, grins and chuckles all the time. Or maybe this is the nirvana I so desperately seek? When I turn 80 all days will be cloudless and giggles? I'm not talking dementia, though now that you mention it....

I'm still formulating these thoughts. I wrote, a lot, over these last few days. Good stuff I think. I read an entire book in 24 hours too. A lazy, decadent thing to do. I watched a few movies I'd seen before but good movies, like books, never lose their allure. They offer something new each time.

I ran away once too. But not for long. I play what ifs? when I do this. What if I vanished completely, just drove and drove. What if I went to the most expensive hotel in town and pretended I was somebody I was not. What if I got a blonde wig and dark glasses and just walked around jewellery stores. Back in the day a friend and I would do this, pretend we were people from out of town. And howl for days at the sheer entertainment value of it and the gullibility of people. Innocent masquerades. No fraudulent intent at all.

An old boyfriend would never grocery shop. He'd take your full one if your back was turned and check out. Saved him the time and trouble and only got stuck once with a box of tampons that he thoughtfully put in his washroom for people like me giving the illusion he was a considerate, caring, sensitive man. Everybody won in his life except the poor shopper who lost.

Did you win or lose this holiday season? I hope you won.

A friend woke up on Boxing Day with every room in her house trashed by grandchildren and their drunken minders. She wept as she emailed me. Her grandmother suicided on the railway tracks on Christmas Day and she totally understands.

And yes, I won too. I kept a very low profile and did the limbo beneath. All was calm. All was bright.

Calmy brights to all my blogland buddies.

Things I have learned

Never place any kind of liquid whether in a bottle, glass or cup on the same surface area as a laptop (lesson learned twice).

The best your new man is ever going to be is on your very first date.

If a man isn't successful in life by the time he's forty, he never will be. (This has nothing to do with money.)

A woman is at her most creative and successful post-menopause.

The day your bathroom is at its messiest will be the day some fussypants will want to use it.

There is no deferring the resolution to change one's life for the better.

I've learned more about others by the way they treat servers and attendants than anything else they do.

People who unconsciously wear pet hair as an accessory are my favourite kind of people.

Whatever unconscious faults, defects, irritations and shortcomings are present in a person at thirty will be completely amplified by the time they are sixty.

Beneficial change is possible at any age.

If you want anything done in a hurry, give it to a busy woman.

Unconditional love is an impossibility. But we get closer the more we practice.

My rights end exactly where yours begin.

Freedom is an illusion.

Religion is legalized mind control of the worst kind.

There are no winners in wars.

There is more to be learned on the journey than in the destination.

Twilight Insight

I remember my father. Freshly retired and clutching a retirement present of a round trip ticket to Canada, looking slightly bemused in a snapshot in a local paper. Travel! Now! What a cliché.

I would ask him about the work he left behind. The work that housed, fed and educated his six children for nearly fifty years. Work that kept him sequestered from any unwarranted intrusion into his day, away from the lot of us apart from a ‘dire emergency’. I always understood that to be one of us dead or at the very least hospitalized. My mother never telephoned him for he was a Very Busy Man with Very Important Work.

None of us were privy to his daily doings. It involved The Government for he was a civil servant in the County Council. Something about land expropriation for road expansions and delinquent rent collection and it was Top Secret. And that was, and is, all I ever knew. Occasionally he would be involved in political elections, overseeing the vote counts and getting his face on television to announce the winning candidate. Heady days and the peak of his bureaucratic career.

But when it was over, it was really over. All those hours, days, weeks, years were rarely alluded to. He was like a man released from prison. His days became filled with other activities. He kept up a vast correspondence with far-flung relatives, including myself. The letters were full of news of deaths, births, marriages, graduations and always included a question at the bottom - to insure he got replies, he told me once. He went to town every day on the ‘Pensioner Special’ at ten in the morning and met others like himself for ‘the best lunch in town’ and then walked around the city he loved.

He told me that a stranger stopped him once on a weekday afternoon right in the middle of Patrick Street and said to him he had the happiest face he ever saw on a man.

He travelled to Dublin, London, England, to Africa, to Wales and Scotland. And of course to Canada and around the U.S. He once spent two weeks wandering around Oxford just talking to the men who worked on maintaining all the old walls and buildings.

I would think to myself. All those years. All. Those. Years. Close to fifty of them. And he never talks about them.

And I finally understand.

What Else Have I Missed?

You can live your whole life just about and miss out on something so important, so life changing, so incredibly profound, that it rattles you to the very core when it reveals itself.

I mean there I was innocently going along for years with the vagaries of plastic wrap, aluminum foil and wax paper in those boxes. You know the ones where you could successfully slice your wrist open on the toothy cutting edge if you so desired and gently fall down in a pool of your own blood only to be discovered days later.....

But enough of that. I often succeed in cutting a finger, all par for the course to get that perfect length of wrap out and severed smartly (as if this ever happened!) on the afore mentioned sawtooth edge.

Of course it's rarely perfect as the bloody roll always manages to wriggle out of the box and land on the floor or leaps off in a quick jog to the other end of the room. I invariable sigh, get the scissors, manually unwind the roll and cut off the piece I need.

I've been doing this since God was a paper boy.

And then, today, I'm doing my bit with the saran wrap, the usual struggle, box collapses, the plastic film roll pops out and on to the counter and lo and behold, I say LO AND BEHOLD, as I'm painfully inserting it back in again, on high alert for the suicide sawtooth edge, I note these little TABS on the sides of the box. TABS. That you like, push in. To secure the roll in place. So you can tug and cut. Without fear of a mental breakdown or chasing the roll all over the house.

How come I never knew this? How come no one every showed me?

OK. Now you all tell me you've ALWAYS known about this. Go on. I double dare you.