It's a Saturday. I just got out of my morning Zoom meeting and haven't begun my list of things to do today other than that meeting and 2 phone calls. Yes, voice phone calls.
It's my brother's birthday. I just called him, ready to sing to either him if he picked up or to his voicemail. His voicemail had me chuckling, as it's a maybe a couple of minutes of him staunchly laying out the ground rules for whose calls he'll pick up and which voicemails will result in him possibly getting back to you and which ones will be ignored and how at the end if you're spam and something like the worst thing in the world a telemarketer you are already dead to him. (I'll spare you the story of when I was a telemarketer & the subject came up at a family gathering I was back home for.) My voicemail to him today begins with me chuckling over the extremity (and hostility, you could fairly call it) of his spiel, before I sing the famous verse, slightly altered.
It's the sort of thing I'd love to tell my therapist about, his outgoing message (ooh, that's a poem title one of us should've used when we all still had answering machines: Outgoing Message), but my clienthood with said therapist has just ended, as she retired this past week. For my last session I took her a homemade and amateurish helium-filled balloon bouquet, with Sharpied custom wishes on the white ones. She enjoyed (I don't even have to say "seemed to enjoy") both the festive surprise and the fun anticipation I reported about the tiny playful (she's been talking about my playfullness lately) screw-you of her having to figure out what to do with the balloons before the next person arrived. In fact it was a happy and fun and fond farewell, and that was sweet. She let me take her picture, and I texted it to her later, including the "thank you" that I'd somehow failed to say in that last session, or on a balloon. She wrote back quite warmly, and something in it prompted me to reply that I'd thought for sure I'd cry, especially when I saw tears welling up in her eyes, but I was apparently more just happy about the whole thing about her and being lucky to have had our working relationship. That made her reply with the idea that gratitide balances out pain (which combo she posited we were both experiencing, "in spades"). And, dang, what a nugget: gratitude balances out pain. That's gonna be the nugget I go on for a good while, I reckon, I plan, I hope, I aim.
My other call was to my pal to offer an apology if I'd inappropriately told part of her story or seemed to be teasing her last night at one point, when that wasn't what was happening from my POV at all, but sure could've come across that way. She laughed and said all was well. She seems in such a happy place now, too, and I love that. It's in her voice and on her face and coming across via other nonverbal indicators I'm not analyzing, but glad to see. Not only am I happy for her, as we say, but it's inspirational to see her moving through (very busy) days with a calm contentedness and frequent unconcealed (matter-of-fact? underlying? clearly pleasant, present) joy. What a thing.
Happily I also know about myself that, in addition to my extroverty tendency to speak before (or while, or instead of) thinking and blurt things out that sometimes possibly can or do cause offense or hurt or some variation on it (including me maybe coming across like a bulldozing jerk), I also tend to police myself or second guess myself or practice habitual checking in for any possible such cause for chagrin, all the while fearing I'm not catching some, and I know that this self-consciousness tendency harms me, while also treating myself and my effect on others as much bigger or more important than it is (or I am). So I can gladly report that I took it fairly lightly, the chagrin alarm this time, not texting the woman late last night with a compulsive check-in/apology, but making a note to give her a voice call today, and be prepared to text right afterwards, if she didn't pick up, that there wasn't any emergency or anything (as live phone calls seem to imply any more).
The world has morphed so much during my time so far on the planet, as in what live phone calls are, and how the various messaging and ways we communicate have morphed.
Just this morning I was thinking how it was in this same house that I used to have a Saturday morning ritual (I remember it well because I had/have been so resistant to regular rituals or things I do at certain times on certain days routinely) of listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. (does that show's name have commas in it? I promise myself I'll just notice next time I see it in writing, and not look it up, cuz it's the weekend, and I'm off work) while I did dishes and caught up on kitchen countertop clean-up. That made me think how it'd been a conventional radio I had in the kitchen that I "streamed" that show on/from/via, and how that's not how radio usually works any more, including for me. Just one example of many I've been noticing/pondering of late.
Another is from going through old photos to find shots to scan and send to the funeral planners among the current friends and family of my ex, tryng to find some she liked but that are appropriate to send. Like, not any with nudity, cuz duh---tho I hadn't remembered & was surprised by the revelation that back then we could just send nude shots off with your rolls of film and they'd get developed and sent back---but also no photos from something associated with her alienation or disapproval from her mother or other family members at the time, usually over her open queerness but especially whenever she was confronting her stepfather's abuse. Like there was a Take Back the Night she organized that included an iteration of the Clotheline Project, and she got angery pushback from family for having a shirt in it with family members' names when some of them didn't acknowledge or denied abuse of some of the children, and in general it was the metaphorical (via literal) airing of dirty laundry referenced in the very concept of the project.
So the old photos in their technology and physical form/existence as well as the content of them are among my throwback thoughts.
One day in 8th grade I took my "pocket" Instamatic camera to school and took pix all day. Many of the shots just didn't come out, or came out badly, but and I shared some of the better ones on the facebook pages of two of the subjects I really adored back then:
Both are still into music, in different ways. The guy on the left is a pastor, I gather. The guy on the right is in classical music. Both were drummers with me, and even the thought of either of them makes my heart smile.
The shot on the right is from a class called Earth Science, which was a common offering back then. Kinda morphed geography into the study of geography plus physical planet sciences and ecology. But also you can see a poster behind Max about the metric system, with a little hand-drawn sign above it saying "America Goes Metric", with a flag. Ha! We really thought that was a transition that was getting underway and would of course continue.
That was also the bicentennial year. Speaking of the world being different.
Someone this morning said something about aging being a process of loss, and boy howdy.
Gratitude is like a magic trick. And to think how I've resisted giving myself that gift.
There have definitely been days lately when I've thought of my dead partner, born 10 years after me, and not just how it's crazy that she's dead when I'm not (which is insanely persistent as a primary association with the recollection that she really is), but that I have this day, and she doesn't. I hadn't been in touch with her at all, and now she's dead, and I am getting gifts from her every day. I get both the revisited recollections and appreciations and understanding/recognition/cognition/feeling of old gifts from being with her, and having been with her, plus this gift of having today, and knowing a good bit more how this day itself is a gift. One I get and she doesn't.
Of course she didn't have to live to know Dolly Parton had died. Not that she particularly cared about Dolly, as far as I know. But who doesn't love Dolly? Dolly, our great uniter, someone called her. Dolly, people have been writing, who stood up for regular working people and every individual soul; Dolly, whose every movie role, people have written, was a strong working woman who knew who she was and stood up for herself, and owned her power & knew her worth, however much she was shamed or abused or looked down on, just like Dolly did in real life. Dolly, who had gratitude as much as any of us, and surely more than most. Dolly, who refused to be the billionaire she could've been, by palpably giving to the rest of us in more ways than any of us can total up and fully know.
Bye, Dolly.
Bye, therapist.
Bye, dear once-partner.
Hello, Today.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ghost_light to thank for them, and for many others--- a snail-mail gift from the great north. Here are a selection of Japanese cards therefrom:
Seems like Japan has some cool festival proclivities.
Thanks so much, ghost_light, for the cards, and for thinking of me!
Phew.
Submitted my film tonight with 2 hours to go on the deadline, having done very little at all today besides try to wrap it and get it in the can. Then I joined a party in my dumb phone game of the year and people were goin' nuts. Just as that was wrapping, the Orioles, on my playback, came back to pass the Phillies, in the game after that amazing comeback against Detroit, right here when they need to not suck for a week so that management won't sell off our favorite players. It was an unlikely hero who tied it (Christian Encarncion-Strand, the player with the longest name in all of baseball, and one of the call-ups after several unfortunate player injuries), and then Gunnar, who's had such a rough year, and obvioulsy (as my pal Lee Ann mentioned months ago) been in a dark place. He almost cried at 3rd base, despite his tough guy thing, having tripled to drive in the go-ahead runs here in the 7th. I don't know yet if they'll win, but what a phew regardless. Please hang on, though, Orio(l)es.
Didn't make much progress on my film yesterday, on accounta the night before I was both wired for insomnia by my knee shots that afternoon AND alerted by an email from facebook that Tessa had posted "We were supposed to grown old together" that Holly---maybe not THE love of my life, cuz that seems like a dumb ttrophy to try to give out, but most certainly one of the big ones---had died. Saw that she had indeed posted one more time, after the months of quiet during which I'd found out about her much-metastasized breast cancer, and went through some wild emotional waves and impulses and lettings go and moves toward the gratitude and love that I'm left with, now that there's truly no point at all in regrets.
In that last post she was pretty much saying the end is here. Said she could no longer walk. Was moving into basic hospice-ness. And linked to a page for her at a site called CaringBridge, which it turned out I already had an account at, from back when my old dear Polly was dying.
There there were pictures beyond the #CancerChic infusion photos and stalwart lesion-filled activist moments to reveal her much-shrunken and bent figure in a wheelchair with short all white hair sticking up and a last several attempts to convey cheer and whimsy and goofy panache. There was also a post on how to get in touch with her, suggesting comments on that page and snail mail, giving an address.
If I'd been checking her socials religiously, I'd have seen that, and I'd almost surely have written her on paper. As 'twas, I'd decided that where it ended after my contacting her cuz a month ago was where she maybe wanted it to end, and where I should. And I had a little mini-peace sitting with that. But finding I'd missed the opportunity to send a letter hasn't taken that peace from me. Now, as my dear Brenda said,
πΈππ π‘ππ€π₯ "ππ"π€ ππ ππ ππππ & πππ π₯ππ ππ¦π₯π¦π£π "ππ"π€ ππ£π ππ ππ
--- and I will maybe never wrap my head around me outliving her, my decade-younger lover to her red hot lover mamma, as she referred to me to the banker in Georgia who'd asked if we openers of that joint account were mother and daughter---
but
somehow I'm free now to be glad of what I had to be glad of with her, and to let it come back to me, unfettered by some obligatory self-care check on delusional relocation from the center of my own hula hoop, as the nuggets of recollection that embody how & why I loved her so very very float up & wash over me.
And just as I wrote that, my Orioes finished the game with the win, 2 comebacks in a row, and there's a chance I won't lose my loves there all cuz of a stupid trade deadline heartbreaking business of baseball inevitability coming in a week.
All the long slog of the regular hours and hours of regular baseball & you get love moments there too.
For years, when I didn't cry, and maybe couldn't, in real life, I would still cry every single time I saw that clip of John Lowenstein in the first game of the '79 ALCS, from before I was even a fan, but which I'd see played a good bit, when I became one, and learned about Orioles Magic. Lowenstein could never get to 3rd base in that clip before the waterworks hit, like I was some bottled-up man who wasn't allowed to show feelings, and I'd wonder what all it was that made that thing the key that turned my lock, but I knew his pinch-hit unlikley hero goofball self getting the walk-off was in there, plus the way they swamped him when he got home. They were all lined up waiting, and then buried him in love.
I'm probably still high as I write to you from the relief of the painkillers and the steroids and the wrapping of the movie and the sleep deprivation, plus the baseball hope, which is (hope) after all the opposite of despair. But dead Holly and the revealed wrap on that soul has to be the big factor in my transportation to a surreal suspension of the weighty gravitas of where I've been in life almost all of these last years.
