today

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.