Maiden Voyage

estranged

what a fabulous word...e-stranged...you become strange to someone with whom you used to be familiar...you used to know every burp, thought, blemish, sleepless night, obsession, joke, reference, nuance in their face, ring on their fingers, sock in their drawer. You used to know where they were, who they were meeting with, which doctor's appointment they had, what time they were coming home, which muscle group they were doing at the gym, how much wine they drank, when they used the last sheet of toilet paper, finished the seltzer, threw in a dark load, threw out the crossword puzzle.

Now you meet for dinner, sit across the table from one another, chatting pleasantly, laughing at the obsessive compulsive lady at the table behind, dividing her food by color group, each in its own separate space, not touching and she doesn't even try to hide it. You try and figure out what language the party of twelve next to you is speaking and you share your pad tai, but you don't know what is in her heart, how she really feels, what she cares about, who she is now.

You leave the restaurant and unexpectedly stumble on the donor/daddy....the guy who made your son's life possible....and his wife. You stand there awkwardly kvelling about your "collective" son, make a joke about genes, and for a moment, you two are together, Alex's moms, again.

When you get home, you introduce her to your neighbor as your EX, and the word turns to ashes in your mouth. But that is now, what (who, she would correct me) she is. Strange.

come down from the ceiling

The start page in my Safari opens to a generic Apple/Netscape page. It is annoying at best, but it gives me the temperature, which like my good friend Annie, I need to know before I get dressed in the morning. I have just been too lazy to change it and I don't really have a favorite virtual place in which to begin my on-line day. This morning, a skull icon caught my eye. It was a link to the Lifeline Calculator,a little test to determine life expectancy. They asked the expected questions, how over weight are you, how long did your grandparents live, how often do you exercise, do you smoke? I was doin great until I came to the question about living. That is, with whom do you live?

Family, spouse, significant other? They didn't have a category for "living alone for nine months for the first time in twenty years" or for "my son lives with me two nights a week in the summer when he is home from college." The closest I could come in their multiple choice format was "living alone for less than ten years." With that, they predicted I will live to the ripe old age of 87. Then I tried it again, lied and said I lived with a significant other, I gained two whole years. It wasn't 10 years or twenty, but, all things being equal, living with family will add two years to your life. Two years, when faced with the end of life, is nothing to sneeze at.

On another note, the plumbers are back, but they broke with tradition and came while I was eating my breakfast yesterday. I say they, but there is really only one plumber, a short, sweet, plumber in his late sixties, who apologized for not returning my calls because he had nothing to tell me. He also promised to fix my shower, which currently pours torrents of water into the tub while at the same time a shower stream barely trickles from above. He also brought with him the carpenter, who loved my comic book shower curtain and is going to replace my missing walls and floor. But before he does that, they are still replacing piping and have now ripped out the pipe and a good chunk of the ceiling. There must be some synchronistic, Fung Shui meaning to all this, the walls of my inner sanctum being ripped away, exposing ancient, rusty pipes, peeling, rotted wall board and a view both downward to my neighbor's kitchen and upward into darkness. Not to mention what it is like to sit on my brand spankin new toilet and wonder who can hear me going about my business...no I won't mention that. But what does it all mean? Is it a reflection of some inner renovation? And when it is all put back together will I love my solitude so much, that I won't mind losing those two years?

today is today

Back now a couple of days from the cape, in the hhh...hazy hot humid....city air...artificial ice of the AC, when it works, suffocating sticky heat when the power goes off at three this morning. Spent the whole day yesterday working on the lab image, running into problems with Quark, when there was "no support for Classic" because in building the image, we had neglected to install 9.2.2. Finally figured it out, dragged the system folder over from another machine, thanks Adam, and we are really close to starting to move it around.

rough night, little sleep, much angst, this all aloneness, this no where to turn at 3:49 am, but Pema. Thank goodness for Pema. In The Places That Scare You, she quotes Einstein and others, but the line that brought me back, finally was from Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. "...when we look to see that yesterday was yesterday and now it is gone. today is today and now it is new. It is like that-every hour, every minute is changing. If we stop observing change, then we stop seeing everything as new."

Somehow that calmed me and gave me hope. How big a task it is to stay in what is now. How thrilling if in fact we could see everything as new. How terrifying.

the rain

Endless, relentless rain. But is there anything quite as lovely as drifing off to sleep to the tune of rain? Windows open, cool sweet air, and the soothing white noise of water. Nothing quite like it-short of the lap lap lapping of the surf in North Truro, a long time ago. We all squeezed into Frank's little condo, Alex in the back bedroom and us in the front, the sliding glass door open to the night. Lap. Lap. Lap. That this season has been so grey and dreary seems appropriate. I don't think I could have withstood a brilliant explosion of fragrant spring. It would have been too too cruel. No. The rain is just right.