kvetching up

"The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone." -George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life , 1858   If I Needed You My mom was many things. She was a nurturer, a kind and caring woman to the world. Jenny and Brian circa 1996, MDA Camp at  Camp Waskowitz . She was a binge alcoholic bipolar mess when I was growing up--and could be cruel and dismissive as easily as she could give a hug when I scraped my knee. Both aspects can be true, I know. It is rare to find people that can be almost or completely one or the other, we are all some sort of admixture of fuckery and kindness at one point or another. Your mileage may vary, I am speaking only of my own experience.  I have been a person who so desperately wants to believe in the innate goodness of humanity and fails over and again to latch onto that view. When I see things like the mass disenfranchisement of black voters, t...

Things change. The Donut Shop at 1st and Pike went away well before I finished high school. I still haven't gotten over it.  Penneys on 2nd and Pike also closed back then. All the creepy X-Rated theaters and sex shops on 1st Avenue left. The SROs and all the old sailors and dock workers that lived in them gone the way of the dinosaur. Richard Peterson no longer wanders the downtown with his trumpet, a beloved figure for so many of my generation. As a kid who traveled on the bus downtown to get lunch delivered via electric train at the old Iron Horse and to the  old wax museum, the Zoo, the Seattle Center on weekends via Metro,  etc.,  I could continue to list all the change. I abhor what Seattle has become.  That said,  one loss puzzles me the most. For all of my childhood there were two things that Daydreaming. marked the advent of warm weather and impending summer, the University District street fair in mid-May, and the Pike Place Market Street Fair which...

So many years gone. Time evaporates like sweat on a summer morning in Death Valley. I was cleaning my office last week when I came across a hard drive of images dated from 2905 to 2016. Video too. Images capture time like a mosquito in amber. I could look at some pictures and tell you the date--not simply birthdays and holidays-but special days. Yesterday I brought the hard drive downstairs and plugged it into my laptop .  Looking at these images of the family in happy times touch my heart--to be sure. However, clicking through the pictures I felt like an archeologist looking at a lost civilization. The children are adults, not the kids in the images. My mom, Jenny's parents dead, but smiling back at me in picture after picture. On the Photo from an old hard drive . computer screen.  My happy, beautiful family. Jenny engaged in parenting like a hummingbird bird harvesting nectar hovering over a flower. Traveling in Canada, the East Coast, New York, Europe, San Francisco, Lake ...

Abby and I were sitting on the far corner of the black leather couch closest to the fireplace, by the picture front picture window. Buddy was lying next to us on the edge of the couch, his tail wagging as he looked out the window. It was a bright July afternoon. The living room blinds were open. The door was ajar. Warm air, carrying the smell of cut grass, blew gently into the house and made everything seem almost perfect. The room was full of light. We were goofing. Abby and I as I showed her a ridiculous video from my youth called The John Wayne Rap. She watched it with the impatient distance of a teenager, pre-a noyance evident. I was doing an atrocious John Wayne imitation, my noise hitting Abby like a shuriken each time I threw a daha her way. We were laughing. Jenny had just come home from the scan she had insisted on getting (after losing 25 lbs in a couple months without trying), the one she was told she did not need, the one the physician’s assistant told her would show nothin...

I am tired.  No, I am exhausted. I am in coach, a daughter on my left, a daughter on my right. I have the attention span of a gnat, so while they are watching movies. Leiney, on my left, is watching The Santa Claus, while Abby is watching Tony Kushner's Angels in America. I saw both parts of the latter at the Seattle Repertory Theater back in the day, after reading Roy Cohn's biography. I wasn't prepared. I was in my 20s, and Kushner's storytelling overwhelmed me. I thought the Reagan era Republicans were the worst monsters. Given the number of people who they let die without lifting a finger and their continuing to propagate hatred toward gay men and IV drug users, it's hard to argue that they weren't Nazis. How many died during that time? How hard did ACT-UP have to fight to get the government and the people to care? How could we as a country just let people be left to the ravages of the virus? The hysteria--someone should juxtapose the way the culture respond...

  Twin Towers You got off the plane that May, glowing with joy to see me. I met you at the gate. You could do that in 2000, without a security screen. In retrospect, you were bursting to tell me something. Before we could even leave the gate, you handed me a card and told me to open it. It was handmade. It was obviously made by a teacher--a Swiss teacher. Neat handwriting, stick figures, triptich in form made with fine point colored marker on thick construction paper. The first page was a stick person--a man. Under the man it said, "You." Pulling it open, the second image comes into view. Again a stick figure, with the standard girl hair that you see on them, essentially a Bell curve with ends curling up in opposite directions and a bow. It was labeled, "Me." The third was a baby's head in a bassinet, captioned, "And baby makes three!" I was clueless. I smiled, kissed you, and thanked you for the card. The look on my face clearly showed I...

Entry 1 6:00 a.m. Crash cart at my gym My knee recovered by yesterday afternoon . Go figure. After two rounds of ibuprofen in the morning, I laid off. By mid-afternoon I had full range of motion, albeit with still some swelling and discomfort, but the pain is gone, and the remaining swelling is what I normally have with this knee. The only thing that I can think is that my knee, as I have experienced in the past, was impacted by the change in barometric pressure. No matter. I skipped exercise yesterday, and will determine which machine I will get on today, as I move through the hours. I met with the dietician on Monday. She was 12--okay, maybe 15. Her instructions were not what I was expecting from my interactions with Heidi the nurse. I was under the belief that she would recommend either a vegan or vegetarian diet. Neither was true. She told me to stay away from Atkins and Paleo, as research has shown it consistently leads to early death for people with Type II diabetes. I get it. In...

"All the time wasted in high school and college on classes we will never use. Imagine if there was one on red flags and manipulation.That should have been a required class. We're just not taught any of this." "It is absolutely crucial for survivors to find kinder ways to talk to yourselves, it is an essential part of healing. And no, you didn't allow this to happen. Allowing something to happen implies you gave it permission. At no point did you actually consent and sign up for somebody to do this much harm to you."   -D r. Ramani I didn't do it on purpose. I didn't even understand there was anything wrong. I never asked Jenny to be mercurial. I never asked her to be overly-sensitive to the point that one had to walk on egg shells when she was about. I never asked for her simmering anger toward me. All true. But, knowing all of this, I did choose to have children with her. They also didn't choose any of the above. My choices were selfish and stup...

I am busy at work dealing with contract negotiations in Malaysia. It will keep me up tonight until 3 a.m. While I am too old for this shit, I am loving it. Very few people have had the opportunity to participate in overseas collective bargaining, so I am lucky. If you follow my Facebook, you know Abby's car was stolen from school on Monday and that, unbeknownst to us, the car had LoJack on it, and thus the cops found it and found the thieves. The thieves took the state patrol on a high speed chase ending on Beacon Hill where the car was ditched after the front axle was damaged and the transmission ruined. The loss of the car has proven challenging, given that Abby goes to school downtown and I am working so many hours in a day. Today, I will drive her to the Armory and work from there while she attends 1 class. Yesterday was a nightmare, trying to get her from school to home. I had meetings from 2-7. Mind, she could have taken the monorail to the train, the train to the SeaTac stop...

A year ago, on the first Thursday of March, Leiney, my sister Jane and I were lying in the bed that abutted Jenny's hospital bed set up in the master bedroom. Jenny hadn't been conscious in days. In fact, she had very much been in the active stages of dying. We were facing her and chit chatting. As you sit next someone in the throes of death, someone taking days to die and who is unconscious, and suffering, fear dissipates. Compassion and love fill your heart. I remember the day before, I sat alone with her and sang every song I could remember that meant so much to the two of us, that she loved so much, that we loved so much.  On that Thursday, none of the three of us could leave Jenny's side. Some days ago, before she lost her faculties, she had seen her dead mother and father standing in the room, a common happening as you near death. Fish breathing, which had been going on a few days before and is another feature of impending death, had passed, and now, she was taking a ...

I wrote to the tandem therapist some weeks ago. She responded, if what she said below is deserving of that description. I didn't find her response until today. Perhaps it's brevity and lack of response is borne of legal concerns, or perhaps it's just a failing of a search for the right words. Anyway, the conversation follows. Shayla  <shayla@xxxxxxx.com>  M To: "Geoff D. Miller" <gdmiller88@gmail.com> Hi Geoff,   I am touched to hear from you. I think about you often. It sounds like you have been doing some deep work and reflecting. I am so glad. And even though the pain is still so present it sounds like you and your girls are surviving together.   I want you to know that I have been honored to know you and allowed to peak into your life’s journey. Thank you very much Geoff.   And please feel free to reach out to me when you want to.   Thank you.     -- Shayla , MA, LMFTA,   From:   Geoff D. Miller < gdmiller88@gmail.com...

Today I was struck by the following: For several years before Jenny was diagnosed, while we were living in Ravenna, she would come home and sit in her car for long periods of time, really long periods of time. I found it odd. Generally, we weren't bickering, so I couldn't figure it out. Oftentimes, in retrospect, she was on the phone. One can only presume with whom she was talking to the majority of the time.  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I hate myself more than I should. I do. Perhaps hate isn't the right word, but it sounds good enough. People are always kind when you are leaving a job, and as I am saying my goodbyes, it has come to my attention that people do respect me and the work I do. That I am surprised probably means I need to find a better therapist--clearly I didn't work through this issue enough. I have my own ego that tells me I am performing well, but the kind words spoken by union and management alike ...

The new year is a dour mistress. I am overwhelmed with sadness, having entered the two months of Jenny's suffering that would make Christ blush for complaining about his crown of thorns, the nails in his wrists, the spears poked into his torso. There is no great lesson from this suffering, other than life isn't fair. Jenny may have failed me and the kids, but damn it if she didn't make the lives of hundreds or thousands of kids better in the work she did. She allayed suffering for so many, only to be killed by her own body in the most painful and lingering way. I did my best to ease her pain, but my attempts were no match for pancreatic cancer. Her sorrow permeated everything, like gamma rays penetrating all of us. I just didn't want her to suffer . We couldn't stop the inevitable, but we could do our best to make her last few months, weeks, days better. She didn't make that task simple, it was never going to be easy. I go back and read earlier posts on occasion...

Here we are. I held a crying Leiney tonight, who was cursing the holiday, cursing it coming without her mother alongside. Jenny was the holidays in Leiney's child's memory. Abby is mum. When I came in from the garage, where Leiney had been working out crying in my embrace, and told Abby that Leiney was sad and missing mom, not a word or response. Nada. This is troubling. Me? I'm still alternating between bitter and sad, can't shake the fact that her infidelity wasn't just with me, but with my kids with whom she spent such little time.  We are going to Jenny's sisters for the holiday dinner. My big sister is in Hawaii. It is going to be hard.

Entry 1. May 21, 2022 The days of my children's early youth often would find me behind a camera to capture the fleeting moments of childhood, of life. I stopped really taking pictures around the time Abby was nearing high school. I dunno why. Nevertheless, now that I am digging in, trying to force myself to finish start the slideshow project, there are too many pictures to go through and not enough time. I don't know the correct strategy to find the best pictures, but I will do my best. If there is an artifact of grace in this project, it is it captures the many good times there were. From the joyous moment Abby entered the world, to the bittersweet COVID driven home graduation ceremony for Leiney, there was magic in our lives. There was love and joy. But photograph s can and do lie. For instance, there is at least one photo below that was taken in the midst of the affair. I can't prove when the affair started, but I know it started in 2018, before our month long trip to E...