kvetching up

4:10 a.m.  The house is ridiculously decked out in Christmas decorations, but it needs more. I need more. I went shopping this morning. There were no hoards, no thronging masses. At Cost Plus, there were 8 or nine sales people and us, Abby and I.  I am a lost soul. I sit alone in the dark, listening to Yeats put to music by Mike Scott, an island of candles burning and making the house smell of Christmas. Tears are rolling down my cheeks, as I go to the well again and again for more strength, trying to power through. It's not working, I am simply filled with sorrow and ever more tears. The early dark doesn't help the situation.  I have turned to candles to make the house more festive, to perfume the air.   4:15 p.m. The girls and I have been out all day, shopping for Christmas items, after a hearty breakfast at the Pancake Haus. Small Business Saturday in downtown Burien and the holiday festival at the Piazza in Renton, both fell short of expectations. This is an us t...

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.

Early this morning around 3:30 or 4:30, depending on your predilection for moving clocks an hour back and forth, I woke up and realized that for the first time in 32 years, I will be celebrating the holidays without a partner by my side. This isn't breaking news, since Jenny passed it was always going to be so. But, I hadn't counted the beads on the abacus, at least not consciously. I started playing Christmas music on November 1 . I am decorating today. We have 10-12 or more Rubbermaid storage boxes full of Christmas cheer. We have lights to string across the fence, and others to hang in the house and on the tree. I've already declared Christmas Eve will be here, at our house. I want everyone here, Jenny's family, my family. We have all the accoutrements relied on every year. I'm buying a 12 foot tree. I'm decorating early, very early. Jenny was just inches from actively dying on Christmas morning, and I had to admit her that night and leave her alone--because ...

I have been awake for a while now. My head full of random thoughts, fragments of dreams and a yearning to find sleep again. It won't happen. Nerves? Probably that's a bit of it, as I have a job interview today. But, I have woken up early several times in the last two weeks. It frustrates me. Sometimes, as I walk around the house, I stop and think, "I am alone." I am traveling through this world now without a partner--not just a partner, but my life's partner. It's a terrifying admission, as I go through each hour pretending nothing had changed. It isn't that I feel I am without friends, given all the support you all have given me these last couple years. But, the way I define myself has changed. The decision making is mine alone. There is no one else to check in with, no one to disagree with, no one who will tell me my schemes are hairbraned. Mostly, as meager as it was in the end, there is no one to offer shelter, succor or simple reassuring company. ‐--‐...

The holiday season is upon us. I got a call from a dear friend last night, checking on on me. I'm fine, I told her. Then, "It's too soon to tell." Jenny's absence is a void, to be sure. And Christmas for us, probably because we are the youngest in our families, almost magic. When dating, all through the year we would look for ornaments to commemorate our lives together. This continued after marriage--until she died. This year the kids and I will forego Thanksgiving decorations and go straight to the 10 Rubbermaid storage boxes of Christmas decorations.

  Changing Times Friday night found Abby and me at the Inn at Lynden, a lovely little hotel in what I would describe as a bit of bleakness. I don't find Lynden particularly worth visiting, but Abby had the ACT at Lynden Christian High School on Saturday morning, so there we were. The ubiquitous faux windmills gave the place the feel of a poor echo of Leavenworth (the town, not the prison, although I wouldn't argue much with anyone describing it as feeling like some sort of stifling incarceration, given it is a city so famous for its piety).  Abby has now taken the SAT and ACT. She refused the offer of prep courses, and instead did her own preparation. I hope she kills it on one of them. I have been to the pumpkin patch three  times this year. Abby couldn't go the first time. Last week, smoke week, kept the asthmatics in the family (namely Leiney and I) from being able to weather the corn maze. On Sunday, Abby led us bravely through. There was no acrimony, no dallying, no ...

 The summer of 1974, we moved from 4910 S. Rose Street to 8431 S 117th Street in unincorporated King County. The new neighborhood was filled with kids. I could wander the neighborhood, now going into 3rd grade, my mother didn't care. There were two corner grocery stores, nearby, a diner, a barbershop. I could ride my bike to get a haircut, get candy, or even go to the diner for breakfast alone, which I did a few times. It was Mayberry, except with the racism out in the open. That summer, while walking home from the elementary playfield, I walked past a house 4 houses north of mine where Willie, my 17 year old next door neighbor, was being harangued by his girlfriend out in the yard. Willie always had a basketball with him, and dribbled it as he walked between his house and the home where I heard thr haranguing. My bedroom in our 800 square foot home, was above the unfinished garage (spider stories would chill you to the bone), and had a window facing north. I always had it open. Re...

It's complicated. I wake up in the morning feeling happy.  I take out the dogs, make my coffee, turn on Bloomberg. I make toast, pour my freshly brewed, and then give the dogs a treat. After all of this, I sit and drink coffee, before getting up to take Willow and Buddy out yet again, about 5 minutes later. Somewhere in the midst of this process, as the sun rises into view through our east facing windows and light of day strengthens, my thoughts turn to Jenny, and the void that she left in our lives. I miss her. I know, ultimately, that we were not good for each other, still after 11000 days together, I have many cherished memories and a deep and abiding love for her. It's easier for those who have experienced such a devastating loss to erase the bad facts and engage in hagiography of the  than one might think. I am not prone to mythologizing, nor immune, I suppose. But, I also know over time, after my mother died, the scales began to fall off my eyes and I better understood h...

This morning, as I was letting the dogs into the fenced lower yard, the bald eagle couple that live about a mile from here, showed up in my back yard, having a picnic of all things. I didn't have my phone, so no pics. But Jeff, the guy building the hogwire fence, well, he was there.  The wife was eating a garter snake, while the male kept watch a few branches away.

Thanks to my friend Paul, I got back on the treadmill today. I am trying hard to push forward. My right knee, the bane of my walking existence since I was 23, tried to talk me out of using the treadmill, in fact was rather insistent. I placate the bastard by slowing my  pace, and hope to lull it into a false sense of sloths security as I push forward. That said, the sorrow so distant last night hit me from behind like Harley Quinn's bat at sunrise.

I am abed. I climbed in about an hour ago. The ceiling fan is turning, I have a window open, and am quite prepared to keep this up all night, if need be. I may even sleep like this. French pop music circa 1935 popped up on YouTube after I requested Edith Piaf. Truth be told, my love of early 20th century Parisienne pop arose from the use of what were soon deemed illegal file sharing sites. My law school, which called itself, "The Global Law School," had about 25 percent of its spots guaranteed for foreign students. These foreign students were primarily European. On our shared network in family housing, you could store files. They weren't secure, these files. One or more of the foreign students, I learned from one of them, had created a place on the network for mp3s to share. I eagerly and greedily snapped up all I could. It led me to Kasey Chambers, made me fall in love with Townes Van Zandt, gave me dozens of songs I waltzed Leiney to sleep to each night. Most of all, it...

I am laying naked on the bed, the ceiling fan pushing the cool air over my corpulent magnificence.  The kids seem pretty happy. Abby is back in school. Leiney is on Orcas Island with her boyfriend for 5 days. I, as I mentioned above, am laying in the dark, naked and alone on my messy bed.  Not quite alone. Willow and Buddy are like spiders, you are never really more than 10 feet from one of them at any time. I've nixed sending the girls to Hawaii for Thanksgiving with my sister. I need them here with me. I want them here with me, not somewhere else as we mark our first Thanksgiving without Jenny. If I were to be asked how I am getting along, I'd say, I am lost. I am sad. I am relieved the suffering for Jenny has ended. But, I feel a huge hole in our lives that I can't begin to understand how to fill.  I have resigned myself to living in a terrible limbo. I am utterly detached to anything at all outside my immediate family and a couple of very close friends. I am listless,...

9.11.2022 I left NYC the day before the planes hit the trade center, to work at a legal clinic. Jenny was working at a school on 114th Street when the attack took place. She walked home on Broadway that day to West 3rd, the subways were closed. Traffic was shut down too. She stayed in the middle of the street, for fear of more attacks, until she reached 14th Street, where the military had already cordoned off the area, allowing only people who lived below it access. She was 4 months pregnant. She felt incredibly lonely and helpless. The phone system wasn't working, overwhelmed with callers, and we didn't speak until late that night or maybe even the next morning. All she could focus on, despite being 4 months pregnant, was how she could be useful. 2 days later, she began working (each day until school started, and then on the weekends) 12-16 hours a day pushing wheelbarrows full of bottled water into what became known as the pit, until she was too pregnant with ...

  I went to read the column Dear Wendy did on Jenny and saw they must have had a system crash as a lot of the responses originally up were missing, including my own response printed here.    Bereft and Crestfallen August 30, 2022, 1:13 pm Every comment on the original advice request, starting with Wendy’s was welcome, and not incorrect, even though the advice varied. No one was wrong. My wife died in March, and her behavior never got better. I did as Wendy suggested (advice remarkably close to that of my therapist) and let go of thinking of my spouse as my partner. It was difficult. We were together 31 years, married for 23, almost 24. I cared for her until she died. Over time I discovered many more bad acts, none worth discussing now that she has passed. Had I understood the cruelty better an/or sooner, cruelty that was often times intentional and sometimes not, but always lurking– I would have left well before diagnosis. She hate...

I was bored this evening. When bored I look at places I might travel. I looked at Christmas in Arosa, Switzerland, Paris, France, and Berlin, Germany. I could take my girls for 9 days in Berlin, stay st the downtown Berlin Holiday Inn Express for 640 bucks. Go search yourself. Given that there may be no natural gas in Germany come Winter, that their economy is stalling, and well, let's be honest, last time I was there their Nazis were feeling frisky, it doesn't seem like the safest of plans. Besides, I have zero vacation given my long weeks away from work. Someone asked me the other day how I was doing. I responded that it depends on the day. The day before yesterday I was relieved that this person who had so come to loathe me wasn't here to glower at me. Yesterday, I said, I missed her tenderness. I do today as well.  Being back at work brings some measure of normality, which is welcome. A routine, fixing problems, using my mind productively, all that js welcome. Still, ba...

I drove through Redmond for the first time since Omi and Jenny passed. All these backroads and byways Jenny and I traveled all through the years, full of meaning and memory. I am right now at the  Bonnie Raitt show at the Winery. Out with my sisters, forcing myself to get out somehow. This was the only way I managed to do it.  Mavis Staples opened. I can't enjoy it. Right now she is dedicating a sing to John Prine. All amazing stuff. Just unbelievably beautiful. I can't find any way to enjoy it. The ghosts are everywhere. The could have been, the never were, the never will bes blocking the horizon.  "They say Jesus brings you peace and grace, well he ain't found me yet."