Tag Archives: marriage

Why Thunder Storms Thrill Me

Posted on by

0

Men are big, like a thunder head.  As frightening and as surprising.  I stop and laugh and breathe in my laugh.  Then in three seconds I see the lightening.

I have learned to fall asleep in a thunder-storm–the noise and the light a soothing background outside my curtained window.  This is the type of beauty that is heard first–the rolling noise, and sometimes the bang–coming first to be followed by the bright flash of light.

Sometimes I miss these thunderstorm days, which make making decisions and trying to find something to do automatically done and decided.  If you go outside during a thunder and lightening storm, you risk being struck dead by lightening, and this probably is more likely if you carry an umbrella.  (Metal attracts electricity.)  The umbrella, being standing high and tall, is a seeker of the lightening, especially on a golf course.

So, take care, if you have to be outside.  I often cancel all my plans for some relaxing nap time.  If I am on a schedule, and I have to go out, I will rush from door to car and then drive very carefully and then rush from car to door.  Even though I feel secure in the car, because of the four rubber wheels that insulate from electricity, I am afraid of the wet roads and front windshield full of rainwater running down.  Almost no visibility and wet rubber slipping and sliding make me nervous.  Brakes and engines do not respond like hands and feet.

So, when I have the luxury to reschedule and just fall flat  into bed, I do.

I f I am with my husband, he is guaranteed to drive.  In fact, it makes me nervous having him beside me in the passenger’s seat.  So, a happy house and home is me in the passenger seat, yelling at the kids to keep quiet while we are driving!  My husband…  God bless him, does the dangerous thing of yelling too…  I warn him again, and again, that he might as well be texting when he takes his mind off the road!  So, we risk our lives every time we get into this contraption that is the car.

I also know, that even when he uses his membership at the race car track to drive a speeds imagined vicariously on iMax screens, that that is not really enough.  He denies it, but I know when we are not in the car with him, that he races between the stoplights.  On the highways, he waits for the fun curvy part, turns on his police radar, and races.

It is so dangerous.  It is frightening.  And I cannot stop him.  It is an argument we have… both for real and both for the sake of arguing facts..  Sometimes I just give up.  Sometimes, I become affected and I have to yell very loudly at him before I can calm down and just let my thoughts and sentiments be known in a precisely said word.

So, if you happen to be reading this…, please…. please….  Stop racing the car!!!!  Stupid.

These things are just the things that nature makes.  I ponder and think, and still cannot come to an understanding.  Where is all the sense?  Where is all the reason?  Where are these things of the brain and the mind?  Well, I have to agree with most people, reading a book is not the same thing as watching the movie.  Movies have come a long way since the nineteen-twenties.  There is sound, color, foley artists, and magical flying brooms.  I wouldn’t know what a magical flying is if I didn’t watch it on a movie screen.  The safe thing about watching it in a movie, it that we know the actors are not likely to die to the real world and never appear again.  If we attempt the magic at home, we also attempt suicide.   So, this is my sense, and this is my reason.  We can still live and have a good time even if we do not carry AK-47‘s and fly fighter planes into an air battle.  We can stop pretending to be on a race car track in between the stop lights, as that… driving at track speeds on a narrow road where stopped cars, slow cars, and cars that are changing lanes, is what will kill you and the other driver.

So, husband of mine, please drive like a normal person!!!  He is spoilt and has access to too many gadgets.  He knows too many tricks.  And a crazy, ability to figure out any type of engineering.  Stupid.

So, I welcome thunder and lightening storms.  We are in agreement that when there is one, I will drive, otherwise we stay at house and home and have a nap.

Her Fearful Symmetry

Posted on by

0

The first time I saw beauty in the most fearful place, I held my gaze and could only turn away when I started to breathe again, my shallow breath only allowed in when my muscles around my chest and neck could work once again.  I took a deep swallow, and asked an odd question, “Why is there two of that girl?”

Identical people puzzle me.  They look like each other, and often tail each other closely, starting and finishing each other’s word to the complete agreement of each other.  They dress in the same dress, and for some reason become completely lost and awol when the other disappears.  They tail each other from the time they are born to the time they pass on.  They are completely famous without the fame.  In public, people recognize their existence, albeit, only from the point of view of being in the presence of two beautiful and exceptional people, but they are recognized.  It seems, twins, and being a twin, makes for interesting gossip and talk and fulfills the need in some people to have confirmation of the extra-ordinariness of life. The very bodily existence of twins is very strong and loud evidence of life.  It is confirmation without true proof as to what life is.  Is it a brain?  Is it the beauty of models’ bodies?  Is it the strength and accuracy of athlete’s muscles?  Is it our ability to talk?  Our ability to create fictions, and stories and plan for the future? Is it our ability to create and rate and fall in love?  Do we create love?  And if so, do we create life?  Is life and love a very spontaneous accident?  Or is there a scientific method and law as to how it all happens?

I am looking at a conversation that two people are having.  One of them keeps insisting that twins are better off than all other kinds of human beings.  To have a bond that never breaks because there is nothing that is the match of that bond….  no words, no actions, no ideas, no love…  This is a very deep thing to say and think!  That being a twin for life literally means neither will ever be alone, even if one passes on, or if they find someone to marry, the twins to each other are never truly alone.  They would share that love as well!

I imagine this situation, the one in the overheard conversation….  To say that if I am in trouble, that there will be someone who will be there to save me…..  This, too, is very deep…  Any girl would like to be in this situation!  To have security forever!  I imagine this situation, and I think, I would be very satisfied!  Perhaps, twins are better off than any other type of human being!

Unfortunately, I was not born a twin.  I am single, and I am this way for my entire life.  I have learned to live with this “difficulty” in a way that makes me more willing to try my luck and to try to make friends, even in an unlikely situation.  I am often in a lonely job, as writers tend to have to do their work in isolation, and in quiet, and in full concentration of brain work  so that they can hear their own thoughts.  Writing is messy, and if you don’t catch your thoughts and ideas quickly… they will fly off and disappear!  So, this is how I feel secure….  Hearing myself and editing myself and creating word-filled pages that work and feel like magic!

So, am I resigned to this life?  Well, of course.  There is nothing that  I would wish undone.  There is nothing that I would wish redone….  (Sometimes when I am angry, or feeling jealous, I do wish that my entire life were redone… but that is a situation that even twins cannot outwit.  Being angry and /or jealous is natural even if your twin is perfect evidence of what the situation is.)

So, here is my life.  Summer is just starting, and I am becoming very busy with all the plans that are floating around the house.  My husband wants this….  My kids want that….  And then, do we have time to visit grandma?  Will there be time enough to buy a season’s pass to the theme park?  And, are the kids ready to take on over night camp?

These are not necessarily easy decisions to make.  Being bad and getting slightly poor grades are not conducive to going out to play at the waterpark…  It is more likely that summer school will be the result and consequence of that!

Life is not easy….  As the anthem of my generation states, “Life is a mystery, and we must stand alone.”  It is tragically beautiful, and, I bet, this is one thing that twins do not understand!

Keeping Promise During Struggle

Posted on by

0

The tall tree stands by the stand of the tall buildings.  It is a break in the street, apparent against the sky.  When the sun is shining, reflections of light create glare off glass and metal.  I am happy in this warm weather and think of the man I want to marry.  Everything seems perfect, and I hope everything is true.

Where can I get to where I want to go?

Remembering those early days when everything was just as hopeful as everything was just as hopeless.  We are married now, and those days still stay with me.  The freedom is in the marriage–the promise of the hope I had, and therefore the promise of happily ever after.

When struggling through the day, when work is working like a dog, and I am mindlessly keeping up, and I think of all the undone work I have to do once I leave the office, I truly do struggle.  I usually just take a deep breath, and literally, with stoic face and demeanor, soldier on into the evening until I can finally fall, exhausted, into sleep for seven hours.

Life is long, and sometimes, because there are so many things happening all the time, it can accommodate a full range of responses and results.  I am, by nature moved by these things, again and again.  I am beginning to find that knowing less when I was younger, truly was a blessing.  Now, when I look at these scenes, and these places, I find that mostly, I was wrong in assuming the way things were, was in fact the natural order of things.  I am jaded now.  Things will never again be as good and as perfect as when we were all at the beginning.

I am glad  that I was young when I fell in love with my husband and I am glad that me married young.  We have had many years filled with happiness.  We are still together and comfortable.  Now, even raising children and parenting them, is easy in this family.

The scene of buildings and trees is a common enough sight in this city.  When I see that moment, that moment, when everything was just as hopeless as well as just as hopeful, I am back to that first day, when I was hoping I was in true love.  With age, the judgement of good and evil, and middling, is much easier to make, and I find I am much more satisfied with just doing the same things over.  I find that a cup of coffee in the morning is satisfying enough to take me to the next morning.  No more one more latte for the afternoon….  I am not going to over-satisfy myself.

The on-coming summer season, is just as exciting this year, as it  was last year.  I am trying to remember where all my summer clothes are…  hidden in the drawers of cabinets and chests, and armoirs in the rooms of this house.  There’s also the closet, for things that must hang.  I am a bit of a peacock and love to match the frilly, colorful things all together.  The warm weather reminds me that often we will be out late into the evening and sometimes, as a treat, at the cottage, we will sit  by the lake and light a fire in the fire pit there, into the deep night.

Everything is filled, and everything is filling.  Every morning is a treat and every night is an easy rest.  I live from one moment to the next, filled with surprise form one surprise to the next.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Posted on by

0

Aged cheese and aged wine.  Grapes and cake.  Sometimes people just need some time and a good way to forget.  There is so much in life, and to think that the majority of the good things are bad is depressing in itself, without some devastation to make it all the blackest of sin to be living.  The question I am thinking of, because I was just thinking about my life in terms of life-changing events, is:  “Is the beginning of the end already too late….  Or is there just more to work with?”  Immediately, I started having berating thoughts:  “What if I was just plain lazy?  What if I always did the easy thing, chose the easy way, and made anything difficult to do something I couldn’t have in my life, even in the sense of the difficult as something to contemplate?”  What if I don’t know how to do anything worth while?  Will I die a horrible death?  Will I suffer until I die the horrible death?  I started on this road of thought because I started comparing my life with, obviously enough, my sister’s life.

She started fast out of the gate….  Always the straight A child, the one who won more than the “Participant” award.  She would win first place, she wuld win the cool prizes with $100 or a new wardrobe, and she had the cool friends, who, for some reason were in Indie bands who played in the bard around town.  She got into the best schools, and had the vest and coolest hobbies.  She could talk on the phone half a school night and still get the straight A’s again.  She could always choose the winners of the year before they were announced on Oscar night.  She used cool words, even the Professors thought were cool.  And, to end off the comparison with her graduation from a Masters Program, she took a two month trip through Europe.

In comparison, I did the things that were less.  How do I come to this conclusion?  Easy….  I do the easy jobs that pay less.  I married a man that drives a Honda instead of an Audi with leather seats that even looks sleek and sporty in grey metallic and four doors.  I have thought about having a big family, with three children and an option to have four or even five…  but I just can’t afford it.  Children require a two-income family.  And on two incomes, if I consider the need of a private school education, my husband and I can only afford to have one of each… a boy and a girl.  And lucky us, it just did happen in this million dollar way….  One for me and one for who I married.

In a sense, when the first child was born, it definitely marked the end of my life in some sort of big way.  Everything I started doing, and that I keep doing, now, is look after the life of my children.  Their schedule comes first, and lucky me, I have a job that is flexible with me to run to the aid of my children when it is necessary.  I was of the generation of feminists who demanded equality with men in every way, but, surprise, when a woman falls in love with a man… the man always comes first.  They are chivalrous because we love them that way, and we let them come first, because they like us this way.

So, I ask again, is the beginning of the end too late….  to have the things that you always wanted?  Or is the compromise…., always necessary?  Will I never have the chance, ever again, to experience the things that I thought I would have the chance to experience…  Sometime?  I don’t have to think about now…  Now, my children know what it is that takes to raise them, already, and I will not disappoint them.  In some way, it is an investment, after 65 I will not work any more, and somehow, I would like a home to live in for as long as possible….  And in this way, I invest in my children.  I am looking at least thirty years into the future.  So, with this mark as the beginning of the end, have I missed out on a life of glamour, the one I envision where I get to fly the world, taking photographs of famous people, famous models, and creating great artistic works that people will hunt for?

All of a sudden my teenaged dream of this life of glamour was replaced, even before I knew it.  I did marry an artist, and in some ways, I live vicariously through him, often, but, even he, doesn’t have the glamorous life I dream about.  It’s a lot of nine to five work.  We are mutually looking at our lives, feeling that it has been replaced with domesticity.  Our children now walk us.  We daily rate what is most important, and yes, our children take top place.  I revel in their victories and cry with them in their sorrows and failures, as does my husband.  We laugh, now in a way we never thought we would laugh.  Laughter used to mean something coll and funny, now, it’s love that comes tumbling out of our mouths. We cherish those moments.

Until we are able to have more time for ourselves, we will continue to sell our souls for the money that keeps our family together, in our home.  So, is it beyond possible to change our lives and have those things we have dreamt of?  Is it too late?  I hope that it isn’t true.  I watch as younger artists gain so much more with half the time that I have.  I watch as young graduates take those enviable jobs that I have secretly wanted, with half the experience I have.  As these opportunities are “taken away” from me, I ask again….  Have I been too lazy and only settled on the easy things?

Let us hope, then, that this is not the truth.  I hate the idea of compromise, but I am not completely sure that I understand the concept of compromise.  I look at the time ahead of me, and I am now beginning to think, “things never really change.”  I consider myself as someone who is born to be an artist.  It matters that I hold onto this part.  It keeps me occupied, and I know that I will be occupied, and I know I will be occupied beyond the years that my children need me.  I would be pleased to be an older artist…  So, is the beginning of the end too late?  I don’t think so.