An unexpected anniversary

It has been a month since Tom died. Exactly a month. I have moved through that month with a foggy brain and at the same time learning how to do things that I have never done before: visit the accountant for the taxes. I said to him, "This is what I want--I want you to fictionalize my tax return and I will pay you money." It turned out he didn't have to fictionalize anything, because our lives were in his computer already. I was out of there in 20 minutes. I  paid him, of course, but not nearly what he was worth to me.

I had to have the oil changed in my car. Never have had to do that. I was like a queen bee sitting on my marital throne. They laughed at my Fiat 500. One of the guys came into the waiting room and I asked, "Why were you laughing at my car?"  He replied that they hadn't been laughing at the car but at themselves. One out of four of these guys knew how to drive a stick shift. Ha.

I have to to deal with robots on the phone and listen to gaggy music while I wait for a human being to help me. I hate these phone calls. I'd rather go in person than deal with robots. But guess what? No one works in the office anymore.  They work from home on their computers.

The guy at the bank was lovely to me. So was Cynthia from DMBA.

Tonight, I rummaged in Tom's closet and found an unopened box: an Intex Challenger I blowup kayak with one seat in it. For fishing on a lake, I thought. He bought a blow up boat. Maybe it will flood in downtown Salt Lake this year, and I'll blow that thing up and paddle down Main Street.  Tom would like that.

Thursday night emergency?

 My posts have been irregular, because I left my computer at Jill's house. I checked the bedroom before I left, but I think I made it into the bed. Seriously.  Anyway, Jill came back from her vacation in the Maldives and sent it back. It arrived today.  Thanks, Jill. I'm glad to have it back. Using Tom's old clunker of a desk computer put me off my game.

So Thursday night, at eleven o'clock there were six (6) huge fire engines lined up on our side of the street. When does that happen? Lights were ablaze, but nothing else was. Our building had no alarms.  The action seemed to be happening up the street, but I think it must have been a health emergency rather than a fire. No smell of smoke, no hoses, no water. Nothing except a few firemen moving up and down the sidewalk. Not even a body.

Imagine having a heart attack or a gas attack and having six fire engines show up! It was like the circus had come to town. It was better than a circus. I sat on the terrace in my coat for a half hour. It was like being five years old again.  

Letter to Bill

Dear Bill,

Since you died a few days ago, Tom and I have brooded around the apartment about losing you. It is unconscionable that you are not among us. Surely, it is a fiction. In a day or so, Christine will call us and say that Bill wants to meet at Freshies for lobster rolls. His treat. He wants to read us some Billy Collins' poetry.  

Then comes the jolt: there will be no repeating of Freshies, or Billy Collins. No more drives up the canyon. No more shared birthdays. No more board games. No more books from the D.I. shared at Christmas time. No more well told stories about your blind date with the girl who was queen of the Golden Green Ball. You accompanied her in the grand march down the stairway of the Rainbow Rendezvoux , one hand grasping her waist. “How did you get to be queen?” you asked her.

“I made three years’ hundred-percent attendance at church,” she said.

No more stories about midnight struggles with the vacuum cleaner in the dark after you’d gone to see Psycho.

I, personally, most enjoyed the James Mustich Jr. period. You gave me a copy of 1000 Books You Must Read Before you Die. Our competition was never voiced, but we both began reading voraciously and ticking off the boxes as we read. I never would have read Flat Line: a Romance of Many Dimensions, a novel in which the main characters are lines, squares and triangles. We read Dostoyevski’s The Idiot at the same time, amused with the long rants and ravings of Prince Myshkin’s odd friends.

So Bill, did you finish all 1000 books and does it matter?  I didn’t. Eventually, I felt oppressed with someone else’s list of books I should read. Mustich did encourage me to read Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (in translation by John E. Woods) which replaced the Brother Karamazov as my favorite novel of all time.  You know what a big deal that is!

You tried to get me to read Robert Musil’s book, but I never did. I think you were going to write your dissertation on something like The Intersection of Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. 

Really, Bill! No wonder you switched to Harvard Business School.

Now that you’re gone, I’ve decided to read it. I ordered both volumes today and I’m going to read all of it in honor of the dissertation you didn’t write.  In honor of you, my friend.

Love,

Louise

     

Bill died

 Christine called this morning to say that Bill had died. It was like a blow to the solar plexus to receive such news.

What does a wife do on the first day after her husband has died? Make the obligatory calls. Walk through the house as if it's a museum where one of the curators has left for distant shores. Pull the sheets off the hospital bed in the family room. Start a load of wash. Stare into space. Stare into more space.

Tom and I lay on our bed and stared at each other. Then I got under the blankets and stayed for the rest of the day.

Eternally thirty-one--let it be so

 I don't know if I liked being thirty-one-years-old as much as I now like looking at my-thirty-one-year-old self. Long neck, thick hair, original teeth. I must have had complaints about that body. I know what they might have been. "My mouth is asymmetrical. My mouth is large and my lips are uneven. They slant from one corner to the other. As if I'm about to have a stroke. I'm getting bags under my eyes." Kill me. Kill all thirty-one year olds.

This was taken early summer of 1973 with sons, Jonathan and Edmund. In August, they would turn three and four. We rented a third floor apartment in the Dahlem section of Berlin. Frau Schneider didn't want to rent to someone with two children, but she made the mistake of coming out to the car to have a look, and these two towheads melted her down immediately. So we lived on Auf dem Great 51 for an academic year. The house was filled with original German expressionist art: the beginning of an education for Tom and me. Tom was on sabbatical to watch early German films in mostly east Berlin archives. He'd sit in the dark and take notes on a tape recorder.

The boys and I spent part of each day at the park down the street feeding ducks and engineering roads for a large boxful of Match cars. It was rather idyllic. Except when it wasn't. One of the boys was a biter. The other one peed regularly in his waste can in the middle of the night.

I may have had facial tics.  But, hey, look at those perky breasts!

Rose and the old people

 We've had our dog, Rose, about a month now and I have learned the following: her way of showing love is to bite you on your hands with little sharp teeth. One needs to replace hand with a toy, or put her on the floor.  I have not enjoyed this biting.

She will potty in her own sweet time, and really, don't we all potty in our own sweet time? So, we're apartment dwellers and have a terrace and we are training her to do her junk. on the terrace. Unfortunately, she likes to dance in front of the window and yap at us, so it's better if we leave the room. I have found the answer to this letting her in and out, a bothersome dance. There is a doggy door made explicitly for glass sliding doors. Who would have thought? For under two hundred dollars, we can install one of these and I'm all for it. See pic below:

With this doggy door, we could go on vacation for weeks. Days? Hours, maybe. Or we could just allow her to live under my bed where she enjoys an occasional poop every once in awhile. I am so honored.

Blue and white draperies

It turns out there are lots of choices for blue and white draperies in varying price ranges. I'm showing you four of them. I like the first one because it has a little green in it, which is diverting if you have blue and white everywhere--well, not quite everywhere. The second choice has a modern flair which lightens up my European Imperialism style. The third might be too dark. I like the fourth one, because it makes me feel like a gypsy (again, fighting off that European Imperialism). But I think I'll go with number two!

Our apartment comes with those seventies vertical blinds that are unspeakably ugly. They must go or I must jump over the balcony, (light-hearted fabrication there). How about if I just roll my eyes again?