Essay #9: Dream & Memory

The brain doesn’t distinguish between dreams and memories. So said some article I read in the Science Times some years ago. But what does this mean?

            If I dream something, will I later think it is a memory of something that happened while I was awake? Or is it simply that the same parts of the brain are at work when we dream and when we remember? What is happening when we “remember,” anyway? Memories aren’t snapshots stored in synapses that come to consciousness in identical form every time we think of the, again according to articles I’ve read. Instead, eachact of remembering recreates the memory, which feels the same, even though it may vary in detail that we don’t notice.

            So, too, with dreams. I’ve been writing many of my dreams as soon as I wake in a dream book for 20 years. Sometimes as I wake, I remember only the most recent part, i.e., the ending of the dream. But as I start to write, more detail of what led up to that ending comes to mind, and I write that too. Am I actually “remembering” more of the dream, or is my brain creating the dream as memory as I write? How much is the dream or memory contaminated by my imagination? And why do I think it’s “contamination”?

            All of it—dream, memory, imagination—is created by my own brain. None of those—dream, memory, imagination—exists independently of me, my mind, my brain. Until I write them down. Once on paper or computer screen, the words exist independently of me, available for anyone else to read, comment on, ignore, argue with. They become part of a conversation connecting me with other humans. Words make the dream, memory, imagination social.

            Maybe this is something Donald Trump does not understand about his tweets. The words his fingers create are no longer only in his head. Other people read them and respond, not necessarily in the way he wants them to, if he even has a thought about the effect of his words on anyone but himself.

            What does he think his words do, other than express his feelings of the moment? What is it like to be a thought in Donald Trump’s mind? George Will, the conservative commentator, said last spring that Trump doesn’t know what it means to know something. A writer in the National Journals says Trump resembles an American monarchy, with him in every corner of public life, the actions of his family followed like the activities of the British royal family. And it’s looked to me like those around him behave like courtiers, yessing him and manipulating him so they can remain able to prevent him from inflicting damage on the world.

Essay #8: Catching Up

            I had such hopes for this year. I’d write every week for Vanessa’s 52 Essays in 2017. I’d write every Tuesday for the Two Writing Teachers’ Slice of Life Tuesdays and daily for their March Slice of Life Daily Challenge. I’d write every day in April for the Blogging AtoZ Challenge.

            Well, I have no discipline. I got through Week 7 for the essays. I missed only four days in March (posting twice a few days when I missed the actual dailiness). I wrote 10 blog posts for the blogging challenge, but posted only seven. I have managed 20 of the Tuesday slices of life, which is half the number of weeks so far. So Slices of Life get most of my attention—or maybe just what I’m in the habit of doing; this is my third year on that project.

            But I’m going to try to get back into the essay challenge. Only 11 weeks left in the year, so unless I write four essays a week from now to the end of the year, I’ll never catch up. But writing is better than not writing. Writing always tells me what I think. I often don’t know otherwise, or don’t remember. If I don’t write it down, I can’t remember it.

            This has always been the case with my brain. Tell me something, and really, it does go in one ear and out the other. I might remember a conversation being interesting, or fascinating, or boring, or annoying, but the details of why are lost in fog. Unless I write them down.

            Many years ago I saw someone on a subway platform wearing a T-shirt that read: “Writing is thinking, not thinking written down.” I want that T-shirt.

            (Is this an essay? It is because I say it is.)#52essays2017

#52essays2017, Essay 10: K Is for Keep On Keepin’ On

(I’m way behind the essay a week writing challenge, and have clearly not kept up with the daily Blogging AtoZ Challenge for April. So I will combine the two for my essays and try to catch up, which could mean writing two or three essays a week for the rest of the year. Haven’t checked a calendar yet for a real schedule.)

My husband died last year. I keep saying that, and it’s probably getting boring for other people. But it still feels like the most important thing that’s happened in my life recently.

            It was a moment, the moment Jack died. Up until that moment, our lives were entwined. We were not the joined-at-the-hip type of couple, like my husband’s brother and his wife. We had our own friends, we traveled separately often, we shared housework—and we kept our money separate. He went to the gym almost every day, I went maybe three times a week. But we both loved baseball and went to games together, went to the movies, had some friends in common. And we were both storytellers, though he was much better than me.

            When he got sick and said things like “if I’m here next year,” I ignored the implication. I continued to believe our “moments before,” alive, would go on forever. Denial, much? It’s the “moments after” that continue to mount up, to add on, to move me steadily away from those moments when Jack was alive.

            Yet I have to keep on keepin’ on. Remembering the past is not the same as living in the past. But integrating the past into the continually-moving-forward present is a paradox when one member of that past is no longer present to continue that work. His memories have evaporated, or live, imperfectly, in the memories of others. I don’t want to be stuck in the past, I don’t want to lose the past, and I want to keep on keepin’ on with the past as companion. 

#52essays2017

#AtoZChallenge and #52essays2017 (#9): J Is for Jumble

            The jumble is my mind. I have not been able to settle on a J word for weeks. J could have been Jack, my late husband who was never late and would have hated being referred to as “late” (I didn’t think to ask him about that as he waited for death, which was not as on time as he wanted, but was not too late either). But a brief post about “J Is for Jack” would not have been possible.           

             J could have been Jaffe, my family name. But that too would not have been a brief post as I gathered Jaffe stories. And would they be stories about the family I grew up in? The family my father grew up in? It could have been only how his father came to this country, since I know very little about my grandfather’s family, besides his coming from Vitebsk, Russia (the same city Marc Chagall was from), in order to escape being drafted into the czar’s army.

            “J Is for Joy” is too clichéd. That it was one of the first words that popped into my head was reason enough to reject it.

            Jumble. Yes, my mind has been a jumble. I sometimes find myself at the end of the day wondering, “what did I do today?” “What did I do yesterday?” Last month I missed a meeting because I had it in my mind that it was at 6:30, when it was clearly written into my datebook for 6. I write an e-mail to my daughter every week (and she to me) to let her know what I’ll be doing, when I’ll be home or out. (Before Jack died, he talked to our daughter almost every day, so he was up on her activities. The e-mails are my attempt to replace that exchange.) But then I forget and have to keep consulting the datebook myself to be sure I’m in the right place at the right time. And my to-do list? I add to it, then never look at it. There are items on it from a month ago; I look at the list and can’t deal with the phone calls or other tasks, but can add one or two more.

            Enough. I’m going to a friend’s 70th birthday party in a pouring rain. It’s the middle of May in New York City, and it’s 52 degrees outside. Mother Earth is not happy, as a full-page ad[[https://www.keepmotherearthhappy.com/]] in yesterday’s New York Times attests to. 

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 I never finished April's Blogging AtoZ challenge, and wrote this weeks ago and forgot to post it. Maybe I can catch up with the #52essays2017, which I only got up essay #8, which also did double-duty.

#AtoZChallenge: I Is for Ignorant

The dictionary defines ignorant as “destitute of knowledge or education,” “lacking knowledge or comprehension of the thing specified,” or “unaware, uninformed.”

            I like to think of myself as being aware, informed, knowledgeable, educated. Of course, there are aspects I am ignorant of, as is everyone else: I’m ignorant of when I will die, what I will die from. I am ignorant of what will happen in the future, though I can make educated guesses based on the past — with the caveat that comes with financial advice: “past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

            Being aware, informed, knowledgeable, educated: this is important to me. But why? Didn’t an 18th century English poet write “ignorance is bliss”? He was thinking of the perils of life, which only ends with death, and if we knew when that would occur, wouldn’t that overshadow any present happiness?

            One night when I was 15, I lay in bed yearning to know everything there is to know in the universe. I no longer remember what prompted that desire, but it remains embedded deep in me.

            For many years, I thought the way to learn about any subject was to start at the beginning, like a novel, and read through until I got to “the end,” which would be “the present.” The Hungarian Uprising in 1956 sent me to the World Book encyclopedia; I had to find out why Hungarians were rising up against communism, which my parents thought was quite a good system. Outlining the history of Hungary would answer my questions, except that it didn’t. The Six-Day War, in 1967 sent me to books about the Israeli-Arab conflict, except that some assumed Israel was right, and others assumed the Arab view was right, and I didn’t yet know how to dance through the evidence from both these viewpoints to determine my own opinion. I still thought it was like math, there was a right answer and a wrong answer.

            As I moved through adulthood, I realized that I was never going to know everything there is to know in the universe. I decided there were some things I could remain ignorant of. India was one: until I read the Jewel in the Crown series, and decades later visited the country. I don’t know Spanish, so I decided to remain ignorant of Latin America: news stories occasionally pierce the darkness, but without much context. Even some parts of American history are shadowy: the Civil War, the antebellum period, the early Republic.

            I started thinking about ignorance after reading a review article in the New Yorker about books on democracy. Universal suffrage allows many people to vote who are ignorant of policy, how the government works, who the candidates are and what they stand for, and even how to think rationally instead of emotionally. So should these ignorant voters have the same rights as more knowledgeable voters? Saying no leads to very undemocratic results. Saying yes can lead to our current president. Per Churchill in 1947, “it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time....”

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I'm using this for one of my essays a week, which I have fallen seriously behind on. #52essays2017

Essay #6: Marches, part 3

Fall Mobilization, 1965; me on left, and Jack behind.
Of course, we are smoking. Everyone did.

            Political marches and demonstrations are exhilarating. Being among a group of people who agree on an issue, even if you don’t know all or any of them, is exciting. I suppose those who disagree with us might think we are like a mob – but we are not dangerous. We are not threatening to harm anyone. I personally don’t like the current group of young men (I think they are all men) who call themselves the Black Bloc, wear masks to cover their faces, and throw rocks at stores and offices. They’re not changing anyone’s mind, they’re not making an argument. Perhaps they think they’re being revolutionary. They’re not.

            My first big protest, even before I joined that picket line in October 1963, was the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August that year. You know the one, where Martin Luther King made his “I Have a Dream” speech. There were lots more speeches that day. People were mostly worried about how radical John Lewis, representing SNCC, was going to be. A recent history of the March on Washington and the movement that preceded it (The March on Washington, by William P. Jones. 2013) says few knew about the intense debate over what Lewis would say, but I was aware of it, and I was hardly close to any of the march’s organizers.

            One of my co-workers and I met and mingled with the crowds streaming along Independence Avenue toward the Lincoln Memorial. (My roommate did not come along; she’d heard rumors of rampant burglaries while residents were out being goody-goody. I thought that was ridiculous, and that was no uptick in crime that day.)

            Walking along, we met a teenage African-American girl (white liberals still said Negro in those days) from North Carolina who’d come up on a bus. I felt so tolerant, proving, I thought, I wasn’t one of those hateful, bigoted white people in the South. It was exciting being among so many peaceful people for such a pure cause. It was hot, and toward the end of the afternoon, I decided it was time to go. The speeches were too speechifying. My co-worker had left, the teenager had found the rest of her bus mates. I was nearing the trees on the north side of the Mall when Martin Luther King’s voice  stopped me. It was more the cadence than the words that stopped me at first, but then I focused on his words: 

“... one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood....” 

I stopped under the trees and stayed to the very end of his speech, 

“We will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last.'”

That speech has been replayed so often that it’s hard to disentangle memory from its reinforcement, but I know the thrill I feel now is what I felt then. What he wanted was what I wanted. Harmony, friendship, unity. What I feel I’ve been searching for all my life.

            Antiwar marches were something else altogether. I had been reading about Vietnam in the papers since 1962. What did I know about Vietnam? Well, my seventh-grade got a weekly newsmagazine for schoolchildren, and in the fall of 1954 the two lead stories were Brown v. Board of Education, and the division of Vietnam into two countries after the end of French occupation. I remember reading about Catholics fleeing the Communists in North Vietnam, and as a red-diaper baby, I wondered why people would be fleeing Communists. “Vietnam” must have stuck in my head, because when I dropped out of college in Washington, D.C., in 1962 and was reading the Washington Post, I noticed news stories about Vietnam and its neighbor Laos, and kept on reading. 

            1965 saw the first big demonstrations against the Vietnam War. There was the Spring Mobilization in Washington, the Fall Mobilization in New York. In the spring we rode down to Washington with friends and stayed at an apartment my college roommate found for us. On a sunny day, we gathered in front of the White House and walked back and forth. As more and more people joined in, were there police guiding us further along Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Old Executive Office Building? I don’t think so. What I do remember was our starting to move down 17th Street and then turning east.

            Our goal was to encircle the White House. The only official presence was Park Rangers, who patrolled the environs of the White House. The heavy security now just didn’t exist. Only two or three Park Rangers tried to halt us and point us further south, but there were so many of us. (25,000 was one later estimate.) We formed a long horizontal line, and as the Park Rangers moved to one end to block us, we surged forward at the other end. And as they rushed toward our end of the line, the other end surged forward. In this flanking maneuver, we managed to get almost all the way across the South Lawn. I loved the feeling of outsmarting the authorities. It felt revolutionary – and without guns.

            In the fall, there was a big march down Fifth Avenue. Jack was a copy boy at the (Dorothy Schiff/pre-Murdoch) New York Post. One of his fellow copy boys belonged to some Trotskyist sect (I think it was Youth Against War and Fascism), which was one of the organizers of the fall march. He prevailed upon Jack to be a marshal, too. Marshals were supposed to keep marchers in line, tell them when to stop, when to go.  Although we both instinctively resisted being in a position of telling other people what to do, being a marshal meant we got to wear armbands; we’d walk along the outside of the march; we wouldn’t be hemmed in the middle of the crowd or behind or in front of a sign we might not agree with. We didn’t yet have a coterie of compatriots to march with, though we probably met friends at a bar afterwards. We were always ending up at bar in those days.

Marching, to be continued.

Essay #5: Marching, part 2

Marching in the streets. I’ve been going to protests for more than 53 years. A sign I saw at the women’s march on January 21 said something like “Why am I still having to fight for this shit?” I feel that way myself, but I can’t sit home and pretend the current events don’t affect me, even if they don’t all specifically address me. Here’s how I got this way.

            In the fall of 1963, while Kennedy was still president, Madame Nhu, sister-in-law to South Vietnam’s president, came to Washington, D.C., where she gave a talk to the National Press Club, attempting to shore up support for her brother-in-law. I was living in a commune of like-minded lefty students and other young people. Some of them organized a protest in front of the National Press Club at noon on a Friday afternoon in October.

            The organization where I worked, United World Federalists, was just a few blocks away, so I thought I would walk down on my lunch hour and join them. When I arrived, the “picket” was across the street from the Press Club, not where I’d expected it. And among the dozen or so people walking around in a circle with signs (“Madame Nhu must go”) were none of the people I knew. What to do?

            I had never joined a picket line. Even though I had lefty parents, they had never involved me or my younger siblings in any political activity. In fact, their political activity largely consisted of working for Democratic candidates.

            When I was 16, I’d heard about a march against nuclear bombs from New York to Washington, D.C., in August, to culminate on Hiroshima Day, August 8. The march was scheduled to pass near our home in Levittown, Pa., and I wanted to join in. My mother said, “no.” My father had recently started a new job, and if anything happened to me, if I got into the newspapers, it might damage him. But this is something we believe in, I argued. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stand up for my beliefs. But it was 1958. I knew about McCarthy, but he’d been out of the Senate for a few years. Because my parents didn’t connect their politics and their personal lives, I didn’t understand until many years later how fearful they were.

            A year or so later, there were pickets of the local Woolworth’s in sympathy with civil rights sit-ins in the South. I wanted to join those too. But no one I knew in my new high school were part of those protests, and I didn’t know how to become part of a group where I knew no one. I never even asked my parents.

            Now, watching a group of people I didn’t know walking around with signs expressing thoughts I agreed with, I didn’t know what to do. People going by looked at the picketers or ignored them. No one joined them. I wanted to, but didn’t know how to take that first step.

            Then I noticed, down the street, another group of protesters. They were wearing brown uniforms and carrying signs the proclaimed them as the American Nazi Party. I knew such a thing existed and its headquarters were not far away, in Arlington, Va.

            I watched the Nazis in support of Madame Nhu, then the picketers in front of me, then the people walking by, oblivious to both groups. Thoughts and feelings began to clarify. If I continued to stand by, I was basically saying, there’s no difference between these two groups of people expressing their political thoughts. Maybe this is what happened in Germany in the 1930s, ordinary people not able to see a difference between Nazis, Communists, Socialists, and other political parties. Here were two opposing views right in front of me, and I knew who I thought was right, and that I had to make that clear with my body.

            Still feeling nervous, I stepped into the walking line where a space appeared. A woman smiled at me. I smiled back. We walked and walked, until it was time for me to go back to work. I had gotten my political feet wet and didn’t drown. 

#52essays2017

Essay #3: Fear of fear of fear...

            I got lunch at the Great Northern Food Hall at Grand Central today. After buying a curried herring on rye smorebrod, I wandered around looking for a place to sit. A whole section of tables had been cut off “for a charity event” and all the seats on the north side of the food area were taken. On the opposite side, I saw a l ong banquette that was empty, so I sat down, took off hat and scarf, put backpack and purse on the floor, and took a bite from my sandwich (which was delicious, BTW).

            A young woman in uniform came over to inform me that this seatting was only for full-service customers, and I would have to move. Well, where was I supposed to move to? There were no free seats. She was polite but insistent that I had to move. I refused. If you find me a seat, I’ll move, I said. She stared at me, clearly angry, and repeated that I had to move. I said, I can’t move if there’s no place to move to. She strode away, and I wondered if she was going to call security.

            I felt like a cranky old lady. I wondered if there would be a scene. I wondered if I would be arrested. I was a bit frightened, but also a tiny bit exhilarated.

            The young woman returned to say she’d found me a seat. Fine. I picked up all my stuff and followed her to a row of high stools at a bar, which I had thought was only for people ordering at that food station. I thanked the young woman and finished the excellent smorebrod.

            Was I so daring today because of what I started writing for this essay yesterday? By  writing about fear, Girl Griot had sparked the following.

            Fear is one of the topics on my essay list. I too suffer from fear and probably have most of my life. I was going to start with the poem "A Chant Against Fear" by Jamaican poet Tanya Shirley. “A Chant Against Fear” lists 32 of Shirley’s fears. Here is a small list of mine.

Fear of new schools.

Fear of calling someone in school by the wrong name.

Fear of pronouncing words wrong (my mother's sister is my ant in Brooklyn, my aunt in Connecticut, my ant in Pennsylvania).

Fear of being stupid, and fear of being too smart.

Fear of riding a bike.

Fear of the horses I love in the fields across the road.

Fear of never having a boyfriend.

Fear of what would happen if I had a boyfriend.

Fear that no one would ever ask me to marry him.

Fear that I would marry the wrong person.

Fear of becoming a mother.

Fear of never having a child.

Fear of making the wrong decisions.

Fear of speaking up in public.

Fear of swimming.

Fear of being a woman alone.

            Just as Girl Griot relates, I too have been called “brave” for writing about my personal life and feelings, and reading that writing aloud to strangers. I didn’t feel brave. Yes, I was nervous about reading aloud. Would my stories connect to anyone else? Was I the only one who felt this way?

            In elementary school I’d be afraid to raise my hand when the teacher asked a question because I’d have to speak aloud, even from my seat. But I was more afraid of the teacher thinking I didn’t know the answer, so I’d  sometimes dare to raise my hand. In high school I was afraid of going to the Friday night dance party at school, but I went anyway. Maybe this time someone would ask me to dance, but that rarely happened, and no one asked me twice. I was overcoming one fear and encountering another.

            In college speech was a required class. I was afraid to stand in front of a class of 10 and give a talk on a subject of my choosing. If I looked at my notes and didn’t look at the faces staring up at me, I could manage it. Almost twenty years later I was standing in front of a class of 18 undergraduates as a professor, terrified of whether I could teach, but by now confident that I knew what I was talking about.

            When I hit 50, it felt like several layers of fear were sloughed off. For a while, at least, I ceased worrying about what other people thought of me. How did this happen? I don’t really know. Perhaps I’d learned that those people whose opinions I worried about were just as worried themselves. Were we all in a feedback loop of fear?

            As I’ve gotten older yet, fears of aging have crept in. Fear of losing my memory. Fear of dementia (which neither of my parents had, and they lived into their 90s). Fear of infirmity. Fear of losing friends to death, as I’ve already lost Jack, my husband. Fear of illness as I live alone. Fear of dying. All quite normal fears, I suppose.

            I think I’ve lost my fear of speaking personally in public because I now feel I have to speak up. How else can I connect to others if not by raising my voice. And listening to others as well. And reading their words, as I hope they will read mine.
             And did I lose my fear of confrontation because my leg hurts when I stand for more than a couple of minutes? I had to sit down, no matter what. And I didn't have to justify to Jack whatever bad consequences occurred. I was on my own. I am on my own. For a few minutes at least, I was not afraid to be a woman alone.
 #52essays2017

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In 2017, I'm trying to write an essay a week. You can join in. 

Check out Vanessa Mártir’s blog to find out how!

Week 2 Essay: Masculinity in "Manchester by the Sea" and "Moonlight"

Last week I saw Manchester by the Sea and Moonlight back to back, and I was struck by the similarities. While the protagonists could hardly be more different -- white working-class Lee in Massachusetts; poor African-American Chiron growing up in Miami -- to me they both seemed afflicted by masculinity.
            Lee is certainly haunted by his own truly careless action that led to the death of his three children and loss of his marriage. But even six or so years later he's unable to forgive himself and cannot allow anyone else to forgive him. Men take responsibility, and if taking responsibility means cutting himself off from all social contact, that's what Lee will do to remain a man. The only social contact he allows himself is to get into meaningless fights after getting drunk in bars. When his brother dies and leaves him the guardian for the brother's 16-year-old son, Lee finds this unthinkable; he's already proven himself incapable of caring for a child, and a man never makes the same mistake twice. Lee barely talks, perhaps taking “the strong silent type” as model and punishment.

            Chiron is silenced almost from the start with no model of masculinity. His father is nowhere in sight, and he’s different enough that even as a child other boys know he can be bullied and chased at will. In his childhood, one man helps him, a drug kingpin; once he’s befriended Chiron he refuses to sell drugs to his single, drug-addicted mother, but Chiron feels the contradiction almost viscerally. The only way he can have a friend is to engage in fake fights, with their homoerotic overtone. As a teenager, he’s taunted for his gayness, for not being a man like the other boys. In the most tender yet tense scene Kevin, his childhood friend, and he make love on the beach. But for Kevin to continue to enact straight manliness, he’s forced by the school bully into taunting Chiron into a fight. After being beaten savagely by classmates, Chiron’s revenge is an assault against the bully that lands him in prison. As a grownup 10 years later, Chiron has learned to survive by becoming a drug dealer, just as his mother has finally gotten straight (has she also been in prison?). His masculinity is less brutal, and he controls his drug sellers through mind games. But he is still suppressing his sexuality and thus any close emotional relationship, as being openly homosexual can only hurt him in his survival mode of drug dealer.

            Of course there are many ways the two men are different. As a gay black child and man, Chiron’s entire life is circumscribed by race, sexuality, and class. A.O. Scott’s review of Manchester by the Sea has a very interesting take on the movie’s racial subtext. But both address the question of what it takes to be a man, whether straight or gay. Lee and Chiron appear to me to be struggling with what they’ve learned masculinity means.            

            EDITED: This is just one small angle on these two movies, which have many nuances, especially Moonlight, that I’m not addressing. So please take it for what it is, and not what it isn’t.

SOLTuesday: Bureaucracy

I should have all my dealings with bureaucracy on Tuesdays. It will always give me a Slice of Life story to tell.

            One of my husband’s retirement benefits was a flexible spending account that reimbursed him for his Medicare Part D premium. He had never made a claim because he hated filling out forms, but in 2015, he decided, with my help, to find out the procedure. Then he went into the hospital. Then he died. A couple of months after that, he got a letter reminding him that he had until the end of May to make a claim for 2015. Okay, I thought, I’ll do it.

            I called the phone number on the letter, got sent a claim form, called to make sure I was filling it out correctly and also to make clear to the woman I was speaking to that this claim was for my dead husband, so please don’t make out the check to him.

            Of course, a few weeks later comes a check made out to Jack Robbins.

            Again, I called, and at this point I learned that Jack’s flexible spending account was administered by “a third party,” not the benefits office of the company where he had actually worked. And while I had notified that company (let’s call it Company A) that he had died, that information had never been sent on to the “third party” (let’s call it Company B). I was then put on hold while a benefits person at Company A got in touch with a benefits person at Company B, and, I thought, conveyed the proper  information to Company B.

            I then went back to Company B, where I was told that not only would they send me a check for that premium reimbursement as soon as the computers had all the right information, but that I was also entitled to that same survivor’s benefit. How would I get that, I asked? We’ll send you the information to set that up, I was told.

            This was all six months ago. I waited for the information to come; it never did. Life intervened, and this all went to the back of my mind. But the new year reminded me that this was a very loose string. So I called Company B today.

            The woman I spoke with was very helpful, and even offered to direct deposit the reimbursement so I wouldn’t have to wait for a check. But in looking up how to set up an account for me, she saw that the computer still showed an active account for Jack. Could it be that Company A’s computer had never properly sent the information that Jack is dead to Company B’s computer? Jenna, Company B’s representative, said she would look into it and call me back within two days. Maybe I will have a Slice of Life Thursday. 

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own. 

 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^#52essays2017^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yet another writing challenge. There are no rules for this one about what constitutes an essay, so in case I don't get another more traditional-looking essay written this week, this will do.