#AtoZChallenge: E Is for Everything

            I don’t believe in astrology, but my birthday is in Gemini, and I do find that everything in my life has its upside and downside, simultaneously. I also have a hard time choosing among the many things I want to do, on any day.

            I would never have been able to be a real academic, because I would not have been able to keep my attention on my sliver of a topic for as long as would have been necessary to write a dissertation, let alone turn that dissertation into a publishable book, as well as all the papers and talks required to get tenure.

            Everything in my field of interests includes reading, writing, watching movies, going for long walks, seeing plays, going to museums, listening to music of all kinds (except polkas and operas), cooking, eating, writing about my reading, knitting, crocheting, having lunch or dinner with friends, e-mailing my friends, reading Facebook, commenting on my friends’ FB posts,

reading the stories my friends post to FB, tweeting my rants about language misuse and grammatical mistakes, traveling to other countries, traveling to other states, playing the piano, organizing my books, organizing my files, oh, I’m getting tired just trying to think of everything I want to do.

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            I wasn’t sure what my E was going to be. Here were some of the possibilities: empty, erasure, enabled, elevated, elegant, effluvial, effort, early, eucalyptus, effect, elephant, easy, ephemeral, ergot, evil, ever, eternal, enter, entire, epic, ears. Maybe I’ll write about each of them at some other time.

SOLSC Day 27: Spontaneity

I brought vanilla cream-filled chocolate eggs to my book group in Brooklyn today, and had bought a couple of extra to share with my daughter when she visited last Friday. But I forgot to give the extra to her. So, since she lives in Brooklyn, we agreed that I would come by after book group to hand her over her “cream egg.”

            I arrived at her apartment in early evening, and we had some very emotional conversation about grieving, sadness, loss, what it all means. As I was getting ready for the long subway ride home, she asked what I would do about dinner. We decided to go out to dinner in her neighborhood, to a quite good Indian restaurant. (I had tandoori fish, which I had never seen on a menu before.)

            As we walked her back home on the way to my subway, I realized that this sort of evening would not have happened were Jack still alive. He did not enjoy spontaneous changes in plans, so I might simply have left the cream egg with C. and gone on home, or not even bothered with the detour and given her the chocolate eggs the next time we saw her. It feels almost perverse that while grieving his loss, I now feel more freedom to do whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it. Ambivalence, ambivalence, ambivalence.

SOLSC Day 13: Glad & Sad

I think I had a burst of energy from the memorial, with all the people and relatives last weekend, and it ran out yesterday. Is that why I forgot about writing my Slice until it was too late?

            Here’s today’s. I’m walking home after shopping and pass a couple roughly our age, he in a wheelchair, she pushing, and she stops. She says, “I can’t push you when you do that.” He says, “But I have to.” As I pass them, I see that his wheelchair does not have foot rests. I remember that it’s hard to get into the wheelchair when foot rests are attached, even when the food pads are flipped aside. I wonder if she’s complaining because he’s using his feet to “walk” along, because I remember that it’s hard to push slowly enough when the sitter does that — and it’s also hard for the sitter to hold his feet off the ground if the foot rests are gone. I wonder about their relationship and how long she's been having to push him in the wheelchair. I hope they have a flat entrance into their building and an elevator. I am relieved and sorry that Jack and I won’t have to face these problems.