The One That Got Away

This past Saturday, Andrew Cohen wrote an article about a woman he used to date who was marrying another man:

Some readers found it touching and others found it creepy. Columnist Lizzie Skurnik weighed in here.  I found it a little bit of both, though I have to agree with the critics who found the article more about Andrew than his lost love, and who thought his offering her "worldly absolution from any guilt or sadness she felt between the time she said no to me and the time she said yes to him" was a bit superfluous, seeing as how she was marrying another man, a circumstance most people would accept as evidence that she had moved on.

But mostly I found it puzzling, because I have a hard time identifying with the idea of the one who got away.  I must admit, my romantic life has been far from typical. The only relationships I have had that lasted longer than 8 weeks  are my two marriages. I'm not sure what that says about me, maybe that I'm very good about not wasting other people's time? The other thing is that the only break-up I initiated was my divorce from my ex-husband. In all the other cases I was the one dumped. Nonetheless, I categorize the relationships as Narrow Escape 1, Narrow Escape 2, Narrow Escape 3, Narrow Escape 4, Sweet Jesus, I actually married that man, what was I thinking, Narrow Escape 5, three mostly platonic friends one of whom was probably gay and then Hubby! Yay, I finally did something right! Okay, to be fair, Narrow Escapes 2 and 3 were nice guys who had the sense to realize we weren't right for each other before I did, and Narrow Escape 1 was as young and immature as I was. But Narrow Escape 4 put up red flags I didn't recognize when he complained about how his mother stuck him and his father with "her jobs" while recovering from her hysterectomy and Narrow Escape 5 lived with what looked like post-college surroundings into his late thirties, an inability to treat himself well that suggested maybe he wouldn't have treated me any better in the long run. Besides, I suspect if ex-hubby and I had broken up before we married, I would have remembered him as a nice guy who had the sense to realize we weren't right for each other instead of knowing him as the abuser he turned out to be. 

I actually ran into one of the mostly platonic friends about four years after my marriage. We looked at each other for a bit saying, "You look familiar" before recalling we had actually had a few dates. He had also married and we managed to congratulate each other on having found happiness without adding out loud "with someone else, thank the Lord". I doubt any of the others remember me, but if they do, I'm Narrow Escape number whatever. Fair enough.

Hubby, fortunately for me, is the one who didn't get away. We have the same values, the same political views, the same attitude toward money and spending, and just enough differences in personality and in taste in music, movies and the like to keep life interesting. If I hadn't had the good fortune to get dumped by all those other dudes, I might never have found him.  

Sometimes I get all the luck.

Famous in a Small Town

Paintings from last year

Another summer, another week of our annual summer art program for special needs kids. Last year at this time we were trying to sell our house and move out of state, so I didn’t expect to be doing this again. Our summer art program is fantastic for children, with or without special needs, not so good for 60 something, out of shape women with bad knees and bad arches and a severe need for an afternoon nap.  I like to call art camp the reason God invented Celebrex.

This year, the children got to do pottery, storytelling, painting, dance (called “movement”, like they weren’t moving the whole rest of the time) and collage. There were five groups of children so they rotated through the classes. I was with the second oldest group, which comprised two children in power wheelchairs, one with a walker, two children with autism, one with Down syndrome, one with an unspecified form of cognitive disability, two siblings, and two children of my co-workers.  Despite the wide range of special needs, they behaved exactly like any other group of  children that age: distracted by the construction going on outside, inclined to converse with their best friend while being given instructions, imaginative at using any art supplies as small weapons, stubborn about trying anything outside their comfort zone, and generally in need of those crowd control tactics beloved by generations of teachers everywhere. Compared to the younger groups, they were easy to handle, especially with the aid of several teen volunteers and one of the siblings, and for the most part understood the basics of the tasks and did an impressive job with them.

On our first day there, I noticed a reporter accompanied by a photographer being led from group to group. It started me thinking about the advantages of living in a small city. There are stories in our local paper every year about our art program, our annual canoe trip, and our two major fundraisers. These are not just small paragraphs in an “around town” section. These are full articles with bylines and pictures. I suspect that if we existed in Philadelphia or Atlanta, this would not be the case. As Miranda Lambert sang, everybody dies famous in a small town.

The reporter was back for our culminating event, the recital at the end where the children danced “The Ant and the Grasshopper” and displayed their work. By this time, I had forgotten the bad knees and bad arches, the spilled paint, the “swordfights” and got teary eyed when most of our group, who were playing dragonflies, remembered where to stand and when to flash their lights. By the time the ants carried off the dead grasshopper and took their bows, a process that took longer than the actual dance, I was convinced that it was the best production of  “The Ant and the Grasshopper” ever.

I can’t wait for the reviews.

Renewal

I spent most of yesterday afternoon renewing my passport. It sounds like a simple thing to do - you can even fill out the form online - but each of the different steps required driving around town. I had to go to the bank to get my old passport from the safe deposit box, then from the bank to Walgreen's to get pictures taken. After hanging around until the pictures were ready (maybe ten minutes), I had to go home to fill out the form, print it, sign it, and find an envelope. Then I had to drive to the next town to go to the post office. (Yes, we have a post office in our city. Several. It's just that I live so near the city line that I'm actually closer to the post office in the next town.) There was a line at the post office, and traffic on the interstate. So it went.


This takes me back to when I first got a passport, in 1986. Prior to that, my only out of the country travel were day trips to Canada and Mexico, and in those days all you needed to cross those borders was a driver's license or student ID. In 1986, however, I decided to go on an Earthwatch expedition to Zimbabwe, and for that I needed a passport.


Having heard of the horrors of passport photos, I was surprised to find that I actually liked mine, despite not liking any pictures of myself, ever. I didn't think to ask if I could get extra copies. Subsequent passport photos have looked more like passport photos. I was also surprised at how quickly I got it. I was told it would take 4-6 weeks. Instead, it took a little over a week. Holding the passport made my trip seem real to me for the very first time. By the time I had to surrender that passport to get a new one, it had been stamped in England, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Brussels, Italy and France. I still have it. It's been stamped "cancelled" and has two holes punched in it, but my picture can still be seen.


The next edition, the one I just surrendered and hope to get back, similarly disabled, has an even more exotic history. It has been stamped in the Carribean, Canada and Mexico (in a less trusting time), Japan, Thailand, Hungary, France, Argentina, Brazil, Port Lockroy, Antarctica, and Cape Horn,  Chile. The Port Lockroy stamp has a penguin picture on it. The Cape Horn stamp has two. I tell people my passport looks like it has been issued by Pixar.


I don't have any exotic trips planned yet for the new passport. I just want to have a current one ready in case I do make plans to travel. It should come in handy if I ever get a yen to go to Fiji. Or Arizona.

Things We Don't Know We Know

my backyard

My family has always been spiritually adventurous. All of my grandparents started out as Roman Catholics, but my paternal grandparents became Pentacostal after my grandmother fell ill, and my step-grandparents became Jehovah's Witnesses. My stepmother did not like the Witnesses, so she brought us up in the Protestant church closest to our home, which happened to be Methodist. That didn't happen until I was 8, so I did make my first communion as a Catholic, as I was reminded recently when my godmother sent me pictures of the event. Since my most vivid recollection of communion is that the incense made me sick, the pictures were a nice surprise. There I was, in my white dress and veil, which I think served as the prototype for Sally Field's headgear in The Flying Nun. There are my friends, in different dresses but matching veils, including Joan who lived across the street. There is the back patio of my godmother's house, and therein hangs my tale.

Fast forward a bit. When I bought the house my husband and I live in now, I didn't like the postage size back patio, which could hold either furniture or people, but not both. One of the first things we did was have a newer, larger patio poured. It needed shade, so I convinced my husband to build me a pergola like one I saw pictured in Southern Living. The pergola now boasts a sturdy wisteria vine which provides a lot of shade. Hubby and I had some differences over the construction of the pergola. He wanted to use 6 by 6's for the columns and I wanted the delicate ones in the picture in Southern Living, which I got.

So there amidst my godmother's pictures of flounced little girls is a picture of a gathering in her backyard, with relatives sitting on a patio under a familiar looking pergola. The pergola does not look familiar because I remember my godmother, or any other relative, having one. The pergola looks familiar because there is one like it sitting right outside my back window.

"Look," I say to my husband, "I didn't remember that."

"Yes, you did", he replies, pointing out the window. "No wonder you wanted me to make it out of matchsticks." Hubby is the one who does eternal battle with the wisteria to keep it from yanking the pergola completely over, so he favors function over form.

"I didn't remember I remembered it."

I wonder how many other things we don't remember that we remember.

celebrating my communion, long ago

Shredded

Recently I have been looking frantically through all my household files, bookcases, and other paper storage spots to find a copy of a poem I wrote 20 years ago. So far, I haven't had any luck, although in the course of searching, I have weeded out a lot of paper clutter, and found a number of other poems, essays, and letters to the editor I had written.

I also found something else, something I had forgotten I had - a letter that my brother wrote me 22 years ago. I knew what it was as soon as I saw it, and knew also that I should take it over to the shredder, only a few feet away, and shred it without re-reading it. I knew that, but of course, I re-read it anyway.

The letter was a complaint, one of those letters intended to be more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger which are of course always more-in-anger-than-in-sorrow. It was the kind of letter you write, put away till the next morning, read again, and rip up before writing, "You know, you really pissed me off and you owe me an apology."

My brother is like me in that we both tend toward the cold and cutting rather than the hot angry style. I suspect that he did not hear what he wrote in his mind the way I did in mine when I read it, but let's just say that in re-reading it I was surprised the paint hadn't blistered off the walls around the bookcase years ago. Your family always knows how to hit you where it hurts.

The substance of his complaint was that I had treated him badly at our niece's wedding a few months before, and had made a recent comment on the phone of a similar type. As best I could piece together from what he said, he was unhappy that I had told his children stories about him from our childhood, like the time he rolled peas from his lunch down the aisle of an airplane; he was mad that I said it was funny that my son was so much like his uncle since they hardly ever saw each other; and he was furious that I said I didn't know how his wife put up with him. To me, only the last of these seemed like something to complain about, but I can also see where hearing that might have disposed him to take anything else I said in the worst possible way.

So I could understand why he was mad, and recognized that even though I hadn't set out to be hurtful, I had acted like a jerk, and 22 years ago, when I received the letter, I sent him a letter of apology, after first writing a few paint-blistering drafts of my own which I then tore up into little pieces. We've been cordial ever since, although we aren't close.

Re-reading it 22 years later, however, was a different experience. My remorse has been tempered by the passage of a couple of decades and my hurt at his words is fresh again. I had remembered just enough to know that re-reading it was going to be a bad idea, but not enough to know that re-reading it was going to be a really bad idea. Telling the cop who pulled you over where he could stick his speeding ticket bad. Telling your mother-in-law what you really think of her birthday gift bad. Finding the busiest street corner in town and crossing against the light bad.

My brother chose not just to explain what he found so obnoxious about my behavior, but what he found obnoxious about me in general. Furthermore he implied that everyone else in our family, close and extended, felt the same way about me. He wrote as if he believed I had been trying to pick a fight, and that I had mistaken his patience for weakness, instead of my mistaking his not complaining about anything for his not having a complaint. But what hurt and puzzled the most was a gratuitous attack on my intelligence. "Someday maybe you will learn that intelligence is not the same as wisdom."

My brothers and I have the great fortune to be smarter than the average. I am not any smarter than either of them, and none of us are actually geniuses. The only difference I can think of is that they, being boys, were allowed to be smart in peace, whereas I, being a girl, was viewed as as being a problem child for getting straight A's, and it became something of a family project, or at least hobby, to convince me to play dumb. That was about as effective as convincing a giraffe to pretend to be short, and the subject of intelligence became a hot button one, with my brother convinced that I think I'm smarter than everyone else, especially him. That apparently was an issue for him even into our 40's, which is how old we were when the letter was written, even though we had stopped getting report cards 20 years before. How did that happen?

If I had either wisdom or intelligence, I might be able to figure that out. I didn't even have the brains not to read the letter, despite the promptings of my better judgement, so I doubt I am going to find an answer any time soon. The best I could do was belatedly put the letter in the shredder and remind myself that next time my better judgement says, “Don’t do that”, I should don’t do that.

Maybe that is wisdom, after all.

My Jet-Setting Life

John in Neal's Paris loft

For our 22nd anniversary, my husband took me to Paris, where my son threw us a party.

Okay, this is how it really went down. My son's job takes him to out-of-town locations for weeks or months at a time. His most recent job has him spending four months in Paris. Meanwhile, I get a week off from work every year at Easter. Back when my husband and I got married, it was two weeks, so we got married the day before Palm Sunday and had two weeks free for our honeymoon. We went to Paris, Florence, and Rome.

Even though Easter is a movable feast, some part of my spring break often coincides with our anniversary. We also often take trips at that time, since it's not too hot, not too cold and I have the time off anyway. We went to Hawaii for our 18th and the Caribbean for our 19th.

So what could be more appropriate than to use my break this year to take a trip to Paris to visit my son, who has rented a charming apartment, a former artist's loft, where he could put us up?

I tracked down airline fares, and found a flight that could get us to Paris early Saturday morning, so we'd actually be able to spend the weekend with Neal before he went back to work and left us to our own devices. I found a shuttle service to take us back and forth from the airport at half the rate of a cab, having vetoed my husband's idea to take our baggage on the Metro. I emailed Neal our exact itinerary.

Men are amusing. The Sunday before we left, my husband turned to me in church and said, "Don't we have an anniversary coming up soon?" "Yes", I replied, "Friday. The day we leave for Paris." Two days later I saw a note on Facebook that Neal was having a party at his loft Saturday night. I emailed him to say that while we were delighted that he wanted to throw a party to welcome us to Paris, we were going to be a bit jet lagged. It turned out he thought we were coming in Sunday. (Note to the young: read those emails from your parents.)

It all worked out well. Neal found us a hotel to stay in for our first two nights in Paris. We spent a few hours at the party, which I hear didn't break up until 3 AM. And now I can tell people that for our 22nd anniversary, my husband took me to Paris, where my son threw us a party.

Busted

More indications, if only my husband weren't the trusting sort, that I am obviously running around on him. I turned up in an unexpected place. Sort of.

Two days ago, as hubby was bringing in the mail, he asked, "Have you been in Westwego recently?"

I tried to recollect if I had ever been in Westwego, or if I could even find Westwego on a map, as hubby handed me a letter from the Westwego Photo Enforcement Program, which oddly enough, had an address in Arizona. Enclosed was a notice that stated in part, "As you can see from the photos to the right, a vehicle registered in your name and described below has been photographed exceeding the posted speed limit."

The vehicle "described below" was my Ford Mustang. As I could "see from the photos to the right", the vehicle exceeding the speed limit was a silver Dodge Stratus. One would think that an inability to tell a Ford Mustang from a Dodge Stratus would disqualify one from working for the Photo Enforcement Program, but stranger hires have been known to happen. Ask me about my experiences with the Ochsner Clinic billing department for examples.

I could see how the mistake was made. The number on the license plate was indeed mine. The number on the plate was mine, but the plate itself wasn't. My license plate has been issued by the state of Louisiana, and a more than cursory glance at the Stratus revealed that its license plate was issued by Mississippi. I could tell because the word "Jackson" was written across the bottom of the plate. In Mississippi, they put the name of the county in which a plate was issued on it. In Louisiana, we don't even have counties. The license plate on the Stratus also had a picture of a lighthouse on it, like the Biloxi lighthouse. In Louisiana, we have pelicans, but only on the newer plates. Old ones, like mine, are plain.

What with Arizona being an hour behind us, I was able to call right before the office closed and talk with a nice woman named Peggy about how Ford does not make a Stratus. She got my phone number and said she would talk to someone at the help desk and see what they had to say.

The next day, as I was grousing to my co-workers, (the very same co-workers who saw me in the office on the day I was supposedly speeding through Westwego) Peggy called. The citation against me had been voided, and called for no further action on my part. This is good, since now I don't have to find my way to the courthouse in Westwego to plead my case. I can just imagine getting lost, speeding to get there on time, and getting a ticket for real. That would be embarrassing.