Dating Episode 0.1 [Summer 2007]: Window Shopping from a Fishbowl

Lil and I were sitting in her SUV outside a senior’s home after grieving group. “OH MY GOD!!! I can’t believe he said that.” We giddily scrolled through replies on her phone. She had posted an ad on an online dating service a week or so before. She’d had a few winks, and some brief conversation, and was now exchanging innuendo-laden phone calls and text messages with a young divorce in a somewhat-distant suburb. I was pretty sure texting was too sophisticated for my cheapass phone.

“I’m sure Dan is thinking, ‘who is this woman?’” Lil said of her late husband. An introvert, she’d been married many years, contented, devoted, a good Mom.

There was no picture in her ad, and she was fierce about keeping her intentions from her teenagers. It’s the neighborhood pool, she said. There is so much gossip – I just know they would make mincemeat of me. I hear about everyone else, so I know…

But we were totally high on it. It seemed a little scandalous: me, feeling still married, and with a 3-year-old, with an estate to handle -- I could flirt? Then again, I’d just selected a fragrance. Could I really do it? Was I ready?

“Why can’t you go online and browse? It’s free and it really gets you revved up. You can at least see what is out there. That’s how I got started.”

It seemed possible. “Well, I do like shopping online… I suppose it can’t be that bad.”

I started on Plenty of Fish. My, there were a lot of men out there. Several of them might have been incarcerated… they’d say they were "on assignment" and would return to the area in 18 months. But you could search the database using all kinds of screens… marriage status, age. Many were clearly older than they said. Probably one-third had photos they’d taken with their phone held out at arm’s length. Or in the bathroom mirror. Shirtless. They were not hot. The literacy level on POF was low.

“It’s like window shopping at Wal-Mart," I told Lil. “But even Wal-Mart has some good things if you look hard enough.”

I decided to post my own ad. Who was I? More importantly, who was I not? I didn’t want to have to screen out too many guys who’d hate me. There were thousands of men there.

A direct approach would suit my brand: “Wiseass brainiac widow, 41, with one kid, seeks coffee and conversation. About me: No one thinks I'm boring and I am not fat. My kid insists I'm silly, although most people don't get my jokes. Please tell me that you read real books and aren't into smoking or drugs... I'm not overly concerned about politics and I love to dance.”

My pseudonym would be "Lynnette" (The result of my taking a “Which ‘desperate housewife’ are you?” quiz).

I had dipped one toe in. How deep could it get??

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What I Threw Out, When

It's amazing how much emotion is bound up with the stuff. One day I summarized in response to this common question, on a bulletin board:

When did you get rid of stuff?

• His clothes -- I tossed most within a few weeks. He cherished his chinos, but I was sure this was the last thing he'd care about.
  
• Clothes, the rest of them -- 2 years
• The clothes he went to the hospital in, the last time -- just recently (I had hidden them).
• Toiletries from in medicine chest -- 3 months.
• Toiletries, rest of them -- 1.5 years
• Jovan Musk -- stayed in cabinet for 2 years
• Prescription opiates, hypodermics -- 2.5 years
  
• Books -- I started to sell them after a few months, but then, he'd promised me he'd winnow them down already. I've done this slowly, emotionally, in tiers. At last, at 2.5 years, I can see them by their cash value (But I am writing down the names of all his books, preserving the information as part of his artwork/legacy).
• Furniture of his that I never liked -- 2 years.
• His car which didn't work at all but I was paying the insurance -- 2 years.
• His art materials -- starting to, 2.5 years out.
• Junk in the basement (unmarked toxic liquids, odd bits of wire) -- starting to, 2.5 years out.
• His tools -- starting to, 2.5 years out. Amazing that he fancied himself handy at all. Look at this house! Argh!!!
• His stuff in the attic -- god knows if I will do it even when we move.
• His family photos -- trying to get the good ones scanned so I can throw them out. (40 or so oversize albums of his mother’s – she died two years after he did).

Most of the house looks the same, but there is a lot of unused stuff, boxes, things “on the way out.” Sorting takes me forever. I suppose trying to hang onto someone's spirit will encourage anyone's packrat tendencies, but in me those are strong to begin with. Gavin was neat, but he’s not here. I suppose it's partly my hostility. He'd be appalled at how much stuff I (excuse me? He!) saved. (Mr. Fresh is neat too, but doesn’t care much about stuff).

Each week when I was on leave I bring home half dozen office boxes and feel productive (the "library" still has a wall of filled labeled boxes). I deducted more than $1200 in $250 increments in each of 2006, 2007, and 2008.

The hospice social worker advised me to keep a t-shirt or something to remember his smell; I did but I can’t remember using it and tossed it at about a year.

As far as emotions, seeing his things around casually has been helpful for grieving and okay for my young child. However, I'm glad I took his voice off the answering machine (after about a week). I'm finally feeling ready to take his name off the phone bills so that I can appear on caller ID.

My situation may be a little unusual because he was an artist, and I will have a bunch of his artwork forever, for our daughter. Even better, 98% of it is in collections and loved all over town. This makes it easier to NOT treat his “sensitive” toothpaste as a “legacy,” but that crap did stay on the sink for a loooong time.

But basically -- seeing these objects categorized and written down reminds me that it's just stuff.

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Snowbservations

Can I just say how much I appreciate the poem that arrived with today's update on trash collection from county Solid Waste Services?

Let the old snow be covered with the new:
The trampled snow, so soiled, and stained, and sodden.
Let it be hidden wholly from our view
By pure white flakes, all trackless and untrodden.
When Winter dies, low at the sweet Spring's feet
Let him be mantled in a clean, white sheet.

Let the old life be covered by the new:
The old past life so full of sad mistakes,
Let it be wholly hidden from the view
By deeds as white and silent as snow-flakes.

Ere this earth life melts in the eternal Spring
Let the white mantle of repentance fling
Soft drapery about it, fold on fold,
Even as the new snow covers up the old.

— "A March Snow", Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The last one they sent was Robert Frost, but still appreciated given the context. This one is actually kinda apt. Thank you, trash man! (Trash communications woman?)



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The Backbeat in the February Funk

After September 11, we all expected each other to be flaky, emotional, to have trouble sleeping, to be inappropriately open, to reorder our priorities, to acknowledge the world was breaking up around us. It was a major disruption and public.

What's different now? Why is everyone cranky and thinks it's "them?" How could it be "you" when things are falling apart?

We were glued to the TV, to the recaps of the buildings as they crashed and evaporated. We were filled with denial -- I remember the posters, "missing person," over all the lampposts. It was baffling and external.

And now for months I've been staring at the ^DJI, down, down. Back in time, back to 1997 now. Before Gavin's first "death." Before 2001. Before the dot.com bust and reboom. We're drowning in tales of people cutting more than corners, of abandoned pets and homes, of seniors ruined by Madoff. Some assisted living facilities are offering that you can have a roommate now. I'm so glad I'm not close to retirement. I'm so glad Mr. Fresh's parents were scared early on. I'm glad I have a cheap house and I'm so, so happy to not be alone.

Yes, I'm in a seasonal funk, and I'm still grieving, and I do hit that special widow dramatic spot of "why me?" when I get low. Add that to numerous real issues in my personal bit of the world and this is a challenging time for me.

I remember September 11 feeling unbelievable and totally real at the same time -- a lot of us said "surreal."

But this crisis is just plain real. Many of us, at least in my town, only cracked open our clenched eyes two weeks ago and we are all feeling it. Hell, I think the concrete feels it.

Why aren't we all giving each other room to be grumpety-grumps? (Why aren't we all considered heroes for showing up and soldiering on, as we were on September 12?).

Maybe we all feel we are partially to blame, even those of us who can say we didn't benefit from the boom. We were still living in the dream world. I heard a story about someone who went to jail for an alleged sexcrime and said he hadn't fought harder in court because of his Catholic guilt over having sex at all. Do we all have something like that going on?


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I did not laugh

He was probably 8 or 9 years old, in line at the grill outside the lodge.

"Wow! Dad, 7 inches -- that's a really long hot dog, isn't it??? I mean, it's like (holding hands some distance apart)."

"Yes, son, that is really long."

"I'm going to get that! I'll bet it's the biggest hot dog I've ever seen!"

"I'm sure it is, son.... Yes, ma'am, one hot dog, one beef, and two Dr. Peppers, please."

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I HATE FEBRUARY.

I shouldn’t, my daughter’s birthday is in February, and I am usually on the upswing by Valentine’s Day, even when I haven’t been in love. I can understand why red signals prosperity for the Chinese – I love seeing those cupids and hearts everywhere, drugstore windows made me smile, and the candy!

Good things have happened in February: I moved here on Valentine’s Day 1989. Childbirth, Chinese New Year, and other explosions. The evenings lighten. I find daphne and camellia and hellebore surprises consistently.

But I spent one and a half days last week convinced I’d be fired Friday afternoon. It was a level of paranoia that I don’t think I’ve experienced … ever – although I think it was also based on some decent observations. And the truth is that since I got married and didn’t need the job so much – this is the first time in my adult life that I've not been the breadwinner – I have been phoning it in, at best. I can’t handle the detail in the kind of work I used to do, which they hired me for. I don’t have the patience for it, or the eyesight. I’m impatient and stupidly unafraid to show it. And I’m bored with doing it after 10 years and I don't fit this particular environment.

And the next tasks which they’ve trained me to do seem to antagonize someone important to a degree that I can’t imagine fighting, or winning, or accommodating and hugging into some great hippie happy ending.

Combine that with all the other things that sucked the past few weeks:
-- Mr. Fresh got a notice from IRS saying he owes $17K. He was super upset. While he has been blown away by my competence and ease at hiring a professional to do tough stuff, it's a stress on a new relationship, one that has had to hit the ground running.
-- Volunteer work for church has been haywire because I couldn’t get the data I need (just got ‘em; supposed to be done tomorrow; Good effin’ luck!)
-- I got angry at one of my NIMBY neighbors and he exaggerated our conversation to the point where the community association has called and asked if it’s true that I have giant plans to destroy the character of the neighborhood. I was provoking him, I’m mad at myself, and of course, I still want everyone to like me. (And no, this will not be what makes me rich, not in the next 10 years anyway).
-- I ran out of time to schedule an art thing that will be fun, but requires preparation, and now I have to do it this weekend.
-- We got an offer from the cab company that destroyed our front yard in September and the company is in bankruptcy. We may have to settle low.
-- We reserved honeymoon tickets, but then had to confront that they cost money.

And oh yes, the economy. Yeah, that. We didn’t want to notice, but the hammer keeps getting bigger every few weeks and those whacks are beginning to smart. On the Tuesday that the stimulus bill passed and the market tanked anyway, I told someone that I felt our whole town woke up and could see the vultures circling above. Did I mention Mr. Fresh was trained as an economist? He had been pretending along with the rest of us, sanguine, it will be limited. No more.

I am pretty sure someone put itching powder under my turtleneck two weeks ago and it’s still there. So in the hallway in my great anxiety I told a friend how I hate February and she said, “Isn’t that when Gavin died?”

Nope.

He died in June. But let me think of that February. 2006. It was effin’ hell. He was dying on the couch. I could see him receding from us. I was furious and trying all kinds of futile manifestations like taking him to a neurologist, vacation, church, anything. Anything! Let it make some difference! Let it HELP! HELP.

The insight is that this loss still connects to everything in my life. Nearly three years later, I’m not in active grieving, but find a thumbtack on my chair and my first thought will be “why me” all over again. All the pain, the anger, the position of widowing comes flooding back. I’m there again, not here, not married again and better, not mothering competently, not holding down a job. There, watching someone fade and flow away from me. Unable to do a fucking thing to stop it. So sad I could kill.

The rage that sent me crying after the argument with my neighbor. Crying in Mr. Fresh's shirt: “Why do those people care what I do with my property when they never did a goddamn thing to help us after Gavin died? They were all one block away and we could have died a dozen fucking times! And they couldn’t bring one fucking casserole?”

But it’s a lie, this position, my widow’s anger. (Though it is true that widows traditionally exploit their properties. That’s another kind of rage.) The fury that made me provoke a good neighbor who is actually one of the only people who helped out that year and a half when we were dying, Short Stack and I, and who put a gate in the fence so she could play in his kid’s treehouse.

Maybe it’s rightful rage – loss sucks – but like so much in my life, it’s been misdirected.

I still expect that ax to fall, and I am still angry. But I already saw one lawn full of purple crocus, and I can work on the resume. [I am so bad at ending on a hopeful note. Ack, February!!!!]


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Dating Episode 0 [Summer 2007]: My Elbow Was a Delicious Cake

We went around the circle in grieving group. What happened in your life this week? I was all a-giggle. “I BOUGHT PERFUME! Here smell this!” I oozed manically, extending my cleavage to Viv.

I’d never bought a perfume before. Sure, I used to wear sandalwood or musk oil, smearing it through my hair before martial arts class. But I’d always been skeptical that the marketplace could come up with a fragrance that really suited me, me, me, and it seemed that every perfume I tried smelled like my Grandma, mostly half-rotten lilies, at least on me.

I had lost a man. I had a child, a job, and a graduate degree. Maybe I could admit I was a woman in the marketplace – the perfume market at least. I could, I thought, settle on a single product, or two or five, and let go of my artists’ dream of inventing my perfect personal fragrance (which might take till after my death). Maturity meant dealing with reality and the limits of the mere 1,000 fragrances that are manufactured commercially. Enough perfectionism, let’s dance.

I asked girlfriends how they had selected:
“My friend who picks my haircolor told me what to buy… and ze men love it.”
“I’ve always worn White Shoulders, I don’t know why.”
“I had a hip aunt who wore this and I wanted to smell like her.”
“My grandmother told me Chanel means you’re classy.”

It was not useful and I was scared of the lilies. Then one week I sat so close to a cute Jewish lesbian at church that I joked I could smell her perfume. (Yes, it was a flirt, but given my state, she would know I was not serious). She said, oh, do you like it? She schooled me about the fragrance families. Yes, of course I like vanilla, musk, woods, spices. Must be an Oriental amber.

Tried several at the MegaBeauty on the way in to work each day. They were all so powdery – it was just wrong -- I am not a dry person in any sense of the word. Sniffed around and decided Oriental Spicy for sure.

Opium smelled fantastic at first but faded to a soft smell of Gillette shaving cream, definitely not what I was after. Went through 10 more, at least, many of which completely disintegrated on my skin.

But I fell in love with my own arm the first day of Versace Crystal Noir. “Oh man,” I told Emma, “I smell like a cake, HERE” – a vanilla cake made mostly of gardenias. Gavin and I had honeymooned in Oaxaca where they sold gardenias from the zocalo for a peso, there were always some in the room. Each day I stopped at the store and respritzed; I couldn’t stop sniffing the crook of my elbow. And it got better, peppery and floral with none of that old-lady lilyness I so abhor. Faded to something that was still seductive, even to myself. While I was sniffing I noticed, hmmmm… that arm tans rather beautifully, and has a little tone left in it… and oh the other one. Quel arm! Nice.

Sixty bucks later it was mine and I was its.

I’m pretty sure that was when I started to think of myself as a single woman and not so much as a widow. All of a sudden there were men in the streets, and in cars, and even in meetings with clients. They looked at me. I looked for empty ring fingers. (How strange to be on the make after 15 years.) Friends said, “you look great, have you lost weight?” and “what a great haircut.”

It would be another 5 or 6 months before I had my hands full of flesh, but now I was moving through air that had been charged. It wasn’t just the “aerial notes” and “headspace of gardenias” (with a touch of clove and vanilla) but those were a constant subconscious reminder of where I was and where I was headed, if slowly.

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More Winter Blah's

It's hard for me to convey just how much I hate this time of year.

Usually, though, Valentine's Day is the start of the off-ramp, the upswing. Even though the light's been gaining on us, a minute at a time, mid-February is when it begins to seem real, that spring might come.

Yes, there are still treasures: Mr. Fresh bought me some chocolates yesterday, thinking there were actual mushrooms in the "truffles." I asked him if he was joking, looking intently in each other's eyes, and I could not tell if he was. (He was serious).

And we are planning our honeymoon. In our own way, while we learn about each other and how to cope with the in's and out's of each other's routine weekend lowpoints.

The other night we were teasing each other and he said, "God, we are just like an old married couple." Me: "We are an old married couple. We just weren't married to each other most of that time."

So I'm still feeling down, and needing naps. It doesn't help that the economic situation seems to have sunk in a bit all around. Tuesday I felt everyone in town was finally seeing the buzzards circling above (no blame -- I have been looking steadfastly away too). And reading blogs of young widows and widowers, recapping their death experiences and their denials, hearing of their shocks, does not help (though finding comrades does). I dread looking at my analytics and seeing the downward bounce after being featured in BoingBoing (thanks, Gar). Sure, it was up 3217%.... that means it will soon be down 3216% too. I'm a silly blogger, a bad journal writer, and a mediocre worker overall.

But there's dark chocolate in the house, and a scuba honeymoon to look forward to. So, onward.


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