Augie Dog and I were sharing an early autumn breakfast; his was toast, mine was eggs, salmon and mushrooms on English muffin with a lovely mug of tea, when through the open bedroom door a sleeping Mr FD could be heard declaring:
“Glorious! Victorious!”
Only in his dreams.
Copyright. Doesn’t the word just fill you with joy and enthusiasm?
Now, imagine an entire day spent listening to someone drone the Australian copyright laws at you. Hours and hours of … you can use downloaded music for the classroom but you can’t use it for a school competition, you can make a copy of an out of print book, but not if there are other editions available, all those, what I call the i before e exception to the rule, rules.
Add to that a table companion who sniffled and snuffled all through the day, and who had the temerity to exhale her hot germy breath all over me so that within the prescribed 72 hours I had a sore throat and runny nose to the point that I couldn’t spend time with my grand daughter this weekend (Petit Fille is 12 weeks today!)
So, the very next time someone says to me, “It must be wonderful to be a librarian and have all those books to read!” as though I sit in my office with my feet on my desk reading every volume in the collection all day, every day, I may just move those feet off the desk top and land them where the sun don’t shine.
Mr FD was deep into his snoring and snorting sleep rhythm when he muttered, “Blood. What is that up there?”
Then all I could do was lie in the dark and think of brain splatter.
forest reading: kate endle
What is your greatest fear?
I have so many fears, where do I start? Fear of heights, of snakes, lizards and frogs. Fear of failure. Fear that I will be found out, fear that someone will realise I am just bluffing my way through life (Not a real goddess? Who knew!)
Fear that something will happen to those I love. Now a fear that my grand daughter won’t have the life we all wish for her.
Fear that Tony Abbott will almost certainly win the next election.
Fear that I will develop dementia like both my parents. Fear that I will be a burden to my children. Fear that I may go blind.
Fear that I may have to work until I drop by the side of the road.
Fear that we will never learn that conflict and war produces no winners. Fear that we will continue to abuse the planet we live on, and each other.
Fear that we really will have Charles as our King one day. All hail Queen Camilla!
Fear that there may be a blight on tea crops and my favourite beverage will become scarce instead of plentiful.
Fear that my stick will snap.
Fear that I may develop even more fears.
I could go on, but I fear I will drive you away… What is your greatest fear? Are you frightened that you might wear two different coloured shoes at the same time?
No one tells you that one day you are going to walk through a door and life as your know will cease to exist. If they had there is a good chance I may have chosen to not open that door to find my husband in bed with his best friend, and I may have not accepted the job that my husband’s best friend had offered me two years before and that obviously I had to leave after finding the two in a naked romp in our marital bed.
Did I mention that my husband’s best friend was named Douglas? Douglas, not in the way Americans name their daughters Sydney which is a boy’s name everywhere else in the world, and even a city in Australia, but used as a girl’s name in the good old USA, the land where anything is possible. Douglas as in a six foot, dark haired male Adonis that every female in the world swooned over, and now, as I was shortly after informed by my husband, was the love of his life.
“Our marriage was a mistake” he said, already putting it and me into the past.
Mistake – muh-staky. Noun. 1. Incorrect idea or opinion; thing incorrectly done or thought. 2. Error of judgment. Verb. Choose wrongly; in error.
“I was mistaken”.
Mistaken / muh-stay-kuhn. Adjective. 1. Wrong in opinion or judgement
I had been called a mistake once before in my life. My mother had met up with a friend that she hadn’t seen for many years one day when we were shopping and she descried me as her “happy little mistake”. At the time, being only seven I wasn’t sure what she meant, but as she rubbed the back of my neck as she spoke as she always did when she was being affectionate I somehow managed to understand that it, or rather I, was not considered a bad thing. Later, as I grew I understood the meaning more, especially when the large age gaps between myself and older brother and sister drew understanding. I had been unplanned, my birth a “happy mistake”, but my mother never stood in front of me naked and told me she would prefer never to see me again.
It was all one long out of body experience after that. I walked out the front door, then walked back in, only to see my husband being embraced by Douglas as if he was the one that just had his heart ripped from his chest like one of those actors in some B grade sci-fi movie that are always on at two in the morning when you can’t sleep and the only alternative is the shopping channel and you know that you don’t have the strength to resist buying some over priced magic dusting rag that you would never use anyway and so you watch the damn alien hand slice into someone’s chest and draw out the heart, squishing it between greedy fingers.
I digress, if such a thing is possible when your life becomes a B grade movie in its own right.
I walked back in and spoke to Douglas. He had shorts on now. Why was I feeling embarrassed when he was the one cavorting naked in my bed with my husband? “I want the keys to your cabin.” Douglas owned a cabin surrounded by trees on the side of some lake I had never remembered the name of. “You can have my husband if you give me your cabin.” Somewhat of a successful high flyer Douglas had more to lose then I did, I just had husband who made a mistake, and so a cabin to silence me would be a cheap payment.
“The keys are on my car key ring” Douglas replied gesturing to where his trousers lay on the floor.
If he thought I was going to rummage through his pockets as if searching for loose change he was crazy. I put my hand out and waited for him to retrieve the key from the key ring and place it in my waiting palm. If his hand had touched mine he would have felt my hand starting to sweat. It was quite possible that at any moment I was going to hyperventilate due to a panic attack.
“You two get out of here while I pack my things. Then I never want to see either of you again.”
They didn’t argue. I would like to think that they had the decency to know that I needed peace and solitude to work through the bomb blast that had just blown my fairy tale life to smithereens, but even then I knew that they just wanted down with me and in the easiest way possible.
I waited until I heard the car turn out of the drive and into the street before I screamed abuse at their retreating backs.
Anguish /ˈaNGgwiSH/ Noun. 1. excruciating of agonising pain of either body of mind, acute suffering or distress: the anguish of grief. 2. to affect with or suffer anguish.
Synonyms. Noun. agony – pain – torment – distress – torture – misery
Verb. agonise
It helps to have a sister who is a lawyer. Whilst not a divorce lawyer, sister knew lawyers who knew lawyers and so within days the divorce ball was rolling. I really didn’t have to see the husband ever again if I chose not to, and I certainly chose not too.
Not surprisingly it took me more than a night to pack my things. In fact, that first night I did nothing constructive, well not from a moving sense anyway. A therapist might have considered what I did as very constructive. After I exhausted my lungs and made my throat raw screaming abuse at the back of the closed double front door (did the size of the door mean I could vent more anger? It was a very large double panel door; maybe that symbolised a door for each betrayer) I saw in the hall mirror that my eyes were puffy and I had produced a red rosacea nose that needed wiping. I cried ugly obviously, but hey there was no one here to see so who gave a damn?
If my life had been a chick lit book at that moment I would have opened a bottle of the husband’s finest and drank myself into delirium, except it wasn’t a chick lit book, and I don’t really drink. Well, just a glass or two. One glass makes me happy and I laugh and laugh; the second glass sends me to sleep. A two pot screamer in the old language. Instead I made a pot of tea and sat in the kitchen in my pyjamas and just tried to breathe.
“The nose of the Bulldog has been slanted backwards so that he can breathe without letting go.” Winston Churchill.
The next day, after I sobbed on the phone to my sister, my brother, but not my parents, my siblings roared into revenge and sorted my life out. My sister organised a lawyer for me. My brother called a removalist. The house would be divided between us, but the contents were going with me, it seems. Professionals neatly and with great care packed my life into a number of cardboard boxes which they then deposited into a long moving van and drove to their storage warehouse until I summoned them to reverse their task and unpack the boxes to fit into my new life.
New life.
That was going to be the not so easy bit; mainly because I had to do that for myself. A tiny weeny bit impossible when all I wanted to do was sit in the corner of the room. The tea cup clutched in my hand was the only thing stopping me from curling up into the foetal position permanently.
For ever and ever amen.
No husband, no marriage, no home, no job. All I needed was a fatal disease and I would have the jackpot.
In the cold light of morning I realised that going to Douglas’ cabin was maybe not the best place to lick my wounds and blossom as an unemployed divorcee. The idea of a house in the woods on a lake still sounded right though. Somewhere where I didn’t know anyone and they didn’t know me. No questions, no replies required, no stares or knowing looks behind my back. I could be Eden the woman who lives in the cabin on the edge of the forest near the lake and not the ex-Mrs husband who had been too blind to see what was happening right in front of her face until it was lying naked before her.
So, the only thing I did for myself in those first few days was to phone a realtor and locate a cabin of my own. I mentally christened it Lake Woebegotten and loading my Honda Civic to the roof with basic necessities I headed out of town and into what was to be…
I got lost on the way. It was the sat nav’s fault. Recent road works had change onramps and off ramps and so female voice giving the direction kept recalculating until in the end I stopped to buy fuel and a map. Recalculating. If only I could recalculate the last fourteen years of my life. B.H. Before Husband.
“Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid… well, they’ve started to give me a little pang or something – not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret… I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: “I’m sorry, I’ve let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.” ― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
Young colleague who is hearing impaired (challenged is perhaps the better term, hearing challenged) has just received new hearing aids. After they were fitted she went to the bathroom. While in there she heard a noise and became very concerned that there was a leaking pipe somewhere, or rather a gushing pipe.
Slowly the realisation dawned that it was the sound of her own urinating!
On the trip home with her partner she was describing how different everything sounded, including his voice when she heard a noise which she thought signalled car problems.
“It is just the air conditioning” he replied.
“Well, I don’t like it!” she declared.
We don’t realise how much we “blank” out of our everyday life do we?
This year I not only got to celebrate mother’s day, but I also celebrated my first “grandmother’s day”!
And yes, she would ask me such a question! And yes, I would answer just like that!
bomb shelter – yes sex sells even mutual self destruction!
hot dog for lunch?
waiter, there’s a cat in my soup?
I am so over this whole responsible adult person role that I have been playing for way too long. I really do think I have been typecast and it is time for the damn second act to allow me a little of improvisation.
Don’t you just get fed up to the eye teeth with the alarm ringing, roll out of bed at 5 am every weekday to climb over the sleeping dog and kick your toe on the way to the bedroom start to the day?
Not to mention, but I am, the deciding of which costume to wear to perfect the character that you need to be that day . Am I professional take me serious woman; learning is fun teacher; reading is not a bore librarian, I have my own style and refuse to be a stereotype and yes I can wear pearls with everything if I want to individual, or my brain has gone on a long beach holiday in a foreign country and left my true identity in control and that is not good I anyone’s book boomer?
What to wear versus what is ironed/clean or fits me. Then lunch…sandwich or wrap, salad or frozen meal? A can of tuna… Onto the highway and its more of that get out of my way I may just drive over the top of you but the thought that it might damage my car and cause me more inconvenience (going to jail will do that, inconvenience, I mean) and why are you all passing me when I am exactly on the top legal speed (my cruise control confirms it) commutes that leave me way to much time to contemplate my wretched condition and as I drive 40 minutes each day I am tired of all my recorded music and the radio is driving me mad with their depressing news and information or inane breakfast shows.
A day of lamenting that parents don’t teach their kids respect or responsibility, or much of anything any more. Kids shouting their rights to you but never considering that maybe you have rights too. A life of buckling under management teams that all seem to be bad copies of each other – all inept, deaf, blind and dumb in the sense that they always have to take to road to nowhere and expect you to sing happy songs as they throw you off the cliff and point fingers at you.
Years of people making promises to fix the washing machine on Wednesday but to call on Thursday and say they can’t make it for two weeks and then still now show up and a world where everyone is willing to critique your performance, your life, your actions, but never stop to self-reflect at all. People in glass houses shouldn’t stand up in the bath, matey.
No suitable ending in sight, except the big light calling, calling, and to some that is no ending at all. Life’s a shit and then you die. Nobody cares, nobody dares, off we go again.
Yes, Friday and not enough weekend ahead to do anything to change my mood, my life, my chances. Drink will rot my liver, pills make the head hurt, chocolate goes to the hips and everywhere else. I long to lie in green fields but the fire ants would bite, the snakes would slither and bite as well no doubt and the crows would pick over what was left.
Turn off the clocks, shut all the factories, stuff the children in the closet. Let’s go to the faraway place where we always expected to be. Burn the bridges behind. I’ll boil the kettle you can get the teacups from the cupboard in the corner. Then sit down, drink your tea and shut up or I swear I will hit you with my stick. I swear I will.
It is not as if Mr FD has been silent in his sleep, it is just that most of it is unprintable!
Last night I heard Mr FD muttering in his sleep “I just frown at it, that’s what I do, just frown at it!”
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