NO REASON TO GET EXCITED

No Reason to Get Excited

The sky was, to these color blinded eyes, a powdered baby blue; the air was nippy and J. was remarking that for all of the Fall-like weather there were hardly any colors in the leaves.  “They’re either green or on the ground brown and crackling. I think it was because of all that rain.”  “Is it that,” I asked, “or was it the lack of a lot of heat this summer?” I hoped my  ignorance of meteorological affairs was not too obvious.

“Either or, it’s not important except that we hardly had any time to enjoy a high fall filled with the reds and oranges of the season. Usually by this time there is a tree in the back of my mom’s house that has blazing red leaves but today there is nothing but a skeleton against the sky and a heap of leaves needing to be raked”.

“Yeah, one of the things I did not have to do for the past two years was rake the leaves. One of the advantages of apartment living.  Last week I found myself blowing leaves all afternoon until my arthritic thumb started to ache.  Sobriety awarded me my return home, but sometimes you have be careful about what you wish for,” I mused.

And as an afterthought J. mentioned that he could not obtain a hard copy of the CT. CDL Driver’s handbook and asked at the DMV for one. They told him that he could download it from the internet. J was flummoxed when he asked them, rhetorically apparently, “what do you do if you haven’t got a computer and internet access?”  They were not amused!

So I volunteered to let him download and burn a copy of the handbook for him to get printed at Staples or Kinko’s or someplace like that.  Which he was terribly grateful for and when he arrived I realized that he might need a CDL physical exam and I volunteered as a gesture to give one to him.

In the rooms you always will meet people who come from circumstances that are worse than yours and  J.’s was certainly like that.  Crazy girlfriend, difficult family, hard to find work in this economy, not a great skill set that I’m aware of except that he is willing, and clever and a hard worker and from what I can tell a nice guy. He first dropped into the rooms ninety plus days ago having just returned to the area from being out of state. He said that he finally wanted to get sober. Again. For the umpteenth time. But this time he was the most serious.

And unlike many chronic recidivists whom I’ve met in the rooms, I believed him. And to this date I had no reason not to continue that belief. For he immediately took on one, two maybe three commitments and he never slacked. What he said he would do he did. He came early and left late.  

And he would help you out if you needed it… And I did when the time came for me to move back home. He was there willing and able to help with the furniture and the packing of the truck.  And I swear, that without his genius of placing each chair and table and each lamp and bed stand just in the right place, I am sure that I would not have been able to fit my small apartment of things into the grossly underestimated size of the truck that I rented.  “I’ve done this more times than I care to count, so I’ve become quite the expert at this,” J. said with no hint of gloating.  Just that sound of sure confidence that experience brings when you know what you are doing.

So I don’t know what I was expecting when I finally got home to living in a large house and had to start sharing a life again with another person.  Because I have been thinking that my wife has been finding any circumstance to pick a fight with me over the most picayune  reason.  Whose knives are we going to use in the kitchen.  Can we settle on the pots and pans. “I don’t know if I want you to put your TV in the living room”. 

How can I tell her that the bedspread that she has been using for the past four or five years is the most hideous thing I have ever seen and I would rather we burn it before I have to sleep under it….  And today I find my ginger taken out of the refrigerator and placed in a cupboard. And I am practically gritting my teeth thinking how this will dry out the ginger as I count to one hundred.

And I am reading this litany and thinking of the scene from the “Fantastiks” between the two fathers and the upshot is “You’re -  standing – in – my - kumquats!!!!”

Meaning, I am complaining about such frivolous things when there are so many issues of greater import to concentrate on why am I wasting gigabytes of memory on this junk?

Or the AA equivalent which is why do I allow such idiotic stuff take up space in my head rent free? For it is now becoming clear that my feelings of discomfort at home have nothing to do with my wife and everything to do with me and how I am perceiving my adaptation to my move back home.  What, after all, am I complaining about?

It’s only been a month. I took years to screw the relationship up. It’s going to take awhile to mend some of the rents I tore in the fabric of our marriage.  And after all, don’t other people have things that are by far worse off than I have them?

I mean things have not been so happy on my wife’s side of the family of late with two contemporary cousins, one dying of sudden mysterious causes and another whose husband suddenly died.  There are things in this life I need to step back to reconsider  in the greater scheme of things.

Like that CDL physical that I so freely gave to J. It happened to be serendipitous.

It won’t get him his driver’s license but I did find a suspicious mass in his groin. Which along with the nodes in his neck made me send him to the hospital for a further evaluation.

Against the sure diagnosis of lymphoma, my problems are high class and surely forgettable or at least postpone able.  For in the greater scheme of things, life, so far, has not dealt me the worst hand in the deck.  There is plenty of time for me to reconsider my life and how I react to it.

Then I can begin to see the true colors of the day, soak them in, breathe them and thank my higher power that I am alive to appreciate the blues, the yellows and the reds and not dwell upon the notion that my colorblindness reveals those colors differently to me than they appear to the rest of the world.

© res 10/17/2011