Little Gems of Joy AKA Nothing Happens to Me.
At the beginning
of the first episode of BBC’s Sherlock Watson’s
psychiatrist tells him that writing a blog about everything that happens to him
will help him. ‘Nothing happens to me,’ he tells her. This is very much how I
feel. Nothing happens to me.
Yet I cannot
lie; my life is punctuated with little gems of joy.
For example,
Shelley invites me to dinner at her house in Deep River one Saturday and I use
the trek up the valley as an excuse to do some power visiting. I stop in at Tim’s
and spend over an hour sitting with my regular coffee group reveling in the fact
that I didn't tell them I was coming and they are still meeting at the same
corner table at the same time, in the fact that they are happy to see me and
apparently don’t mind at all that I am interrupting their normal routines by
appearing and dominating the conversation at first, in the fact that I don’t
interrupt their normal routines overmuch and after a while they forget that I
am there and return to chatting about the minutiae of their daily lives as
always. I have a couple chores to do in town and everywhere I go I bump into
people I know. It is almost Christmas and all of them stop to chat for a minute
or two. The familiarly of it is bitter sweet. I drop in unannounced and have
tea with Catherine and sit and talk with her for hours and then drop in
unannounced and have tea again with Suzanne and her family. At Shelley’s her
son Nick cooks supper for us and then disappears off to wherever it is that
teens disappear to in Deep River and Shelley and I chat for hours. The illusion
that I am still living here is so strong that I almost forget I have made the
mistake of moving away.
For example, on my oldest son’s, birthday, another of my sons arranges a wing night out
in Ottawa. I invite Geoff to join us and he picks me up in Arnprior and drives
me into the city. We all meet at Fred and Laura’s place and walk from there
down into the market, the first flakes of winter snow falling gently down
creating, along with the Christmas lights that are already out, a friendly
festive atmosphere. It is a lovely evening, relaxed and stress free, full of a good
food and good beer and good company. We feel, to me, like a normal family, perhaps
more so even than we did when we were all living together. I had business to discuss with Geoff and had
intended to talk with him about it on the drive back to Arnprior but in the end
it had been such a lovely interlude that I couldn’t bear to bring up anything
that might be controversial, risk wrecking the affability of it all, and so I
let it lie.
For example, most
weekends I turn on my computer for an hour or two to catch up on my e-mail and usually
end up chatting with one or more of my sons for most of that time. The easy
familiar conversations that I have with them, the ongoing dialogues about both
the trivial and the critical aspects of their days, are one of the highlights
of my week. Part of me would have liked to keep my kids under my own roof
forever, to be aware, merely due to proximity, of the details of their daily
lives, but now that they are grown and gone everything they choose to share has
its own shade of preciousness that would be impossible to explain to anyone
else who does not have adult children.
For example, I
love the house that I am living in and the open view that I have on three sides
of my house. The forever subtlety changing colours of the water/ice/hills/sun/moon/sky
fills me with more pleasure than I can easily express. Sometimes I get up early
and lie on the couch wrapped in a sleeping bag and fall asleep again watching
the sunrise. Sometimes I bring my computer to my spot by the window to
watch TV while eating supper but have it sit unheeded as I watch
nature’s show instead, a storm blowing in, or the bay freezing over, or even
merely the sky washing itself with a glorious range of colours as the light slowly fades in the evening and the
two lighthouses I can see from my front window start to blink off in the
distance.
For example,
though I sometimes find it a little lonely living on my own, part of me also
likes the abandon with which I can set my schedule. I can get up when I want
to, eat when I want to, listen to the CBC to my heart’s content.These may seem
like insignificant details, and I do not dispute that life would be richer were
I living with a partner, but, as a woman/mother programmed to put everyone else’s
happiness before my own, to not restricted, at all, by another’s schedule does
have a certain freedom to it which cannot be denied.
For example, I
love the fact that I am living close enough to two of my children that I can pop
into the city to have supper with them, even when there is no occasion, or have
them phone me up and ask if they can drop by and have supper with me.
I even like my job
enough, that, were I hypothetically given the choice to move back to Deep River
- which will never happen – I don’t know if I would take it.
So, though nothing
happens in my life, though, like Watson before he met Sherlock, there is
nothing to write about, I am muddling by. And there are little gems of joy. It
is not good enough forever, not by a long stretch. But it is good enough for
now.
