It poured last night, just poured. It started raining as Elsa, and I did our before-bed walk. We raced home. Elsa does not like rain. I meant to get my yoga stuff off the line, but I forgot. There was nothing I could do by the time I got home. It was a hard one that soaked everything in the first few minutes.
It doesn't usually rain continuously here. We may have hard rain for an hour, but that's it. I knew from the sound of the rain that this was an all-nighter. I have no idea what I heard that made me know that, but I was right. As I lay in bed, I thought, "I'm not going to church in the morning." Going to church would have meant having to sit through mass, being cold and wet. I remembered my mom's comment when I was reluctant to go out in the rain, "You're not made out of sugar; you won't melt." I lay there, thinking she was wrong.
When I got up around 8 am, Elsa and I went out for a walk. It wasn't raining, but the cloud cover was dense. We didn't go too far before I heard the rain and then felt a few drops. Elsa was as anxious to get home as I was. As we ran back, I could hear the rain falling, but it didn't seem to be falling on me at the same rate. I actually looked around to see if what I was hearing was only water falling out of the trees. There weren't enough trees or any close enough to explain what I was hearing. I saw a few drops on my sweatshirt sleeve.
Judy had written me that she wasn't going to church. She had another kidney stone attack, had taken some painkillers, and gone to bed.
I called E. telling him I wasn't going to church, and he could send up K. whenever. Then I lay down to do some reading. While I had a sweatshirt on, I was only wearing shorts, and my legs were bare. I didn't throw the blanket over me, and I could feel the cool, damp air on my skin. I remembered nap time at camp on those cold, raining days in August in Upstate New York. Our camp was on lake Otsego outside of Cooperstown, NY, where the baseball museum is. Camps provided me with some of the best times of my childhood.
Those days camp was an eight-week affair. School closed at the end of June, and within days we were off. We traveled by train and then bus. We all assembled on one of the balconies at Grand Central Station, excited to see our friends again. I know we were there by the four of July because I remember celebrating it there every summer. Every kid had their own wooden "boat' with a candle set in it. These were launched on the lake on the evening of the Fourth. It was a lovely sight, but as I write this now, I have several questions. I think we all made our own boats. How did we all get that done in time? And, of course, what happened to all those floating candles and their wooden 'boats'? Did we pollute? Probably. It was the early 50s. Who thought about things like that at the time?
I remember the first summer I went to camp, my parents were so nervous. Afterward, they told me that I quickly connected with the kids in my bunk, who I gathered with on that Grand Central Station balcony and ignored them. They were hurt. Parents! What are you going to do with them?
I had another one of those nightmares about Mike leaving me for another woman while I was napping. This time, he made it clear that he was leaving me for a gentler woman. I'm kind, but I don't think anyone would consider my demeanor soft. Again that reference to Mike, he told me to be gentle with a nurse in all his agony. I still want to report her for what she did. It made me furious.
E. had called while I was napping to ask if he could send K. up. I called him back. K. was able to read the stories we had been working on and one more. I don't want to push it too much because he is still reading word for word. I want to wait until he can read the first two stories fluently before I move ahead.
I called his mom to update her. She told me that all the roads were closed on her side of the island because of fallen trees. Also, Saddle Road, which cuts across the island through the valley created by two mountains, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, was closed because of flooding and debris. It was still raining; it looks like E. and K. will be here for a few days longer than expected.
I called Karin because I found another runner I hadn't shown her. She was in a movie. I called Shivani; she had a friend over and would call back when she left. When Shivani called back, she picked out several items. She loved the stuff and took a lot of it. Yeah.
K. and E. came up. I had E. work with K. to train him to follow up on my work. He read three of the Carpenter stories with him. Then I started on "Danny and the Dinosaur and the New Puppy, a Harper "I Can Read!" level 1 book. I had him read the words he could, waiting to see if he needed my help. Words of more than one syllable, I just gave him. I guided him to decode words of one syllable with any phonetic regularity without digraphs or silent letters. Words with some phonetic surprises, I pronounced all the phonemes and gave him a chance to blend them. I could give him up to five phonemes at once, and he blended those to get the word correctly.
After they left, I got to work on the remaining lines, things like napkins and towels. There are linens items four feet long and eighteen inches wide with embroidered initials. What in God's name are these? I called Dorothy; she knows everything. She suggested they are bath towels. Talk about nonabsorbent. She said they couldn't be dish towels, which is what I thought they might be, because my father's family would never have done their own dishes. They had servants for that and wouldn't put embroidered towels in the kitchen. Maybe their big hand towels. I also found some unidentifiable initials. I found a G.R. and an F. something that looked like a P; neither of us had any idea who these people might have been. The one sure thing is they are all dead now.
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Musings:
I heard a discussion on what makes for good marriages on NPR. Research shows that people who complain more have better marriages. My guess is there is a difference in how people complain and how partners respond to those complaints.
If someone says they are not comfortable with what the other person is doing, that's one thing. However, if they are just constant complainers, complaining about their general dissatisfaction, or presenting their complaints as accusations, that's another thing. I can't see how a character attack is going to be well received.
The value of complaining also depends on how the partner responds. There are three ways of responding: Shrugging off, or even better, laughing off, their partner's complaints. There's nothing that beats being totally ignored. The second is an automatic surrender and just suffering in silence. The third is the winner. The partners work out their differences and find a solution that is most comfortable for each of them.
This is NOT compromising. The term compromise suggests that both people give something up, sacrifice. I prefer the idea of co-creating. In co-creation, a unique solution is found. It is something that neither party may have considered and may contain elements of both partners' original expressed needs. It's a surprise.
Co-creating entails trusting your partner to have your best interests at heart as well as their own. It also involves a willingness to explore the unfamiliar.
I have found that I get more than I had ever hoped for in the process of co-creating. It rarely backfired. I'm sure it sometimes did, like when Mike and I toured Ireland in 1976. Oh, yeah. That wasn't a co-creation. I just did what Mike wanted without expressing my needs.
I must confess there were times I did things where I didn't clearly understand how it would benefit me, like moving to Princeton, NJ, to be closer to his young son. I remember feeling that this was something we had to do. I wanted this for him and Damon. I'm not sure you can call it unselfish. It felt like my need. By the way, it wound up being wonderful for me.
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