I went to bed late last night, after 11pm. I wasn’t tired. This was my second day of skipping the statin I’ve been on. Dorothy told me she refused to take them because they made her feel so lousy, tired with achy muscles. I felt weaker and somewhat subdued. Of course, I was on such a low dosage, half a pill of the lowest dose of the mildest medication. Nonetheless, I felt lousy. I felt like I was getting the flu. I didn’t go to Bikram or school last Thursday because I was concerned about making other people sick. I took to my sofa and slept for the whole day and then the entire night.
I was able to sleep well once I went to bed. I woke up at 8, thinking, OMG, I’m running late. Elsa and I went for a longish walk up the hill into a local subdivision. For some reason, haole koa doesn’t grow there. This is very weird. It grows everywhere; that tree will take over the island. However, in this subdivision, the undeveloped one-acre plots are wide-open fields without the cursed tree. I think they must look somewhat like the English moors.
When Elsa and I got home, it was 9 am already. I had to jump into the shower and get ready for Judy and Paulette’s pick up around 9:30 for my ride to church. I managed to get dressed in time, but I didn’t have time to do my MELT routine on my hands and feet.
Today, Judy told me that she tried placing a drop of Doterra’s lavender essential oil directly on her open nostrils. She said she fell asleep almost immediately. When it comes to sleep, all I have heard from Judy is how she has trouble sleeping. If this works, I know tons of people who could use this information. I’m not one of them. If I sleep any better than I do, I’ll be in trouble.
As I entered the church, Sue Brio handed me an invitation to a potluck at her house on the 21st. During the service, I observed the lectors to familiarize myself with the routine. When Don read the first reading, he looked up a lot. When Sue did the second reading, she looked up less frequently, and I noticed she kept her finger on the text as she was reading it so she could return to it quickly.
Father Nui’s homily was about identifying and living your own essence. It had meaning for me. I have been feeling very different of late, not as connected to others, more encased, more reserved, and not at ease. With Mike, I was entirely at ease.
I don’t remember what I felt like at the start of our relationship. I was a different person then. I was more anxious in general. My guess is that I was less comfortable with anyone than I am with everyone now.
I was comfortable with Mike pretty quickly. The first measure of that was when I was standing in line to see a movie. I noticed that I didn’t feel a need to talk to him all the time. Then one day, he joined Dorothy and me for an outing to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. The three of us were sitting in silence by the side of a pond. Those moments were like coins dropping successfully into one of those old street payphones. Oh, so many of you who may read this will have no idea what I’m talking about.
There were pay phones along the streets. This was all pre-cell phones. We weren’t even dreaming of cell phones. I don’t know if they even showed up in sci-fi stories. We dropped coins into a slot. Sometimes the coins landed successfully, and service was provided, but sometimes they didn’t. If not, they would fall into the coin return slot. You could hear the difference when the coins struck and know if they had connected successfully or not. My guess is I sighed and relaxed a bit when the coin had the right sound. I had several feelings like that with Mike when I first met him. He felt right.
There were many things about him I liked from the beginning. Among others, he wasn’t afraid of my verbal ability. He didn’t look at it as a possibly annoying quality he would have to endure; he loved it in me. He loved that I loved the life of the mind. He also saw me as a loving person. He saw me the way I saw myself.
His being an intellectual was in his favor, but other qualities put him way ahead of other academics. He was a profoundly moral person, not in the narrow sense of the word, as one who already has all the answers, but in the spirit of always asking what the ethical path is. Besides my comfort with him in shared silence, I loved his ability to be uninhibitedly childlike. When he enjoyed something, he was delightfully uninhibited. I can imagine people being surprised by this quality in Mike. He was sober in so many ways, but when at play, he was showed childlike innocence.
Jean Mabry’s husband remembered a time he went swimming with Mike at Kua Bay. He whooped and hollered like a young boy as he played in the waves. Mike also was not ashamed to cry, sob openly. During the false alarm warning Hawaii residents that we were under military attack, Mike was on Oahu at a deacon retreat while I was here. He sobbed uncontrollably. Others were shocked and interpreted that as a weakness. Yes, I think he, like most men, would not have done as well if I had gone first, but his emotional openness was not a sign of weakness.
There were differences and actual problems between us, as there are between any two people, but the edges of those differences had been smoothed over. We didn’t have differences with sharp edges, or at least not very sharp edges. Of course, we both changed over our forty-five years together. The differences that were there in the beginning, while serious, were familiar. He was arrogant to the point of contempt. I had seen that before, and I really blinded myself to how bad it was. Between the Catholic church and me, that got wrung out of him.
Another problem was that he was very left brain and believed that it was better to be that way than the way I was. He was an information collector. I see no point in that unless the information is beneficial to me or someone else. What’s the point of just collecting bits and pieces of data? If I can’t use it to create something else, why bother?
Mike was a linear thinker. My thinking pattern drove him nuts. That wasn’t the worst. I could live with that, but he insisted that the way he thought was superior to mine. When he first met, he told me that he thought I was one the brightest people he had ever met, and then later in our life together, he told me I didn’t use my intelligence correctly because my mind made connections all over the place. I learned from his linear thinking. I don’t know how much he learned from my thinking, other than to develop an appreciation for it. That was enough.
Now that Mike is gone, I feel the difference from the way I was with Mike last year versus how I feel with everyone. I don’t like it. I’m not entirely comfortable with anyone as I was with him. I know that I have to explore this change to love and heal myself and everyone else. That way, I will grow and adapt to my changed circumstances.
Later in the day, I had K. come up to work with me. He had been coughing during each of our sessions. I finally asked him if he had gone to school on Friday before he came over here. No,, he had been out of school for three days. I felt his forehead. He had a temperature. Yikes! You don’t knowingly expose an old person to the flu. We, like the very young, are more vulnerable to illness. It could be curtains for us. Yes, I go to a germ factory three to four days a week, exposing myself to the diseases that the children carry. I use Doterra’s On Guard regularly to protect myself.
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