I completed 6,000 steps with a good hip swing to each side just on my morning walk.
I worked on the book today. Shivani and Dorothy read the Introduction and Chapter one, and they were all over me because of the disorganization of my presentation. While this was very disheartening, it was also what I wanted. Everyone else has read what I have written and told me it was great. Some inserted a few missing commas; some wouldn't read it at all. Mike was good at catching words with unclear antecedents. He must have seen the structural problems with my writing. Maybe he was afraid to get into it with me. I suppose I would have jumped sky-high and defended myself. It wasn't worth it to him. He hated conflict. Maybe he assumed that a professional editor would catch what he chose to ignore. I will never know now. Either way, I am grateful for Dorothy and Shivani for feeling up to taking me on.
I rewrote the introduction section, which I'm going to recategorize as Chapter 1 because it lays out the foundation for understanding the rest of the book. I want to see if what I've already written hangs together before I continue.
Damon called. I told him that Cylin said he was proud of me for keeping the house neat. He said he doesn't think he said that but knows that Cylin knows him well enough to know he would think that way. I told him his being proud of me means a lot. We talked over some financial matters, which I think are pretty well resolved now, and the loss of my beloved Rainbow vacuum.
Damon said, "Buy another one." The Rainbows run over $1000. He said they make perfectly good wet/dry vacuum cleaners for must less. He checked the Internet while we were talking and came up with the Bissell Cross Wave. It only costs $250. It looks pretty good. I'll think about it. I checked out some of the video recommendations on the Internet. It gets good reviews. Of course, these folks aren't comparing it to the Rainbow, but I can see where the Bissell would be better for me. It looks less complicated to work, for one. With the Rainbow, I have to bend down to clean out the collection tank. With the Bissell, it is at the knee level. I also think this tank holds less. I may have to empty it more often, but it will be easier to reach and lighter weight. All considerations as I age. The whole machine is much lighter than the Rainbow. However, it doesn't have attachments to clean the furniture. I have another vacuum already that can do that. Yvette bought us a Shark ten years ago after we bought the house and before we moved here with our own vacuum. I'm seriously considering this move to the Bissell. Now, I have to wonder if I can sell the Rainbow as is and get some money for it.
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Musings:
I had cause to think of some people I knew many years ago that I wrote off. I believe some of them were actually involved in trying to split up Mike and me at the beginning of our relationship.
They reported me as a VD contact. I think they assumed Mike was so conventional that he would have left me when he was given cause to believe I had been unfaithful. He just laughed. He said if I had been unfaithful, there would have been no way that I wouldn't have come clean with him. I was a compulsively honest person. I am still honest, but I am a little less compulsive.
I initially thought they took this action as revenge for a mistake I made. One of our old commune mates moved back into the commune while her husband worked in California for the year. She stayed in a closed-in porch area. It was a small space with a kitchen stove in it and all windows on two sides. I don't know what that type of window is called. They were sort of like louvered windows, but each slate was large and open and closed separately. I had spent time in that space and found it quite comfortable. Jenny found the room freezing cold. She asked me if I knew what was going on. I checked and couldn't find anything wrong.
When spring arrived, I was there when she opened the windows. She hadn't latched them. After closing them, there was a device for snapping them shut securely. She hadn't done that, letting in the cold air. I laughed. I laugh at absurd situations, and this was one of those. I assumed her husband, who worked for the board of health in the VD department, had reported me as revenge for the discomfort I caused his wife.
I have also considered the possibility that they did it to force Mike to break it off because Mike was such a bastard. I don't think they did it for my sake. They just wanted to get him out of their lives. And yes, he was. He was contemptuous of everyone in the house except me and sometimes me. Only, I thought he was just being funny, ironic. I had no idea that anyone would speak to another human being the way he talked to them and often to me. As I have written, it was quite a while before I realized that he was expressing genuine contempt. He was calm and ironic in his presentation. Once I realized what he was doing, I was on his case like white on rice to get him to change his evil behavior. As many of you know, he spoke about how he used to be arrogant and regretted it.
I cut the culprits out of my life permanently and wouldn't want any more to do with them. It is perfectly possible that they became completely different people who never would have done anything like that again. Still, I didn't have enough good experiences with them versus bad to make it worth finding out.
I am the type that always feels badly about unresolved relationships. I have heard it is more difficult to lose someone you have difficulty getting along with than someone you love and enjoy and have a good relationship with. I think I'm doing well without Mike because I loved my relationship with him. He died in a period of our life when it was all good. Really, all good. Nah, there were a few hangnails, but we were both working on trimming those.
Why do we find it easy to forgive some people for unpleasant moments and not others? There are two variables: the number of good moments we have shared with the person versus bad, and the other is how much unpleasantness the bad actions have caused. Ah, I can think of a third: how dependent we are on the other person.
Mike did several unpleasant things to me, created uncomfortable moments as I did for him. I always found it easy to forgive him. I even found some of the things he did funny because I couldn't imagine he would deliberately disrespect me. It was so easy to see his flaws as almost adorable. Whatever he did 'wrong,' he never pushed the 'end of the relationship' button in me. I never considered leaving him because of something he did. But, as I have written before, I did consider leaving him during a period when our relationship went painfully dead. But, fortunately, we came out on the other side and went back to being a loving couple. God, I loved that man; I still do.
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