When your child leaves.  It is a dark gray, soggy wool sock in the mouth fishing twine and electrial tape around your insides type of feeling.  I, needless to say, don’t like it.

My heart is a little bit broken right now, and I have a nice tall glass of “feeling nothing” in front of me.  It isn’t working.  I’m no Auntie Mame.

Tim and I will try again.  We will also stay in contact with Paul.  For him, and for us.

1.  My sister gets into town tomorrow.

2. My foster son is going to a different placement setting.

3. I’m getting married.(not a mixed blessing, just for the record)

4. I went and had my favorite sandwich last night, and I don’t like it anymore.

5. I get to leave work early, only to come home and help my son pack his stuff.

I went to private school, a mixed blessing, that no matter how you spin it, felt like being sent away. ( I really want to add here that I realize the sacrifices that it took to send me to SJMA, and it was an amazing opportunity.  It was just a difficult situation being gay, and dealing with abandonment issues) In the oversized business class vehicle that my father would drive me back to my teenage angst in, was a radio.  My father was a firm supporter of public TV and Radio.  From the accursed radio would come those magic words “This is NPR, All things considered”  They certainly were not considering that I did not want to be stuck in the car for 89 minutes listening to them, that is for sure. But as the love of tomato sandwiches grew in my adult years so did my appreciate of the Public Broadcast System.  My father and I never really spoke in the car on those trips, he listened to the radio, and I listened to the building dread inside me.  How much better would I know my father if he had turned the radio off or if I had made the effort to speak?

Let me start by saying “I will be going back to bed”.  It is 5:44am on a Sunday.  I thought I was being all sweet getting Tim up at 5 who most grumpily replied that he was taking a later bus.  If there is a later bus, why not take it every day?  Oh well, he is a grown man and capable of getting to work.  We really should not try to talk that early in the morning anyway, as we both have the confusions, mumbles and grumpies at that time.  I generally love mornings, no one is bothering me, calling me or asking me to do anything.  The plus side of being 33 is that I can normally get away with that at 7, no need to be up at 5.  So I sucked down a cigarette, which I really need to quit,  threw on some flip flops and headed to the beach.  took the dog for a walk.  She is always so happy to be taken out, a task that others have been doing more than myself of late.  Now we are warm in the house, with this terrific Maui like breeze coming in through the screen door and windows.  Sable is curled up in a little black ball of fuzz, the hides the fact that she is almost a 50 pound dog, she still looks like a baby to me. Ah, she is out of her ball now and resting her head on the arm of the sofa.  She appears to be enjoying the morning breeze as much as I am, she keeps licking the air.  Winter is coming, at long last.  Funny that I should be living in the desert and hating the heat.  There is a payoff, isn’t there always?, Fall, Winter and Spring here are all like fall and spring in Chicago.  My two favorite times of year.  I like little slugs on the littler of amber leaves raked into rebellious piles.  I just don’t like raking them into piles.  Do people still rake leaves?  

I am getting married in 6 days, 11 hours and 7 minutes.  I have become a human countdown timer. oops  6 min.  See?  I’m so excited I want to just hold still and not do anything at all, for fear of something going wrong.   Fine way to live life, like some innocuous fruit or vegetable suspended for all time in a giggling, reticent ring of tomato aspic.

Who do you think had to input all the correct spelling of words into spell check.  Sometimes I type a word, the check fairy underlines it in her 3rd grade teacher approved red line and I am convinced that they are incorrect and that I have spelled it as correctly as is possible.

I am supposed to clean today, dust and the lot.  I resent dust.  It is like the old troll at the bar that just keeps coming back for more rejection, no matter how much you tell him to stay away.  It just keeps coming back, dusters, pledge and a shrunken t-shirt, vacuum or whatnot it just reappears.  I think, sometimes, no matter how illogically, that my electronics have all been shipped to my house with a built in dust dispenser.  Maybe the spell check fairy has cursed me with dust for telling him that vacuum really has one “u” and an “e” at the end of it.  I have been granted the power of revenge against EL Senior Spell Check, I can now add the spelling of particular words to the Spell Check Dictionary.  That can’t end well.  One erroneous click of the mouse and Tim forever becomes Tium.  I have not yet figured out how to REMOVE a word from said dictionary.

I have to go now, this has been all things reconsidered.

So here I am at dnner with tim and feeling tired. I love love love him.