notes & things | 11/20/2022

I am still feeling a little like the world is unreal these days.  Yesterday, I looked out and could have sworn I was trapped in a furiously shaken snow globe.  By the time I made coffee, it had dwindled to a few flurries.  It gets so dark so early, and I sleep so late, usually till around noon, , that it seems there are a few scarce hours of daylight before nightfall. I'd intended to write all day to get a jump on work for this week where I'll be traveling a bit and away for the holiday, but instead I had a long, long phone call with a friend I'd only been texting the last few months and it felt good to catch up on all her misfortunes (her own family and pet deaths) and my misfortunes. We both agreed to bury 2022 forever and never speak of it again. This summer, I'd been very happy, and some good things (personal, professional) had developed in late October  I will talk about later, but the price of good fortune was the exact opposite it seems.  Autumn has been positively Greek in its hubris.

Tuesday is my dad's memorial service, when we will placing both his ashes and my mother's, which have been on the mantle for the past 5 years, in the ground of the plots they owned since around the time they got married. It is all moving very fast and I have yet to catch my breath or spend much time with my thoughts.  I've mostly been working furiously and napping frequently in equal measure. I have to keep reminding myself that its the holiday season, that Thanksgiving is this week.  I am not really feeling it, but am hoping to fake it til I make it, procuring new garlands and stockings from Amazon for my bookshelf, some new evergreen sprigs for some vases. I was going to just wait til I get back to the city next Sunday, but I may just put it up tomorrow. 

I write this post now as I would normally be embroiled in my twice-weekly call with my dad, an hour I have cautiously watched approach on the clock on all day as I did the usual Sunday things like sweep the floors and clean up the kitchen. The past few years, he had taken over where my mother had left off on Sundays and Wednesday nights.  I have always been grateful for that time, mostly since the previous 20-ish odd years of living away from them had involved very little phone convo with him, since my mom liked to do the talking for both of them with him occasionally chiming in from the other side of the room. Only when she was really sick and the delirium had set in did he take over. It was sort of like getting to know someone new, but also very familiar.  I am not quite sure what I will do with myself, especially on Sundays when the 6pm call was so engrained in my schedule my entire adult life.  We would talk about meals and streaming and what was going on there.  About his cat, (who at 17, passed away recently as well while he was in the hospital, and we were at least glad that we did not have to share this with my dad.)

Though I suppose life is all about finding new routines and structures, but it feels like, though I cling to my structures and routines like a life raft, they sometimes fail me. I don't know what my new Sunday nights will look like going forward.  Maybe I should just plunge myself into writing and work and when I emerge into 2023, things will look a little less lost.