A SAFETY DEPOSIT BOX...AND A MAIL BOX...

So I took all of my own things out of the safety deposit box. I left a lot of things that aren't my wife's, but my children's, in keeping with my mantra of leaving as much as possible at home as it was. I am surely not the first person not to be able to live by his mottos or mantras... But all the savings bonds my mother-in-law bought them are still there, as well as the Krugerrands my birth father bought in a moment of madness, thinking that gold would be his salvation. They are tiny, by the way, smaller than a dime, but as luck would have it, there were exactly enough of them to give two of them to each of his grandchildren...

Here's the thing... I got back to the Weird Little House, which I have still not started calling "home," but I didn't really look into the envelope of stuff I had brought up until I went to deposit it in my new safety deposit box at a bank down here. And it was sobering: aside from the title to my car and one or two other things, it was all old contracts from my former life, things I could really file in my house and not notice even if they all burnt up -- those contracts, and those contacts, are all as dead as the dodo as far as I can tell. So why did I slip them into the drawer at the bank? Just one more occasion where laying a past life to rest for good is too painful to do just now. I spend a lot of my time avoiding things; it will have to stop sooner or later.

My mother came down to visit, and brought my Florida sister, the only member of the family to immediately understand what was going on ["you would not be doing this if you felt you had any choice"]. We went to the movies; I had gone ahead to get the tickets, and they met me there -- only by then, I was in a complete panic over whether or not I had turned off the burner on the stove that had our dinner on it. I didn't mind the loss of a burned dinner, but the idea of sending the whole house up in flames when I had just filled it with many thousands of dollars of my belongings made me... a little crazy. So I ran to the house, found everything just as it should have been, and ran back, and missed the first five minutes of the movie. This gave my sister the opportunity to lean over throughout the rest of it to tell me things that were immediately obvious, but were tangentially related to those first five minutes. I could have killed her.

Instead, we all went back to the house, and my mother, who had only heard me say how weird and little it was, decided that it was really very nice. I suppose it is. My sister, who had been upstairs and seen the true extent of the chaos in which I am living, was tactfully silent [where was that tact during the movie, I should like to know?]. I made far too much pasta with chicken and vegetables. I suppose if I keep at it, I will eventually eat my way through it over the next month or so...

They stayed and chatted and nagged at each other until it was time to head for home. My mother has not been able to spend more than a few nights away from home in my entire married life because the barn animals await her and dinner, or the dogs can't be left alone, or she has guests arriving late at night -- or something. She complained bitterly when she was my age and younger that her mother never came to visit. So I called her on it ten years or so ago, and she said, "Oh, but I understand exactly how your grandmother felt now." So my children are warned that they are expected to do all the traveling, no matter how inconvenient and laborious it may be:
it's family tradition...

Among the million things the Troll has not done: gotten in touch with all the people he knows who live in the area. It's true that he hasn't seen most of them since he was twelve, but that doesn't mean that they will bite. It's just one of those things; just as my former pastor listed all the members of his family who had "failed" in life, by which he meant in marriage, thank you so very much, so I weary of the thought of wading through the story of my separation and impending divorce and the reasons for it, over and over again. I have decided I will have an open house, maybe by the end of the month -- if I don't have the books unpacked by then, I may as well slit my wrists and have done with it -- and let the word work its way through the crowd. None of them need to come back if it upsets them...

I find myself seriously contemplating taking jobs it never occurred to me that I would deign to do, or ever be considered for, just because someone asks if I would be interested. I have met with unfailing kindness, on almost every side; one of my old friends tried to set me up with his bosses at a High Tone Old Money-Type Establishment, but after getting my resumé, the first words out of his boss's mouth was: "Why do you think we should hire you?" And you know what? I couldn't answer. It turns out the thing I am least capable of selling is myself. I haven't heard from my friend since, either. Do you suppose that means something?

And I have become as dependent on the e-mail of strangers as I ever was on blogs, my brothers. There is one dating website in particular that has gotten me into lots of trouble; it brought me the Professor, which should have been enough to make me think twice about ever going near it again. But my profile now says "PAWS OFF" in no uncertain terms, and I tend to reiterate the obvious in any personal communication as well. But here's the catch: they are continually sending you [i.e., me] profiles of people who supposedly match you.

And if you say, hey, why not send a silly note just to say "hi" [and "PAWS OFF", of course], they immediately give you a choice of more people who have profiles similar to the one you just responded to. I have just spent several hours wending my way through the thickets of internet dating, winding up by six degrees of separation sending greetings to people so far away that I will never meet them, and I can only guess what sort of reactions are going on around the country. Sometimes I suddenly find that people from California or Holland have looked at my profile, and I think: "Well, why not say hello, as long as you know they've been snooping about, and they are VERY FAR AWAY?" Of course, a person with more on the ball would also recognize that they looked at the profile and ran in the other direction instead of saying "hi," but then that Person With More on the Ball is definitely not me.

I kept myself afloat [i.e., sane] for months by corresponding with the BlogBrothers, driving a few of them crazy and one or two of them away, so I guess now it's the turn of all the poor bastards on the dating websites. What I realize [duh] is that I am pretty desperate for companionship, no matter how distant. As long as nobody tries to push me beyond what I feel I am ready for; they will get more than they are ready for, I'm afraid. So far the guys who have fallen for me have been mostly what Dickens called "elderly frights." [With one or two notable exceptions, Mephisto.] Some day I am going to figure this all out. But please don't hold your breath.

In the meantime, I am just trying to keep my capacity for making an emotional minefield of my surroundings quietly at home where it belongs. I figure that after the famous Decent Interval, I will be cool, calm, collected, and ready to roll, although I suppose it's also possible that I might also be desperate enough to kill an innocent bystander for a cup of coffee with the right guy. Or even the wrong guy. Go figure.

We all choose our path, and then have to deal with the costs and benefits that ensue. Me, I prefer to keep the madness between my ears where no one else suffers from it; those of you from a particular corner will recognize this as the question of becoming "an occasion of sin" for others...

Stay tuned.
Not that anything too interesting is going to happen any time soon.
But life has a way of sneaking up on all of us.