home sweet home
after a week of long days, sleeping in the spare room of my dear friends kami and akesha, i’m settling into a period of relative stability in roslindale, on fairview street, which does indeed have a fair view, and which also leads up a hill and then down a hill straight in the arnold arboretum, which if you don’t know boston is simply beautiful, peaceful, and restorative. a little break from the constant need to think which is endemic to this area.
and out the window in the little office nook i am lucky enough to have this week (thanks kristin!) the snow is finally coming down. first storm of the season. inviting a bundling up and a trip up that hill and down that hill to that very arboretum of which i have just spoken. or written. or whatever. i’ll be there.
and first there is this. the update. the bringing it all up to currency. today.
a tale of the instability of stability
and first, before we can get to today, a little story from several years ago. it was the mid nineties and my mother had gone missing. i called and got one of those annoying little robots with the ascending beeps and “the number you have dialed is no longer in service” thingy…and the “no other information available at this time” thingy.
well…not the sort of thing expected when calling my mother, who never changed anything, unlike her son who is always changing everything. well eventually of course i found her. apparently my sister had taken it upon herself to move my mother from her apartment in honolulu, where she had lived for something like 21 years, to an apartment in florida, where she lasted something like a week.
don’t get me started! that is another story altogether. not suited for a simple family blog like this. more like an ittybiz kind of thing, which is ironic, since my father was a sailor and he really couldn’t hold a candle to naomi dunford. and, well, been there done that. currently incarnated as clean-languaged; will use asterixes or translation page as needed.
so the story i’m telling goes thus, given to me by my sister, a week or two after the fact:
which key does what?
after a week in her own apartment, my mother ends up living with my sister, after said sis notices that said mom can’t seem to figure out which key goes in which lock. i’m assuming that this was a long, drawn out, terrifying moment for my sister, discovering that her mother, who seemed fine a week before, is suddenly lost and confused and can’t find her way home while standing on her own (dunfordism) doorstoop! ay yi yi!
why didn’t you tell me, my sistered yelled in my general direction. why didn’t you consult with me i replied. and that is indeed another extremely dunfordized story.
and this story? what the heck are you going on about with this story? well, let’s put the pieces together, remembering, of course, that this is just one interpretation of many. i’m not propping it up as the absolute truth, the way things are, or were, as the case may be. and it’s the one that makes sense to me, and that i’m hanging all this other verbage around, so here goes:
the dark side of stability
my mother lived an extremely stable life. you could set the clock by her actions. church on sunday followed by a trip to the grocery store, to buy the same things as the sunday before. i suppose she could have called and said “i’m on my way” and they could have said “we know, just walk up to checkout number three, everything is bagged and ready to go.” and on and on.
of course it wasn’t always quite so extreme; and as the years went buy the channel got more and more narrow, and repetition trumped variety on a regular basis. so when she up and flew away to florida, well…where’s the church? where’s the grocery store? where’s the carrots and broccoli? and the onion dip?
where are the keys and whose doorstoop am i standing on and why are you looking at me all funny like that darling?
yep. stability meets change and it crumbles like maytag blue on a spinach salad. and instability? well, instability meets change and it thrives, fills in the cracks, and turns into something nobody ever thought of before. like blue cheese! and woo hoo for that. ‘cos we all know that change is coming, right?
and that was the week that was
since we were working the failure meme this week, let’s look at everything in terms of success and failure. and none of that mamby pamby new age rationalization and re-definition of failure: if it got done it goes in the success column, and if it didn’t then it goes in the failure column. now if i could figure out how to insert some columns here i could do that! then again…i like the word column more than i like the visual…
things that happened!
woo hoo! i went to the bank, i washed my clothes, i floated the housesitting meme, and i attended a wonderful concert put on by the students from the conservatory lab charter school of boston. that was probably the most fun of the week; watching rowans eyes light up when he saw a bunch of six year olds playing twinkle twinkle on their violins. and then tripping over to chinatown for herbs and pho afterwards was the coupe de grace.
of course the school choice process is still going to be dreadful and boring (he smiled ironically and sincerely at the same time), and perhaps it will be filled with other joys of equal magnitude.
also managed to change my cell phone plan to stop that dratted 45¢/min from kicking in. and entered the amazon points and got some xmas/solstice/hanukkah presents.
things that didn’t happen
- didn’t hire a va (got some leads)
- didn’t get any bodywork (something about a snow storm…)
- didn’t finish all my bureaucratic nonsense (know how to spell it now!)
things that kinda happened
i know, this is kinda waffly. still…
- i got two cd’s burned for rowan…not quite a mess of cd’s and dvd’s on my list
and that was my filled to the brim and where the heck does the time go week! i guess i must have been busy teaching and stretching people out.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Christy Zarlengo 12.20.08 at 11:05 pm
I love the link to Maytag Blue Cheese. I can’t stop thinking it’s a kitchen appliance made of blue cheese…or blue cheese with kitchen appliances mixed in?
chas 12.21.08 at 12:18 am
@Christy Zarlengo:
i just went into the boston cheese cellar in roslindale and bought a little chunk of maytag blue today! it’s a new thing for me as i avoided blue cheese for years until i had a little morsel of cambezola a few weeks ago…now i’m hooked!