Not An Easy Sunday
November 7, 2022
Sunday mornings I start my day, sometimes in my pajamas, at 750 am. I go to the gym down the street for a 8 o’clock Pilates class. I reserve a space three days in advance; it’s popular because it’s ridiculously hard but eighty percent of the time, we’re lying down, on our backs or our bellies, so it suits the lazy, the hungover, and the people that want to look good in a bikini. The classes are never the same, but I can count on a Joni Mitchell, Taylor Swift, James Taylor, type music, on the playlist.
It is hard, it is not so hard. If I chose. I can do pushups from my knees and use light weights. I like staying low to the ground when I’m just waking up.
Today, there was someone new. The music was soft. The moves were hard; ten minutes of side planks on a Sunday? There was stretching, and then more work. It was lovely. It was different. It ended at 849 am, four minutes over.
Church is at 1030. I’d signed up to teach religious education, or Sunday School, which means I spent half the service with eight 7th graders, helping the lead teacher with the lesson of the week. I’ve been out of the loop for a while, so I didn’t know the kids or the teacher, at all.
I made friends with Leona, the artist, and Sebastian, the shy one. The lesson had an African theme, my husband volunteered to fry the plaintains, (a job assigned to me,) so I could join everyone out to the yard and watch our group play a game.
It is November in New England and this morning the temperature was over sixty degrees. There is something delicious about spinning around in the leaves and the wind on a November morning in very short sleeves.
I can’t remember the name of our activity, but it came from Africa and hiding, then finding stones, was the point. The leaves have mostly fallen, so there were breaks to hang on naked branches, examine seeed pods, and discuss whose turn was next. No one slipped on the wet grass, or broke a limb, the human or the tree kind. At the end, we lost about half the stones, and the lead teacher said that was impressive.
We all tried the fried plaintains, and I don’t think they were that good, but some of the kids liked them or were polite.
I raced home afterewards to get ready for a funeral for a friend. This was a woman I worked with a long time ago at Quincy College. I can’t sum her up in a few words. She smiled with her eyes, adored sparkly eye shadow, spoke her mind without lowering her voice, and was someone I would call a friend today, even though it’s been four years, because she was loyal and fierce and…
I will think of her often. I wish I’d seen her before she died and after Covid.
There was dinner with friends and two glasses of Chardonnay. There was a walk around the block, Sophie sniffed, and Chanel sniffed and pulled.
And now, I am home. I am thinking about church and faith. I am thinking about my kids when they were young, and if the dogs will need another walk. The windows are open, so I’m thinking about global warming. I hear Colin’s voice upstairs, I wonder if I should remind him to bring his trash down tonight; tomorrow is Monday.
I am thinking about my friend Pat- years ago, she told me my boots were too beat up to wear to work, I gave them away the next week.
I am thinking about how two weeks ago, my friend and I talked about visiting Pat at a home and how she was a little confused. Both of us knew we didn’t have the time to make the trip.
So many people were there to say goodbye today. I hope she was watching.
We toasted at her when we got our drinks, and then conversation moved on- to classes, work, flight plans, holidays, kids and conversations.
That’s the way it goes, I guess. One day isn’t ever one day, really, it’s a million tiny days sandwiched between waking up and sliding in between the sheets.
May peace be with you, Pat.
May peace be with all of you,
Julie
Letter To My Father (It’s About Time.)
August 21, 2016
I read a poem
written by someone else’s daughter
About her mother, who has Alzheimer’s.
Judy spoke of her mother’s journey,
Of her need
To be let go.
She spoke of clocks, conversations, lunch round noon,
snow bout mid December,
and all the parts of life
that are defined
by knowing what is going on,
what has happened,
and what will likely happen next.
A million pieces of knowledge tether
Most of us,
To know the date most days.
Class is Wednesday night,
Colin plays on Saturday at nine fifteen,
I need to be at work by nine,
Katy’s birthday is coming in two weeks.
I am never sure what time it is, and sometimes
I think Wednesday’s Thursday, or I lose an hour or a week.
I’m not sick like her, or like you were.
When it took over,
your eyes were clouds,
your lips made shapes,
your tongue made sounds.
Your muddy eyes would take me in,
or the wall behind me,
or a angry nurse marchcing down the hall.
Your lips would purse, then open, close,
more like a fish
Than like a man.
You’d smile when I’d offer up
A cigarette
And smoke it
Unlit and upside down.
Your eyes were clouds,
They belonged inside a winter sky, not on a face,
but I never let them go.
I would
Bring you taboo cigarettes,
I would fix your shirt, wipe your chin
and when his mouth moved
I’d lean close.
I’d smell the spit, the sour breath, last week’s
applesauce, the sweat
And I would listen
Because I knew you
Would never leave without saying your goodbye.
You were a gentleman.
I never let my you go,
Not when you’d already left,
Not when you still looked at me
and knew my name,
Not in all those spaces
in between\
And afterwards
And now.
Spring Band Concert/ reflections on community
March 16, 2016
Bliss
January 13, 2015
I’m driving to the library and “What I Like about You” comes on the radio.
There’s no one else in the car and I have time to listen to the whole thing and pick up the first season of Breaking Bad before I arrive, on time, to fetch my basketball boy and his friends.
I return home. The dishwasher hums, nothing is left in the sink but a half eaten sponge,
Sophie the Sweet just informed me she’d rather nap than walk in the rain, my daughter smells like lip gloss and soap.
My friends love me, my family still calls. I’m not close to being done with anything and I’ve still got plenty of time, (or the ignorant bliss of assumption)
I am just so damn happy to be alive.
I’m a terribly, busy, and important person, and still I make time for the dogs. (So you have time to read this.)
January 15, 2014
My life is busy right now. Three jobs, two kids belonging to a total of four teams with a side of flute lessons.
I don’t have time to meander thru Sunday’s paper, I toss out the coupons, and the business and real estate, and get right down to Dinner With Cupid. I make food, and then we eat lots and lots of leftovers. I exchange quick texts to really good friends that go back and forth and back and forth while we attempt to find a mutual time we can both make it for coffee. I’m hoping they are reading the same subtexts I am- “I really love you and look forward to when we can spend time in the same room and I can see your face when I ask if you think this dress makes me legs look short or I can reach over and hug you when you talk about spending three weeks searching for just the right senior center for your mom.”
So, I have no time. The other morning, my daughter had created a beautiful picture to go along with a book report. I typed the report for her, it was much quicker than proof reading the damn thing, and I glanced at the outline she showed me. When she was walking out the door, I called out- “Make sure you bring that report home. I need to see the your beautiful illustration.” I’m pretty sure it is a “beautiful illustration”, but I still haven’t seen the finished product. She did mention she got an A.
But inside this life of mine, there is one luxury that is a necessity. Every day that the temperature isn’t below 15 degrees fahrenheit, and there aren’t sheets of rain racing down in my general direction, or snowflakes floating and sticking to the sheets of black ice all over the road- I take the dogs for a walk.
I carry Sophie and Coco to the car. I stuff them inside. I grab a coat, my headphones, my IPhone, and a cup of coffee from hours before placed in a really tall plastic water glass so it won’t spill.
We drive to Cunningham Woods, about a mile and a half away from our house.
When we pull into my parking spot, always the same spot, if the dogs got turned around by a particularly amorous, intact, black lab they’d be able to find it, the car of course. None of us like the lab much. I slide open the side door to the mini van and they spill out of their seats the way that Katy and Colin did right after they first figured out how to get out of their car seats without any help.
I sit behind the steering wheel, iphone in my lap, speaker cords tangled in the steering wheel. I open up Spotify, the magical spot that holds all of my songs. I pick a play list, I look for a song. I find what I need on that particular day, I place the headphones over my ears, I untangle the cords from the wheel and the gear shift and my foot. I put my keys in my pocket. I think about locking the car. I don’t.
I hop out of the car, carrying nothing more than phone, wearing nothing but my coat with deep pockets,(and clothes of course. This isn’t going there). Inside my coat are my keys, and maybe a piece of gum I seized in the most recent “you can’t have gum in this house until you learn to put it in the trash when your’e done.”
We all start our journey. Sophie is the slowest. She sniffs. She peers out at other dogs from behind trees. Coco dances, hops, races, skids, he’s a pinball mini doberman pinscher on crack.
I follow along behind. I’m not really following them. I’m just moving along a path we’ve taken a million times before.
Some days, I’m listening to old hip hop- “Get down with OPP, yah you know me…”, TLC, Mary J Blige. Sometimes I’m checking out the latest rap song I heard when Colin had radio control. Often, I’m dipping to old songs I’ve heard a million times before. One day I listened to five different versions of “Romeo and Juliet” originally by Dire Straits, but did you know the Indigo Girls did a cover? Another afternoon, I checked out Richard Thompson’s “One Thousand Years of Popular Music,” the highlight of which was his cover of Britney Spear’s classic “Oops, I did it again.”
These walks take anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour and a half. I take as much time as I can, or as much time as I need. I tell people that I have no choice, the dogs need their walks.
And they do. But I really need my ramble, and a little bit of time singing along to silly pop music, gritty rock and roll, ballads, and anthems. I’m taking moments to visit the person I was when that music was probably a pretty crucial way I defined myself. I remember as early as junior high. First week of school, first time someone new sat next to me at the lunch table, one of my first questions, or one of their first questions, would be- “who do you listen to?”
These days, I get a chance listen to a little bit of everything. But you know, it’s only because the dogs really need their walk.
julierichmond 