Pillow Talk Friday Round-Up

In an extraordinary display of fearlessness bordering on normalcy, I went to Kohl’s today and bought two pillows. This was a watershed moment. A friend, albeit a quite odd one, once told me (actually more than once) that the average person spends seven years thinking about buying a new pillow. I don’t know his source on this, perhaps his own experience generalized to the world, but I get the phenomenon of realizing in the dead of night that your pillow is for shit but then forgetting that fact by morning when you make the bed and plump up the pillow in some weird ‘all is forgiven’ trance until later that night, reality resurfaces. Anyway, two weeks out from shot #2 and I was pushing a cart in Kohl’s like nobody’s business. It was deluxe. And so are the pillows.

My sister returned, unopened, the note I sent telling her our brother died in late January. She could have just tossed it in the trash, so to go to the trouble of putting the unopened note in a new envelope, addressing it, putting a stamp on it, and getting it to a mailbox was a studied and sculpted rebuke, ruined, although she will never know, by my expecting that this was how she would respond. I don’t care. I just wanted to be able to tell my parents the next time I go to Hastings to scrape the moss off their headstones that I did my duty.

Swirl is still sick. He’s on mega antibiotics and is going to get better but we’ve been told by a friend whose dog had the same tick-borne disease that it will take weeks for him to get better. Swirl being sick has changed the shape of our days – no more couple of hours dog-parking, no loading dogs into the truck to go places – he is in sick bay or the backyard. So, for the first time in years, probably since I was training for one of those hideously long charity walks, I have been taking walks by myself. It’s curious and weird but good.

I continue to struggle with the adage, “You don’t have to say everything you know.” Keeping my mouth shut or re-phrasing how I say things has become an art form for me. Still, at my age, I know an awful lot and frequently feel that many would benefit from my experience. Then, I remember that much of what I know is from a slice of time and that there are whole wide swaths of things of which I am largely ignorant. Still, wisdom, a gift overarching knowledge, is the reward of age, I think, but only if you hold it in your pocket like a gold watch and not fling it around like Mardi Gras beads.

A year ago, we had an enormous retirement party for my husband. A week later, the world went on lock down. Three weeks later I made him a cake for his birthday – a banana cake with no frosting because I didn’t want to use up our cream cheese. I had already ordered six pounds of black beans and rivers of tuna. We bought thermometers and Tylenol, an oxygen meter that is still in the linen closet. We talked about who would take care of our dogs if we both got sick and I felt a sore throat coming on with every swallow, especially in the dark of the night. In the morning, I would feel my forehead with the back of my hand and put my cheek on my husband’s head. “We’re okay, I think. Do you think we’re okay?” And he would answer, “We’re okay.”