This is How We Used to Live Friday Round-Up

I can’t believe we used to live this way. We liked it at the time – all the hubbub, the demands, people’s expectations, our ambition – but wading through a replica week as older folks, it seems crazy overdone and exhausting. We can still do it though – dress up, mingle, give speeches, and keep smiling – so we’re proud of that. We bumble through everything together which is what makes all the difference. I’d sit in a chair on the porch without him.

At a meeting today, the two people sitting next to me I have known forty and forty-five years respectively. I’ve known them both longer than the elected official with whom we were meeting has been alive. That is some deal, as my dad would say. What I say is this: one weird, beautiful thing about aging is knowing people for forty and forty-five years. It’s amazing, even if you’re not close, close friends, it’s still like knowing your own arm, they’re so familiar and dear.

Swirl is teaching Tempest how to destroy newspapers and books and Tempest is teaching Swirl how to howl. Tempest nailed into the E.E. Cummings Complete Poems (1,144 pages long) but she only chewed the cover, not any of the actual poems. Swirl, the ever silent and regal, has taken to lifting his head to the sky and howling while he waits for the gate to open for our trip to the dog park. It all feels very ‘Call of the Wild’ to me and I like it.

This afternoon, the eye surgeon took a laser to my right eye and it was wild. All blinding white light with flashes of yellow and red. Afterward, I couldn’t see out of that eye but he told me ahead of time that’s what would happen, and then he flushed out my eye with something which felt gushing and catastrophic but again he said I’d think my eye was leaking. So, the lesson here is good prep is everything. And, yes, I already see better.

I started this blog to write about adoption and other death-defying feats but now I’m writing about a cat in the window. Either I’ve told all my scary stories or I’ve lost my edge. Where are the knives?