Saturday, August 10, 2013

Time And It's Flying. Time And Its Flying.

My baby boys are coming back tomorrow morning at seven. I don't usually take care of them on weekends but their other grandmother, who usually takes care of them on Saturdays and Sundays has had surgery recently and just lost her mother and so tomorrow they are coming here.

"Lost her mother." Ah me. We use such strange phrases to describe death, don't we? It's like putting a pink satin pillow under a loved one's head in the coffin and lining the whole box with sweet tucked silk but that's a human thing. We've been trying to take care of our dead and deny their deaths in various ways since time eternal, as the graves of the ancients prove over and over again.

God love us in our futile attempts to stave off the cruel reality of the ending of a life whether with a belief in heaven wherein our good deeds will be rewarded or another sort of afterlife in which we'll need our jewelry and our favorite pets and a boat to get us from this shore to that or a perfectly preserved corpse, stuffed with herbs and wrapped in white linen strips, our vital organs in jars beside us in the bowels of a pyramid which thousands of slaves spent thousands of hours building out of stone and sweat and blood and belief.

Okay. This is NOT what I had planned to talk about tonight.
Not that I had a plan in mind but whatever.

It's been a good day. I had lunch in town with a dear friend and I'm so glad I did. This is another friend with whom I can get to the point immediately and we talked about real stuff, hard stuff, and then we went to a crazy place called The Country Dollar Store where we bought bejeweled items



 and polyester scarves which look just like the expensive ones and there were women all over the store buying earrings and necklaces and pink glasses frames and tiaras for tiny girls who know in their hearts that they are princesses. I bought the boys some stickers and a blow-up beach ball just like the ones I used to play with when I was a kid, blue and red and yellow and when Owen comes tomorrow and slyly asks if I have a present for him, I will.

I took the recycle to the trash place, I've been to the Post Office where I got a beautiful note from the man who owns the condo where May and I stayed in Asheville. In it he said, "I stopped by the condo a few days ago and WOW! y'all were great guests!" which makes me feel good. We tried, May and I did, to leave the place nice. And wasn't that kind of him to send me that note?
Again with the kindness and really? Can you get enough of it? I don't think so.

I also wrote a few words on a story I started a few years ago which I thought I'd lost forever on my computer but just recently found again. When I reread the twenty-three pages I'd written, it sort of blew me away because it was so good and so unlike anything that I've ever written that I felt as if a stranger had written it. I have my sincere doubts that I am up to that sort of quality of work these days but it's extremely exciting in a very strange and quiet way to think about going back to this story.

Elvis just chased down one of the hens and fucked her and in the time that it took me to write those words, he is done and they've both strutted off to other activities, getting ready for the roost. I'm going to go to bed early tonight to be ready for my boys tomorrow. I wonder what Owen will say and do which will crack me up. I am looking forward to Gibson's cuddles and kisses and giggles and new words. And god knows, I haven't heard "Brown Sugar " in over 24 hours.

As I told my friend today, there are so many things about getting older which I never ever expected. The first, of course being that I never expected to get this old and the rest of it I never could have imagined either. The way everything seems so accelerated, time and the process of aging especially. And the fact that I'm so busy and that there's so much to do and to be done. I honestly thought that things would slow down but no, they haven't. Not one iota. And that change, which is the only constant in life would be the most accelerated thing of all.

Well. Ponder all that shit and get back to me.

I think the chickens are ready to be shut up for the night.

Love...Ms. Moon






15 comments:

  1. Every day is a slightly smaller percentage of your life than the one before it. It's starting to speed up some for me.

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  2. I'm so busy that I can't hardly stand it. I try to blog, but I just stare at the cursor, blinking...nothing. I don't even know where to begin.

    Quiet night in, and I'm so glad.

    Squeeze your boys tomorrow for me!! I am missing mine.

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  3. Mr. Downtown- I know this in theory but GOD ALMIGHTY! it's a different animal in reality. Love you, baby.

    SJ- Honey, we do what we can. Amen and that's it. I'll squeeze my boys. You can count on that.

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  4. Mary, this Elvis just chased down one of the hens and fucked her and in the time that it took me to write those words, he is done and they've both strutted off to other activities, getting ready for the roost. reminded me somewhat of my first marriage and really made me laugh. I love your descriptions of hearth and home your flora and fauna it all reminds me of when I was a hippy and fell in love with women just like you.
    Rebecca

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  5. Madame King- I doubt seriously that if you met me today you'd fall in love with me but then again, I'm going through a very low self-esteem time in my life. As opposed to...ANY OTHER TIME?!
    As for the flora and fauna, I'm just a journalist in that regard.
    As to your first marriage- no wonder it did not last. Elvis at least protects his ladies from outside threats. Sort of. He tries. In his pretty-boy rooster way. He tries.

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  6. I'm not sure what was better -- your post or Radish King's comment. Either one and both --

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  7. the hair bling is awesome, if i had hair, i'd wear stuff like that.

    Very exciting about the story! I love it when I find old work that pleases and inspires.

    Missing my boys too...

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  8. Yes, the time/speed thing... and then when it's joined by a sort of burgeoning feebleness thing... and the forgetfulness thing... oh, Lord...
    (and, I guess, the ellipsis thing...)

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  9. Yes, coming back to your writing and finding it brilliant. Like someone else wrote it. Yep.

    By the way, your writing Is brilliant, funny, insightful, compassionate and wise.

    It's why I keep coming back.

    XXX your fan

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  10. I agree with Beth about your writing.
    And the funniness quotient seems to be increasing. You may be doing stand-up when you're ninety.

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  11. It IS exciting to think of you working on your story again. I hope we get to read it sometime! As for aging, yes, it is weird how time seems to bend and pass more quickly as we get older. It freaks me out. I don't like it. Make it stop. (Well, not STOP.)

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  12. Yes, it does seem that time is speeding up and the days passing and the weeks and years too. I remember when I was a child, each day seemed to go on forever and I miss that. Time does slow down for me on the boat for some reason. Maybe it is my time capsule.

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  13. yep, every year seems to whizz by faster than the one before it. I can't believe it's already the middle of August. where did this year go. and while I don't think of death as a cruel end to life, I'm not anxious for it to find me. not yet anyway. my mother was ready for years and tried to sleep the time away. but death is the flip side of birth. I imagine there would be no birth without death. I think if our religions didn't tell us to be afraid of death that perhaps there would be no fear there.

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  14. Elizabeth- Anything that Madame King writes is better than anything else. Period. The end.

    Yobobe- Maybe I'll wear the hair bling two times a year. Still a bargain, right?

    A- You made me laugh. Thank you.

    Steve Reed- And when it does stop, well...what will any of it have mattered?

    Syd- Time spent by or on the water is magic. That's the truth.

    Ellen Abbott- And our culture is so afraid of death and we do everything we can to separate ourselves from it. I think that is a big part of the problem.

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  15. Now that I'm back to the land of internet and reality, I'm catching up in a Merathon of reading. It's a great way to start my day. I've missed you.

    Two things about this post. One, ever since I learned how the Egyptians processed their dead, I saw our mortuary practices as equally bizarre. Bizarre. I just can't fathom how we got to where embalming and fancy caskets were normal? Maybe it's me that's not normal. But at least you think the same way too.

    And two, while on a relaxing vacation, I started reading a book that is equally fascinating and frightening, called Out of Time, about the aging process and how our culture predisposes us to hate our older selves. The only good takeaway I have so far is that we have our inside self, which is ageless, and the reflection in the mirror that does not match, and we are trapped in a temporal vertigo. I love that term. I'm dizzy out of time here.

    Thank goodness I have your blog to read and calm myself. I'll keep you posted on that book, though I doubt it will do more than describe a problem I'm very familiar with and offer little in the way of answers or coping tricks. xxoo

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