(I wrote this for my writing circle some time ago but afterwards I thought that maybe some of my nieces might enjoy seeing what at least one of the old ladies in their lives has lived through (and this ain’t the half of it, by a long shot! LOL). I decided to do a bit of editing but let it stand pretty much as originally written. Perhaps it might inspire the nieces to keep journals of their own lives. It’d be a lot easier for me to remember this stuff if I’d written it down then. So, young ladies…)
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Today would be, if I were still married, my forty-third (forty-seventh by now; this was originally written in July) wedding anniversary. Next week will be the thirty-fifth (thirty-ninth) anniversary of my prior husband’s death. This fall (October) will be the thirtieth (thirty-fourth) anniversary of living with my life partner. Well, hey, marriage didn’t work, so I tried not-marriage and, so far, it’s going well.
I can’t believe that it’s been nearly half a century since I was married. Oh, it does seem like a long time ago, but that long? No way! And yet, when I consider all that’s happened since then, it had to have been that long ago in order to fit everything in.
Thinking of all those anniversaries made me do a sort of flash review of more of my life and it amazes me what all has happened to a shy Midwestern farm girl who went to the big city to go to school; met her eventual husband through a series of unbelievable but true connections; more or less eloped over a thousand miles to marry him while he was in the army; spent the first thirteen months of our life together apart while he spent them in Korea; went to Texas to be with him when he returned; and then, in only a few years, lost him to another (younger?) woman.
I mean, it’s enough to write a book about.
I was thinking, as I wrote about all this in my journal, that if only I could write like Willa Cather, or Helen Hooven Santmeyer (also from Ohio, like me) who wrote “And Ladies of the Club,” I could make this life that I’ve always considered as pretty average and ordinary and dull into something entertaining if not gripping.
I realized even at the time that some of my “adventures” could be grist but I knew not for what. I didn’t yet realize that the soul doesn’t crave “grist,” per se, it craves human experiences of all sorts. We’re the ones who decide to call them “good” or “bad.” Soul just calls them experiences.
Some of these I’ll mention here, from the time my housemother got drunk and pushed the dean of the school down the basement stairs of the dorm, to the “cowboy named Dusty from Montana” that moved into her dorm room with her for a few months, to the dorm mate we rushed to the hospital with a drug overdose (whether accidental or deliberate, we never knew), to my wedding and its omens of disaster on Tobacco Road in Georgia (it’s hard to believe how young and naive and unconscious I was then), to the few short years in Texas where my husband was a military policeman, to all that followed. I have to assume my soul was happy. I had experiences.
Then there was the drawn out resistance to divorce, adventures with crooked lawyers, the inevitable divorce, then only a little over a year later, my prior husband’s death in a plane crash, a plane he wasn’t “supposed” to be on. And then, and then, a few years later, the struggle to find enough money to go to Korea to visit my then-boyfriend and, through the inexplicable intercession of my ex’s widow, obtaining exactly the amount I needed – from a forgotten savings account that he’d left with my name (not hers) as beneficiary. More experiences.
And then there’s the eventual “divorce” from that long time boyfriend yet again, for another younger woman yet again, and then, and then…
But there, you see? It’s been an ordinary life of an ordinary person but I think it could be interesting and entertaining if only I could figure out how to write like Willa Cather or Helen Hooven Santmeyer.
Maybe if I live long enough…
[…] Anniversaries and Experiences […]
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