Breakfast

Breakfast has nothing to do with this post, it's just that I went down to the cafeteria and snagged some eggs and potatoes and sprinkled them with hot sauce and slices of jalapeño and poured some darjeeling and really don't want to ruin all that with work so I'm blogging instead and that was the first thing that came to mind to put in the title box.

Herself called me last night to tell me she'd gone to the doctor where they burned off seventeen cancerous spots from her hands and forearms, legacy of a California childhood, I guess, if not years of gardening, and the blisters hurt. Really hurt. Six, seven years ago I had shingles and the blisters were painful as they swelled tight with fluid, but these were worse. She said they were, anyway, and why not. Her main worry though was that they would pop and ruin the sheets, so I went over and wrapped her arms up in gauze tape, did it really carefully because any pressure at all was high pain; and then as she lay in what used to be our bed in what used to be our room, I brushed her hair as I used to do so she could relax, and read to her as I used to do so she could fall asleep, and she fell asleep, and I turned out the lamp and carefully, quietly went outside and stood under the winter stars and looked up at them and asked through my tears if maybe some of the good luck that seems to follow me around could instead please go to her?

I don't know in what ways prayer works and in what ways it doesn't, but I was serious, so maybe, who knows. When her truck was broken into a week or two ago, about the same time she decided to bail our son's girlfriend out of jail because her parents couldn't or wouldn't do it, she said that when I left I took my good karma with me. I don't know about that, but I do know that some thief has her truck registration hence address and her garage door opener, and despite resetting the garage door opener code, she now lies awake worrying about home invasions, or coming home the next day to find the house cleaned out, especially now with our son having today gone back to college. I really don't think it's more likely now than it has been the past eleven years living there, but fears are not soothed with rationality. The fact is she now lives alone in a great big house that we built to be filled with a family, a house with six outside doors, three of them glass, and sometimes she just feels, what. Scared? Abandoned? Luckless? Bad, anyway.

It's the scared I want to fix. This ever-freshening perspective has me seeing the element of protection in the intensity of our early love affair. Once I got to know her private pains and traumas and phobias, among other things I wanted to protect her from them, and twenty five years later that is the one thing I see as not having gone away. To others she may look like some fifty one year old woman but I still see the twenty five year old I met, the sixteen year old, nine year old, six year old who suffered this and that at her parents' hands (and at least one other's), and just because of the way I am, I feel in my heart the job of patching it over and keeping her safe from the nightmares is not done, not done at all.

I guess that won't change and is probably a good thing, since it keeps me going over to wrap gauze or move heavy objects or whatever, the things that a man will do for the mother of his children regardless. None of it does anything to dissuade me from the path of exploration that was impossible before I moved out, and that certainly makes for a rich emotional landscape for this journey to pass through.