Another Word For Rebuffal

Today’s assignment: write about one that got away:

His name was Jim. And first he was one of my very best friends.

I met him in a meeting, along with his friend, Freddy, the guy who shook, nonstop for four years straight. Jim was tall and articulate, funny and somewhat attractive. He fancied himself a raconteur. Please. He was from Troy, New York. Nothing eloquent or savvy about hanging your socks on the hot water pipe to dry in a studio apartment in Troy. But in the big city, Jim had a way of attracting the soon-to-be and already famous right from the start.

He called me almost every single morning for my whole first year in recovery and read from the 24-hour-a-day book because I couldn’t read for that long. We went to dinner, often with friends, and then as time went on and I got better, alone. We became best friends and stayed that way for years. While we were dating other people we used to get together and dish about our respective lovers and what was up with them and us and laugh and laugh and feel not so alone in the scary world of impending intimacy. Which neither of us ever actually reached, mainly because our choices made that impossible. We chose people for their looks or their money or where they had a summer house. Jim liked women who knew a lot of words, or women who knew very few words with big tits. I liked men who were "deep" (aka depressed) who wanted to save me. A mixed bag of nuts, yes?

One night we had gone out to eat with friends and later it was just us walking home, late, down 14th Street in the East Village. We had stopped for Jim to get an ice cream cone at some all night ice cream shop (remember, this is New York City) and were strolling down the street, nearing the corner. Jim asked me if I wanted a taste of his ice cream and I said yes and leaned in to lick when, all of a sudden, he pulled the cone away and leaned in and kissed me. It was a big, very big, very wonderful kiss. I was stunned.

There was a garbage truck on the corner, and the guy leaned out to shout, “Man, you sure took her by surprise! Right on!” and honked the truck’s horn. Which made me jump all the higher.

“Wow…” I said.

“It’s been Wow for me for quite a long time, Nancy” said Jim.

And that’s how it started.

And it all made sense, you know, we hung out all the time anyway. The only one surprised I guess was me and everyone we knew seemed to take it in stride. What a change for me, though, how easy this all seemed to be. We still did much together and talked every day, several times a day. But things were a little more tense, as things can be when you’re getting to know someone AND sleeping with them at the same time. But we really had a lot of fun.

Everyone I knew just assumed that this was it, that we would probably just be together from then on, get married. Including me.

On Memorial Day weekend I was trying to decide whether or not to go out to Southampton for the weekend and Jim had said, yeah, go out, I think I’m going to go Upstate and see my son. Okay. Simple enough. I spent the long weekend with friends and this was pre-cell phone era, so we didn’t talk at all that weekend. I got home and left a message on his answering machine Monday evening. Tuesday goes by, Wednesday, Thursday…that afternoon he called and said we should meet for dinner. Cool.

We met on the East Side at a little bistro. We ordered dinner and Jim seemed really giddy and smiley and stuff and I think he’s going to maybe ask me to move in or make some kind of more solid commitment when he started laughing and bursts out, loudly, “Nancy, I think I’m in love!!”

I laugh back and say, “Wow, Jim, me too!”

And he says, “Oh my god, did you meet someone too?”

Wha…? “What are you talking about?”

And he starts talking loud and fast, without stopping, in a way that would make me and anyone else listening think we had never started an affair and that we were still just friends:

“Oh, my god, she’s beautiful, she’s perfect and I’m so in love, I can’t believe it. I met her on the train, I never made it to Rochester, she was going to go on to Martha’s Vineyard alone, but I decided halfway up there that I was going to go with her and we made love on the train and then spent all weekend in each other’s arms and I am just so in love I can hardly sit still!”


What? What the fuck! I stand up at the table and knock over the water glasses. I am furious and beyond hurt and I simply can’t believe the manic state he’s in. He’s completely negated the last six months, hell , the last five years, as though they never happened and treated me like one of the guys!

“Oh, god, Nancy, wait” he comes out of his reverie.

But I'm up and running out of the restaurant and down toward the East River walkway. He catches up and says wait, wait and I finally run out of breath at the railing. He falls to his knees, grabbing my hand and says, “Is it possible to be in love with two people at the same time?”

And I say, “Not when one of them is me!”

And he says, “Wait, please, you have to wait for me. I don’t know what’s going on or what I feel. I feel sick, really I do, but feel so in love with her I’m sick, really I’m sick. Can’t you just wait for me to sort this out, just give me a week, Nancy, just a week. I love you.”

This is so freaking dramatic. But I can’t stand the tight knot in my chest that feels like it’s going to bust up through my throat and so I just walk away. “Don’t follow me. Please.” I just walk all the way home alone.

A week later Jim calls and wants to meet for dinner. I say yes and meet up with him. He tells me her name is Carly Simon. You must be kidding, right? No, it’s really her. And she’s been in town and he’s seen her all week. “And I think I’m going to marry her.”

Did I mention this was a week later?

And he did. He married her less than a month later.

Refractory Adjustments

Does anyone know who the god of jobs would be? I'd like to set up an audience with this diety, please. Ahem AHEM!

Today I had a great interview. It was for a job that, in its description both written and delivered in the interview, could not have been tailored any closer to my person if it was sewn directly onto my body. Confident, perceptive, people-person who can talk - I could stop right there, right? - to and/or train retailers about environmentally positive merchandise and knows how to structure well their own time and environment. With energy.

And it pays more than minimum wage.

Tonight, post-interview and pre-dinner, I am wondering what it would be like to not have to wonder where I'm going to get the money or the ooompf to continue in our sweet yet meager little life, me and the Sash. Life used to be so much "bigger" - me, an upper middle class wife and mom who may have been unhappy, yes, but used to just living however the moment flung her - now a single welfare mother, comparison shopping for toilet paper, calculator in hand for the shampoo aisle, feeling the devil-may-care thrill of buying a quadruple Americano, yes, a fourple, at Diva. No more fighting and fighting and fighting for a new mortgage, to keep the electricity on, to get a scholarship to Hebrew school, to land a job? Wow, it's been a long haul, yes?

However, I think what the fight has been most accurately about is to find a new way of looking at the world. What I've most needed a is new pair of glasses. (Again!)

Picture this...a photo of myself with a caption below - "Self-supporting through her own contributions." WOOT!

I know DSHS would be thrilled to kiss my patoot goodbye. It says a lot about where my life in this economy has taken me, both fiscally and spiritually, when my wants would be pretty much taken care of with simply getting a job that could get me off the dole. And that would be nice.

But with some new glasses, I can see that while this job could mean that, it has the potential to mean much more for me - I couldn't have even dreamed up money AND something I'm already good at AND feeling good about what I'm doing. And I hope I get it.

But if I don't, I've earned these new specs. And through them I already see that there are more things out there than silver and gold. That there are things that fit my new vision of what I really need, and maybe even what I really want.

So, for right now I have to let go and let the next right move make itself known. And we know how good at that I can be. Riiiiiight......?

Joan Crawford's Eyebrows

Today I sat. Like I've committed to myself to try to do daily, if only for 10 minutes. I must sit and I must continue to go within or I will "dry up like an old fuckin' Thanksgiving turkey breastbone," as my friend Tim so eloquently put it. Today I am on the dry side of sober.

Unresolved discontent has gotten me re-interested in seeking an inner life, the same inner life I was seeking before my outer life went to hell in a handbasket. That was three years ago, and as life has moved on since, I feel as though I personally haven't moved an inch.

So I go searching. For people who have what I want, classes that teach what I want, a book to read with something I haven't heard before in quite the same way...? For a new job.

At present I'm a shelver in the mornings at a bookstore, same company where I used to be a manager, but again, when my external life went kablooey so did my work status. Anyway, I'm shelving during this time of impending crisis and I'm in the Christian section, shoving every incarnation of the Bible known to humankind onto the shelf without regard to arrangement, just get the freaking things off the cart and onto the freaking shelf. And this is not just because I'm jewish and the Bible's not my thing, but they can be so cumbersome and all look the same unless you pay close attention. And attention is not what I've got today. I am not in a good space. I want to be somewhere else.

I move on to the little, bitty inspirational books and feel as though I'm going to bolt from my body. My friend Andrea quoted Pema Chodron today, "Never underestimate the urge to bolt." I feel like bolting - urgently - but I've got to get this shelving done so I can afford to eat dinner tonight. A particular book with a van Gogh painting on it has fallen off the shelf. Oy. I put it back and move on down the line and, what the hell, the same book has hit the floor again. Ugh. Did I mention that I hate shelving? But I go back and put it back on the freaking shelf, anywhere for god's sake, just get back on the shelf little Christian book! I move on down the shelves again and for the love of god, the book has fallen off again!

All right, already!!

It is Henri J.M. Nouwen's "Life of the Beloved." What do I want with a book by a catholic priest? However, the subtitle is "Spiritual Living in a Secular World." This catches my attention because, although I'm "jewish" I'm also a little bit of everything else. And I open it:

"I have called you by name, from the very beginning. You are mine and I am yours. You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests. I have molded you in the depths of the earth and knitted you together in your mother's womb. I have carved you in the palms of my hands and hidden you in the shadow of my embrace. I look at you with infinite tenderness and care for you with a care more intimate than that of a mother for her child. I have counted every hair on your head and guided you at every step. Wherever you go, I go with you, and wherever you rest, I keep watch. I will give you food that will satisfy all your hunger and drink that will quench all your thirst. I will not hide my face from you. You know me as your own as I know you as my own. You belong to me. I am your father, your mother, your brother, your sister, your lover and your spouse...yes, even your child...wherever you are I will be. Nothing will ever separate us. We are one."

Oh my. I'm not going to get all swoopy at work. So I buy it.

I bring it home with me, it reverberates in my purse, in the seat next to me, in my car on the road. In my hands while I'm reading it. It's 149 pages that read so smoothly it's more like 5. It is where I am.

Or shall I say, where I'd like to be. Because regardless of how elevated I feel when I sit to close my eyes today, up comes the "crowd at the mall," as I call them. Jeez, there's an awful lot of chatter in there. Always has been. But seemingly more than there used to be. Hence the peeling of the onion effect: the closer I get to me, the deeper, more ancient the chatter. My sponsor used to say, "Stop distracting yourself from yourself." Twenty-five years later, with many, many periods spent in meditation, I think I'm just starting to understand what she means.

And what comes into focus in the crowded mall of my psyche today are Joan Crawford's eyebrows. Everywhere. They're thick, like fuzzy worms and everybody's got 'em. My mother used to draw them on every morning. "Never leave the house, never be caught dead without your eyebrows!" One of my mother's tenets. Even at the end - in the hospital she actually crawled out of bed to draw on her eyebrows, only to break her arm when she fell. A couple of days later she died. I forgot to ask my brother if she had her brows on.

Even when I tried to focus on the Serenity Prayer today, all I ended up with were the brows. Many a shrink has had a heyday with me.

Today I'm grateful for Henri Nouwen, for the chatter, for the brows, for my mom - and for the willingness to keep trying to find my truth - that I am, we are, the Beloved.