Sexual Abstinence and Dr. King

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality. - Rev. Dr. Martin Luthor King, Jr.

There is a a blogger at the Des Moines Register who has decided to fast one random day a week to show solidarity for the poor and oppressed people around the world, particularly those prisoners being held at Gitmo still.

My partner Megan Felt and I have decided to fast one day a week - abstaining from alcohol, caffeine, food, juice, prescriptions, sex, and all monetary purchases - to stand in solidarity with the poor and oppressed in the world and, more specifically, with the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and other locations around the globe.
We're starting today, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but will randomly select a different day each week from here on out.  
Imagine if every American fasted and abstained from monetary purchases for one day every week.  We would lower our consumption rate by nearly 15 percent.  Imagine how those resources could be redistributed to better provide for the least among us.
Fasting one day a week isn't even all that hard either.  Yeah sure, it's going to be uncomfortable, but whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. 
David Goodner - Young Adult Board at The Des Moines Register 1/21/08

Mr. Goodner is a twenty-six year old student at Iowa. Most of what he writes is political in nature and reflects his interests in making the world a better place through public debate, I think. It’s hard to tell. He’s a kid. Only a kid could believe that not having sex or taking his allergy medicine once a week would translate into a saved world. Well, alright, that’s not fair. He doesn’t think he can save the world by doing these things. He is trying to prove his compassion through a meaningless set of gestures. And that is a harsh assessment. And a fair one. But I think it’s probably something we have all been guilty of from time to time over the course of our lives. It’s easy to make small and relatively easy sacrifices. I can remember collecting change from middle school kids for the food bank. They would drop dimes and nickels and pennies into a jar or can and at the end of a week or two we’d have five or six dollars. It was ridiculous because half or more of these same kids came to school every day with that much on them, but only a few of them could think to donate a couple of dollars rather than a few coins or nothing at all. Going without a pop from the machine at the end of the day or not being able to buy junk food a la carte at lunch was too much sacrifice. Their chump change giving was enough to make them feel good.

What I found to be the most odd sacrifice was giving up sex for a day. Which leads a person to wonder just how often David and his partner have sex that giving it up for a day is a hardship. And just as an aside, isn’t it cute the way he refers to her as his “partner”. Such solidarity with same-sex couples is proof, I guess, of the seriousness with which we should take his other “solidarity” stances. But back to the sex. One day. That’s a sacrifice? He clearly has always had a partner because speaking as someone who went without sex for the duration of her first husband’s illness and quite a while longer after his death, I’d just as soon write the needy of the world a check.

Gestures are just that. If you want to help the poor, then really help them. Donate your time or your money or something that you bought mindlessly on your last cruise through Target. Volunteer. Join a cause and work for it. Sipping bottled water for a day? Walking across campus instead of driving a half mile to class? Skipping the snugglies with your honey? What is that? Really, what is that?

On the Eve of Two Years

My first husband Will will be dead two years tomorrow. Interestingly I had a visit from him today as I was heading to the grocery store.

I am a button pusher when it comes to the radio. I surf XM until I find something I like. I listen. And then if the next song is not something I care for or I am not in the mood to listen to - I begin my surfing all over again. After I dropped Katy off at school and was heading toward the Safeway, our song came on. It’s a song by Everlast that was playing constantly when Will and I were first dating and though it is not romantic in any sense of the word it dogged us so much that Will took to calling it “our song”. I have only heard it sporadically since he died, but whenever it has come on the radio it seems “sent” because it turns up at moments when I really need to hear from him. And that’s what is even more interesting because I didn’t think I really needed to hear from Will today. I had asked him to pop in and say hello in my dreams a few days ago as I am dreaming like crazy and to my mind - no purpose. But Will has declined command performances in my slumbering hours. He has shown up only once - as I remember him from before he was ill - and that was the night he died. And he didn’t speak to me. We didn’t interact at all. I just saw him packing up that old white boat of a car he drove when he was a teenager and then he hopped in and drove away. It was as clear a message as he could give me that it was time for each of us to move on. We had spent enough time in limbo. His only concessions to me have been a photograph of his urn that I can see his face on and the night he walked by my bed just before I fell asleep just about one year ago. Aside from that, he has used the radio. When he wants to remind me that he is still checking in and making sure all is well - it is Everlast, and when he wants me to remember that I am doing fine and he is proud of me - it is Jimmy Eats World. Considering how much time we spent driving around in his pick-up and listening to the radio, I think it is fitting that he chooses to contact me this way.

So, I sat in the parking lot and sang along with Everlast until the song was over and though in retrospect it makes me cry, at that moment I felt pretty good.

6AM

Went and bought an alarm clock for myself on Saturday because I wanted to start getting up before eight (or eight thirty) and try and re-establish a more work friendly routine before moving back to the States. I will never find a teaching job that lets me sleep in and for now I could use the extra time in the morning for writing and getting things in order for the initial move. I know that April/May isn’t exactly around the corner and that I made the move up here in less time (plus sold my house, car and gave away nearly all of my furniture to boot), but I would rather avoid the panicky feelings of deadlines looming like large scary monsters.

So, was I up with the sunshine? No. And just an FYI - the moon is still bright shiny and full at 6AM in northern Alberta. The reason for my spectacular failure was that I couldn’t fall asleep last night. It was probably one o’clock by the time I managed and even then it was another one of those dream filled sleeps that I am beginning to find aggravating as they are just non-sensical and exhausting.

Part of my trouble is that I don’t really wind down prior to going to bed. I am usually busy with something - writing or shredding or something too busy. Lately too I am stiff from hunching over the shredder or my daughter’s head. And finally, Wednesday will be two years since Will died. I haven’t any sense of how to commemorate it. The first one was just getting to and past it, but now that I have and the day isn’t as fraught with anxiety and dread - now what? His grave is back in Iowa. His friends fell out of touch long before he died. My own family will not remember and truthfully saw his passing as a blessing for me and although they are right on an intellectual level, the emotions don’t match up for me. His mother considers me a murderer for not intervening when the aspiration pneumonia set in that final weekend. Katy is too young to drag into this commemoration of loss thing. I think for now it is better to celebrate his birthday and remember the happier times of his life and not dwell on the illness and death. Since she is a carrier of the disease that killed him, she will have her whole adult life to consider that and the fallout as it will effect her and her children (should she choose to take that risk). So, I am a trifle bit alone in this remembering stuff and honestly - I don’t feel like it anyway. I look at pictures of him when he was well - no, he was never well - but when he was not visibly ill, and it’s hard to remember how I felt then. It’s like flipping through someone’s photo album. Would it be awful of me to just feel sad but more grateful that it’s all behind me now? Because you see, that is what is making me really sad. I am happy. Happier than I can ever remember being. I love Rob. I love our life. I am looking forward to the future and the plans we have made and the ones we are still formulating.

Getting up early is a practice thing. Just like everything else.

Shredding, Purging and Nits

Last night I started sorting the last of the boxes of papers and other crap that I stupidly lugged from Iowa to Canada. Rob says not to be hard on myself about it, but it’s hard not to when you spend an entire afternoon shredding receipts that predate your daughter’s birth and are sorting through old check duplicates from four years ago. This was all stuff I had more than enough time to handle even before Will died and I simply let it stack up. And why? Because I let my inertia take over and I listened to people when they told me that it was okay because of my circumstances. It wasn’t okay. It still isn’t. But, it’s done. I have sorted the wheat from the chaff and can now get on to the much less fun task of filing.

I am a horizontal filer by nature being a concrete random and all. Filing just doesn’t feel natural and sticking them away in drawers even less so. Worse is that I can’t find them at all once they are neatly put away. It’s as if file cabinets are kryptonite and once the papers are securely encased within them, I lose all sense of them. When they are scattered about or in plastic totes, I can hone in on nearly anything quite quickly. But filed papers disappear from my radar and I can be rifling through the exact folder I need and never find it at all.

Fortunately the ordeal was just depressing from a self-recriminating standpoint. Last night I found a lot of the paperwork from hospice, the funereal home and the autopsy that was performed on his brain and spinal cord by the university to which I donated his tissue so that researchers working on ALD can learn from him. I also found more of the cards that my MIL has sent sporadically since November of 2006, but I didn’t bother to read them again. Today’s fun was limited mainly to pictures, Katy’s school stuff, receipts and old billing statements. And of course my regrets that I wasn’t on top of the clutter the way I should have been. It seems to me sometimes that my now is forever running into or falling over piles of debris from my then. Perhaps life is this way anyway and it was just something I didn’t notice until now, but it is still cause for heavy sighs.

And finally, would a day around here be complete without nit-picking? I think not. We find the tiniest bug. Just one. It’s dead now. And two dozen nits - picked them suckers with a vengeance. Kate’s bedding is still being washed daily and all clothing worn by each of us is tossed in the wash basket regardless. Tuesday is the next shampoo treatment and then - knocking all wood within arm’s reach - perhaps we can get back to normal. Although I think our sofa will have to go since neither Rob nor I can bring ourselves to sit on it (his nephew was an inert mass there for his whole visit and interestingly Rob remembered that the boy confessed to a very recent short haircut after Rob wondered what had happened to the long hair that adorned his Facebook photos - my loathing for SIL continues).