That’s odd, it’s been exactly a month.  Again.  Maybe it’s the full moon that gets me here.  I’ve never kept a journal, aside from Xanga, and between being out of practice and my problem with organization, I’m hard-pressed to come up with a first paragraph. 

I think this has happened before, though I can’t remember back that far.  Really, I don’t know where to start.  Maybe I’ll make a list.  I like lists.  It’s how I always get ready for things. I’ll divide it into the plus and minus.

Tango class sucks because the only guy without a partner is close to 80 and he can’t dance. 

Derek and I are contemplating a new arrangement where I pay him to work on my house.  I think this is what we both had in mind all along but already it is making things awkward.  There are other reasons it’s awkward. 

I found out he tried to borrow money from our mutual friend, this friend who is working two jobs so his wife can stay home with the baby. 

I have given up voice lessons and am slightly disappointed in myself.

My commodity broker called me up, wanting to short gold when Derek was long. 

I have lost sooooo much money in my stock portfolio.

I gained five pounds and had to buy all new pants.

It’s partly because I have been mesmerized by my new huge TV where I sit ’til the closing bell each day, taking notes, trying to understand everything they say.  Then I watch two more hour-long shows where they dissect what went on.

I am pruning the shit out of my yard and have a pile of branches the size of my car.

I love the music at my tango class and my teacher turned me onto a place where she volunteer teaches on Fri nights and I can get one-on-one instruction there.

Have I mentioned that Derek is hot?  Have I described his intense, huge, dark, liquid eyes?  Sometimes I make the mistake of lingering there and he sees me see him and the conversation gets stuck for a second. 

I am learning that Derek isn’t the altruistic guy he makes himself out to be.  As he becomes friendlier I am questioning his motives, which makes me feel safer.

I sing tenor in church now and it is a relief.  I don’t have to push myself to sing higher than is comfortable and the two other tenors can both read music.

I am getting more and more comfortable with the commodities trading and doubling my money with each trade.

I have enough notes to write a book about this bear market.

I have begun cooking up a storm, making all my favorite fall food.

The front of my house looks so much better and a guy is coming tomorrow to pick it all up.

        Really, I’ve forgotten how to write.  I can’t even think how to close it.

Wow, it’s been a month.  I’m sorry to have been absent so long but I’ve been — Overwhelmed is the word that comes to mind.  He said I could write about him so here’s a glimpse:

Derek wears holes in his clothes.  Sometimes he wears a beard.  He calls it his homeless look.  I think he’s secretly vain and used to be fashionable.  He says when he climbed out of a car accident and looked down at his new pants it changed his perspective.  He was 16.  That was 17 years ago.

He’s giving up turning houses and is going for a job with the city.  Now his hair is very short and he’s clean-shaven.  We were painting the railing on my porch yesterday – He’d dropped by after his interview and grabbed the brush from me, showing me how you paint the edges first.  He wouldn’t give it back so I went and got another – and he was telling me about his last girlfriend.  It bothered him that she listened to her mother and not him. 

He took me to his church on Sunday.  I’m the first person who has ever taken him up on the offer.  I think he tries to save everyone.  Actually, I liked it.  I learned about a story in the Bible, something I’ve been curious about for some time now.  The music was like rock and roll.  No hymnals, just some lyrics printed out on a little piece of paper they passed around.  A kid in a baseball cap with a good voice played guitar and there was a pretty good drummer and bass player.  Derek didn’t approve of the cap or the drums. 

Then we went to buy me a 40” HD TV.  I made lunch while he set it up.  We planned our strategy for when the market opened Monday morning.  We are shorting the S & P 500 and now I can see the tape from my desk.  I’m up $800 in 24 hours.  He’s suggesting I buy a call on corn, thinking it is close to a bounce.  When he had me paper trading he was teaching me futures.  But now that it’s real money we are doing options.  So the most I can lose is what I paid. 

He calls me a lot.  Like five times a day sometimes if the market is crazy.  And he’s been coming over a lot to watch TV with me.  Maybe because he doesn’t have a TV.  He got caught with his last house.  It’s still on the market.  He never lives in the house he’s selling and since he is just trading now he is staying with a friend from church who is in a wheel chair and needs someone to do the yard and the house.  The guy has always been in a wheel chair.  He has a beautiful house and great taste if you like modern.  Derek keeps the house and yard immaculate. 

Once I realized he was a clean-freak, and once he’d installed the TV and we’d moved onto dinner preparation, he began cleaning my kitchen.  He met with resistance when he tried to combine my two paper piles but in the end I noticed they were one.

I’ve been socializing.  At first it was with the high school reunion committee.  We had the party on the 6th so two weeks before and the week after the emailing and phoning was constant.  I wrote a thing about it which sparked much feedback so one of the guys started a blog but that’s died down.

Prior to that I met some people that I’m fond of.  Remember the young woman I met at the Recorder Society?  Well, she had a party a while back and I met a friend of her husband’s who is a commodities trader.  He has been teaching me how but once he figured out how old I was and once I figured out how hard that game is — Well, today I told him that we probably didn’t have much reason to hang out.  We both lost a lot of money the last few days and we were supposed to get together tonight but I called him and canceled.  What’s the point?  I miss him already, though.  He stays up until 3 in the morning to watch corn, or maybe it was the dollar.  So we’d talk for hours while I taught him about the stock market and he taught me about futures’ contracts.  It was fun.  He’s a Virgo, too, and a good teacher.  We got along really well.

I also met someone from the meditation class.  My voice teacher tried to set me up with him in the beginning of summer but he’s married so I said I wasn’t interested.  That was until I read an email he’d sent me months ago that I somehow missed.  He got his masters in India, worked for Llyods of London, came here and opened up a store, which he just sold, but his wife refuses to leave Chicago.  We talk about meditation.  I have a hard time keeping up with his logic and making out his English but he is fascinating.  In person, though, he is very stiff.

It’s fun to spend time with new people but then I feel lonely when they fizzle out.

This was today’s quote from the Daily Guru:  “All of us are always self-absorbed. The question is, with what self do we identify?”  Of course I might have read into it my line of thinking that I have a shift going on in my identity.  I drove that car home with the sun roof open and the radio blaring — He’s a professional cellist and the radio was set to classical — and I felt different.  Kind of like I did wearing dress-up clothes to the weddings.  It had been a while since I’d worn pearls, and dress-up clothes suit me.

I know from being bald how unnerving it is to have a noticeable shift in our image.  And I put a lot of stock into image.  Not that that’s good.  It’s probably bad.  But I take great care in dressing for each day.  I choose my shoes and jewelry to go with my clothes, whether I’m going to the river or the hospital.

I’ve thought about it and it’s not about appearance it’s about …I don’t know what it’s about.  All I know is that things are changing.

I’ve always suspected I had mental problems and lately they are surfacing.  There is a new car in my driveway, new to me, anyway, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.  My brother came to look at it; he asked to go for a ride.  What he meant was he wanted to drive it.  I said, “No.” I didn’t want him racing around in it.  He acted like I was crazy, saying “I don’t want to get a ticket or anything.” 

So we went for a ride and he drove.  He insinuated I’d paid too much.  He acted like it was too nice of a car for me.  And all he could say about the way it drove was that it seemed “rough.”  I asked what that meant and he said when we went over the speed bump it landed with a thud. 

I think he must be jealous.  But that’s not what I’m concerned about.  I want to know why I’m not more excited.  Why am I not standing in the dining room looking at it?  Even though I know the woman I bought it from — Remember the woman who hosts the recorder playing every Mon? — I still feel nervous about it.  It must have to do with the fact that Saabs are expensive to maintain.  But this car has had no problems and it only has 62,000 miles on it.  It’s a 2001 and I paid $9,000 for it.  It will last me a very long time so I don’t mind the fact that I have to put the good kind of gas in it and the synthetic oil.  So what’s my problem? 

I think it has to do with my brother’s basic reaction, and that is that it’s a nice car.  I act like I don’t know what he’s talking about; that it’s a station wagon.  We grew up in a family that drove station wagons.  There were four of us kids so my mother drove whatever station wagon my dad was done with.  My dad owned a lumber yard and half the time I rode to flute lessons in the delivery truck.  They spent money on the country club (both were big golfers), music lessons and clothes but acted like the neighbor’s Tbird was nouveau riche. 

I certainly wouldn’t have picked a Saab, though I think they are cool cars, and when she said her husband was selling his car I got very excited because I had remembered pulling up behind him once, admiring it, though I couldn’t  remember what it was.  There are VERY few cars I admire.  But mostly I bought it because my dog crate fit in the back.  All the records were in the glove box and I see these people every Monday.  What could be better?  I just can’t figure out what’s wrong with me that I’m not thrilled.

The rain came and washed my mood away.  I woke up early and went to my favorite new coffee shop, Cooks Illustrated in hand, to plan what I was taking to the three potlucks I have this week.  Then I hit two grocery stores for all the ingredients.  For the choir I am taking mac-n-cheese.  For my breast cancer support group — After all these years I think we need a new name — I am taking Cobb salad.  And for the recorder party I am making corn bread and taking it in the cast iron skillet. 

I’ve been working on my high school reunion and when the phone rang I thought it was my friend S…. because her last name came up on the caller ID.  But it was the gal I met at the coffee shop, who works for my high school friend’s husband, calling to remind me about the Thurs night for wine thing they do every week.  I thought small world and said, ”Yes, I am coming.”  Those bizarre coincidences always give me pause.  This new woman seems kind of zany but any friend of the barista’s I guess is okay.

I’m glad to be home after all.  I have lots of fun things going on and this new back-to-school weather always makes me excited about fall.  As much as I love spring and summer, fall always jumpstarts me.  Fall is full of possibility.

I’m back.  Obviously.  Feeling a little flat.  More about that later when I can give a shit enough to write something.

The barrista seems difficult to me.  I think what happened is that he is not being polite anymore and when he doesn’t like something he doesn’t hide it.  I always sit outside and now he brings his little cup out and joins me when he can.  He tells me about the people sitting inside.

The last three times I’ve been in there the subject of communication has come up.  The first time in reference to his failing marriage. The second was when I told him about the wonderfully amazing conversation I overheard between two of his patrons, one of the men relating a discussion he’d had with his wife.  And the third was this morning.

The last time I’d seen him he told me about how he was closing the store one day in September and holding a three-hour seminar on communication.  I said I was interested.  But right before that he said something startling.  After I told him about the remarkable conversation I’d overheard he said, “That’s right, you don’t know much about men.” 

This was the second time he’s left me confused and speechless.  I am trying to make a good impression, as he is in a position to help me meet a man.  Plus, I like him.  I feel a certain simpatico with him.  So I didn’t say anything about my experience with men.  In fact, I decided his statement was true.  The kinds of men who hang out there are worlds apart from the kind of man I’ve been dealing with.

So today when he sat down, plaintively, I missed the cue.  I was rambling on about how good it was to get out and soak up new stuff.  I was telling him about going to the very restaurant who makes his pastries.  I was relaying another conversation I’d overheard.  The man was a writer from Manhattan.  He had left his cushy job to come to Oregon, and, as he told his coworker about the college gig he used to have and how he traded it all in for the kind of weekend he was describing, I hung onto every, eloquent word. 

We were sitting on a patio with perennials, just one mile from the fast-food and car lots which predominate my landscape, but it might as well have been Martha’s Vineyard.  I was explaining this to the barrista.  The part that pissed him off was when I described the writer.  He was small with bad skin, weird hair, and ugly shoes.  The barrista is short, which I had forgotten.  And he is a little overweight, which, who cares.  So he cut me off with an annoyed tone and launched into his schpeel about the seminar.

It’s starting to sound not free.  And like “The Secret.”  And that’s cool but I felt like I was talking to someone selling a pyramid thing.  And what I wanted to talk about was what men hear when women talk.  Or what he heard when I talked.

Because we had an issue.  A woman went into the coffee shop, just to use the bathroom.  He explained when I wondered why he wasn’t getting up.  He used it as an example of how he’s evolved, saying before he’d be all judgmental about how she wasn’t really going to buy coffee next Saturday “when she gets paid.”  He used a line, no doubt from some brochure, the gist being everything is okay just as it is, because that’s how it’s supposed to be. 

I was thinking good for him because I would be more uptight.  I said my style of parenting was to make a rule so that I didn’t have to arbitrarily decide case by case.  This came up because we were speculating about other people wanting to use his restroom.  That’s when I saw him get defensive. 

He pretended he didn’t hear me when I said, “What about when she tells the others and they start showing up.”  She looked down on her luck and ‘the others’ I referred to were the homeless.  I saw him stiffen, ignore it, and then say, “What?” 

That’s when I went into the part about my parenting style.  Really, I was portraying myself as chicken, saying I took the easy way out, having blanket rules so that I didn’t have to have the conversation.  He didn’t like what he was hearing. 

It was a perfect example of poor communication between men and women.  He said, in a defensive voice, that he was thinking about getting a lock and key for the bathroom.  I didn’t get a chance to explain, as a customer came and he had to go.  I love that he lets people use his bathroom.

I’m glad he’s married.

Emily, what made me flee back into the house was the look on her face.  It was not a peaceful look.

Ilsa

I was all ready to go dancing Wednesday night when I thought I should check the temp to see if I needed a sweater.  I opened the front door to step out onto the porch when I saw Ilsa, my cat, curled up against the stoop.  It was odd that she didn’t move out of my way, and when I leaned down to get a closer look — I didn’t have my glasses on — I could see she wasn’t breathing. 

I quickly shut the door and began to pace.  I knew something was up with her.  That afternoon I flashed on her, thinking something had happened.  She hadn’t come home the night before, which wasn’t that unusual.  These hot summer nights she liked to stay out late and hunt.  I’d find a dead shrew on the carpet the next morning. 

I wondered how long she’d been dead, how hard her body would be.  Ewwww, I shuddered and paced some more.  I’d never touched a hard dead cat before.  As a vet tech, some 35 years ago, I’d bagged tons of dead cats and dogs, but they were warm and soft, and they weren’t mine.  I’d held her dying brother in my arms as the vet put him to sleep, just a year old.  He was such a cutie-pie; I still miss him. 

Ilsa was too elegant and precious to be squished into a plastic bag but I was afraid the raccoons would get her if I left her on the porch.  I knew what I had to do.  I opened the door to see how long she’d been dead.  She was rock hard with not a scratch on her.  No blood, just a pool of clear liquid beneath her little body. 

I put her in the refrigerator and called my brother.  He said I could bury Ilsa in his yard as my dog would surely dig her up.  He’d soak the ground so it would be easier digging in the morning.  I paced around some more and decided to keep my date with the Canadian, not wanting to be in the house. 

I had two drinks, danced all night, and put her out of my mind.  The next morning I drove the cold bag over to find his girlfriend had the hole all  ready.  I opened the sack, trying to ease her into the dirt without having to touch her.  “I think I should widen the hole,” said Mary.  “Her head is too close to the surface.”  I didn’t want to put her to more trouble and I didn’t want to have to pull Ilsa back out so I picked up the tail and shifted her body so that she laid flat.  All this with no tears.  I think Mary thought I was being cold-hearted.

Maybe I am.  I was so mad at first.  Just when she’d settled in around here and could actually walk by the dog without a huge chase scene.  She had begun sleeping with me every night, racing up the stairs ahead of me when it was time for bed.  She would always be curled up against the back of my thigh, tucked into the bend of my knee.  I can still hear her hit the floor in happy anticipation of watching the the water swirl in the toilet when I’d get up in the morning.

In this last month she followed me everywhere, wanting to sit on my lap or help me get my make-up on.  If I went outside, so did she.  If I were on the computer she would be perched on top of the back of the couch.   I would always have to leave the downstairs sink running because she refused to drink out of a bowl.  The cushions to the couch had to be pulled up, even after the dog learned to stay down, because she liked to sleep where she would be squished if someone sat down.  I could never have a vase of flowers out because she’d dump it over trying to drink out of it.  Life is easier now but she had such a mystique about her that the house feels empty.

I don’t even really like cats but this past month I began to see how cool she was.  Lately we were able to communicate telepathically.  She used to have to make this little noise in the back of her throat to tell me she wanted something, and then she’d either lead me to her bowl or the bathroom sink.  But lately I would just get the signal, look over at her, and follow.  I started noticing her more, looking her in the eyes and telling her how great she was.  This was maybe two weeks ago .

Ilsa was beautiful in a muted way.  A barn cat, she was small.  She wasn’t a true calico but she was red, black, and white with the softest, most beautiful coat that always smelled good. She looked Egyptian, very regal.  But she was sweet and quiet, and had always kept to herself.  She fucked with the dog all the time but she did it on the sly.  After four years of tormenting each other they were finally friends.  Only now she’s gone.