Friday
I knew this would happen.
As soon as I found a project I was bound to enjoy and perhaps, with which I might stick for a reasonable period of time, I’d get a job.
So I am now employed.
I had a job before I realized it. Like Pig-Pen of the Peanut’s cartoon gang, I seem to walk about in daze, unaware of the cloud following me around. Mine is cloud of fog and haze and his is a cloud of dirt and dust. I was at my desk using a pic to stab at a Queen Anne olive when the phone rang and the next thing I knew, I was ten minutes into an interview agreeing to come in for a second interview—which I did—and there I was signing sixteen documents giving the company permission to look into my past with a Dobsonian telescope.
I now have an official badge—an identification badge—and a 3-ring binder the size of the family bible and a headache the size of a small country.
Three weeks of training, 8:30-4:30, M-F.
Part of me is so, so sad.
The third day of training, between PowerPoint presentations, I listed the losses I would mourn:
What I will mourn
Two loads of laundry a day (to stay on top of it)…
Picking up kids in the afternoon—chocolate pudding for snack…
Baked salmon with a confetti sauce, new red potatoes and asparagus with hollandaise sauce made from scratch, and a loaf of homemade peasant bread…
Driving a 15 year-old to tennis lessons…
Cleaning the house at a leisurely pace…
45 minute bike ride…
Friday morning Bloody Mary’s and 2:00 pm vodka martinis…
Que en paz descanses, my life as I know it.
I looked over the list Saturday morning and as if I was afflicted with a special Tourette’s-like syndrome affecting consciousness rather than motor activity, I had a moment of clarity which brought me to a screeching halt and caused me shout out: THE THINGS I MOURN? Really?!!
Friday morning Bloody Mary’s and 2:00 PM vodka martinis?
I ran out of vodka two days before I started training which meant that coming Friday, I would not have had a “Friday morning Bloody Mary,” because I had neither the vodka nor the MONEY to buy some.
The things I mourn? Really?!!
The Truths and Realities are as such:
I haven’t been able to “keep up” on the laundry for two weeks because I ran out of Tide and I don’t have the money to buy more;
I haven’t “cleaned the house at a ‘leisurely pace’ for four months because I’ve been too busy sitting in a rocker crying over my financial situation, using a t-shirt to blow my nose because I can’t afford to buy a box of Kleenex;
I haven’t driven a fifteen year old to tennis lessons in months because she doesn’t have tennis lessons because I cannot afford tennis lessons;
And, those vodka Martinis and Bloody Marys and Cape Cods of which I have grown so fond, dried up a week ago—because: I’m too poor to afford even the $7.98 bottle of Barton’s Vodka.
It may appear that recently and only recently, I’d been swimming in vodka. And, indeed I had. I stole (stole may be too harsh a word, more like took or helped myself to) a large and expensive bottle of vodka which THE ONE WHO MUST BE RESPECTED bought for me last April, before I fled his house with all my baggage and moved into my sister’s house. (I saw the bottle in the liquor cabinet when, while he was out of town, I let myself into his place to “borrow” some Tide laundry soap.)
If I’m going to mourn anything, it should be the following:
Unpaid bills; swollen, crying eyes; sleepless, anxiety-filled nights; cheap, cheap vodka; the marvelous humiliation of asking THE ONE WHO MUST BE RESPECTED for gas money to drive the fruit of his loins to flag football field located in BF Lancaster County, exactly eleven miles from the nearest ATM and or public library.
I am employed. I thought I heard HR mention $15.85 an hour, health insurance, and a small allowance for car and phone. That is a really, really good thing.
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