Category: “Chaos project”

Losing It: Take One & Take Two

This morning I had what I predict is a new, recurrent, anxiety dream. I was looking for something. Eventually, it was, somewhat miraculously, found.  But in between, enormous feelings of guilt and misery, letting down the (long-ago) client these things had belonged to… colour separations for a printing job assigned to a company now long out of business…huge efforts to resurrect phone numbers and remember names of the printing rep, the jobber they had usually tasked with making and storing separations, and so forth. Waking up relieved and surprised.  This was not the ancient recurrent falling dream, the familar exam dream with its variations. Yet I have the hunch that it’s the dream of this stage of my life, the fear of “losing it.”

It came at the end of a long and good night’s sleep, after a day when I had nominally been in charge of a pot luck lunch at church, itself marred behind the scenes by ovens and stoves that failed (one sparked spectacularly) after I had not been able to find the new oven thermometers I had bought six months ago to verify the functioning of those same three stoves. Not that the thermometers could have helped, really, with the functioning, though the volunteers might have better known what they were up against. Only the oldest stove, a big six burner restaurant appliance, was working right. Here again, somewhat miraculously, people were fed, food was abundant, leftovers were distributed, dishes were washed. Even the horrible black crust on the bottom of the pot that burned on the stovetop was scoured clean by a newly retired engineer and devout lay reader. Three strangers appeared when the last tired but cheerful members of the clean-up crew came downstairs to the curb; the three guys helped load all the bags of dirty tablecloths and tea  towels, and the cleaned pots, into the share car which (also miraculously) had not been ticketed all day even though I had not been able to pay for the parking at all on my phone, which defaulted to the “information: new hours” screen every time I tapped “continue,” after I had been just too stubborn to go pay with cash–instead, had made screenshots of the computing glitch, preparing to defend myself if fined.

And when I come to write all this, for a blog I now see with horror has been dormant for three and a half years, I find my desk covered with papers and “debris” with scarcely room to rest my forearms on either side of the cup of hot microwaved coffee.

Yes, I live with the fear of “losing it” these days whether it’s the discipline to regularly clear the desk or kitchen table, or to unhaltingly climb up or down even a small flight of steps, or to remember keys or keep track of appointments … I’m almost used to forgetting names now…or to keep my temper in the face of stuff that wouldn’t have irritated me five or seven years ago.

Because “losing it” also means losing not physical stuff or capacity but self-control in a wider sense, doesn’t it? 

I witnessed the extreme example last week, watching what my friend D. calls “people behaving badly”… a seemingly endless cable tv show in the US called “customer wars.” It’s comprised entirely of video footage from restaurants and shops where customers insult servers or bully and punch each other. Quite an eye-opener to the unititiated me!

So many questions. Are the people who watch this show (why?) desperate for someone to feel superior to?  Vicariously relieved that somebody else can simply raise mayhem?  Are the people who act out their frustrations, without any filter or control, the folks for whom Donald T is the ultimate hero? Are the producers of A&E making a fortune, having put scriptwriters and camera people and actors out of work, substituting their craft and lifeswork with the images of hapless and unphotogenic humans caught in low-resolution jumpy images on security cameras?  Who watches this stuff?  And how can showing this as a form of “Art and Entertainment” not degrade public comportment further and further? Are they abdicating some responsibility they ought to be living up to?

I guess I’m coming late to this parade.  But, well, there you are.  There’s much more to say on the subject of “losing it” but those notions need to wait.

Valentines

And then I got distracted.

No envelopes in the mail today. No silly little valentines card circa 1953 signed “Guess Who” in my grandmother’s round schoolteacher handwriting. No carefully folded brand new linen hankie in a card with a pink frilly image from Aunt Jeanne.

But I woke up thinking not about Valentine’s Days Past, or about myself, but about a friend whose husband had died in the past year. Theirs was a great love. So deep a loss I drew back from connecting with her. As she said, people send text messages and think they are keeping in touch. The phone doesn’t ring.

She phoned before Christmas. Could she pay me to do a favour? The single sheets, good smooth cotton ones, she had bought for the hospital bed they brought into the house, weren’t really needed any more. Instead of giving them away, she wanted have them made into pillowcases that she could use on her larger bed. I was so glad. To help. To be shown how to help. To do this.

So I woke up thinking I would sew them today, on Valentine’s day. Utterly appropriate. And let her know, too. Call her. And then I got distracted.

Yesterday, friends came to town. They invited a few people to my place for tea. This motivated me to clear space for the guests. And to “ferret things away.” Boxes and boxes of papers, labelled at least, and then, at the last, simply heaps of things in closets and in the small bedroom. One of my newer friends came and loyally helped. Do I dare even post a photo of the result? The seen and the unseen, the public and the private? Maybe later. As one friend said about the small bedroom where a lot of the debris got piled, “We all have rooms like that.” On the other hand, I had been able to clear the hall closet and even add a second rod to accommodate more coats. Felt smug when people asked “where do we put our coats” and I was able to say, breezily, “in the hall closet of course.”

Waking, I was still enchanted by the result. I could move through my rooms entirely at ease, nothing to stumble over, no coats and boots on the floor by the door, no little piles of deliveries coming in or out. Could I possibly keep it this clear? Oh, I wanted to so very much. My office was a wonder. I had moved the desk sideways and could enjoy the carpet.

My dad had designed and hand knotted that carpet in the early years of his retirement. Bringing life to his beige living room. It was the largest and most ambitious of the carpets he made; he worked so intensely on them, he got stomach ulcers and had to give it up. I have this one and most of the others in my house now. The colours are SO not mine, but my office has pale green walls and so I decided to use it there a few years ago. The first thing I did this morning was vacuum it and admire it.

Then I opened the narrow office closet and took out the things I had stuffed in on top of everything else–papers from my desk that needed attention or had simply been at the bottom of the piles of OTHER things on the desk. The kind of stuff I call “toxic sludge” or “screech.”

Because it was morning of a sunny day in a newly clear house I began by actually processing each thing that came to hand. So when the sheet of labels that comes in the back of every Leuchturm journal came next, instead of putting them somewhere I looked for the notebook whose spine had NOT been labelled… the red one from 2017. Took it down from the shelf, and there inside the front was the photo of Romero that gave me the idea of this post, I saw it in my mind’s eye with the pillowcases I had thought to construct.

And then, when some of the papers in the closet slid down behind, this is what I pulled up with them next:

My husband John Geeza, who is now married again and has his own studio in Guelph, drew this portrait of me because I loved Matisse so much. I’d framed it at one point, and then reused the frame for something else; the drawing is wrinkled, but that can be fixed. It seemed a wonder to me, this morning, to touch in with so many expressions of love. Happy Valentine’s Day!