Tuesday evening

[mrissa]

elisem says of her work tonight, "But you know, if I didn't have this, I'd be praying for it right now." Yah. That. With a lot of my life, actually.

It has been a day with good stuff in it. I went to the allergist and bought markgritter suckies* and went to the bank and got lunch with dd_b and walked by Lake Calhoun and picked up a small blue stuffed sheep for the dog's birthday** and came home to spend time reading The Necessary Beggar -- which is, incidentally, a very kind book, though I don't mean that only nice things happen to the characters, not in the slightest -- while timprov watched baseball and markgritter played on the computer and the aforementioned birthday beast wandered around looking unsettled about the thunder. These were good things. I had pizza. I petted cats. I talked to my mother.

I feel a little funny about this morning's post, but there's never enough to say about someone's death, never the right things either, so you do what you can and you remember vividly, and sometimes when it all hits and you spend half an hour crying and only manage to calm yourself because you have to shower, that's the right and appropriate thing. And The Necessary Beggar is exactly the right book for me to be reading today. I have it from the library, but I need my own. It is gentle, and it does what it is doing well.

There is something that ought to go on the list of things to do, and there is a bit of short story that occurred to me as I was going to sleep last night, and I should have written it down and did not, and now my brain is reaching for it, slowly and quietly but still reaching. We have real grown-up nightstands now, and I'm putting notecards and a pen in the drawer of mine. This is such a simple thing, but it seems like it could make me happier or at least less likely to spin my wheels.

I am in that kind of quiet mood where it wouldn't matter if I was in an auditorium full of people shouting, I would still be in a quiet mood. It's an internal quiet. It's not bad. Just quiet. Also I think I feel rather younger and smaller than I am. Tomorrow there will be more to do, arrangements to make and revisions to send and all that. Tonight there is quiet, and deep breaths, and my shoulders relaxed for the first time in a good while.

*Hard candies. This is my small cousins' name for them. My small cousins are closing in on taller than I am, I'm told, but when Matthew is 6'5" with shoulders to match, he will still be my small cousin.

**This is not an obscure British term for "mess" or something like that. It really is the dog's birthday.

Comments

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

The other post was not open for comments so I hope you don't mind that I'm saying this here: I'm very sorry to hear of your loss. ScottJames' dad sounds like he was quite a wonderful person and I hope you will accept my sincere condolences.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

The Necessary Beggar sounds good. I'll look for it. There are times when one needs a gentle book.

And no, there is never enough to say. Word people are always looking for the perfect articulation of something, knowing that to say something exactly right changes the world - and when you know that sometimes you have the power to change the world, and there's something in the world that has hurt you, it's hard not to feel at some level as though exactly the right words would make things better somehow. And in a way, I suppose, they do. But mostly they don't. Not right away, anyhow.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

You have my condolences, too, Mriss. (So much for turning comments off.) And many virtual, long distance hugs. And the same to Scott James' family, even though I don't know them. The loss of a loved one is an inconceivable tragedy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is it just exactly: saying something exactly right changes the world. But not in the way I most want it changed, here, and all the other ways it changes the world -- by letting friends and their families know they're loved and that I'm thinking of them, for example -- is very much more subtle and hard to wrap my hands around.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Yes.