For decades, I’ve held a kind of moral advantage in my relationship with Other. He snored. I didn’t. It wasn’t pretty some nights. I shushed, poked, even kicked him. In the mornings, I was sometimes resentful and he was penitent.
Lately, though, there’s been a leveling out of the playing field. For a variety of reasons, I now have to sleep on my back for at least a portion of the night. And guess what: I snore too then.
Other has been remarkably good-humored about it. He says things like, “Boy, you really knocked the dust out of the rafters last night!” “Why didn’t you wake me up or roll me over?” I ask. “I knew you were tired,” he says.
It’s sort of infuriating, because I’ve had years of sleep loss from his snoring, and his sleep disruption is only recent. But I have to acknowledge that he now holds the high ground.
Every once in a while, I have a yoga class in which I’m thinking the whole time, “I feel fabulous!” My “om” vibrates thrillingly with everyone else’s. The stretches feel deliciously elastic. Muscle-firming feels genuinely strengthening. I can stand on one leg forever in Tree. The inward-rotation-this and outward-rotation-that are second nature. I can actually feel the white light rising up my spinal column. For an hour and a half I am 100% present and ecstatic.
But those are the days when I probably didn’t need yoga anyway. It’s days like yesterday—when raising my arms above my head made them ache, when good pain felt like bad pain, when I hated every minute of every pose and couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be over—that yoga is most crucial.
Because the thing is, even with a class like yesterday’s, when I felt bad going in and bad throughout, I walk out feeling better: physically relaxed, emotionally calmer, and often with renewed courage to face the world.
I don’t often watch a movie twice, but I was stuck on a plane with nothing to do and I still had Take This Waltz on my iPod. I love it when characters dispense home truths in naturalistic dialogue, encapsulating the whole movie, as when the drunken Geraldine tells Margo, who has left her husband for a sexy neighbor, “You think everything can be worked out if you just make the right move … I don’t agree … Life has a gap in it. It just does. You don’t go crazy trying to fill it like some lunatic.” Or as when Margo’s ex-husband Lou rejects an overture from Margo: “Some things you do in life—they stick.”
Being a home aide is a difficult job—requiring the skills of servant and saint. I had to fetch something from the file cabinet in the room where my parents’ home aide sleeps, and caught a poignant tableau. Laid out on the aide’s pillow was a Holy Bible and a stash of candy bars.
When I walked into the office today, the clock over the desk had stopped ... When I pulled out a $10 bill to put into the office lottery pool, it was torn and taped back together ...
Under stress, I tend to get superstitious, looking for signs and signals. Right now I’m in the throes of making a decision that seems momentous to me. Yesterday I woke up to find a pigeon carcass on the deck. It seemed to have fallen from the heavens. What does it mean?
