Molten Mercy

A chickadee was just tapping at my window while I was looking at Carole McDonnell's blog. Was it telling me that all the bird food was gone or picking up invisible to me insects? I got up and set out suet and sunflower seeds amongst excited chirping. The dog got excited because I always give her the suet container to lick and chew on. Happy, happy Pepper, the hairy hairless Chinese Crested mix.

I finished The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd last night. How I wish I could write as beautifully as she. She has a gift for using the exact right adverb or adjective that describes everything. Her metaphorical use of mermaids is masterful. But as to the plot.... Sigh. I despise adultery. It's engaged in enough that there must be billions of people not getting their perceived needs met. And I need to remember that not very many woman have my wonderful husband. ... So the main character in her midlife crisis has a few months of glorious sex with a monk and becomes alive and can do art again now that she's broken out of her box of marriage. It's fantasy sex with someone she does not know who might leave his socks on the floor or might behave abominably in traffic, but she doesn't need to deal with it, so this is good for both of them, and she returns to her marriage revitalized. Whoopee. She also discovers that the pipe she gave her father as a child is not, after all, the cause of his death. Instead, she discovers that her father committed suicide after coming down with the same hideous brain-eating disease his father did. And instead of finding a way to kill himself by himself, he has to involve two monks, his wife and two of her friends, who make it look like an accident. Guilt drives the mother of the main character to, thirty years later, cut off her fingers. Once the mother is forced to confess this to the daughter, she is freed of the compulsion to punish herself. Uh huh. So now I have been taught that having a fling would help me return refreshed to my marriage.

Being in love is an awful lot of fun. I can see the attraction. Since I make friends among men more easily than I do women (unless the woman also has a mild case of asperger's or has no problem with my differences) I've had the chance to skirt the edges of falling in love again. When I find my emotions going there, I simply draw back until the hint of the possibility goes away. Why can't everybody else do that?   I suppose my attitude is why my feeling daughter finds me such a chore sometimes. She told me she's tired of explaining why she likes the dangerous things she does. After all, I'm never going to get it. I suppose so.  I solved my mid-life crisis by taking college classes. I already have a B.S. in medical technology, so I was relaxed in the classes and massively outperformed the students half my age. Wish I could have been that good the first time I went to college.