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SoulMates: The Blessed Few


I was blog surfing among the widowed recently and came across a very touching, heartfelt post about soul mates. As my regular readers know, I don’t really believe in the concept. The idea there is just one perfect counterpart for us in all of existence as we suppose we know it just seems ridiculous especially in light of the fact that many people lose partners go on to happy and fulfilling relationships.

My great-grandfather lost his first wife in childbirth after ten years of marriage. He was crushed. He literally gave away their five children and wandered like a Hebrew for over twenty years. Never settled anywhere for long. Went into and fell out of numerous careers. Spent years on end so out of touch with his family that no one can say for sure where he was or what he was up to for at least half of the twenty years he spent on his own before meeting his second wife, my great-grandmother, and the mother of  his six youngest children. When she died of breast cancer not long after their 19 year old daughter also died of breast cancer, Granddaddy simply allowed himself to be shuffled between my grandfather and his remaining sisters*. Her death snuffed the spirit she’d rekindled with her love.

Who was Granddaddy Christie’s soul mate? Based on his reaction to the losses and my understanding of the term, I would have to say both women were. It flies in the Disney princess theory of soul mates so heavily marketed in our society, the notion that we have just the one shot. It defies the reality that many, many people never mate at all. The numbers of single people who have never married have never been higher and are increasing all the time. Is there a soul mate shortage, perhaps? Does the creator play favorites?**

The blogger, and one of the commenter’s, seemed to think that only a very select group of people are blessed with soulmates, leaving me to wonder what they think the rest of us have in terms of relationships. Are we simply filling voids with warm bodies? Settling? And does this mean that people who never marry at all are lesser beings in the eyes of whatever god they espouse? Is there an unworthiness factor in play?

Not wanting to pursue remarriage does not confer special status on one’s former union, nor  does it mean that, if one chose, one couldn’t find another mate who fits seamlessly – and I understand from experience the difficulties in play. It simply means that, for whatever reason, a person isn’t interested in a future that includes marrying again. It’s not mystical. Why the need to dress it up with soul mate mumbo jumbo? And by doing so make assumptions about other people’s relationships? Is it just the grief talking? Or a Queen Gertrude thing? Protesting too much because maybe the soul mate thing is just a Madison Avenue invention and it’s too hard to go there after a loss?

I am touchy where this topic is concerned. When this “soul mate” thing is bandied about, it feels like judgement. The same way the second class widow status conferred on remarried widowed people by so many of our small peer group is judgement. Either Will wasn’t my soul mate at all or Rob is me just settling, and it’s so much more complicated than that. And it doesn’t take me – the person I was or the person I have become – into account at all. I become a passive princess. Snow White. Sleeping Beauty. Life assesses and assigns based on a mysterious set of criteria that have nothing to do with who I am.

And it also judges Rob and I in terms of our commitments to Shelley and Will, questioning them at best and nullifying them at worst.

I don’t think anyone means to denigrate other people’s choices or lives when they bring up the soul mate topic or go on about being unable to “replace” perfection. When one loses a mate, one wants to feel there was meaning and a point to the other’s life and that their union counted for something more. It’s natural to latch onto ideas like soul mates and heaven. It’s comforting. But the soul mates idea limits and denies and it seems like cold comfort, but that’s just my opinion.

 

*By this point the breach caused by his abandonment of his older children had been healed, in a large part due to intervention by Johanna, my great-grandmother. She made the effort to include them and saw to it that her children had unlimited contact with the children of her step-children (some of the older boys were actually older than Johanna and married with kids by then). Some of my dad’s best friends growing up and as a young man were his uncles’ children and grandchildren. Odd, I suppose, but this is my model and probably why I don’t find remarriage and blending as abhorrent as many seem to. Nothing is impossible where good parenting, respect and love are concerned.

**I actually think that he does. And if you believe in the “created in God’s image” thing, I wonder how he managed to pull off such a image of perfection because a perfect God couldn’t possible create imperfect beings. But then I also don’t believe that perfection was what he was going for.

10 Films a Stolen Meme


Stealing meme’s is all I seem capable of which means this Monday ritual is probably played out, but let’s give it another week, shall we?

Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen films you’ve seen that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall. Tag 15 friends, including me because I’m interested in seeing what films my friends choose…or don’t and just comment. I like comments.

1) Gone With The Wind – because it cemented for me the idea that the novel is the best source for good story although I love the first half of this film. I even went to see it on an honest to goodness big screen when it was released for one of it’s anniversaries. It’s a must see on a real movie screen.

2) Moonstruck – I don’t know why I would have so strongly identified with the main character, Lorretta, when I first saw it. I was still in college and didn’t know anything about love, but her loneliness was something I understood. My favorite lines are from that movie:

Love don’t make things perfect. Love ruins everything.

Do ya love him, Lorretta? No, Ma. But I like him. Good, ‘cuz when ya love ’em, they’ll drive ya crazy ‘cuz they know they can.

Someday you’ll drop dead and I’ll come to your funeral in a red dress.

3) The Empire Strikes Back – not the best one of the six but I loved Yoda and movies I can remember lines from must be important.

This one long have I watched. Never his mind on where he was. What he was doing.

4) Much Ado About Nothing – my favorite Shakespeare film adaptation. I used to show it to my students and they loved it too. Emma Thompson is fabulous.

I cannot be a man through wishing, so I will dying a woman weeping.

Or

Thus goes everyone to the world but I and I am sunburnt. I can sit in a corner and cry ‘hey ho’ for a husband.

I can get you one Lady.

Can you get me one of your Father’s getting? Your father made excellent husbands if only a maid could come by one.

5) LadyHawke – I remember taking a break from studying for finals my junior year to catch a matinee of this movie. I went alone. It was an old theatre in downtown Iowa City. Smelled like vaudeville with seats that sunk to the floor. This was another film I used when teaching folktales.

It’s like escaping mother’s womb. God, what a memory.

6) You’ve Got Mail – Better than that insipid Sleepless in Seattle but probably not the best of the romcom genre. Still I love Tom Hanks in his everyman romantic lead suit and the supporting cast is awesome.

The answer to all life’s problems is in The Godfather.

7) The Godfather I and II – I read the Puzo novel when I was in 7th grade. Sr. Marilyn was appalled to discover that yes, my parents not only knew but approved of the idea that I could read whatever struck my fancy. She had no idea that my parents weren’t moved to actually find out what any of the books I was reading were about. They were just happy to have at least one literate child and content to feed my hobby in whatever way they could – short of actually reading themselves. I first saw this on television. I believe both my folks watched too. They were part of a boxed set that Will and I bought when we got our first dvd player. They were his favorite movies.

8) Fight Club – I never saw it when it came out. I never read the book it was based on until I decided that doing so might help me better understand Mick, who is a Chuck Palahniuk reader. I am still torn about it, but I think it holds kernels of wisdom.

9) Cinderella – name a film version and I have probably seen it. My favorites are the Drew Barrymore version, Ever After, which tries to explain where the fairy tale originated and Disney’s musical version with Brandy and Whitney Houston. Yeah, corny and I don’t care. Cinderella has always spoken more to the core of me than any other of the princess tales and I am familiar with my versions of the different folk tales from my English teaching days. I used to tell my students that folk/fairy tales existed because they represented the commonality of human beings in terms of what we need and dream of, and I still believe that.

10) A Christmas Carol – I can watch just about any version of it, but my favorite is the George C. Scott television movie. Did you know that Dicken’s working title for this was “The Sledgehammer”? There is nothing about it I don’t love.

Okay, so this could easily be one of my last Monday meme’s, so I’d appreciate a comment from my normally reticent lurkers.

On the Road #fridayflash


Hands are not easy to remove, but with a Swiss army knife, a hammer and a pair of electric wire clippers, it can be done. They were all I had anyway.

The woman didn’t need her hand anymore. As nearly as I could figure, she hadn’t been dead for long. The tell-tale greenish cast to the skin just about the ears and the nape of the neck contrasted with her bloodless pallor, but the moist heat of the Gulf coast seeps in quickly. Dead bodies seed fast. This one wasn’t crawling  but would be soon enough.

I didn’t need the hand though I’d used fingers for the odd biometric scans that were still in use in some communities. I needed her ID braclet in tact, cutting the chain deactivates them. My own tag was worthless. I’d been issued it before the war ended and now it marked me as a transient refugee and I wasn’t going back to the camps. It was chipped as well, so I’d tossed it as soon as I could even though it was rare to run across SS outside the metropolitan areas and they are the only ones with functional scanners these days. If a person needed to cross a border however, which I did, chipless IDs were desirable. It said two things about the wearer. The first assured the border patrol the person had status prior to The Dissolution, and the second that he or she had never been detained. Detainees, who could be anyone from a simple refugee to a war crimes fugitive, were not allowed to travel freely between zones without papers. Visas were hard to get. Costly and nearly always attention attracting, I’d never bothered to try and obtain one even though I probably had connections enough still to do it.

The most important aspect of the bracelet was that, judging from its size and shape, it conferred citizenship on the wearer. I hadn’t seen one of the new IDs issued by the North American Alliance of States and Provinces, but it was similar enough to the old one that I was confident enough to sit in a ditch for two hours hacking skin and pounding bones to obtain it.

She appeared to have been thrown from a bike which I found a few meters off from her twisted corpse. I keep to the ditches when I travel the old major highways despite the paucity of traffic. It’s only marginally safer at any rate, but I exercise as much caution as I can now that I am alone.

I toyed with the idea of taking the bike too, but it would have made me a theft target and, being female I am temptation enough, so I left it with regrets. In the end I emptied her pack, keeping the useful or edible and then transferring my possession from the tattered Lululemon bag I’d liberated from a deserted store along with a few clothing items I’d always coveted but could never afford.

In the pack I found an old Canadian passport. Her name was Claire. I ripped the photo out and a couple of pages for good measure and stuffed them into a pocket of my light jacket. No one would question a beat up passport from before the war. Just having one at all was a coup.

I’d been heading west but now it was time to go north. I wasn’t sure exactly where the new border lay. The last I’d heard the NAASP extended only as far south as Missouri and just to the Mississippi, but the Confederacy had been in retreat all year and with luck I might hit the border sooner than that.

The heat settled around me like Lady Godiva’s golden tresses but in a sticky stringy way I’d come to loathe. It was not like the dry winds of the Emirate where I’d left my child in the care of friends when war broke out, trapping my husband in a disintegrating land.

The last word I had from him indicated that he was being relocated north. New Ontario maybe but more likely in the Nations. I was a long way from there.

Bracelet jangling loosely on my wrist, I climbed up the grassy hill to the road. Dusk darkened the horizon and dimmed the air all around.  I hadn’t seen or heard a motorized vehicle for almost a week. The rough pavement made for faster travel and, with my new identity, I decided to risk the scant patrols.