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It’s 6 A.M.


A 2010 Girardin MB-II school bus belonging to ...

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I am not getting enough sleep. And if the light-headed space cadet feeling wasn’t clue enough, shoulder blades melting into lock-down is a red alert.

It’s partly my own fault. Spending time with Rob is priority, and with renovation, his lengthening work day, and kid things keeping us both busy, we tend to make up the us time by stealing from the Sandman, but we pay a heavy toll.

However, even when we do manage to get to bed at an admittedly relative decent hour, there is still the matter of the 6 A.M. wake-up call.

This morning it was the neighbor’s diesel truck roaring to life, but it could have just as easily been the yellow school bus that also revs up at an ungodly early hour. It’s not a new issue, but as the end of the school year still eludes us by well over two months, I am past exhausted with this slumber interrupter.

And there is little that can be done. Because I like the neighbors. Dee plays with their children and they are pleasant and not in any way objectionable as people, which is so refreshing for me I am loath to disturb the wake of that boat even just a little.

Most of my adult life has been spent in active avoidance of my neighbors. They have been National Inquirer noisy, demanding, obnoxious, creepy, drug-addled, dangerous, criminal and lecherous. There was the guy who lived below me who came in every night at 3 with his buddies and cranked up the television, which ended with a screaming match between us that woke the entire building but put an end to his party apartment ways.

I lived across the hall from a drug dealer, whose customers thudded up and down the stairs all night long, and I lived underneath a girl who liked to do her aerobics at midnight.

At university, my first apartment was shared with the hands down winner of bat-shit craziest roommate ever and our next door neighbors appeared to dine regularly on something that smelled like wet matted dog fur, a situation I only improved slightly when I moved into the next apartment – right next door to a frat house.

My first house was sandwiched between two middle-aged married lechers, who made it nearly impossible for me to do my yard-work in peace.

The house I owned before moving here had me contending with hostile Stepford wives because my lawn was tidy to the impossible suburban standards and exposed me yet again to an alcoholic pervert in the adjacent lot, who ironically was someone who teased me mercilessly about my weight when we went to the same junior high.

Making nice with neighbors was not a high priority when I moved here. Rob is not exactly gregarious and keeps interactions to the minimum he can get away with and those he knew also knew Shelley, so they were polite and distant, but after four years, and with Dee out and about, I have gotten to know a lot of people around here. Teaching yoga at the community hall has made me a known quantity even beyond the block.

And I like it.

Sure, I wish the renter across the alley was a better pet owner because that dog of hers barks all the time, and the guy at the end of the next street who lets his dogs live in the house while he occupies the garage give me pause, but most people are pleasant and good-hearted.

So I don’t really want to make an issue of the school bud or diesel truck. I don’t want to be “that” neighbor. The picky princess one.

But, gawd, I am tired and can’t wait for summer to come and the big yellow bus to be mothballed.

Too Many Words


My own work. Created using "Inkscape"...

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The limit is 500 but I received a dispensation for another 50. So how many words have I written?

843.

A first draft should just flow freely. Even when you know there are word count constraints, the first rule is just get it down and done. Worry about length in the edit.

If I’d had a thousand, the mandate would have been relatively easy.

Explain how you and Rob made your relationship work.

Which begs the question of why our both having been widowed set the odds against us in a way that other relationships aren’t as challenged, but the book is advice based and geared towards women who find themselves dating and/or in serious relationships with widowers.

A widower once showed up in the forum who took issue with the idea that dating him would be more difficult than dating someone with a different set of variables. He argued that divorced or never married men presented women with similar issues. He ranted and raved quite a bit – which left the question of why he would need special handling not all that much in doubt – but he made a good point. One I don’t disagree with really. Dating is dating. Baggage is baggage to be unpacked and then put away in a drawer, donated to a charity or tossed in the trash.

And everyone comes to dating with a unique to him/her set of details for someone else to parse.

So what did we do?

In 550 words or less?

We wanted it enough to do all of the things that the experts tell you are critical in establishing and maintaining a good relationship but that most people are too lazy, caught up in life or simply resist because it wrecks the whole sexy romance aura of it to bother doing.

  • Did you know your partner’s complete medical history before you signed on the dotted line? Or debt obligations? Credit problems? Portfolio? Retirement plans? I did. And Rob had my info too.
  • And did you talk about your fears? Plans for the future? How to raise the kids – discipline and Santa Clause issues alike?
  • When things came up – as they do – did you speak up or stuff it until it exploded in a Technicolor montage of every little thing that drives you crazy, being sure to include all miscues and imagined slights?

There was not a lot of doubt where Rob and I were headed. Even in the very beginning, our emails read like two people mining for a potential relationship. We weren’t youngsters and we don’t come from the school of drifting until something is so obviously a relationship we are forced to make it an action item.* Though Rob thought we could perhaps live together for a bit, the immigration issues, compounded by insurance and employment and child concerns and my rather immovable point of view on the stupidity/just asking for trouble problem with the whole free-form co-habitation thing, made that a less desirable alternative. Rob gallantly refrained from pointing out that we were engaged and planning to be married in September anyway, which was really a sweet thing for him to do.

Both of us did the cohabitating thing with the late spouses. Rob and Shelley at the behest of her grandmother, who believed couples needed at least two years to practice before tying a knot**. I went along with cohabitating with Will but I laid my cards on the table first and put a time limit on it, and he was invited to agree or move along.  He found my conditions completely reasonable and actually proposed well before his time was up – as he had planned to all along I later learned. Living together is a rather pointless exercise for those who’ve decided that marriage is what they want anyway. But it mollified others and provides the illusion of having put time and thought into your decision.

When I share the odd story here and there about our courtship and the early part of our marriage, I leave out the work part. Partly because it’s not romantic and partly because I – incorrectly no doubt – assume that everyone knows that good relationships don’t bubble up from the sea-foam like Aphrodite.

Things came up.

We had three children in varying stages of not being terribly pleased with us. There were in-laws who felt trampled upon and friends who weren’t sure how to react. Our mothers were supportive but not all that secretly worried. My dad was about the only one who wasn’t too concerned.

Logistics. Moving and merging households. Immigration. And the emotional residue from care-taking and grief still wanting central stage from time to time, having been in the spotlight for so long how could it be otherwise?

550 words. I almost need a book.

*For the record – again – I am personally opposed to living together in a mindless manner. Nothing good is the usual result. As an off-shoot, I don’t think it’s wise to know what you want but keep it from the other person because they either a) don’t want the same thing really or b) you think they might meander into line with your way of thinking if you just stay casual about it. To varying degrees, they are all recipes for personal misery times two (or more if you are foolish enough to impose this on children either by dragging them along for the ride or creating one from scratch).

**At least that is what Rob told me she told them. My theory? No one was crazy about the idea of Rob and Shelley marrying. I suspect that Shelley’s grandmother used her considerable influence to simply slow the two of the them down a bit, and they went along because they were incredibly young and marriage  – at least in the days of our teenage yore – seemed pretty permanent. But that’s just my theory.

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Short Man/Tall Woman


Me with 8 foot tall woman

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Is it a form of bigotry to discount short men as mating prospects? Blogger Kay Steiger thinks it is. She’s stirred up a little hornet’s nest at The Daily Dish with responses to her recent diatribe against prejudiced women of a certain stature.

Although not a dwarf herself (she’s 5’6″) and freely admitting that she’s never personally dated a man shorter than she is (her current paramour is in fact freakishly tall by any measure), she finds some women’s disinclination to date … beneath them … puzzling and open to scrutiny even.

Being on the tall side of womanhood myself, I have never had much option where height and dating is concerned. Most men are eye-level or lower and if I wanted to date at all, I wasn’t in a position to rule out such a large segment of the male population. It was a matter of practicality because I found very early on that young boys and men of most ages don’t like to date tall women. And their reasons for this are just as lame as the reasons women give for not dating shorter men.

Aside from Rob and a guy I had a wildly irritating attraction dance with at university, I have never dated or been married to someone taller than I am.

Will was an inch shorter. It made him crazy enough that I played along with his assertion that we were the same height. He was slightly built though with a solid muscle base that made him much heavier than he looked. Dee inherited that from him. She is a peanut to the eye but lift her at your peril.

The shortest man I ever dated was just 5’2″. Bald and as tubby as a Hobbit to boot. None of these things doomed the relationship but his obsession with being shorter than I was one of the tipping factors for our not dating very long.

I went out with a red-headed ROTC Marine during university who I towered over as well, but he didn’t even seem to notice, which made him unique.  Most men I dated, and they were shorter, noticed – a lot.  It was tiresome.  My height is not something I can alter though I avoided heels as much to increase my dating potential as I did because I found them dangerous to walk in.

Ms. Steiger, however, seems to confuse actual bigotry with attraction, and attraction is all about finding a “good fit” with someone who could wind up fathering your children and being the one to hold your world together when it threatens to fall apart. It can’t be underestimated or lightly scoffed into a shameful submission. And it certainly shouldn’t be analyzed from the point of view of a petite girl who apparently only dates taller.

Being with Rob has been a physical revelation. Not only is he taller, he is bigger than I am. Because the other side-effect of a man who is shorter than you are is that he is often smaller in other ways. Less muscle. Not as broad. Sports the same or a tinier waist span.

Rob can lift me easily. In our early courting days, being swept up the stairs like Scarlet O’Hara was not uncommon.

I don’t have a wider shoulder span than he does or bigger hands. His biceps require two of my hands to encircle and he couldn’t get a leg into my jeans let alone wear them with ease.

The looking up thing though is surprisingly hard on the neck. I can understand why a shorter man might want to avoid that.

His greater height makes spooning actually possible and I can fit into the crook of his armpit while we are sitting close without having to slump in my seat.

Which isn’t to say that any of these “advantages” means that short men should despair of taller women if they are attracted to them. I certainly didn’t use any of the above as criteria in my dating days. In fact, intelligence, a biting sense of humor, lovely eyes and a firm lifted bum* atop a pair of shapely legs will take a man a long ways in my estimation.

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt to be able to grow a beard. As Beatrice once said, “He who hath a beard is more than a youth.” Which is a good thing too.

In my opinion, the physical side of attraction probably stems from those moments in our childhood when our sexual awareness was taking shape and we began to thrill or be repelled by all manner of things big and small. My beard thing has its roots in my dad’s habit of not shaving when he was on vacation and the teasing way he would whisker rub us. It developed further when I was a just teen and wildly enthralled with the Bee Gees for reasons I can’t even begin to rationalize. Twinkling eyes were a hallmark of my dad’s family. All the men had them though for a time I was drawn to big chocolate peepers because the first boy I ever adored beyond reason was a little fellow (yes, he was shorter) in kindergarten whose eyes were melty brown and his hair fringed like Jack Wild.

If not for attraction, we could easily interchange one mate for another. We could be Borg like in our ability to assimilate romantically, but where would the fun be in that?

But I think short women should refrain from comment on this topic, they don’t have the proper perspective.

Quickie Update: I emailed my two cents to Andrew and he actually posted it. You can read it here. It’s number two, in case that wasn’t obvious.

*Hockey butt. Both Rob and Will played hockey as youngsters and it does a man’s lower half good, imo.

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