HAPPY SAINT PATRICK'S DAY (AND OTHER COMMEMORATIONS)

I had no corned beef in the house so I made kielbasa with mashed potatoes, and carrots from Massachusetts. Very satisfying.

I used to celebrate March 17 as an anniversary, but had forgotten about it and remembered it only as I was waking up today. On this day in 1985, I made a decision to explore intimacy (didn't think it would be lovers at the time) with my Ex. The Big Ex. The Ex from whom I've never gone on to actually commit to someone else as a partner, though I've been in love and made many commitments since then.

In a profound way, my novel Ginny Bates is a rewrite of that 1985 decision. My character Myra also decides to step outside of being an abuse survivor into a new territory, and chooses someone who "didn't fit the previous pattern" to partner with. However, Myra has either luck or better judgment on her side than I did. My choice was more or less catastrophic. I know sometimes the way we must learn our life lessons involves catastrophic judgment, and this is particularly true if you are damaged. Of course, I wasn't aware of the damage at the time (who is?) and I thought it was the best decision I'd ever made.

Don't worry, my Ex doesn't read this blog. She's absolutely incurious about anyone she hasn't hooked into her narcissism, and once I smartened up, it's as if I never existed in her world. She is the anti-Ginny.

I was in the first honors program that my university attempted, a hand-picked group of 25 who took innovative courses together for two years. In one of them, we were team-taught by a physicist (with a strong background in astronomy), a biologist, and a chemist for four hour chunks three times a week. It was in that class that I learned, from Dr. Krishnamurthy, both the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and about entropy. I drove home after class, a 70 minute commute to the trailer where my mother lived out in the boonies, to do her weekly grocery shopping, laundry, and other chores -- because going off to college didn't mean there was anyone else to help her. I remember that drive home, trying to come to grips with entropy, that my universe was slowly dissolving around me, moving from matter to energy. I had to pull over at one point, next to an isolated creek, and cry for a while. I have six planets in Leo: change was not yet something I could relinquish to the vagaries of g*d.

To be honest, I still have issues with g*d in that regard. But, as Myra quotes Voltaire in my novel, "G*d is a comedian playing to an audience too terrified to laugh."

It was that same college semester, perhaps that same week since they are so linked in my mind, that I walked past graffiti on a wall which read "PHILOSOPHY 101 FINAL EXAM: (1) Define universe. (2) Give two examples."

I was planning, in this post, to talk about the reunion of original characters on ER and a few other things. But I think I won't now. Instead, I'm going to go write and will leave you with this poem by Denise Levertov that I love so much I once made stationary from it:

STEPPING WESTWARD

There is no savor
more sweet, more salt

than to be glad to be
what, woman,

and who, myself,
I am, a shadow

that grows longer as the sun
moves, drawn out

on a thread of wonder.
If I bear burdens

they begin to be remembered
as gifts, goods, a basket

of bread that hurts
my shoulders but closes me

in fragrance. I can
eat as I go.