I have a new plan for this blog. Yes, no surprise there. But, hear me out. Because I’ve been stymied by that manuscript I have in the works, and because these entries here continue to be easy to write, I’ve decided to write the manuscript here.
Terrible idea, I know. AI will steal my words. People might, as well. If I do get as far as publishing a book in some form, who would be willing to read it, when y’all have already read it here? For right now, though, this idea is all I’ve got.
To help foil AI, Tracy suggested I put some text in white typeface in the middle of each book-related entry. I asked him, “You think AI will show me how to do that?” He did not laugh.
I’m not going to name the book-related entries something special or even call them out or say where I plan for the entries to go in the manuscript outline. Just, you know, if you see white on white or whatever I learn might protect this text, just ignore it. Thanks.
Onward with this story.
This weird thing happened to me while I visited a large, weekly, ukulele strum-along a couple of days ago. There were 62 uke players there: almost all old people because they meet in the middle of a weekday, and they play really old songs that they all seem to feel great nostalgia for. To top off this image that makes me claw into the ground as I’m being dragged toward it by my heels, this group meets at an assisted living center out in the suburbs of Wisconsin. Whatever. That doesn’t have anything to do with this story.
After the uke strumathon, I was walking down the assisted living hallway with my new friend, Julie, who had driven the two of us there, when I came face to face with another lady I know, Kathy. (I know Kathy from the Pineapple Players ukulele strum group that I bike to every week.) Here’s the thing.
When I looked from Julie to Kathy and back to Julie, I froze. I was insanely uncomfortable. I couldn’t remember either of their names. I couldn’t think what to say, whether to introduce them, what to ask.
What I felt like was that I’d been caught cheating, like in an affair. Seriously! I felt like a deer in headlights.
On the ride home, I dissected that moment to figure out why in the world I’d bungled it, when all I was doing was seeing two people I know. Not even out of context, but in a likely environment, even!
And, I realized this.
It’s been what, six years? Seven years? A long time since I’d been in the company of one person I knew, when I came upon another person I knew. (Well, to be fair, this might have happened that one time while I was volunteering at the info desk of the Airstream rally, but just once!)
It had been so long since I’d been in this situation that my brain just couldn’t find the right switch to turn on, to tell me what to say. That unused switch was hidden behind a million other switches I’d developed over those six/whatever years on the road about so many things I now no longer do. None of those things, by the way, have anything to do with current social life, that’s for sure.
It’s funny: this imaginary brain situation is exactly what’s happening in our new storage shed in the backyard (aka the Cottage). I have an old-style mechanical lawnmower in there that we bought used for the house. It’s way in the back, stuck behind the tent, the wooden block for the hitch, the bin full of sewage accouterments, travel stuff like that. I keep bringing it to the front, and, somehow, old travel-related stuff keeps pulling it back into the recesses.
To our credit, we do keep opening travel bins to grab things we can repurpose, like using the sterile drinking-water hoses to water the tomato plants. (This irks Tracy to no end, seeing as how about once a week, for years, in such a variety of environmental conditions, he worked his ass off to keep those hoses sterile. And here I am throwing them around in the dirt!)
But, that’s all beside the point, which is that my brain is like the Cottage, a tangled mess of old tools that are in the way of tools I might actually need now.
This got me thinking that I’ve come a long way since we got off the road a year ago, but in some ways I’m still stuck in that traveling mindset. So, it might be time to take stock.
June was my month of visitors, and I’m hoping we’ll get more in August, so that’s left July as my test summer month of living in this new house, getting a feel for my new life in place.
So far this month I’ve realized a mess of things. Like, that I made a mistake buying a house and settling here in Wisconsin, instead of renting an apartment for longer. And, that I’m glad that, at least, I bought this house (or, one on this street). That I could not love my yard more. That this is the first time I’ve experienced “retirement” as most people imagine it. That Tracy and I have to figure out separately how we each spend retirement, even though I hope we spend a lot of it together.
Instead of my usual writing habit of realizing that it’s taken me way too long to get the point of this entry, then going back and editing it all down to a tiny intro and carrying on with the point, I’m gonna leave all the above preamble stuff intact and simply call this part 1, whether I feel like what I’ve written so far merits an entire entry or not.
As I keep learning over and over, this is my blog, and I can write it any way I want to. Stay tuned, I guess, for more about all those things I’ve learned, which I meant to be the meat of this post.
