Ives is using finances as an excuse. He's retired, and his wife wants to travel. She brings home pamphlets about cheap airfare to the British Isles and Italy. She desperately wants to rekindle her love for Ives, but he is stuck, unable to move from a place of grief years after their son has been dead.
Ives and Annie are not living paycheck-to-paycheck. They are not wealthy, but they have a comfortable life. They don't have to worry about money. I sort of envy them. I can't remember a time in my life when money wasn't a concern for me. Maybe when I was in college, living at home, and had overage checks from my college scholarships. That's about the only time.
On Thursday, I just signed the papers for a loan to get the roof of my house replaced. My next paycheck is dedicated to getting my car fixed. Most of the time, my paychecks are spent on the day that I receive them. And the bills still pile up.
I know I'm not unusual. Most families are in this situation. I do have great fear of what would happen if I suddenly couldn't work for whatever reason (just like Ives). It would only take a few weeks for the walls of my life to come tumbling down, so to speak. That's always in the back of my mind. I try not to dwell on it too much.
I worry too much about the future. I know that. I worry not about things that are happening, but things that might happen. It's not a really healthy way to exist. It's sort of like standing on a street corner, afraid to cross the street because a car might come screaming through the intersection and kill me. Living like that precludes any enjoyment at all.
Yes, I have to account for every dime. Yes, I bring home left-overs from drug rep lunches at work. Lo mein and lasagna. Yes, I only go to movies once or twice a year now. (It used to be once or twice a month.) Yes, I have house payments and car payments and loan payments coming out of my ass. Yes, yes, yes.
But I still have to carve out enjoyment. I'm planning on going to go for a walk today. I may take a book with me, find some place to sit and read. Tonight, I will have pizza, maybe watch an episode of The Lawrence Welk Show. For Father's Day tomorrow, I may read all day long. It's cheap and relaxing.
Lawrence Welk and walks. Saint Marty is livin' large.
Lessons on Lessening
by: Sally Wen Mao
In the rigmarole of lucky living, you tire
of the daily lessons: Sewing, Yoga, Captivity.
Push the lesson inside the microwave.
Watch it plump and pop and grow larval
with losses. Watch it shrink like shrikes
when they dodge out of this palatial
doom. On the sky's torn hemline, this horizon,
make a wish on Buddha's foot. How to halve,
but not to have--how to spare someone
of suffering, how to throw away the spare
key saved for a lover that you don't
have, save yourself from the burning turret
with the wind of your own smitten hip.
Do you remember how girlhood was--a bore
born inside you, powerless? How you made
yourself winner by capturing grasshoppers
and skewering them? You washed a family
of newts in the dry husked summer, wetted
them with cotton swabs before the vivisection.
That's playing God: to spare or not to spare.
In the end you chose mercy, and dropped
each live body into the slime-dark moat.
Today is a study in being a loser. The boyfriend
you carved out of lard and left in the refrigerator
overnight between the milk and chicken breasts.
Butcher a bed, sleep in its wet suet for a night.
Joke with a strumpet, save the watermelon
rinds for the maids to fry in their hot saucepans.
Open your blouse and find the ladybugs
sleeping in your navel. Open your novel
to the chapter where the floe cracks and kills
the cygnet. Study hard, refute your slayer.
Confessions of Saint Marty
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