five oh five oh five

I had my last session with the trainer on Tuesday… ten weeks for the same cost of one hour with the physical therapist and she did know as much about rehabbing my knee… though she really wanted me to train to be some martial arts babe, and that just isn't going to happen. I felt a little bad, I know she needs the money, but she had started giving me attitude about being five minutes late and really. It's the gym. I'm not going to tell a client who calls that I can't talk because I've got crunches to do. And I'm still not convinced that ball crunches… on a support ball... are that instrumental in recovering from knee surgery… but … whatever. Not like I don't need them.

When I told her I was finished, except for maybe a monthly check in for a couple of months she was sad, because she fancies herself as something I "do" for myself. Her words: "You have to make yourself a priority. You give and give and give and there is nothing left over for you." I shouldn't have been flattered by that, but I was. I'd rather be a giver than sculpted.

One of my favorite movies is playing: Good Will Hunting with Robin Williams and Matt Damon. "It's not your fault."

Mother's Day is Sunday, and I'm still in denial. Today I went and bought a gift for my Mother in Law who hates me because I read and don't mind clutter and she was the "homemaker of the year" in high school. In her house the only thing there is with printed words is the Bible, and it is artfully arranged in a curio Cabinet with a pair of antique glasses sitting on top. Please.

But I'm a get-along girl and so I bought her a Brighton straw bag that I will overnight tonight. She'll be visiting for graduation this month, and the bag will be nice for traveling. That isn't the weird part though. The weird part is that I bought one for my own mother too. Well not really. She's been gone a year in June. Mother's day last year was our last normal conversation, not preceded with, "but what does the doctor say?"

I wrote the play by play of her last illness and death last year to a friend who is no longer a friend. I kept all of the letters and pasted them together in one long document, taking the references out. I believe in preserving raw emotion as best i can, and then calling upon the preserves when I need it later. I never posted or published any of it, lots of sad stuff regarding my siblings in there, but I'm thinking it might be a way to acknowledge the continuing grief. Perhaps I will post it here when it's been a year. I'll think about it.

I'll take the bag back. Or keep it. But it was for her, and well. I'm strange.


I was going to close tonight with a memory, and a phrase with which I am mesmerized, but the memories are hurting right now, and I've been advised that the phrase is copyrighted. I'll have to get a license I guess.

Instead, I'll use a paragraph from a story I'm working on.

They nearly tripped over the carcass of a deer, its body half buried in the sand. The snout of its nose was bleached white in the sun, and the skin picked clean, so that there was a skeleton head attached to the fully preserved body. The breeze from the lake sterilized the air and Susan couldn't look away. It was like an abstract painting whose meaning she couldn’t get, a poem too metaphoric for her to decipher. She wondered if it had chosen this place to die, or if it had been killed. Above all, it seemed at peace.