It wasn't the worst day ... but felt a bit off my game. After my morning visitors and before late afternoon arrivals, M and I went on some -- what are they called? -- errands, I suppose. I didn't quite have my balance all the time. Walking through stores ... it was after lunchtime for Parents and Kids out on a gloriously pleasant almost 70 degree day a week before Thanksgiving in Philadelphia. It was the infant and preschool set ... mostly out with Mama.
I was thinking, again, about how much easier it is for some folk (well, me, for instance) to do for others and give than to receive. The thought kept coming to me that while it may be so, as the saying goes, that it is better to give than to receive, the absence of a good dose of either capacity may well cause heartache. Of course, I knew this intellectually but I suspect didn't quite "live it." There was a young woman behind us at a checkout with a singing 4 year old. He was quite happy carrying a small lampshade for Mom and she seemed quite pleased with her little fellow and happy, if a bit harried, as I might expect her to be.
My mind wandered to what I must've been doing on such a day as this when she was born in the 80's. I certainly wasn't doing DISCO. The 80's saw me teaching in university ... what my colleagues called "fulltime." (Oops, it's 434 AM and someone called, another Fourth Quarter person, to report complications, but now I'm back to writing about reminiscing about the 80's). Those days, our older kids were to turn 20 and our youngster was to lag behind ten years and indulge in those things that preoccupy what we nowadays call Tweens. But I was playing Pater Familias and also teaching and then directing for many of those years (and all the 90's) a post-professional training program for helpers ... Psychologists, Psychiatrists and Social Workers with the occasional Psychiatric Nurse. Then there were my other duties supervising folk working with an addicted population and training family therapists trying to meet the needs of people disillusioned with their previously made choices. Oh! And then my plumbing and masonry and building retaining walls with my indentured sons and occasionally working as my sons' mechanic replacing a clutch plate on a Saab story or getting greased up over some other used car problem.
Any case, all these thoughts flashed "in mind, in line" in the moment before Mom and four year old found a better line for him to use Mom's new lampshade as a megaphone. How did a kid born around 2009 know about megaphones, anyhow? Go, figure!
It must have had an impact on me, though, as by the time "day was done" and a call came in offering to make a later-week appointment easier for me, I found that "inside" I was not as cordial as I might've been. A kind of "cool, no that's OK" ... didn't feel quite like me, "where was the gratitude?" ...even given my problem being comfortably receptive to receiving. It was obvious to M that I was not quite myself by the time Monday ended with sleep and it was still on my mind as I rose 4:00'ish.
I do remember bopping about with our two sons, 40+ years ago. Good memories! Think I must've been beneficently envious at the checkout ... not wanting to take away what the 2013 bopping pair behind me had but wishing, indeed, that I could have parts of it visit me, again. (Our youngest grandchild who is, BTW, 4 yo, IS coming to spend 4 days with Grandma and Grandpa ... I wonder ... not certain 'what I wonder' ... but enough wondering for today!)
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