Time collides when someone dies | The past overwhelms the present

That popped into my head when I was starting to mop the floor so I had to find a pen and scratch pad and write it down before I got too caught up in what I was doing and forgot. Both ideas popping and forgetting are sort of how my mind works.

Last night my partner and I were talking about a funeral the daughter attended recently for a high school classmate. The daughter is in her fifties and is herself starting to feel the tail of time dragging behind her. After the funeral the classmate’s father went up to the daughter and in his profound grief told her, “You know, your mother was really hot when she was a teenager.” To which the daughter said, “I’ve been told that.”

My memories of the classmate are tied to those of my partner, too. He was a person who always smiled, seemed at that time of his life after graduation to have found profound happiness. We were in our thirties then and the tail of time wasn’t quite so long.

My adventures in grief didn’t start until I was in my early forties when my brother died. I was thinking of him this weekend; when he was in the hospital and I was describing a near misadventure with the chainsaw and a tree and I was laughing about it. The look on his face.

It wasn’t until my fifties that close friends died. My college roommate and best friend and what I did to that relationship. A woman who I never took seriously enough. There’s a post of mine which I won’t link to because it is inadequate. I think of her almost daily still. The beautiful woman, another post I won’t link to. She was foundational for me and I don’t think I would be in this relationship with my partner without that time with her.

I have things I use almost daily from those who have died, beyond the thoughts that cluster like stars in my head. After my brother died I wore his clothes until they fell apart. I have a friend’s jacket and leather gloves. A bin of clothes from another friend that I can’t wear because they smell like him and that smell now is of loss.

I’ve thought of posting a photo of my razor but I haven’t. It was my grandfather’s and it’s the best razor I’ve used for shaving. The nickel plating has worn off showing the brass and the brass is not shiny but has a deep patina of its own. I think the patent dates back to the early years of the twentieth century. Perhaps he had it in France when he fought there in World War I, but probably not. Maybe when he worked in the steel mills before the Depression hit hard. Surely he had it when he was a prison guard in the federal system before the next world war.

The objects are just tokens. All I really have of these people who are gone and the people I know who are still here is memories and the things we share. For some the present implies a future, for others all that remains is the past.

I used to believe that since I had been in a long term relationship that I could have a relationship with anyone because I had learned how a relationship works.

That was an overly simplistic view on how the world is. I tend to get along with people. One evening when the daughter’s birth father came to visit to watch her high school graduation we, my partner, he, and I, were talking about college. He said I was the one everybody liked. I’m not combative, am soft spoken. Over the years I’ve slowly learned to work to not get into dominance games with other males.

The problem is that being in a good relationship, where everything works smoothly, gave me the impression I could do this with anyone. The problem is that until this relationship I had a pisspoor track record in relationships. I hadn’t the slightest idea of what a relationship actually was. I was okay in the fucking department; I was miserable at paying attention along with a host of other faults. It was to easy to come to believe that success was entirely skill based.

In our society a relationship is initiated in the dating experience but I’m a total dating novice. I’m still not sure what a date is. My partner says we’ve been on a date and my response is always, that was a date? I’ve gone with women to dinner and such, but they invited me and paid the way. And I was thinking all the time we were just eating out.

I’m afraid that my idea of the perfect date is something like Six Days Seven Nights where Harrison Ford and Ann Heche crash land on a deserted island, there are arguments, there is strenuous activity, and so on. And there have to be pirates, of course.

The funny thing is that the only person where that type of experience has happened is with my partner. One of her comments about our being together is that we have the best adventures.

We have structured our lives so that life together is a daily adventure. There are moments where we look at each other and think it’s great to be able to share this with you.

There are very few people I could live this way with. One woman I loved said she could never live without an air conditioner. My partner and I have never lived in a house with an air conditioner. There was a period in our lives when we lived off the grid—no running water (which included no bathroom), no electricity, no phone, and so on. If anything, that experience brought us closer.

There are very few people willing to do that.

Another person—there was great sex. She was absolutely fearless about public, whatever. But we never talked. I am not sure if we tried, really tried, it would have ever worked. I’m afraid if we sat down and talked and talked, which is how the relationship with my partner began, not in bed, things would have blown up.

That’s the other thing. My partner and I mesh so well, complement each other. There’s a balance of interests. We constantly excite each other in our discussions.

In the end, there are very, very people I could do that with.

Our relationship began with intense friendship. When we had sex the first time my fear was that this was going to destroy that friendship. She says that what she was thinking was on top of everything else he knows how to fuck.

Not a bad way to take things the next step.

Our grandson came to visit this last weekend, the first visit here since before covid. He’s six and he’s very proud of that fact.

The daughter and her wife had two sons that they raised. One son was an officer in the Army and fought Isis in Iraq. The younger soon is married and his wife just had their first son. Once the boys were out of the house the daughter and her wife decided to adopt a third and he’s the six-year-old who visited.

I set up an iPhone on a tripod and passed the clicker for taking photos to the boy. My partner and I were at his sides, kneeling. He stood and we talked and laughed and he clicked the shutter. At one point I turned to my partner and said, “You didn’t see this, did you, when your mom took us to Fort Ancient?”

That visit was in 1970, weeks after the daughter’s birth and after a bad fall which left the woman who would become my partner in a coma for days. My best friend suggested we see them and we drove from the east coast in a roundabout trip to college.

We had a good visit which included being driven to the earthworks at Fort Ancient in southwest Ohio. Driving back at night the sky lit up with heat lightning, the first I’d seen. My best friend took a photo of the new mom and me there and we’re both grinning.

We have history that goes back years. We are old enough to know that one of these days we’ll leave the stage of history. We also know that the past holds the present in a firm grip. I grew up in the Jim Crow south and remember seeing Whites Only signs. This was also the era of duck and cover, school kids under their desks with their hands covering their vulnerable necks during a nuclear attack. After leaving the new mother and daughter, back on the highway to college, my best friend and I passed a large billboard proclaiming, Welcome to Klan Country.

The grandboy is African American. He’s bright, sweet, shy, and friendly. One of our fears is that the terrible history of the United States may have already doomed him.

I’m sure just about everyone in a moment of boredom or whatever has taken an online quiz or answered questions to find out something about themselves. There’s the BDSM test, of course. The Myers-Briggs test. You know what’s popular here in profiles.

A while back I decided to take an online Asperger’s test to determine if one is on the spectrum. There are several tests and after taking one test I had to take another just to see if I’d get similar results.

The Asperger’s test was interesting because I don’t really think I’m on the spectrum even though I have elements to my personality that may be markers. There has been so much recently in media and news that these markers or behaviors are pretty well known. When taking these tests if one wants a high score it usually isn’t that hard to get a high score. Similarly, if one doesn’t want to score high that’s not a problem either.

The thing is I’m taking the test and I’m trying to be honest in my answers, though honest is hard for a number of reasons, and I’m thinking my partner if she took this test would give many of the same answers I was giving. We’re so much alike.

Honest answers are hard because I’m not the same person now as I was when I was 18, or when I was 35, or when I was 50. Many of my social behaviors are learned by watching and study and the social person at 18 didn’t have the experience that the social person had at 50. The 18-year-old couldn’t bear to be touched; the person I’ve been since then thrives on touch. A friend back then said that he worried about me until he realized I was the center of every group I was in.

So I took the test and scored highish, 39. I can’t remember the cutoff, it was maybe 33. Above the cutoff point it was suggested that the scorer see a professional et cetera. A second test on another site had a similar result.

Anyway, the test was a lark and I got my partner to take the test. I was expecting her to get similar results, but her score was 11. I was trying to figure out why her score was so different; she was pissed at me because I didn’t know her as well as she thought.

What it came down to was our collective score was fifty and that’s a good number. Five and multiples of five have always been favorites for me and fifty is solid. Like our relationship which is based on balance. We complement each other in so many ways. Working together we have accomplished so much.