Slow Motion Meandering

I spent a day in the car driving to a place don’t usually go to and to do something very strange for me – I went to Watkins Glenn to buy yarn.   This use to be my weekly drive to see youth I was working with who lived in a few of the 20 counties I serviced.  When I was making the trip, there was only one wine store and a vineyard and now it was fence to fence wine, hence the Finger Lakes Wine Trail.   On the way down, I stopped at a place for lunch and could not get my head out of the flashbacks of the area, the kids I worked with, the judges, the police, and the coworkers.   Even as I took the paper place mat, turned it over, to make a few notes, I thought of how many times I saw my father at a business lunch, when Mother and I were along to chat with his staff person’s family, take the place mat and start drawing out what he was trying to get across or thinking out a new invention.  As I was paying the bill, the wait staff commented on my scarf and one said, she always wanted to learn to knit.  I know the scarf is great and it is definitely the terrific yarn.  You want good stuff; you start with good stuff and make it better.

I saw Lincoln this weekend and was fascinated by the relationship between Mary and Abe.  The in your face, speak your mind woman and the quiet story telling deep thinker.  Okay he married her because she got “knocked up” but in spite of it all, it looked like it worked for them.

Leaving a relationship does not happen overnight unless someone just shoots someone.  Usually there is not a breakup, as in a crack or snap.   It is more that the water boils over in the live pan because you can’t stop the bubbles of discontent from growing or you just live with a slow boil sucking the life out of the water until the pan is dry.  Not with a bang, but a whimper.  You mark the slow leaving as the “day” you broke up but you know better.

Keeping careful attention on your relationship water is very important.   While every now and again it is terrific to have the heat turned up to full boil, but most of the time and what make for long term, is the slow motion meandering where you share what each aches and long for in life. It is feeling that comfortable and safe enough in each other’s space to tell the other something you have hardly been able to tell yourself and know it will not be judged.  You cannot be committed to someone who turns a face way from your life in and out because they are afraid to face their own demons in the night.

I thought of how many days I drove that road knowing I was going to spend the evening with someone very special in my life sharing demons in the night and yet knowing that tomorrow, I would drive back alone.