A 10 Year Anniversary, Time Flies When Your Having Fun?

good-bye

nothing dramatic

basically numb like days before

this day; came, and went

though I seemed to have missed it’s passing

this waiting for words

she packed a few things

gradually more disappeared

there never really was a day

when everything was finally gone

for I’m still here,

at least somewhat

the product of

this slow erosion

the disappearing of days

where time doesn’t heal

time, only yields a slow digression

a stripped down affiliation

marked only by the absences,

no harsh words

time leaves no yelling

just a mute leaving

the consequence of

an accumulation of indifference

leaving each

just wanting to ease

no one giving pause

the days passed too swiftly

for some things take time

even to decay

until nothing is left to say

not even good-bye

I like the poem above and think it is one of my better ones. I tried to capture my view of the slow death of my marriage to Kathy. Several people have said they can identify with poem and it's depiction of the collapse of a relationship. I got divorced 10 years ago today. I did it like most everything I do. I was my own lawyer and Kathy's too, I guess. I did all the legal forms for the divorce. At the court date, I was called up to the stand as the plaintiff, though not sure why I was put on the stand. We were doing a very simple divorce, basically stating that we were married, had lived apart for a year, and had settled all property matters. The judge looked through our legal papers and asked me several nonsense questions.

"Do you live on Twin Oaks?"

"Yes"

"How far down Twin Oaks?"

"Down past Shelton Vineyards, about 6/10 of a mile off 268."

"That's a pretty area. Did you grow up there? On a farm?"

"Yes"

"Are you Willie's boy?"

"Yeap"

"You and Mrs. Bryant don't live together?"

"No"

"Your documents look good, take them across the road and register them with the clerk's office."

It went something like that, simple and neat. Except that I tend to grin or laugh in awkward situations, such as on the stand in a courtroom. Kathy was sitting at the defendants table, crying and crying. So you have me grinning and laughing while my soon to be ex-wife is crying. I'm sure I looked a bit like a jerk. As we walked across the road, I asked Kathy why she was crying. She said she didn't know, it just seemed kind of final. I think I said that is kind of what divorce is. Thing is she was the one who really wanted out of the marriage, I didn't. Anyway I found the situation comical, Kathy did as well. We are still friends and talk regularly.

WARNING: You may not want to read this, Crystal.

For those of you like my friend, Crystal, this may be one of those blogs you will want to skip.  She has said that she can only handle me in small doses.  Thankfully, Alison can handle a large, continuous dose.  Though I may leave some of you wondering how.  This blog actually came about from my recent thinking on how good life is for me right now and thinking more about the Bel Monte race.  I guess I could have written a nice, overly romanticized blog about a seemingly perfect life.  Problem is that is not real, for me anyways.  I doubt I would see life as so wonderful without the un-wonderful portions.  My life has had the surviving sections, just the same way Bel Monte had a tough surviving section.  That is one of the great things about ultras, many times the races will have ups and downs, literally, and emotionally, and physically.  One of the biggest impacts on my life was going through divorce.

Going through divorce changed me and changed me more than any other life event I can think of.  I use the phrase "going through divorce" because just the fact I was once married and got divorced isn't the key factor.  It was all that I had to deal with personally, how I view life, and how I had dealt with life previously.  It would be a book to write all of it so I'll just hit the high points.  One, I wasn't ready to be divorced.  I was a Christian, in some ways strict.  I'd only be married once, only know one woman, love forever.  I still love Kathy, my ex-wife.  Personally, I don't understand how you once really love someone and stop.  I do believe in God's love, the agape love, and in living it.  Most people only seem to apply this to children.  Kathy and I are still friends and talk regularly.  Some people don't understand this.  I don't understand any other way and haven't lost a rational discussion on the subject.  The love has changed.  It's not romantic or sexual.  I love my sisters, I don't need to say more.  But part of my dogma is once I care about someone, I don't stop regardless of the situation.  Some folks have said they couldn't deal with my views toward Kathy.  I guess that is one reason in a list of why I'm not married to them.  I couldn't deal with someone who doesn't get my point of view, cause all they could offer me was a temporary love or concern.  The point is that changing that type of love with Kathy was tough and rocked me to the core.  What did it say about me that I would say I want out?

I also kept myself neatly packed inside in my younger years, before 26.  My internal life was like a post office mail box.  Everything was tidily categorized and ordered.  Some boxes were locked shut.  Things went in and disappeared from my mind.  My divorce dumped everything back out on the floor for me to sort through again.  I spent years sorting back through my past life, some parts I'd seemed to have forgotten.  I'm not sure what I've done with all that crap now.  I've written quite a few poems and some journals.  To be honest, I drank some on nights I felt too overwhelmed.  But one description of me now is that I am not afraid to be naked.  If something about me is good, bad, indifferent, it is what it is.  I'm not ashamed of any of it.  I struggled with being a "perfect" Christian before.  I'll just say that I don't now.  I know that bothers some people, especially when I say exactly what that means.  If I did it, I'll tell you.  I might say it was or is bad, but I did it and in some instances will probably do it again.  To use Christian terms, I sin, I know that I will repeat some sins.  I'll try to sin less, but I sin as a willful act, a choice.  I don't believe in the "it's not my fault, I couldn't resist."  I'd rather own my actions.  I might not be a perfect person, don't even want to be, but I'll be honest with you.

Somewhere in that rambling is how divorce upset my previously perfect, and falsely, balanced life.  Divorce was a hard process for me that brought out some good things in me, some bad.  It definitely changed me for better, and worse.  I do like that I am more like I was as a kid.  I wish I could recover the naivety I had as kid(that will be a good blog sometime), but I won't.  One of my best lessons was that life, time, the movement of the sun and moon stops for no one.  We each have a limited amount of time and I plan on living mine up.  I don't want a gravestone when I die(don't believe in that, for me), but if I did I would want it to say, "He did too much," or "He did too much living."  The second sounds a little arrogant, but I can live with that.  I also have much greater appreciation of life after divorce.  I am much more thankful for anything, even some of the "bad" and "difficult."

Below is a poem that I wrote this weekend.  It's a first draft, which I seldom like.  I like some of what this poem says, but not exactly how it says it.  It was brewing in my head for years and finally fell out.  Anyway, I thought I'd toss it out there.  So the point of all my rambling is that some parts of life must just be survived.  During my process of divorce, I made some different choices from before.  I didn't try to be perfect.  I shouted at God, cussed God, questioned my belief in God, but I talked to him and I talked honest.  I was merely surviving for a year or more, and not doing that well.  Just as I had to survive a large section of Bel Monte 50 Mile.  You force yourself to put one foot in front of the other, whether it is fast or slow, running or walking.  When you can, you make yourself run and good things can happen.  If you walk when you could be running, you'll miss an opportunity.  Other people can judge whether I'm good or bad, better or worse.  You can judge.  I'm not sure how much sense this blog makes, but who cares.  It's me.  I'm definitely different and not afraid to be judged or disliked or liked.  But I plan on using my time up and I'm not afraid to be naked.

Drunk and Naked on the Floor

Looking back,

it was just a night 

alone in the sea. 

At the time, 

it was night after night, 

drunk and naked, 

alone on the floor. 

Where was my God? 

Though I've asked, 

he hasn't spoken. 

Too many nights, 

I couldn't sleep 

and the Comforter 

never came, 

maybe my hard words 

kept him away. 

No one wants to see 

a bare soul on the floor, 

naked and drunk. 

Someone came and walked away, 

a man stripped a little too much. 

They'd worry in silence. 

I'd suffer alone. 

Sometimes you have to 

swim on your own 

or drink 

yourself naked and drunk 

on the cold soil.

It seemed like years, 

it seemed like a night or two, 

maybe there's little difference. 

A bad mind lost time, 

a day, a year, 

I remember little of either. 

So looking back, 

maybe just one night,

maybe four years, 

a minor detail 

of a corrupted mind. 

Not sure who rescued me, 

or if I swam the ocean alone 

and found the shore. 

God hadn't walked away 

having seen me stripped bare 

ranting in my nakedness.

Shrivel feet on course soil, 

clothed once more 

suddenly appropriate again, 

but not underneath. 

Though, the Comforter 

could cover 

a multitude of nakedness. 

She'd say I still wasn't right, 

though she found me 

far from removed 

from the shore 

only sometimes 

naked and bare.

Just a single night 

alone in the sea 

left me different and bare. 

Maybe God needed 

a man, 

naked and bare.

I knew she was the woman for me when she said, "I hate eating ants."

Because of microfracture surgery on Alison's knee, she wasn't working during my grafting this year. So Alison was helping tar my trees to seal the grafts. This also gave us some time to talk several days. One of her comments a couple of weeks ago was quite interesting and comical. We were talking about relationships, dating, marriage, and such, when Alison made this comment. "I don't know if I would have dated you if you had been living with your parents." Some of you may be laughing hysterically now, as I did at the time. Alison asked with a bemused look, "What's so funny about that?" Which is even more comedy, and why we are a good fit. I said, "So you're not sure that you would have dated me if I was living with my parents, but the fact that I was living in a barn with no bathroom and had been for over 3 years was no problem." Alison, "But you were living independently in the barn, it was your barn." Alison eventually moved into the barn with me. I lived there for over 8 years, she lived there for a little over 2. We finally moved into our log house last January.

I think I first knew Alison was the woman for me when she said, "I hate eating ants, they don't taste good." Habitating with Alison is like gold panning for strange and funny statements. She does not spew them constantly, but they're truly notable when she does toss one out. Alison was living in Chapel Hill, NC when we met. Small ants were getting in her apartment and into her cereal. It was too much trouble to pick the tiny ants out and she wasn't going to throw the cereal out. So she just ate the cereal with the ants. She said they made the cereal taste funny. I knew I had discovered the rarest of women. Probably not every man is looking for such qualities as ant eating in their mate. Alison knew I was the man for her when I ate cat food with her. We eat strange things, don't we. Her cat, Oscar, loves canned cat food and we were wondering what made him so nuts over it. So we tried it, and we are still wondering.

We tend not to say please and often don't even ask for somethings. "Get me the scissors." But we say thanks for all kinds of things, big and small. "Thanks for getting the mail." "Thank you for that wrestling match." Our prefered date seems to be the weekly trip to the grocery store. We miss the other when only one of us is able to go. So I tell her I take her on an expensive date every week, she pays. Alison says, not many women could live with me. I know it's not a criticism, just an observation. I like honesty and blunt is just fine. I'm rather bluntly honest. She also says that she likes the parts of me that she tends not to like. Without those parts, there wouldn't be the good parts either. Alison says she realizes she can be hard to live with, but I say it's not a problem for me. We're not naive or looking through rose colored glass, far from it. Manure grows vegetables and flowers quite well, but you do have to put up with a some smell for a bit. We were both married once before, which accentuates our appreciation of each other. Our understanding and acceptance of one another's uniqueness is nice. It's like a chipmunk met a frog and thought that makes sense. You can figure out which one of us is which.