Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow....

Today, I got up, grabbed an air tank, dodged a highway worker making a poor choice on a narrow bridge, filled the tank, dodged the same stupid guy on the way back over the bridge, and filled the leaky front wheel on my lawn mower.  Then I spent the next three hours riding in increasingly small circles in various sections of my yard until all the ugly upthrust seed Vs of the Bahia grass were gone.  My shoulders and back got too much sun, and I'm hoping they will decide to stay at "freckle" and not move up to "sunburn."

I had to do something, and mowing can be very meditative.  I turn up a random playlist on my phone and because my mower is pretty old, I have to put most of my attention on making sure it is actually cutting right.  It's not go-kart fun, but it will do in a pinch.

Finally, late this afternoon, Dad called to say everything has been cleared for tomorrow.  The surgery is officially on.

So now, I'm making lists, laying out clothes, packing up things I'll need during the interminable wait.  In a few hours, I'll go lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling.  Then tomorrow will be today, and we will see what we will see.

Fordite

"Fordite, also known as Motor Agate, is a unique automotive enamel material with an interesting history. The original layered automotive paint slag 'rough' was made incidentally, years ago, by the now extinct practice of hand spray-painting multiples of production cars in big automotive factories. 

The oversprayed paint in the painting bays gradually built up on the tracks and skids that the car frames were painted on. Over time, many colorful layers built up there. These layers were hardened repeatedly in the ovens that the car bodies went into to cure the paint. Some of these deeper layers were even baked 100 times. 

Eventually, the paint build-up would become obstructing, or too thick and heavy, and had to be removed. As the story goes, some crafty workers with an eye for beauty realized that this unique byproduct was worth salvaging. It was super-cured, patterned like psychedelic agate, and could be cut and polished with relative ease!"  - taken from fordite.com 
__________________________________

I'm obsessed with this stuff.  In addition to mad housecleaning, I am also using the internet as a tool for avoidance of reality, and as I stumbled through the rabbit hole of Etsy, I came across Fordite.

As the history blurb above details, this is a reclaimed thing, something that occurred as an accident, a nuisance byproduct for the auto industry.  How beautiful this nuisance is, though.

I wonder who the first person to notice the internal loveliness under the unsightly exterior was, who the first person to scratch the surface and find more than was expected.

Fordite, or Detroit Agate, isn't produced anymore.  Technology changed the manufacturing process, and this side-effect doesn't happen now.  What I'm sure the industry looked at as a waste now fetches as much money as some "real" gemstones, especially if it can be proven to have come from a particular auto maker, model, or factory, for example the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, KY.  I even saw one piece marked as "mustangite."  Guess what it was supposed to have come from?

I have found a piece on Etsy that I really love....well, probably more like five pieces, but still...and when my money from the AP reading comes, I am going to splurge on a piece.  Aside from the incredible visual appeal of it, I like the symbolic reminder that it's what's under the surface that matters, that the world rarely takes the time to look for less-than-screaming-in-its-face-obvious value and is prone to discard things of beauty and rarity.  It's a lesson worth remembering about a tendency worth avoiding.

I don't think that's too much philosophy to hang from a silver chain, right?  If it's too much for you, I guess you can just enjoy all the pretty colors.  To each, her own.

Type A

Today, I exerted my Type A-ism over the only thing I can control right now, my own house.  I got up, made coffee, cranked the Dance Workout playlist on Spotify, and started cleaning.

I vacuumed, steam cleaned the kitchen, dining room, and bathroom floors, did laundry and put it away, stripped my bed and put my feather mattress out to sun, emptied and reloaded the dishwasher, washed and replaced my slipcovers, took out the trash.  Every little thing felt like a stitch to hold the fabric of life together.

There's more that needs to be done, shelves to dust, a piano and an organ to detail, a shower curtain to replace.  Once I'm finished inside, there is a whole world of yard work. I am going to hold this line.

What's the alternative?

Recently

Sometimes, it seems like your life can drastically change from one moment to another.  Like somebody has flipped a switch from one position to its opposite.  Final.  Complete.  You were *this*, but suddenly you are *that* instead.

I have been having a chain of these events during the past two months.  Instead of the gradual shaping that life does on all of us, the water over the stone, the windstorm shaping the dunes, things lately have been all dynamite and sinkholes opening up.  I have yet to figure out the extent of it all.

For one thing, I lost my Roux.  She had what they decided were several small strokes, and finally, I sat in the back corner of the teacher's portion of the school cafeteria and made a decision to let her go.  I have not been able to go back into that space since that day.  I lost something more than just her.  Some part of my heart just snapped off and quit.  I am not sure I am going to be able to get it back.

And then there's the friend I treasured who has thrown me away.  Looking back over the past few months, I guess it's been coming for awhile. There's no comfort in that.  All it means is that I've been stupid a very long time.  I'm hung between pain at the loss and sheer anger at once again being the one to whom it mattered more.  I can't get over the fact that I never seem to learn.  

After that, I sat in a very large room and graded papers for eight straight days.  This may not sound like much to you, but it becomes a form of meditation.  The focus required strips away everything non-essential.  The breaks that are taken allow only certain key concepts to float up from under the weariness of the job.  During this time, I came to a very significant realization about some things.  An opportunity came to me during this same time to make some changes.  I took it.  I am still not sure what the outcome of it will be, but that still small voice in my heart told me that if I didn't even try to take this, then something like a total ossification of my soul was going to take place.  

And then I came home.  My parents came down the day I got back to have dinner, and in that way they have, they told me that my father's doctor had ordered a heart cath for Thursday, two days away.  They hadn't told me about it because...and sing along because you know the chorus....they didn't want to distress me with it.

 So Thursday came, and we went through all the same motions I did not so very long ago when another big part of my own life changed, the sign in.  The cath lab waiting rooms are small, private, as opposed to the larger room for the ICU/CCU/Outpatient surgery.  I am always grateful for a small waiting room.  I cannot stand to look around and see all the faces filled with misery and fear.  It presses down on me like a stone on my chest, and I can't breathe because of it.  Mom busied herself with preparations for something she was working on at the church.  I took a deck of cards, found a battered brown coffee table, and played solitaire over and over.  I lost much more than I won, but the movement helped me block out the interminable creeping of time.

The doctor finally came to see us, and the news was not good.  A surgeon would have to look at the results and make a recommendation.  The cardiologist had exhausted all the means at his disposal, and the blockages and damage were severe.  Basically, Dad could have died at any moment with any exertion.  And someone shifted the gears on the machine of my life again.

When the cardiovascular surgeon came to see us later that afternoon, he brought unexpected hope.  Bypass surgery was possible.  It will be complicated, but at least there was an option.  Another shifting of the gears.

Now we're all waiting.  Thursday will be the day.  We'll see who we all are at the end of it.