Miracle of the Sunglasses

My God is a small God. Some people have big Gods, Old Testament style Gods, who do mighty works. Mine pretty much finds things I’ve lost. Maybe my prayers are being monitored by a guardian angel that is particularly adept at finding things and not much else. In any case, it’s a miracle story I offer here.

I’ve been praying lately for money to solve an assortment of pesky obligations that would clean up my checkered past and allow me to proceed with the rest of my life without that burden. It would not enrich me; just de-stress me, so it doesn’t seem too much to ask.

I would hazard a guess that not many people actually get their prayers for cold cash answered. Since I don’t buy lottery tickets, I’m not even giving God an easy way to provide for me. And I’m probably not taking into consideration that He already does in His own way. I manage to get the bills paid every month, even when it involves transferring a debt from one credit card to another.

But so far, every single prayer to find my cat has been answered, usually within 20 minutes if not sooner. I have a cat that gets lost several times a year, and I’ll put in an hour or two searching for him without heavenly intervention, and then, weary and frustrated, I finally pray. I delay so long because I hate to bother God with prayers about finding a renegade cat. And then, I find him. I find him where he wasn’t a moment ago – which is not unusual for cats.

One time I found him in a particularly dramatic heavenly way. When we lived in a house surrounded by woods, he had been gone for several hours. Both my husband and I had searched through the underbrush as long as we had daylight and then with flashlights until our legs and arms were bleeding from the briars and thorns. My husband was particularly attached to this cat and was almost in tears when I told him we should give up; it just wasn’t meant to be. He went inside and I returned to the yard to collect one of our other cats, a good girl who never strayed and was helping us look for the lost cat.

Walking across the lawn, I said a silent prayer that for my husband’s sake, could God please locate the missing cat, scoop him up and drop him in our yard? I bent to pick up the good cat and the motion detector light attached to the garage came on. Right in the middle of the pool of light sat the missing cat, as if he had dropped from the sky and landed in a spot he had not been one second ago.

I’ve grown accustomed to these little miracles. It’s not just the cat, but many other missing and misplaced items that only turn up after I’ve prayed.

So, after another morning of a prayer turned up the lost cat again, I contemplated why I had a God that was so good at the small things, but didn’t trust me with $50,000? Well, I thought, how about something a little harder. Find my husband’s sunglasses.

I had never prayed about the sunglasses before because it was my husband’s problem more than mine. On the daily roster of things causing me stress, it ranked low, even though I had wasted several hours that week looking for them. They had been missing for a week and I had already conducted several thorough searches of the house, yard and both cars. They were nowhere. I quizzed my husband repeatedly about the last time he remembered having them, and he stuck to the same story that they had been in his way while he was sawing a branch off the crepe myrtle tree and he remembers putting them on a shelf in the bathroom. We assumed they had fallen off the shelf into the wastebasket below and went out unnoticed with the trash. They were gone for good.

A few hours after I offered that challenge, a challenge I didn’t think God would take seriously since I was so sure the sunglasses were in the county dump, I was sitting on a bench in the backyard, keeping an eye on the wandering cat again. And then I saw them, the sunglasses, in the grass next to the crepe myrtle.

How could this be? Surely we had looked around the crepe myrtle as part of the initial search? I had been in this very spot several times during the week, watching the cats. That very morning when I was searching for the lost cat, I had looked under the bushes next to the crepe myrtle. If the glasses were there then, wouldn’t I have seen them?

The only possible answer was they weren’t there then. My guardian angel, on assignment from God and hearing my foolish challenge that morning, had flown to the dump, gotten the glasses and dropped them where I would be sitting that afternoon. It’s a miracle.

It’s a miracle that reminds me my prayers are heard and that I should have more faith that even the big things will work out the way He intends for me, in His own time.

Resolution: To Be Happier By Myself

My New Year's resolution is not to spend New Year's with my husband anymore, or travel with his band on road trips. Holidays are not special days. They are just days designated as special. You can make any day with family and friends equally as important. New Year's Eve is, for small-time musicians, the most lucrative gig of the year.

For some reason, musicians are considered a catch. There must be something romantic or sexual about watching someone perform and knowing you'll be the one with them after the show. But the reality is, there is probably no more miserable life for a woman than to be with a musician. If you go with them, you have to show up early for the equipment load-in. You sit at a table alone or with other bored wives and girlfriends during the show. You're the last one to leave because of the load-out. Every drunken guy and girl in the bar wants to talk to your guy and hold up his departure. They shout for encores when you're praying for the show to end.

If you don't go, you're often home alone or making other plans for Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes he even plays on Sundays, usually at benefits that pay nothing.

He needs thousands of dollars worth of equipment to earn $80 for a seven-hour gig. Because it is so prevalent and somehow enhances their creativity, musicians often abuse drugs and alcohol while playing. Neither is inexpensive. I've seen many a paycheck for the entire band eaten up by the bar tab.

My first realization of 2005 was I'd rather be happy and alone then with him and miserable on these road trips. This last one, I sat in the van listening to satellite radio while they unloaded and set up. No one could believe I'd rather do this then sit in the tiki bar the homeowner had constructed next to their house and get a jump on drinking with the early arrivals. At the beginning of every party, everyone is always happy, excited and cordial.

I moved into the house during the duration of the show. The band was playing in a frigid garage, heated by one dubious propane heater. The drinkers became progressively louder, then just insanely loud. I could tell the hour was approaching 2 a.m. as the noise died down and the drinkers became disgruntled and belligerent. People who wanted to drive drunk leaned on their car horns while designated drivers sat on the hoods of the car. Angry neighbors shouted the time out windows like cuckoo clocks. “It's 2 in the morning! It's 2 in the morning!”

There was much searching for misplaced possessions, including a missing dog that I spotted several times trotting around in the neighbor's yard. None of the inebriated could formulate or carry out a plan to search for the dog, so they just bleated with despair, and then anger, that the dog was gone. Then as the hour approached 3 a.m., there was vomiting, stumbling and passing out.

Some guy had been talking to my husband for an hour, and my kind husband gave this meandering, senseless monologue his undivided attention. Meanwhile, his equipment was not making it back into the van where I sat, listening in the dark to all this hellish commotion and crying with boredom. I wanted the party to end. This is not how I want to spend my time. But my husband insists this is all part of the “job” and he is having a good time. If so, then I'm just ruining it for him by being so miserable.

As you get older, you realize how little time you have left and you don't want to waste any of it. The greater good is no longer to accompany my husband on these trips to preserve our togetherness. If it splits us up, so be it. I just can't be this bored anymore.

May-December Romances

I saw that Diane Keaton-Jack Nicholson movie “Something’s Gotta Give” and about 10 minutes before it ended, I started talking to the TV screen. “You better not take the old guy back, it better not end that way.”

Jack Nicholson is alone on the bridge in Paris and I am just hoping the movie will do something shockingly original and truer to life and leave the sorry bastard there, but noooo! Unbelievable! Diane Keaton dumps the adoring, younger man—who is a doctor!!! And he seems fine with it! In a scene we don’t see because it would be a complete and utter falsehood, Keanu Reeves supposedly tells her he senses she truly loves the old guy and it’s okay to dump him on the spot and run to the man—the man who has not been able to commit to a relationship in 63 years, dates only younger women, and caused Keaton to weep during most of the middle of the movie.

This movie was such stupid trash. A more realistic and uplifting movie about senior love is one of my favorites, a Walter Matthau-Glenda Jackson film called “House Calls.” The widowed doctor Matthau briefly tries dating younger women, but once he meets Jackson, there is no going back. The comedy conflict comes from his being forced to temporarily pretend to be interested in a rich young widow to keep her from suing the hospital and protect his incompetent boss. Jackson is not in on the ruse at first and becomes offended, but Matthau woos her back. Unlike Nicholson, he never had a doubt the older woman was the right one for him.

Part of my shouting at Keaton’s stupid decision may stem from the fact that I’m in a May-December relationship. In fact, I’ve been in two, once as May and now as December. It’s always the better deal for the December person, so my recommendation is go younger.

There is a danger the May person may prove fickle. After 17 years of marriage to someone 13 years older, we just weren’t at the same place when I was 40 and he was 53. My son had left home and I now wanted to do things, a lot of things: move, change careers, something. He didn’t want to do anything. I found other people to do things with, and within a year, he didn’t seem necessary anymore and I no longer cared about him. I doubt he ever really cared about me as a person. I was the facilitator of his situation, not a person he enjoyed being with, otherwise, he might have tried being with me.

He was ill and cranky all the time and I couldn’t foresee how long I’d have to be his nurse and how much of my life I’d have to sacrifice to be his nurse, so I bailed out, giving up my rights to everything. I forfeited my furniture, his insurance, pension, everything. It turned out he only had nine more years before his smoking and drinking turned into fatal cancer, and then it would have been over for me and I would be sitting on a sizable nest egg now. But who can see into the future? And nine years is very long when it's in front of you...not so long at all when it's behind you.

Instead, I spent most of the 1990s on food stamps, racking up credit card debt, working terrible jobs, and trying to learn new skills and get back into a competitive job market on my own. I discovered men my age who were single were single for a very good reason. They were closet homosexuals, or unable to commit to anything, chronic Peter Pans still waiting for Wendy to rescue them, or just unfit for human companionship.

When I was 45, I met a 30-year-old man who was still single due to being a musician, i.e. poor and seldom available for a date on Friday or Saturday, a combination that appeals only to young women who don’t mind sitting alone in a bar every weekend while their date plays music. At first it was just a adventure for me, but month after month, he was still there, as if he were in a relationship, and after a few years, I accepted that we probably were if he thought we were. When I was 50 and he was 35, we got married. We needed some legality. He needed someone to straighten out his finances who wasn’t his mom and I needed a next of kin who wasn’t my son. Check back in 15 years and we’ll see how this is working out. (Update: 2022, still working out.)

There's always the gamble my younger husband will do to me what I did to my older husband. I have to hope he's a better person than I am.

Meanwhile, the movie ends with a happy family scene of Keaton and Nicholson out to dinner with her daughter’s family. Let me write the real ending. Having already had a mild heart attack, Jack’s health declines and Diane becomes his nurse. Then he dies. At most, they have a few short years together, mostly going back and forth to the hospital. Now she’s single again and even older. Meanwhile, Dr. Keanu has married another, smarter old woman. Tough luck, Diane. Listen to me next time I'm yelling at you through the TV screen.

Death in the Family

My father died July 29 of leukemia. He was 84. The doctor gave him three weeks to three months to live and he died two days later. I think, facing a specter of death he could not hold off by any of his usual methods, he just surrendered to it. He managed to cheat death during World War II by always being late to the apocalypse. He arrived in Pearl Harbor days after Dec. 7, 1941, and arrived in Europe days after D-Day. He was with Patton, but far enough behind with the radio repair units to always just miss the battles. His youthful heroes were Charles Atlas and Jack LaLanne. He believed in exercise and eating right. Long before Dr. Atkins, he dismissed what he called “mooshy white bread.” He espoused yogurt and wheat germ. He would stand on his head to improve his circulation. He practiced yoga positions decades before it was fashionable for urban career women. He had no bad habits, didn’t smoke and seldom drank alcohol. He was immensely proud of keeping his hair and maintaining his weight. He continued to take long walks and go to the gym up until a few months before he died. With all that going for him, and all the things he did to ensure his good health, in the end he didn’t make it as long as either of his parents. His father did nothing but watch television during his last 20 years. His mother, who smoked all her life, passed away in her mid-90s of natural causes. After my mother died of complications following a stroke when she was 57, he remarried with 24 years to go in his own life and vigorously maintained his health. A lapsed Catholic who never went to church when I was growing up, a man who feared offering a prayer before a group almost as much as he feared death, he suddenly decided, with the encouragement of his new wife, to become a holy rolling Pentecostal, and they rolled with the best of them I really lost my father when he remarried because his new wife’s family became more his than his biological one. That often happens with remarriages. This newly and enthusiastically religious man was a stranger to me. It seemed so out of character, but he threw himself into it as determinedly as he did good health. If he could not live forever one way, he was going to live forever another way. At the very end, he went from perfect health to a chronic backache to a diagnosis of bone marrow disease that was quickly rescinded. The doctors weren’t sure. Then there was a heart valve replacement and a gall bladder removed in quick succession and nothing was the same after that. I never got another letter after the last one cheerily reporting the doctors had changed their mind about the bone marrow diagnosis. All his time thereafter was spent recovering, which he ultimately did not. His stepdaughter thinks they were actually seeing the beginnings of the leukemia when the bone marrow was suspected and the two operations threw it into high gear. You wonder why he would submit to any surgery at his age if he wasn’t still hoping to buy himself another decade or two. And when, despite all his efforts, he was told he could not, he made a few phone calls to the people he knew would not freak out (not to me, I am relieved to report), said he was at peace with it, took a nap and died. His final gift to me was no funeral I had to attend, although family members are aghast that I passed on the memorial service. He didn’t like funerals or anything to do with dead bodies. He had both my mother and his mother cremated quickly without viewings. My sister drove through the night to arrive in time to see the body before the funeral home cremated it. She declared it “peaceful.” I suppose that was something she needed to do.

While cleaning out my email, I found a letter from my father dated Dec. 3, 2003, eight months before he died. "I have good news," he wrote. "I do not have cancer, praise the Lord. The doctor made a mistake. Yesterday I got the wonderful report. The doctor was sorry for the mistake. The second report said I had myelodysplasia, not multiple myeloma. There is no cure for it, but the doctor said it doesn't need treatment. Some people have it because of old age. He said for me not to worry about it. However, I still need to take my Procrit shot every two weeks to increase my red blood cell count. That's the good news. All our prayers have been answered." He died of leukemia in July, the logical next step to myelodysplasia. After looking it up on the Internet just now, it sure seemed a much more grim condition than his doctor indicated. Was his doctor stupid or just misleading him about a hopeless situation so he'd be happy? His sudden death two days after the leukemia diagnosis really caught us all by surprise.