Sozlet stories

awwww thats so sad ...

Whew, closure. I was waiting for a happy ending last night for a long time, had to go to bed without it.

Aw.

Medium-happy, anyway. She definitely has a very short fuse -- little things are setting her off, and when she's set off she's much more upset than usual.

It's expected -- she's watching the only home she's ever known be disassembled and put into brown boxes -- and I expect there will be a lot more ups and downs before things level off in a few weeks or so.

Being about to move feels like being about to die. I swear.

Good luck with it, soz! She'll love her new home once everything's settled down again, I'm sure.

Someone gets it!

I hit bottom last night myself, getting better.

It always ends up fine, etc., but I just HATE this part.

I think I've moved about 150 times and nearly every time is the same.

Approaching the date brings an disjointed anxiety if you do not expect to see the people you know again.

Yeh.

Today was interesting. My and my neice often talk about how much we love our dogs. I say (to my dog), "Aw, Bootilyboo, I love you, old lady" and she says "And I love Mia" like it's some solem sermon. She's so competative these days....

After today's who-loves-the-dogs-more thing, she asked me

S: "who do you loved like Bootsie?"
Me: "I love you and Cole and-"
S: "No, to marry."
Me: "Oh. Well. I, um, don't really have anyone to marry right now."
S: "Kevin?" (Kevin is a friend she's met in the past, she likes him)
Me: "Kevin is getting married to someone else and they're having a baby."
Me: "Who I should marry?"
S: " 'Uncle' Paulie." (a friend of her dad's)
Me: "Why should I marry Uncle Paul?"
S: "Because you like him."
Me: "I don't think Paul wants to get married."
Me: "What about Uncle Joe" (my brother, I was asking who she thought he should marry)
S: "You and Uncle Joe!" (as if she'd figured it all out)
Me: "Nonono, me and Joe are brother and sister! Brothers and sisters don't marry each other (usually)."
S: "Uncle Joe and Mama!" (really thought she had it this time)
Me: S, do you know what getting married is?"
S: "No."

And then I explained. She was so ernest and thoughtful - it was really very cute.

I wanna hear how you described what marriage is.

oh, ok. S is almost 5 years old, so my description is very basic. I told her that sometimes 2 friends decide they love each other so much that they want to move into the same house. And often they want to make babies because then they get to put a little bit of the mama with the dada and mix it up to make a baby. Or something like that. I wasn't epecting the tpic to come up and was caught off guard.

My brother is gay and S still doesn't get that there can be 2 daddies. We try to explain a little bit at a time. She has had at least 2 classmates with same-sexed parents.

Yeah, me too!

Craven, the part about not seeing people again is what really gets me. I'm still in touch with some friends from Madison, but it's taken some doing, and for some of my favorite people it just doesn't work. One of my best friends in Madison was a guy I worked with (well he was my boss, but not a very bossy boss), and we'd spend 8 hours a day together saying nothing for long stretches, then making a comment that could start a long discussion, or just merit an eyeroll or a laugh. Or not even a comment, just a "can you believe him??!" glances over the head of a really annoying customer, or me trying to get his attention when an attractive woman I thought he should hit on walked in the store, with him purposely ignoring me (he was unhappily single at the time, but didn't like the hitting on stuff.)

Anyway, that kind of friendship just hasn't translated well to email. I see him every once and a while, (something like every 3 years), and that's cool, but...

Pasadena friends have pretty much completely disappeared. They were mostly professional friendships, people in my field (though not within my agency) that I worked with. I stayed in touch with a few at first, that tapered out fast. Again, didn't translate well.

Lots of people I'll miss here. Jack's dad just sent me an email saying it's not goodbye, it's see ya later. That made me smile, anyway.

Oh, took too long, you already explained.

Yeah, sozlet thinks babies are very much a part of being married. She thinks all brides have tiny babies in their tummies. I explained that she didn't come along until 7 years after her papa and I were married, but she persists.

(And she knows that the human gestation period is 9 months. She also knows the elephant gestation period, which she told me lately, but I forgot.)

Soz, I know how you feel. I have moved from state to state to state.... 5 times to find myself back in MA without any long-term friends. I barely speak with my best friend from GA because she's so busy raising 2 kids and we're both kind of lazy, I guess. I've never been good at keeping in touch after a move and it's really too bad. Especially since I made such good friends in GA.

I think elephants go something like 2 years!

Aw, soz... I DO know what it feels like. Saying goodbye is never easy, no matter what you're moving to.

I have to say goodbye in the morning to a very special lady. She was my close neighbor for 14 years. She died very suddenly on Tuesday morning at the age of 85. Her husband (age 88) is beside himself with grief. They had been married for 63 years. This will be a difficult funeral.

Moving away from dear friends is kind of like that, I think.

Aw, I'm sorry Eva. :-( Sixty-three years... wow.

littlek, yep.

I think it was Swimpy who pointed out that I'll have just as much connection with A2K'ers as ever after I move, and I have to say that's a cheering thought. First time I'll have that (I hadn't had any experience with an online community until shortly after I moved here.)

So sorry Eva!

Soz, I'm glad it helps to have us around.

<smiles>

I might be a crazy person if I didn't have connection to long time friends. The odd telephone call or visit once in a while - and I mean once in a while... one friend from when I lived in Chicago at age 9-13, visited me in the '90's in LA, uh, 30+ years later, and in a way we were just the same, talk about strange. She writes a christmas letter (the standard ladedah plus some straight talk - she one of the sisters in a four sister family that married nuclear physicists, well, two of them did, I know you and I talked about that once), I type up something, oh, say, in the summer; sometimes we skip years.

When I moved this last time, I knew only one person, and didn't want to lose LA friends all at once, so I did one of those drecky holiday letters but made it both truthful and funny, and damn, I got a lot of response... I had gone through my address book and sent copies of the tome as some sort of wild last resort what the hell act to some real long time ago folk. So now I hear from a woman scientist in Laramie and my friends in North Dakota, and so on. Even, yikes, an old lover... that was sort of a mistake, I called the university to find someone else's address and they shunted me to him. Talk about pitter patting heart, he is still a heart throb to me, though I'd forgotten that, mostly.