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thepauser

~ “I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that.” Pippi Longstocking (Astrid Lindgren)

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Monthly Archives: February 2015

Daily Discomfort: The One With Men In It

20 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by koehlerjoni in Essay, Humor

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

menopause, the avengers, the vikings

This week, I’ve been a shoe and life has been a piece of discarded bubble gum, stuck to me like, well, gum on a shoe.  Everything gnaws; the sound of the clock, the murmur of the television, the barking of dogs, the telephone.   When the Viking Ragnar told his original wife that he’d like to have another wife in addition to her, I cried.  Don’t ask me why I was watching the Vikings, because I have never wanted to watch this show in my life before this week. But this week, I’m all invested in the Vikings.  I have huffed up into a ball of indignant anger over politics, the state of my dishwasher, and the personal actions of someone I have never met who lives in a foreign country.  Normally, these are all things I would not whip myself into a lather over.  This week, I’m stuck.

I’m stuck, and I know the cause. The pause with men in it tinkers with my hormones.  And I know when this pause hits, I’m about as reasonable as a three year old and emotionally stable as one of the Manson chicks.  It’s like being an adolescent, only this time around you have the maturity to stand back and watch yourself acting all out of whack, only this time around you have shame to accompany you on your journey to looney land.  The pause with men in it leaves you feeling like Loki in this clip from the Avengers.

After Loki got hulked, he got to lay around and groan.  Then he went on a year’s haitus before filming his next adventure, in which he got to die a hero.  When the Men-O- Hulk grabs me by my unmentionables and leaves me in a stunned mess, groaning is not allowed.  I have work to do, a house to clean, blogs to write, novels to write, bills to pay, and people to take care of.

So I marshal my waning estrogen, and pray that my mental crimes don’t come shooting out of my mouth at the wrong moment.  But if I did a small crime, leading to a jail sentence of say, two days a month for the next three years– that might work.  Do you think they would let me watch The Vikings?

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Daily Discomfort: Love and Time

13 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by koehlerjoni in Essay, Marriage

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Love, Marriage, Valentine's Day

When the time was right....

When the time was right….

Before I met my husband, I was in a relationship with someone else.  The relationship with the other guy was on again, off again, and lasted for many years.  I often felt confused about other guy’s intentions, his level of commitment.  So when things were finally, irrevocably over with him, I decided I would not invest more than a year in a new relationship unless a proposal was forthcoming.

I met my husband’s backside first.  He was bent over, wrestling a washing machine into a rental house that I was going to share with a friend.  I thought it was a pretty good backside, but I was more impressed with the fact that he was moving a heavy appliance for a girl who was just a friend.  All of my prior experience with young men had led me to believe that most of them were too lazy to heft large objects for others.

I went to college with my friend, and over the years, she’d mentioned my husband’s name.  She got engaged a lot.  When her latest engagement would meet its inevitable conclusion, she would say, “It’s alright.  I’ll just go home and marry Brian Super Husband.”  I thought nothing of this Super Husband person until I was in close proximity to the back of his legs.

My attraction was instantaneous.  He was tall and good looking, and when he smiled, his feelings went into his eyes.  I think he was attracted to me as well, because he asked me out within the first couple of days.

As we got to know one another, a couple of things became apparent. First, he wasn’t going to marry my friend; she was engaged to someone at the time. Second, Super Husband and I were two very different people. This message became clear on my first visit to his parent’s house just a couple of weeks after we started dating.

The neighbor called asking for help with a cow.  I was from the city and had no idea what sort of help a cow would need. I watched from the safety of the truck as he and the neighbor chased a pregnant cow with the tractor.  When they finally caught her, they attached this crane to her hind end and turned a crank.  As they toiled over the crank, a calf emerged feet first, eventually spilling out onto the ground covered in this gray goo.  Since the cow wasn’t breathing, Super Husband did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.  He had kissed me with that mouth.

As much as this incident shocked me, it also let me know that this was a man who would took care of his shit.  He wasn’t much for words, but his actions would always speak for him.  I loved him even then.

I think his tractor's sexy.

I think his tractor’s sexy.

Three months into the relationship, he said he loved me, too.  We spent all of our free time together, and got along very well, but there were obstacles, things I was concerned about.  He smelled all of his food before he ate.  I thought that was weird.  He was Catholic.  He drank sometimes.  I was Baptist, and no one in my family drank.  He used the words damn and hell in some of his sentences. He said, “Where are you at?” and I considered this ending of sentences with prepositions a greater crime than his occasional swearing.  He was precise and mathematical; I was a big picture, find your bliss kind of girl.  He was a mechanic; I was a musician.  He was calm; I was dramatic.  He was about actions, and I was about words.

He wasn’t like any man I’d ever known.  He’d ask questions.  When did you last check the air in your tires?  Have you got your purse?  Do you want to take your little brother and sister to the movies?  How is your money holding out?   He listened to me rattle on about my workday, sympathizing with my plights and rejoicing in my victories.  He said, “Take your time.”  I love that phrase. Take your time. I loved it then and I love it now.

We couldn’t have been more opposite, and yet we fit.  However, when we were nearing the eleven month mark, I couldn’t smell a proposal in the air. My self-imposed one year relationship investment followed me around like a ghost.  I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to say he wasn’t ready for a commitment.  I lived in dread of the day when I would have to break it off.

I went to a wedding in El Paso with my parents the weekend after Thanksgiving.  All the way there and all the way back, I thought about how I would live without him.  A couple of hours before my parents delivered me to the door of my apartment, I told them about my time limit, and that I would have to break up with him if the relationship didn’t progress.  Of course, they said they would support me no matter what I decided.  I cried.  I cried for about two hours while my parents sat in the front in awkward silence.  When we pulled up to my apartment, I still had tears in my eyes.  I remember blowing my nose right as we rounded the corner that lead to my front door.

Super Husband was standing at the door to my apartment, waiting.  He had part of the newspaper in his hand.  After we went into the apartment and greeted one another, he said, “I noticed these rings are on sale.  Would you like one for your birthday?”

I looked at the sale flyer.  “These are engagement rings,” I said.

“Yes, they are.”  He looked so nervous, I couldn’t help but laugh.  I ended his misery and said yes pretty quickly.  I don’t remember what we did after that, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t involve talking. I wasn’t one bit disappointed at the non-traditional proposal.  And even though he wanted to check out the rings that were on sale, I knew that he would never, ever be stingy with the things that counted; his faithfulness, his love, his trustworthiness.

I have never regretted my decision to live my life as Super Husband’s wife.  When I was a young girl, I didn’t picture myself with a country boy who could melt me with one look and then fix my dishwasher.  But God sent me the man I needed, in His own time.  And for that, I will always be grateful.

Daily Discomfort: Tribute

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by koehlerjoni in Dogs, Essay

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Dog Stories, essay, tribute

Rest in Peace, Goldie

Rest in Peace, Goldie

The dog died last week.  She died because I backed over her in the driveway.  By the time I got the car stopped, she was underneath screaming in pain.  When I tried to move her, she howled in protest and snapped at me.  I didn’t know what to do next.

I called my husband, who had already driven most of the way to work.  I told him what I’d done and started crying.  He just said two words; “I’m coming.”  I got a blanket out of the back of the car, covered Goldie up, and sat next to her. Before he arrived, I had these brief glimmers of hope.  Maybe she was just shocked and she’d start walking any minute now.  But I knew deep down it was time to let her go. In truth, we should have let her go long before this.

Goldie came to live with us eight years ago, after my husband’s Uncle B died.  She was six or seven when we got her, so she was fourteen or fifteen years old last Wednesday.  She had a heart murmur.  She had cataracts on both eyes.  She couldn’t hear.  She had arthritis in her front legs.  The reason I didn’t check for her in the driveway before I pulled out was simple. She slept twenty-three and a half hours a day, and I wasn’t expecting her to be up.

On her first night to live with us, she went straight to our bed and jumped up on it.  When we shooed her off, she went all over the house, sniffing and crying.  She was looking for Him.  Uncle B had become ill quite suddenly and after a brief hospital stay, had died.  Goldie had been one of his last earthly contacts, his hand holder, his true friend.

She’d smoothed his way into the next world with more love and affection than any human escort could have provided.   As she nosed her way around our house, I could picture her laying with her head across his fevered body, sniffing through the contents of the trash can trying to find something edible, and perching on the edge of the toilet to drink as her owner lay on the couch waiting for his human family to come and check on him.

When we went to bed that night, she settled on the floor next to me.  I heard her several times as she woke up and cried.  I’d reach down and pat her head, and she would go back to sleep.  For the first two or three weeks, she wanted to be right with me.  I tried to be calm and understanding, because she’d been through so much.  At the same time, I knew I could never give her the same amount of time and affection as Uncle B. I wondered if we’d made the right choice in bringing her to live with us.

My husband’s uncle was a retiree, and he took Goldie everywhere he went. We’d sometimes notice them driving around in his old blue sedan.  One time I saw him coming out of the grocery store, back to the car where Goldie waited.  He opened a candy bar and handed it to her the moment he opened the door.

I don’t think Goldie even had an understanding of what dog food was until she came to live with us.  She constantly begged for table food, and was extremely overweight.   She had terrible gas for the first two weeks, and her over- the- top snoring earned her a berth in the Garage Hotel for country dogs.

She eventually settled into her new role.  Goldie was not our sole companion, and she didn’t have to take care of us.  She was part of a noisy, busy, multi-dog, multi -child family. She was free to be a dog, and she took to the role with relish.

She quickly became the overlord of our other two dogs, dominating the food bowls by snapping and growling at anyone who dared eat in a way that seemed selfish or greedy.  She made sure that everyone had their share, but of course, she always wanted the top choice.  On the rare occasions that we allowed the dogs our left-overs, we had to watch and make sure she didn’t hog them all for herself.   She also made her feelings about her accommodations clear.  If we came home and it had gotten cold during the day, she would greet us by walking back and forth to the heater we’d set up in the garage until one of us turned it on.  She knew herself, and wasn’t afraid to fly her Golden flag.

She was an intelligent dog.  She figured out that if she ran alongside my right rear tire when I was exiting the gate, that I wouldn’t be able to see her.  Once or twice a week, I’d come home to find her sprawled out sleeping in front of the gate, waiting for us to come home after a day spent in total dog debauchery.  At heart, she was an unrepentant tramp.

She brought us presents.  A dead rat, given with the same joy a three year- old offers a scribbled drawing.  A cow bone dripping with slobber.  When we arrived home after work, she led the other two dogs in a rousing production that demonstrated her dog prowess.  As soon as one of us pulled in the gate, the three would get into a nudging contest, shoving into one another and growling.  I never understood the theme of the production, but I did understand that she was the choreographer, the director, and the star.

She loved going for walks down our country road, and constantly pushed my pace.  She always made sure I noticed the dead frogs, and the snake skins, and the trash someone had thrown on the side of the road.  Except for the restroom breaks, which became more and more frequent as she aged, she was an easy walking companion.

She was just easy.  Her eyes sparkled with mischief, she had beautiful golden fur, and she never barked at you for leaving her alone all day while you went to work.   That is why we kept her for ourselves when she might have been happier in the home of another person who could have given her their undivided attention.  We were selfish, because she was just such a great dog.

Her domain started to get smaller and smaller.  First, she started barking at the clothes on the clothesline.  She thought they were intruders.  Then, she started sleeping more and more.  The vet said she had a heart murmur, and the sleeping was her way of protecting herself.  It happened so gradually; first the vision, then the hearing, then the limping.  By last Wednesday, her whole world was the short distance from her bed to the food and water bowls.

Six months ago, my Dad gently suggested we should have her put to sleep.  We justified.  She’s not too uncomfortable.  She’s still eating.  These are the lies we told ourselves.  As in the beginning of my relationship with this dog, I was again conflicted.  When is it the right time to choose life or death for a being that depends wholly on you?

Sitting in the driveway, petting her while I waited for the inevitable, I thought about her life, about all of the light she had brought into it, and how terrible I felt to be the one that caused her demise.  As my husband’s car roared up the driveway, I said goodbye, knowing that we couldn’t cause her any more suffering. She had too many strikes against her, too many to ask her to continue.

We made the choice to have Goldie put to sleep because it was forced upon us by my carelessness.  Running over her was not in my death plan for her.  I thought she would just go to sleep and not wake up, and I knew it would happen soon.  In my mind, her peaceful passing would make it more tolerable.  When you love, though, death is never tolerable.  And I did.  I loved Goldie.  I hope she knew.

The PauseRReport: January 2015

01 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by koehlerjoni in Blogging, Goals, Reflection

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

blogs, goals, monthly reflection

Questions that make you think- Marfa Texas

Marfa, Texas  January 2015

Here are some of the things I’ve learn in this, my fifth month of blogging.

  • My soon to be daughter- in- law sat with me while I created categories and menus to make the blog more user friendly for people who just wanted to look at a certain type of post. Her assistance was absolutely invaluable, so I learned from my sweet, soon- to- be daughter that you don’t always have to figure everything out by yourself.  I love my children and their spouses.  I love them so much.
  • No matter what, it’s really about the writing. Good, solid writing is what really counts, so I need to keep on working to improve my writing.
  • It’s okay to write about what you want to write about.
  • Fulfilling goals is scary. The Pillow Poll was scary.  The Song of the Month was dry-mouth, head in hands, on the downslide of the roller coaster scary.  But when you have done it, it doesn’t kill you.  In fact, it’s satisfying to take a little thought and blow on the spark of it until you’ve created a glowing ember.
  • In writing about my confusion and frustration with the birdy format, I came to a realization. When I voiced my misgivings, my understanding of the platform actually took a cognitive leap forward. I need to examine this idea more.

Books I’ve read this month:

  • All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
  • Burned by Karen Marie Moning
  • The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon
  • Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella

Inspiring me to go through new doors.

Blog Posts I’ve enjoyed:

  • Twirl,  The Carter Library
  • He Wrote It Down, In Other Words
  • The “Word Problem” Problem, Math with Bad Drawings
  • Hiding In The Shadows: The Way We Make a Broken Heart, The Immortal Jukebox
  • Why I Would Rather Find the Funny than the Meaning of Life: Peg-o-leg’s Ramblings

 

Total Views in Month Five:                          382

Total Visitors in Month Five:                      194

My top posts:

  • To Tweet or Not to Tweet
  • It’s the Last Midnight: Reflections on 2014
  • Daily Discomfort: The Rose

February Goals:

Every day is new

Every day is new

  • Sign up for an online photography course
  • Learn to do one HTML move
  • Hashtag a tweet and do three more @’s for people I refer to on the blog.

Recent Posts

  • New Site:On Revision
  • Finally…
  • Where I’ve Been: A Tale of Two Babies
  • We all Fall
  • If you get an Outfit, You can Go to Zumba, too.

Recent Comments

Charlotte Hoather on New Site:On Revision
koehlerjoni on Where I’ve Been: A Tale of Two…
Jalyss Smith on Where I’ve Been: A Tale of Two…
Charlotte Hoather on We all Fall
koehlerjoni on We all Fall

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Recent Posts

  • New Site:On Revision
  • Finally…
  • Where I’ve Been: A Tale of Two Babies
  • We all Fall
  • If you get an Outfit, You can Go to Zumba, too.

Recent Comments

Charlotte Hoather on New Site:On Revision
koehlerjoni on Where I’ve Been: A Tale of Two…
Jalyss Smith on Where I’ve Been: A Tale of Two…
Charlotte Hoather on We all Fall
koehlerjoni on We all Fall

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