I characteristically spend the long, dark hours between 2 and 4 a.m. perseverating. For those of you unfamiliar with that word (same root as perseverance, yeah?) it gets used a lot in the psycho-babble community to mean dog-with-a-bone type thinking. Worrying something to death. Unable to move on.
What I think about is my grandsons, whom I have not laid eyes on for a couple of years, maybe three. I expect that I will not see them again in my lifetime. That used to make me very sad.
Now, I lie in the dark, composing letters to them in my head. Sometimes, I tell them stories from my own childhood. Sometimes I detail their father's life as a youth. Sometimes I poke holes in the logic that allows them and their mother to be fully supported by a man they won't talk to or see. Often, I picture myself shouting toward their backs as I stand on a windswept hilltop. The wind, of course, is blowing my words back.
My grandsons are fifteen and twelve. The twelve year old is coming up on bar mitzvah time, in a couple of months. I will not be invited to attend. I might choose to go anyway, since the event will take place in a building open to the public. But I probably won't. The cheap thrill of seeing my former daughter-in-law register my intrusion isn't worth taking the shine off my grandson's day.
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