may we all be so lucky...

My great-uncle Joe Kokoszka died this week. He was married to my grandmother's youngest sister Mary for 60 years. My mother, also the youngest sister, was named after this aunt.

My grandmom is about to be ninety-three. Her three sisters range from 83 to 91. Her older brother died just shy of 92. They lost a brother in the Korean War when he was in his early twenties. They lost a brother to cancer when he was about 40.

The remaining five siblings' lives where and continue to be intertwined throughout their long lives. They took beach vacations together. They attended the weddings, showers, parties and funerals of each others children and grandchildren. They occasionally feuded or fought. None were big drinkers or smokers. None were teetotalers. They were neither athletes nor couch potatoes.

I don't know the secret to their longevity  Perhaps it is the network of loved ones they created. Their long marriages and large, close-knit families.Perhaps it is their Catholic faith and simple, healthy lifestyles. Their ability to talk about loss, grief, happiness, politics, weather, music. Ability to accept life's pleasures with its pains.

My grandmother's spirit is sharp and strong. She speaks her mind and loves her life. She sings when she does the dishes. When she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins-Lymphoma at 80, she told the cancer that it was not going to get her.

This is my idea of a successful, happy life. May we all be so lucky.

Saddest Year

I started and stopped writing this several times which is why it is posted so long after the fact.

In September 2011 I wrote:

A few days after Jon and I broke up one of my friends said that it had taken her a year to get over a break up from a man she had loved but needed to live without. At the time I thought that was crazy. A whole year of tears and pain? Four days into this breakup I was still crying myself to sleep and had physical pain over it. I had never experienced pain like that before.

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September 2010:

Jon's statement: "If we had a baby, you would have everything you wanted and wouldn't need me anymore." ended our relationship.

He moved out at the end of the month.

October 2010:

I watched his dog Sammich, a pug puppy I had bought for his birthday that spring, the weekend Jon moved out. When I dropped the puppy off in Harrisburg at Jon's trendy loft apartment across the street from the capital building, he was completely unpacked. The pictures were hung on the walls. He took me to dinner to thank me for watching the dog and said that we could get back together and date. I asked if he still felt like I wouldn't need him anymore if we had a baby. He said yes. I said that did not work for me.

He attended my low-key Bingo birthday. My mother, wondering what would bring my ex-boyfriend to my birthday celebration, said that she thought he would propose. He did not. He got me a book and a CD. He left Bingo early.

 November 2010:

Jon told me that he did love me. That the things I wanted with him were not too much to ask. That I was the only one for him. That he wanted to get back together and that he wanted a future with me. That he needed to take care of me.

I did not feel happy like I thought I would. I felt cautious. He had broken my heart. I said that I needed to think about it.

A few days later I drove out to see him. While there my car got towed from the spot where he had told me I could park. Jon got stressed and irritable about it. He loaned me the money to get the car out. Knowing he made $70,000 a year and knowing that he was aware that I was working two jobs at an average of $8.50 an hour I thought the loan was strange since he had just said he needed to take care of me.

I mentioned that if we were to get back together, I would want to take it slow. He would need to earn my trust again. His snappy reply was that it would not be ok for us to see other people and he was not going to jump through hoops. He wanted to pick up where we left off in September. I thought of the chest pains the loss of his love had given me.

I thought of how stingy he was with praise, compliments, affection. I thought of how content I had been living with him in the suburbs of Elizabethtown. In my mind I had everything. He fucking left and was so eager to be in his new apartment he unpacked in a day. He would get jealous and weird about me having a lot of friends, loving to dance, talking to everyone. I thought about what I would need to be happy with him again. I considered whether he would be able or willing to give me what I needed.

After a week I told him I couldn't do it right now, even though I loved him. He asked where I had been the night before. I had decided to keep plans for a second date that I had made before he swept in with his declarations. I confirmed that I had been out with another dude and he hit the roof. I literally ran after him to finish talking about us. He said that I was throwing everything away and he was done. I was upset at how the conversation went but also felt like I had made the right decision given his reaction.

December 2010:

Jon refused to speak to me for several weeks. I tried to call and text him. About three weeks after our fight, I saw on Facebook that he was in a relationship. I called and left a message yelling that he should have told me before I found out on fucking Facebook. He called me back and I yelled at him some more, fucking furious. I continued to be furious for the rest of the month, occasionally calling him to let him know. I was mad at everything. I was mad at Jon, mad at killer whales (documentary-related), mad at my jobs, mad at the economy, mad at my hoarder roommates that kept the house at 53 degrees. My therapist said it was ok. Be mad, it is a part of the process.

January 2011:

Megan moved in with Jon. I am working at That Fish Place/That Pet Place.

February 2011:

Jon proposed to his girlfriend of three months. My tennis racket was still in the trunk of Jon's car. On our second year anniversary Jon told me that he thought we were still getting to know each other.

June 2011:

They had their engagement pictures taken by a friend of mine, in Lancaster at a spot I have been going to since high school.

July 2011:

Jon and Megan buy a house together.

September 2011:

Jon and Megan get married in Lancaster. What the fuck? Get out of my town, assholes. Go back to Harrisburg and let me put this worst year ever behind me.

Happy Place

After a few months of applying to numerous jobs, I have received one lonely response from a prospective employer for more information. I haven't gotten any requests for an interview and I am discouraged.

Work has been stressful and shitty. Line cooks call servers lazy which is insulting to half of us and apparently is a cue to the other half to show them exactly what a lazy server looks like. Restaurant guests consistently tip 8%. A table with a $56 check left me nothing last night. Makes me glad to get 8% and wild-eyed with desire to get the fuck out of that restaurant. See above...I am trying, with no results so far.

It is cold. Buses do not always come when they are supposed to come. They also run infrequently at night when I get off work. It gets dark early and I work second shift hours so when I wake up there are only a few hours of daylight left which is depressing. My hands and feet are constantly sore and chapped from work and the cold.

Half an hour before the restaurant closed last night, the shift reached the pinnacle of shittiness. I wanted to be in my pajamas with the covers over my head. I was standing in the kitchen waiting for the food for one of my tables, trying with partial success to remain calm.

I took deep, cleansing breaths. I stood straight, elongating my spine. Imagining my idea of paradise.

I had off today, which is rare for a Saturday. I walked my dog for about forty minutes this afternoon. It was about forty degrees and the sun was shining. I was content but longing for warmer weather and to walk my dog on clean rather than litter-strewn streets. Again I found that I was daydreaming about my idea of paradise.

Puerto Rico, spring of 2004. Laying on a net in the front of a catamaran. Blue ocean: sparkling, clean, perfect, surf spraying my legs. Sun. Fish swimming in schools. Pina Coladas. Snacking on kiwi and strawberries in between aquatic pursuits.

I was active duty Air Force, about half-way through my enlistment. I was engaged to be married that summer. I was 24 years old. I thought my future would be filled with sunshine and snorkeling. Michael Cunningham said it beautifully in The Hours:

“I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I...I remember thinking to myself: So this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts. And of course there will always be more...never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then."

"It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”