my careless contagion

September is changes. Small at first, then bigger. By the end of the month, we hardly recognize you, September.  She begins when it is still summer. When she leaves, it is autumn. This year, when she began, I was in one place. When she ends, I'll be in another. To some, this may seem like a small change, but for me, it is big. It's bigger than the change in the air or displays in the shops.  September means the beginning of autumn. This autumn will be different from the last several. I'll get lost in it. Swallowed up in it. The leaves will change later. The snow will fly later, too. Last September, we had snow the first week of the month. Here, I don't know when it will fall.  September is my birth month. In grade school, I was one of the earliest to celebrate my birthday. I recall the school principal would come and give me a birthday card and how that felt. Surely, this man was the busiest man in the world, yet he came to wish me a happy birthday. What a wonderful mom...

October 2, 2019. That is a date I will remember. That's the date it crystalized in my head that I can no longer look forward to many years of hunting. It was a sad moment when I realized my hunting days were numbered. Maybe it was just a steep learning curve at play. Let me explain. It was the second time I had been out antelope hunting. The season had started about a week and a half earlier. On opening day, I was out there, but the rain was relentless and driving. I stepped out of my car to pee maybe three times in an hour (I had a lot of coffee because I got up early), then I decided to call it a day. It's not much fun hunting in the rain, especially a cold, driving rain.  Hunting on public land has its advantages; also, it has its disadvantages. Since it was opening weekend, there was a stream of trucks going down the road where I was parked on the shoulder. I decided if there was this much traffic on the weekend, even on a rainy day, I should try in the middle of ...

Part two of how I've changed through the course of my divorce is similar to part one, only I want to flesh it out. This is another long post and is a raw, real look at who I am now in outlook and prospects. The seeds of divorce were planted long ago — in my childhood, even — and grew to encompass not only the pain endured in my marriage but my entire life as well.  When I sat down with my lawyer and initially talked about why I was leaving my wife, he asked what led me to darken his door. Well, I said I had about 100 reasons for divorcing her. Indeed, and more. I could have talked about the infidelity. That seems to be a quick enough summation for most people. However, the infidelity was a minor infraction and just part of a larger complex of behavior on my ex-wife's part. This is the part where some of you may get mad at me. You see, Kate is just a typical American woman. She wanted it all. I wanted her to have it all. I wanted her to be happ...

  I'm going to start by apologizing. This post is going to be pretty scattershot. I know this because my thoughts are scattershot right now. I can barely keep things in their proper boxes, much less make sense of them. So, sorry.  A while ago I mentioned three things I wrote on a Post-It note — things I pray about daily that bother me. I won't name them all, but I do want to mention one. Let's just say there are only two things on that Post-It now.  I prayed before this week began that God would allow something very positive to happen in my life this week. And it did. Not only that, but I got to cross one of those dreadful things off my prayer list. My old apartment has been rented, so I no longer have to pay rent for two places. I wondered why God would give me the go-ahead to move into a new place and then have that hang over my head. As it was, I only paid about $150 to cover last month because my landlord used my security deposit to cover the rest. It's h...

  One of the weird things about me is that I forget about myself. That may seem strange to my readers, as I'm writing about myself here an awful lot. However, this forum is the exception. My life is not my blog, though I talk about my life here. Most of the time, I simply disappear. Maybe we all do this to some extent. Anyway, as a fun excuse to write, I thought I'd post a few of my favorite things (and strangely enough, somehow Taylor Swift shows up yet again). Here they are in no particular order.   Food - I've always thought food was pretty bomb. When I was a baby, I was eating food. In fact, I still eat food. I eat food almost every day! Though the importance of food has become pretty basic (as in, I need it to live), I still think food is pretty great. While there aren't any "floor lunches" with meats and cheeses and breads and olives and other stuff from Zingerman's anymore, I still get down for some boiled peanuts and pistachio ice crea...

Her words came through the screen in my hands like a bolt of lightning. My brain sputtered and my thumbs fumbled, wrote something, backed up, wrote again, backed up, wrote again, and finally replied.  She said she loves me.  Those words were like a gullywasher to my parched soul. Like a cheeseburger to a POW. Of all the words I wanted to hear in this word, those were exactly it. I fell asleep with a smile on my face that night. And I slept like a baby.  My writings here over the last 11 months have been a smattering of this and a smattering of that, though writing about her — the one I love — has predominated. My effusions about her have come in every shape and color. Looking back, some of what I've written is painful to read. Some of it makes my heart take flight. Some of it is merely notes on how I was doing at the time and no longer applies, but somehow she got tangled up in my mess. And that shouldn't be surprising. I was very messy for a very long time. Some...

  December 16, 2016, was the day she came back into my life. In the following two years, I've seen a whirlwind of changes. I was so happy she was back in my life. As of this writing, she is not in my life anymore. Of all the changes I've seen in the last two years, this is the saddest. I thought once we started talking she would never be out of my life. It's okay, though. My life has taught me to live with the lack of things. And it was too good to be true anyway.   There was a change that took place in me on a recent Sunday. I sat alone in my apartment and something broke in me. It was a giving up. It was a letting go. Whatever you want to call it. I realized something that I should have seen before but didn't.  Stepping back and looking at the carnage from two divorces is sobering. If I could have done anything to help any of those in pain, I would have. What I didn't see was that I was perhaps the one most affected, the most destroyed, the most hurt by t...