Rambling and Rambles

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
~Aldous Huxley

Including myself. The first time I went to Berlin (on my own, arriving from Krakow – still drunk and about to be viciously hung over after visiting the horrors of Auschwitz/Birkenau) I didn’t like it. It was too damn vast and unknowable – not neatly walkable like Edinburgh or Amsterdam. That and the wall had just come down. Everywhere was rubble and empty, abandoned, ugly, Soviet style high rises and then, more rubble. Not exactly enchanting. The next time I visited and the time after that things were WAY different. First, I wasn’t hung over. Second, I was staying with my cousin Della, (who moved there from Den Haag), and her awesome husband Martin – I got to see the joint from a native’s POV and LOVED it. Berlin IS vast and can’t be fully seen and appreciated on some quickie holiday. Nope. I gotta go back.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
~ Ray Bradbury

Yeah, tell it Ray Baby!

I need some of that eye wonderment right now. I’ve been struggling to chill after the roller coaster ultra stress of nearly losing one of my peepers, meeting the sight saving Doc Jacobs, getting into BostonSight and then the make or break, deaf UNfriendly PROSE training.

I’d go sit on Nantasket (which soothes my soul to the max) except it’s summer now. The beach is packed. After The Amazing Bob shuffled off this mortal coil, I motored down there, in the pre-dawn hours, on the regular. I’d sit in the sand, absorb the peace and play of light as the sun crept up to the horizon line. I gotta do that again.

It’s three years ago next Thursday, that my man quit this life. So much has happened in these intervening years. The mind reels.

On the first two heartrending anniversaries, Jen, Oni and I got out of town. I couldn’t be here at home on the big, bad day. TAB-loss loomed insurmountably. This year is different. Ten is here and I’m blazingly in love. Every day I’m astounded by my brill luck.

Luck? After a life lived for the sound of music, I’m deaf, I've shit balance and keeping my sight’s a constant battle. BUT, BUT for 30 years I had the MOST Amazing Bob in my life. And now I have Ten. Two men in one life who get/got me and still love(d) me! What these startlingly awesome squeezes have in common is their wonderful big brains, their soothing kindness, EMPATHY, they live(d) proudly outside the mainstream and they are/were kitchen gods of the first order. And that's a very short list of their brill qualities

I still don't wanna be home next Thursday. On Wednesday, Ten and I will depart Valhalla for a distracting road trip to Vermont and Western Mass. He knows that I’m mourning TAB – that I miss him so deeply still. Wickedly bright bean that he is, he also knows that I’m wildly happy that he chose to leave his Oregon home to shack up with yurs truly.

Magnificently lucky is what I am.