Smooth?
I suppose I was once “Smooth.” Most probably smoothest during that era when “Copacetic” was an oft-used descriptive term. My friends George and Laurie used it alot and I, freshly living in South California having recently departed Cheyenne, Wyoming, fell into line. Tom Waits was on the menu, as were doobies in place of three nights a week at the Corner Bar, trying to keep up my consumption of rum and Cokes to keep pace with my hard-drinking fellow-teacher friends in Wyoming. At one point, my principal demanded,”If you are going to go out drinking all night and then come to school fresh from breakfast at the State Line (the only restaurant open at 3 A.M. when bars closed down) please at least go home first and shower, change clothes and brush your teeth! Don’t bring the aroma of your night’s adventures here to school with you.”
Due to an earlier fire bombing of the upper floors of the high school by protesting students, we were using only one floor of the school and had also commandeered the elementary school across the street to teach split-sessions from 6 A.M. to noon, noon to 6 P.M. and it seems all of my hard-drinking friends and I were on the early shift.
We were all good teachers, in spite of our drinking habits, and that was perhaps why our principal cushioned his proclamation a bit. In truth, it was only once that we came to school directly from the State Line, but once was enough. My career in that little Wyoming town lasted 7 years until I decided to move to the West Coast to write the great American novel and to become “smooth” California style.
That smoothness may have continued during my migrations ever northward from Huntington Beach to Los Angeles to Boulder Creek, in the redwoods near Santa Cruz. The town I moved to there was still giving birth to hippies and I guess I fell in line, a good bit later than the rest of them. I never returned to heavy drinking and since my husband imbibed hardly ever in alcohol and never in pot, I depended mainly on eating and smoking (tobacco) to chill me out. Then, partially due to his hatred of the smoke and a line I happened to see in his journal “I guess Judy is just going to keep gaining weight,” I quit both. Quit smoking cold turkey and eating pretty much the same. Lost an amount of weight equal to the weight of a six-year-old child and my body, at least, smoothed out from the bumps and lumps it had acquired over a few years of marriage.
Our life for the next 24 years consisted of long drives over smooth roads to art and craft shows, 11 hour setups and 4 hour tear downs at shows, visits and live-ins from his kids, maintaining a house and 2 acres of property and 7 art studios–but still it seemed smooth-sailing, somehow, as we were doing exactly what we wanted to do. Writing. Creating art. Enjoying his kids and our friends and beautiful envoronment.
But 25 years ago, the smoothness of my life developed some rough bumps. Bob passed away with little warning, days before we were to head down to our new life in Mexico. Two months later, I was driving our fully-packed van over bumpy cobblestones, living in a place where I barely knew the language and knew no one. Our house––furnitureless, applianceless, I nonetheless adapted to, filled the house up, fixed the leaky pool, made friends. I did not manage to smooth out the cobblestones, but I did manage to smooth out myself.
Until, at least, the past year or so as the whole world seems to be getting bumpy. The burnings of banks and buildings and stores and buses and cars over the last week in Mexico are echoed on the world stage with our government killing its own citizens, invading other countries, robbing the poor to reward the rich. I have failed in my efforts to keep my own life copacetic. There are too many projects––books, home-repairs, medical appointments, lessons to plan, rights to my book to try to regain, two years of taxes that i have perhaps not paid and a tax preparer who refuses to communicate with me. But worst of all are the changes in procedure in every aspect of my online life. I cannot understand how to switch to Jet-Pac to get my stats on my phone, cannot understand my email or Amazon or most of my former smooth-sailing sites. They seem to be initiating change for change’s sake. Siri keeps breaking in to what I am doing to ask, “Siri, do you have a boyfriend?” Or “Want to hear a joke?” No, Siri….I want to write my blog and even if I wanted to hear a joke, I know from past experience that your jokes are lame. And am I dumb enough to think you’d have a boyfriend, let alone care if you had? And why are you asking yourself the question???? Time and time again, what I am doing is interrupted by some query about whether I want to buy this or that new app. Messages pop up from 5 different sources where I can now receive messages, when I was perfectly content with email and a phone where I decided when to call. Life was better before WhatsApp and Teams and three different messengers and. and..and.
You might have detected that I am at the end of my rope and when I let go, I know it isn’t gonna be smooth down there. Maybe I’m just getting old, but aside from physical problems that we all face, I can’t remember my mother having all these bumps in her life. She had a TV and a telephone and books. A nice place to live. A daughter and son-in-law in the same town who cared. Another daughter who visited and cared from a distance. No cobblestones. No daily list of things to be done. Meals-on-wheels delivered her meals as she had declared when she was about the age I am now that she had “forgotten how to cook.” Yes, my mother hit bumps. Broke her hip, but, determined not to live in one of “those places,” turned down the use of a walker, walked for a short time with a cane, returned to daily water aerobics and within the year was like new…Well, like her former self before her fall. She once told me, “I never told my mother anything that would make her feel bad,” and so we didn’t.
In short, once we were all gone from home, I think my mother had the smooth life that I sometimes envy, but then I realize that I’ve chosen my bumps—with the exception of Trump, that is. Did not ever choose that man or the world he has created. But I have created mine, and as frustrated as I often am, I am so lucky in the problems I have––almost all of them being of my own choice. And so, if you are still with me after this loooooooong diatribe and chance to ask me, “So how are you?” I guess I am shamed into answering, “Copacetic!”
As you must know by now, the SOCS prompt for the day is “Smooth.” Bet you are sorry you asked.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 