Looks like a big year

It looks like this is going to be a big year.

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I went to the Ecosophian Convention in June. That was big, right there.

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I mentioned a while ago that I'm back to work on my book. My goal is to self-publish successfully this year. I don't expect to make a lot of money at it, although it would be nice if Fate proved me wrong. But it explains an obscure, niche topic. The natural audience is probably not large, and I've never been very good at publicizing myself. The goals that I hope to achieve include:

• proving that I can set and achieve a long-term goal;
• learning about the self-publication process, so I can plan to publish some of the other stuff bubbling in my head;
• opening up the possibility for my sons that they can achieve things in life above and beyond holding a regular job, because it is always easier to do a thing if you see someone else do it first. (To be clear, my own father was rather weak on the "holding a regular job" part, so that was the first thing I wanted to model for them!)

But there is more. Turns out that the world doesn't revolve around me. 😀

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Wife moved from living with Son1 to living near Son2. Son1 and Son2 organized the whole move between themselves, and are handling the aftermath.

Son1 will be moving in with Dorcas soon. Son2 proposed to Beryl.

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Debbie has had multiple spells of atrial fibrillation. Already this year she has had a device inserted into her heart to help regularize its behavior, and she is on medication to help with that as well. We still talk regularly every Friday afternoon, but more and more those conversations tend to drift over to talking about death. She's still making plans for the future, but more and more she talks about wanting things to be in order by the time she is no longer there to order them.

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Because Debbie has been thinking about death, she has been pushing our Unitarian Sangha to establish a Care-Taking Council. I wrote about the very first steps ... setting up an exploratory committee to review the idea ... back in 2025. But most of the activity will take place this year.

Also related to that, this spring our Sangha held its first ever Day of Mindfulness. We are slowly stretching out of a fixed and unchanging shape that we've held for some 20 years.

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Marie's favorite nephew was arrested by TSA. Turns out he was on a cruise with his parents (Marie's sister Cuñada, and her current husband). TSA explored his tablet, and found pornography on it. Some of the pornography involved subjects below the legal age of consent. This translates to five years in prison—automatically—without the possibility of parole. Marie is beside herself—partly at the fate of her nephew, of course, but partly because of the nature of the offense. She has not said so, but my guess is that years ago (before we got back together and she started to re-evaluate her attitudes towards sex), she would have approved of such a law. Today she hates it because it endangers Nephew. There are probably other complexities as well ... Marie generates emotional complexity effortlessly.

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I'm in a fight with my professional organization. I don't know why I care, and some days I don't. It's not like I'm working any more. My membership expires this month. Maybe I'll just let it go. Still, if I do, that's another milestone for this year.

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At the end of June, Schmidt wrecked his car. He described it this way:

"Driving to town for groceries and prescriptions.  Just a mile or two out of town, got distracted trying to let a wasp out the window, drifted just enough to hit a mailbox that (due to prior vandalism I suppose) was anchored with steel and concrete like a damn skyscraper and totally wrecked the car.  Flipped, rolled, slid... good thing I'm in the habit of doing only 60 on that part of the road!  Seat belt & air bags did their job and I crawled out the (pulverized) passenger side window with just some cuts and bruises.  Somebody came along just as I got out and used his cell phone to call 911 -- I was still dazedly trying to collect myself and wondering how to use my phone without  my glasses (knocked off and god-knew-where).... Cue EMTs, Highway patrol, tow truck -- tow operator finally found my glasses for me (way in the back of what's left of the car) so I can see again."

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My former boss wrote me that he is afraid of being laid off, because the huge company that we both worked for is doing lots of business except not in his country.

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Numerologically, 2026 is a "1-year" because 2 + 0 + 2 + 6 = 10, and 1 + 0 = 1. According to John Michael Greer, 1-years are: 

"Ruled by the Sun, this is a number of new beginnings and opportunity. This is a time of practical action and constructive change.  It's a good time to take direct action and to start new things in motion, so long as they aren't complex or evasive. Move ahead forcefully during this year."

All-righty then!

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Have I forgotten anything? Maybe. Probably

Is there more that I don't know about? Gosh, I hope not!

           

Fearing for your children's future

Tonight in the UU Sangha I attend, we started reading a new book for our dharma study, a book by Thich Nhat Hanh about Fear. So during the discussion period, people began discussing their fears. And I heard several of them express fear for their children or grandchildren.

Debbie, for example, is afraid for her grandchildren because her daughter Mattie, and her son-in-law (Mattie's husband), are such martinets, and always yell at their sons (Debbie's grandchildren). Debbie said she's not afraid of dying for her own sake, but she's afraid of the consequences for her grandsons if one day suddenly she's no longer there for them. (To be clear, there's no imminent threat. Debbie's in her early seventies, and she has various ailments that are consistent with her age, including periodic bouts of long COVID and atrial fibrillation. She also has celiac disease, that seems to be slowly morphing into a more generalized autoimmune sensitivity. But she's not on a timeline, with "X years to live"!)

But then another member is worried about his children, too. (I'm pretty sure I haven't given him a name yet.) His kids—a son and a daughter—are legal adults but just barely. They were both adopted out of a dreadful situation, spent their whole childhood being oppositional, and regularly make terrible decisions. So their lives aren't going well, to nobody's surprise. And he's deeply troubled by this.

I think there was someone else too, but I forget the details.

Of course this is common. At some level, everyone who has kids wants those kids to have a wonderful life, free of the spectres that so routinely blight the lives of Other People. That's why I was so upset at the idea that Wife was going to live with Son 1: I wanted him to be able to have adventures in his life (if he wanted them, of course) and I figured there would be no adventures if he were looking after her. As a secondary concern, I feared that living with Wife would ruin his relationship with Wife, although I figured that he was honorable enough he would never throw her out on the street. (Turns out that I called that secondary concern exactly.) 

On not disappearing against the wallpaper

I don't know how to tag this post properly. The reference in the title is to a post from seventeen years ago (yes, really!) where I wrote, in part:

I always start new jobs as The Quiet Guy ... you know, the one who tries his best to disappear against the wallpaper? Despite this, it always happens -- at every job I have ever held -- that one day I am introduced to somebody who says, "Oh, so you're Hosea. I've heard so much about you."

This post isn't about a new job. It isn't about new circumstances, or being around strangers, or anything like that. It's just a rueful reflection on my relationship with leadership.

Sometime in the middle of 2021, right around the time my salary and benefits ended from my closed work, the elected Chair disappeared from our local section of the professional society I belong to. I don't think she "disappeared" in any sense requiring the police, but at any rate she stopped showing up to meetings or answering emails. And I was asked to step in: "Hosea, you're a nice guy and you come to all our meetings anyway ... can you take over as Chair?"

Be careful whom you help. I'm still the Chair of that section today, over four years later, notwithstanding a society rule that you can only be Chair for two consecutive one-year terms before you become ineligible. But nobody else wanted the job, and our Regional Director said it's better to overshoot the term limits than to have no Chair. Anyway I have been trying—this year in particular—to get someone else to take on the job for next year.

Fine, that's nice, but so what?

So controlling, part 3

Yes, the first two posts by this name were more than ten years ago, here and here. Deal with it.

I wrote recently about the many little ways Debbie and I got in each other's way in the days leading up to the retreat. Well, they didn't end there. They peaked, if you want to call it that, while we were driving home. We had stopped to recharge her EV,* and on the way out of the parking lot I was giving her instructions at the same time that the GPS did. She asked me very pointedly if I thought that was helpful. I admitted that of course it wasn't, and added lamely that I wasn't aware I was doing it. For the rest of the day I was painfully aware of every syllable that escaped the barrier of my teeth. I was pretty aware of it the next day too.

Then this morning, as she was making breakfast,** Debbie was setting out some ingredients and said, "You can start on this, and I'll eat that." I asked, "Is that something you want me to do now, or do you mean when everything is ready?" Debbie admitted she wasn't aware she had said anything.

And suddenly the penny dropped. Some people vocalize tasks they are doing, while they are doing it. Some people imagine themselves doing a task when they see someone else doing it. So it stands to reason that some few people just start reciting instructions for things that other people are doing.Most of the time we probably contain the impulse, so that strangers don't see us standing alone talking to ourselves. But in certain kinds of liminal situations it can be unclear—even to the speaker, to say nothing of the hearer!—whether we are talking to ourselves or to others.

This, I think, must be another of the roots of Wife's insistence that I was "so controlling": a habit of talking through what someone else is doing, while she is doing it. Of course I don't do it all the time. If the task is one I don't understand, I keep quiet. And if the other person clearly has it covered, we are likely talking about something else. But especially when I am with someone who doesn't seem confident about a task that I would be confident of—or who seems to be doing it the wrong way around—I probably vocalize the task at hand. This leaves the other person the option of asking me to stop (as Debbie did), of ignoring me, or of complaining later (when there is no longer anything I can do about it) that I am "so controlling." Debbie took the first option. Wife, famously, took the last.

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* We had bad luck finding charging stations on the way home, with the result that we drove several miles out of our way—at least twice. The exercise convinced me that the EV-charging industry is a lenocracy, in John Michael Greer's felicitous coinage. Debbie is still convinced that electric cars are the wave of a bright, new future, and that experiences like ours are just growing pains. I look at the same data, the same experiences, and think of Greer's mordant observation, "If you want to see that the decline of a great civilization looks like, look out the window." 

** Debbie and I no longer cook together in the same kitchen. During this visit, she cooked and I washed dishes, except for the time we were at the retreat (when the retreat staff did both). 

This development has been slow but steady in coming. You remember that when I first visited her in her new state, eight years ago, we cooked together and washed dishes together. At the time I commented, "Who needs sex to be intimate, when you can work together in the same kitchen, picking up and handing off tasks smoothly and conveniently?" Two years later we were still cooking together. But by 2020, I was starting to notice slippages:

"... we didn't work together in the kitchen as smoothly and effortlessly as we have in the past, which made me realize we have gotten out of practice. Nothing serious, but we had to pay more attention not to bump into each other, and I didn't always know right away what to do next. Little things."

I don't remember how we handled cooking last year, and I can't find anywhere in this blog that I wrote it down. Not that it matters, I suppose. The Buddha teaches that all things are impermanent, after all. Right? So it should be no surprise that our ability to cook together smoothly in the same kitchen is impermanent as well.       

Silent retreat

This weekend, I'm on a silent, residential, meditation retreat with Debbie. It's just like the one I joined last year at this time; and at only a weekend it is shorter than the weeklong retreat we joined at the end of 2013. It's organized as a UU-Buddhist retreat in the state where Debbie lives.

A silent retreat isn't literally 100% silent all the time. There are instructions when you arrive, and there are occasional dharma talks. (This time around, we are watching videos by Pema Chödrön in place of dharma talks.) Also, there is a relaxation of the requirement for those who want to socialize quietly during meals, though there are still tables designated for those who want to eat in silence. And there are periods of "free time," which should be quiet but which are not policed too closely if you aren't disturbing others. But then there are meditation periods, when nobody speaks. And the whole campus "goes into silence" in the evening after the last meditation.

The purpose of silent meditation is that it allows you to watch your mind in action—particularly the repetitive scripts that keep us perpetually ill at ease—and in the run-up to this retreat I certainly had plenty to watch.

• I flew out to Debbie's place on Wednesday afternoon. Debbie spent the afternoon looking after her grandsons, and we had dinner with them and their father. (Mattie—their mother and Debbie's daughter—was late at work.) Debbie had to interrupt one of my stories because I was unaware that it was time for the kids to go to bed.
• Thursday was easy, with a couple of errands.
• Friday we drove to the retreat. So that morning Debbie decided that she had to vacuum and wipe down the entire inside of her car before we could pack it.
• Then we got in each other's way while packing—or rather, I got in her way, and we had to spend time talking about it.
• Debbie drives an EV (electric vehicle), so we had to plan the trip around where there were charging stations. There aren't a lot in her area. This part wasn't a big frustration, because I let her handle it. But it was an added challenge.
• Then there were other similar issues when we got to the Retreat Center, unpacked, and got through the first evening. If I avoid spelling them all out, that's partly because they were so trivial that they would bore you, ... and partly because they were so trivial that they would make me look really bad.
• It was all little stuff. But it was one minor irritation on top of another, all because I was running along my little tracks of automatic responses and—at least sometimes—she was running along hers. By bedtime last night I was very grumpy.

I slept long, ate breakfast alone in silence this morning, and hiked around the grounds for an hour. Then I joined the group to listen to Pema's first video, after which they rang the bell for silent meditation.

And oh—how delicious that silence was! After my grumpy and grumbling evening, after I blundered sullenly through the morning—the silence of that first sit felt like I could taste it. It was refreshing like cool water on a hot day. All of a sudden I felt, This is why I am here!*

I sat through the first two morning meditations. Then I skipped the thirs one to write this post instead. Now it's lunchtime, and maybe I'm a little less grumpy.

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* In fairness I should add that the other, later sits weren't all equally amazing. But the contrast that first morning was real.    

        

Another death

There's been another death this year, a woman I've known for a dozen years though not deeply. But for most of those years, I saw her regularly, once a week. I'll call her Janet, which wasn't her name in real life.

Janet and Debbie co-founded the UU Sangha that I attend regularly. During all the years up through when we suspended meeting because of COVID-19 in 2020, Janet facilitated every meeting, every week, except for the handful of times that she traveled to visit family. By the time we resumed meeting—first remotely, and then in a hybrid manner—her treatments for ovarian cancer had started taking a toll. So she was rarely there, and no longer led. Still, she was in everyone's hearts. This year Debbie traveled here (to Beautiful City, where I live) several times to visit with Janet and her family; and finally, five weeks ago, Janet died.

This is just some random UU congregation on the Internet, and not the one
Janet belonged to. But her Celebration of Life was easily this crowded.

The Sangha did an adapted Buddhist ceremony for the dead at our next meeting, and we are doing an abbreviated ceremony by Zoom once a week for the seven weeks thereafter. (Tonight is number five.) Last weekend the UU Church that hosts us (of which Janet was also an active member) held a Celebration of Life for her. In fact, Janet herself designed the Celebration of Life ceremony. There was a little Buddhist input, when the Sangha came up to the front to chant "The Three Refuges." And there was a walk through her life, with lots of photos. Several people stood up to talk about what she had meant in their lives. And there was lots of food. It was a lovely service.

Already some of the other members of the Sangha have started to think about their own deaths. (None of us is exactly young.) One woman has said she wants her service to look just like Janet's, and so she has started writing her life because nobody here knows anything about it.

Where does this leave me?

"Living consistently with your values" part 2

This post follows on from an earlier post a little more than four years ago.

Last week—I think it was last week—I was talking to Debbie over Zoom. She had just come in from roasting marshmallows with her family: daughter Mattie and her husband, plus their two boys (Debbie's grandsons). Roasting marshmallows? I said. That sounds like fun.

Oh it was, she added. And then she told me the story behind it.

The older boy is now in ... I'm not sure, but I think it's first grade. And at the beginning of the week, his teacher handed out a flyer about the Cub Scouts. Anyone who wanted to join could attend a meeting at a certain date and time, and they would roast marshmallows. 

Mattie and her husband told him No, they weren't going to sign him up for Scouts.The way Debbie described it, they gave two reasons:

1. The Boy Scouts require you to believe in God.
2. The Boy Scouts are homophobic.

Besides, said Mattie's husband, the main thing you do in Scouts is learn to go camping, and we already do a lot of camping.

But they were going to roast marshmallows!

So Mattie and her husband offered that the family could roast marshmallows on their own. And they did.

Wrapping up last year

I keep thinking I should write something about the last … gosh, I guess three months of last year. I keep not wanting to do it. Not that there's anything bad about it. I just can't summon the energy.

This is an omnibus post. The only common theme is that I'm too lazy to break it out into multiple different posts. Or maybe I should say that empirically I have already observed a strong tendency not to write it. So tonight I figured, "Better to get it all written than to worry about the details." I count 14 different tags or labels on this post right now. Maybe I'll add more later. That should be a sign that it really does tell multiple stories.

October

Actually I guess I've already talked about a lot of it. In October I traveled to visit Debbie for a week, and we went on a silent meditation retreat. (The retreat lasted just a weekend, so we also spent time visiting her family.) Then I flew on to another town where Marie was attending a conference. I appeared with her at the big dinner, as arm candy, and otherwise wandered around town while she attended multiple sessions. I think I talked about this trip in this post here. (See also this one, for a slice of life around Debbie's family.)

November

In November, Mother and I joined Brother and SIL in driving all day to visit family in another state over, for Thanksgiving. I talk about some parts of that trip in this post here. There were other parts of the visit as well, but I don't remember anything so important that I need to remember it or write about it. Stan was better behaved than he was five years ago, and easily distracted with Monty Python routines. This time it was his little sister who was the terror, but not as destructively.

Your children are not you

I was talking with Debbie a couple of weeks ago, and she was telling me with sorrow about how things are going in their house. (You remember that she lives with her daughter Mattie, with Mattie's husband R., and with their two little boys—Debbie's grandsons.) There have been other conflicts before, but many of the longest-lasting frictions seems to be related to the ways that Mattie and R. raise their children. Of course Debbie says that she understands it's none of her business and she has to back away. But it all makes her very sad.

Mattie and R. appear to be very demanding parents. But I'm sure they would never believe themselves to be cruel. They are good liberals in many of the most stereotypical ways, so I'm sure they think that parental cruelty is Something Bad that Other People do. I'm sure they just think that they just have high standards.

Fine, but are they cruel, in reality? I haven't observed enough to be sure. But you can ask other questions that help delineate that space. For example: ….

Are they dogmatic? Absolutely. 

Inflexible? No question. 

Tyrannical? We only use that word for people who are inflexible about Bad Things; as long as they are Our Sort of people, we prefer to call them "reliable" or "committed." Or to put it another way, I'm sure Debbie would go to great lengths to deny that Mattie and R. are actually tyrannical. It would be easy for me to say it, because they're not my family. What's odd is that I don't get the idea that this tyranny is intentional for them. It feels to me more like they just honestly can't imagine that there is any other way to do things than the way they are doing them.

And this brings me to my title. I think parents are often guided (in their parenting) by introspection. How would I feel if my parent did that to/for me? But this is a poor metric to use, because your children are not you!

Talking with Marie

What did we talk about during the visit? 

We never discussed politics, or almost never. I think she mentioned a couple of things she had heard recently—once she said she'd heard that Donald Trump was going to round up LEGAL immigrants into concentration camps, along with illegal ones—but I just let them drop or made a joke.

The week before my visit, Debbie came to town briefly for something unrelated to me, but she and I had dinner one evening. Afterwards I sent a note to Marie because I remembered that I had promised always to let her know whenever Debbie and I were together. But I asked her, did she really want to keep hearing about these events, even if (as always) Nothing Happened?

During my visit, she said No, not any more. Marie explained that when I first visited Debbie, her insecurities were so severe that she assumed, As soon as he sees Debbie he's going to remember all her virtues and contrast them with all my weaknesses; and right away he will break up with me to be back with her! In the ensuing eight years, of course, none of that has happened. And I reminded her that Debbie and I have agreed we do better without the added complication of sex and romance. For her part, Marie said she finally realized that even if I did ever fuck someone else, that wouldn't have to mean that I'd break up with her. So she has finally decided not to worry about it.

In practical terms, this isn't going to mean anything. I'm pretty sure my fucking days are over at this point, as noted above. And it's not like any of my girlfriends ever overlapped any of the others, except for the brief period when my involvement with D overlapped my marriage to Wife. (See this post. For the sheer comedy of it, compare also my remarks about D's jealousy of Wife here and here.) But in the abstract I suppose it is nice to know that she's finally not worried about possibilities that could never have hurt her to begin with. Does this count as progress, even if it is meaningless?  

Debbie is in town

Debbie has been in my state since the 12th, visiting family and friends. She has been here in Beautiful City since a week later, arriving the evening of the 19th. 

Whenever Debbie and I see each other, I always notify Marie ahead of time. But this time I somehow forgot to say anything until we texted each other the morning of the 20th about getting together later in the day. Then I suddenly thought, "Oh shit!" and sent Marie a quick email with all the plans that I knew about up till then.

Hey love,

Just a note that I forgot to mention before. Debbie's visiting [this state] for a couple weeks. She was in [another city] for a while, and last night drove all the way [here], where she's staying in the house of some of her friends from [the UU church that hosts our Sangha]. I have not seen her yet. 

I got a text from her this morning, and she has come down with a cold (ugh) but is testing negative for COVID. So we might have dinner or something, if we can find a place with tables outside. I forget how long she is in town, but this is not her last stop. (Sometime next week she'll go on retreat with a Buddhist Fellowship that she's connected to, down in Big City.) But I think she's here for a few days.

As I say, I didn't think about it when you and I were talking, because it was driven clean out of my head by our exciting discussion of [your current writing project]. (Actually I mean that seriously!) But when I got her text a few minutes ago, I remembered that I should drop you a note before seeing her. (And as noted, if we can find a suitable set of tables that probably means dinner-time.)

So far, so good. And all of it was true, as of the time I sent it. Marie replied briefly.

Oh, thank you for keeping me posted, love!!!

Very considerate of you.  I hope you do get the opportunity!

Dictionnaire d'amour

"I sometimes wished someone would invent a dictionnaire d'amour—a lover's dictionary listing all the weird and wonderful ways in which humans show their love. An inordinate number of men choose to repair things; other people frantically rebuff compliments, and still others stubbornly conceal their love so as not to pester anyone. A dictionary—yes! Of course, it could never be comprehensive."

⸻ from Nina George, The Little Village of Book Lovers, p. 24

I got this book last week, as a Christmas present from Debbie. So naturally I have to wonder, … is "buying someone a book of fiction in which the story is actually narrated by Love" one of these "weird and wonderful ways" that would show up in such a dictionary?

See also choices like this movie here, not to mention our further discussion here or any of the posts that come after it.

          

What's wrong with the Five Mindfulness Trainings?

Last night, the Unitarian Sangha that I belong to recited the Five Mindfulness Trainings. This is something we do every month or two. The Five Mindfulness Trainings are Thích Nhất Hạnh's recasting or interpretation of the Five Buddhist Precepts. They also serve as the entryway into the Order of Interbeing. (See also this link here.) So they are kind of a big deal for the Plum Village Tradition of Buddhism.

Overall, or at a high level, I don't really have a problem with the Five Mindfulness Trainings—that is, if you see them basically as injunctions to be a nice person and don't look too closely at the details. But you all know me by now. When have I been able to avoid looking at the details? And when you subject them to that level of scrutiny, … well … there are issues with them. Problems. Things that don't make sense, or that really should be worded a different way. 

Things that I can't fully agree with.

Now, any member of the Plum Village Tradition will be quick to tell you that the Five Mindfulness Trainings are precepts—often they take this to mean suggestions or advice—and not commandments, strictly speaking. In principle they won't insist that you stick to every jot and tittle; but they will tell you that the closer you can come to abiding by these, the less suffering you will feel in your life and therefore the happier you will be. Well and good. At the same time, I don't feel that most of them want to hear the flaws—the misconceptions or simple errors—that I find in them. So you're going to have to hear them instead.

Maybe we can all be outsiders together

There is probably no point to this post. Probably if I were sober I'd think of something better to write about. (Although I was sober all day up till now, and didn't write a word except on Twitter. So maybe not.) I guess you can read it and let me know.

Earlier this week, at the meeting of the UU Sangha I attend, our Dharma study was to read an essay by Ruth King about her experience of being Buddhist While Black. Then we discussed our reactions to the piece.

Kalyāṇamitra

I learned a new word in Sangha tonight: kalyāṇamitra. Thich Nhat Hanh uses it in the book we are reading. He glosses it as "a friend who is wise, a friend who has light—a true spiritual friend. This friend might already be very close to you but you haven't been able to recognize them." [Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, p. 146.]

Oh, … I think I recognize her. (Her, not them!) But I'm always glad to know a new word.

          

Debbie and the paranormal, part 2

Following on from the earlier post by this name (last month), I remember once maybe a couple years ago, when I was trying to decide what to do after losing my job and also wondering if my retirement savings would last for the rest of my life.

At one point I was discussing these questions with Debbie, and she said, "You know, I've got a feeling that you have a lot of years ahead of you yet … and also that you are going to spend a lot of that time writing."

Of course that doesn't necessarily mean that she's right, does it?

Or maybe I'd better get to work. (grumble, grumble) Just saying.

           

Drinking with Debbie

I'm writing this in the middle of June, but I've backdated it to May because it's another one of my posts about thinking through the outcome of my trip to Scotland with Debbie. Ironically, last night I wrote this post here, about drinking. So tonight I'm writing another about the same topic? Sure, hell, why not?

When Debbie and I first got together back in 2013, one of the few hard disagreements we encountered was over alcohol. I remember walking past a city park with her one evening, trying to suggest that alcohol could have a place in a well-managed life as long as you didn't let it take over. Since Debbie was a nurse [still is, I guess], I compared alcohol to a medical anesthetic: you don't want to abuse either one, but each one has its place. Anesthetic allows you to undergo the pain of a medical procedure placidly; alcohol can take the rough edges off your day and let you see the world in a more graceful light. But Debbie was resolute: she had watched her parents get drunk and then beat on each other, and so she didn't see any redeeming benefits in it. (See for example her references to this behavior here and especially here.)

Challenges to modesty

One of the recurring challenges that Debbie and I faced while in Scotland was the simple one of modesty. As I mentioned before, of course we have seen each other naked in the past—it's sort of inevitable when you fuck—but that was a long time ago. We have managed to avoid nakedness in each other's presence during any of my other visits, and of course I had promised Marie "no sex and no quasi-sexual activity." Avoiding nakedness is clearly an important part of that.

On the other hand we shared a room in every single hotel we stayed at.  Mostly, each room had an attached bathroom. (You may recall that when we stayed at The Drovers Inn, in Inverarnan, the bathroom was a shared one down the hall, like in a dormitory.) But one way or another, modesty turned out to be … well, … not altogether easy to maintain.

We started simply enough, by changing clothes in the bathroom. (Or if one of us ducked into the bathroom to change, the other might take advantage of the momentary privacy to change at the same time. I did that several times.) Each of us had brought a set of pajamas to wear to bed. I wore mine over top of a T-shirt and a pair of boxers. So I was well clothed for sleep as well as for daylight. I did not look closely enough to establish what Debbie wore under her nightclothes. 

This system worked, as I've said before, up till Day 4, when we arrived at Inverarnan and the bathroom was down the hall. Since it was distinctly inconvenient to retire to the bathroom to change, we just changed clothes in the same room together and made a point of each turning to look at the wall while we were doing so. I finished a moment before she did and was in the process of turning back when I caught a glimpse of her bare back with no bra-strap across it; so I turned back to the wall for another minute until she had pulled on a shirt.

So far, so good.

Debbie and the paranormal

Something else came up during our long conversation over dinner in Balmaha, the night of Day 2. But it didn't really fit in either of my previous accounts of that dinner, neither here nor here.

I already mentioned that I introduced the concept of reincarnation as a metaphor to explain something about how our relationship felt to me. But this also led to a fascinating digression as Debbie started to tell me some stories. As a girl, she had studied Russian in high school. (This was before she traveled to work in the Soviet Union, and long before she married her first husband, who was Russian.) Anyway, while she was learning Russian she would have dreams of herself as a nanny in a Russian household. Then she would wake up with words she hadn't studied yet; and when she took them in to her teacher, sure enough they were correct Russian words meaning just what they had meant in the dream.

Then we talked about other times she had had some kind of extra-sensory knowledge. Once, long after she had stopped any communication with her first boyfriend, she woke up in the middle of the night knowing she just had to call him. So she did, and he told her his father had just had a heart attack. 

More recently, sometime back in 2016 when she and I were communicating only very little, she wrote me an email saying that she thought I had a new girlfriend. (This was of course Marie.) Actually, I told her this story because she didn't remember it. But when I reminded her, she said she was very glad I had Marie in my life.

Just a couple of little notes that I wanted to make sure to tell you about, and they didn't fit in either of the other posts.

          

Hosea and Debbie go to Scotland

So, … how did the relationship fare, between us, while we were together in Scotland for two weeks? The short answer is, I think it was fine. On the one hand, we didn't fight. In the other direction, we didn't fuck. We kissed occasionally, but always with closed mouths. All the guidelines that I promised Marie we would observe, we observed.

But if you want the full flavor of the trip, … maybe I need to talk just a little longer to describe it.