Loose Leaf Notes

1. You might be looking at the couple making out in the center of this video clip, but I’m looking just to the right of that, at my husband Joe (in the blue shirt) dancing.

2. It was a Roanoke block party actually with the block blocked off in honor of Jerry Garcia’s birthday.

3. We were dancing to The Kind, which I like to describe as “my kind of fun.”

4. Dead heading is for flowers but not for flower children.

5. If I search Grateful Dead on my blog, stories from The Jim and Dan Stories, the book I wrote about my brothers’ back-to-back deaths in 2001, comes up unless I put “Grateful Dead” in quotes.

6. We put the down payment on our house in 1991 from money I made vending my crystal wrap jewelry in the parking lots of Grateful Dead shows.

7. Last week I became distressed when I couldn’t find Joe anywhere, inside or outside of the house, and thought he had disappeared. It turned out that he had fallen asleep behind a big forsythia bush along the porch. When he woke and returned, he at first didn’t understand where my distress was coming from and suggested the possibility of a therapy or counseling session to relieve my suffering around abandonment.

8. “I’m not suffering. I’m just living my life, and this is part of it. After years of therapy and knowing where my traumas come from, every time they are triggered and I get through them, they are lessened, and the next time I’m triggered it lasts for a shorter time. That’s the way I do therapy now,” I told him. “We should be laughing about this,” I said. And then we were.

9. THIS happened the same year as Woodstock. Who knew?

10. Sadly, “Something genuinely odd (and disturbing) is happening on the right. Ideas that would have been unthinkable just moments ago are now being normalized and, if anything, the drift toward authoritarianism seems to be accelerating.” – More HERE. 

11. T-shirt seen: Still Dead After All These Years.

12. “The word dead is in dread, but so is dear. It’s like the paradox of what I am living with, needing a simple life with simple routines, while also finding the repetition of days and chores monotonous.  I can’t seem to get enough solitude but too much becomes debilitating isolation. Another balancing act?  Yes, one that falls if either piece isn’t recognized. I think the instinct to pare down my life is right. It makes the inner landscape more visible. I might not always like what I see in that landscape, but it’s there affecting me whether I acknowledge it or not. I know that the sense of dread and monotony I feel is only a reflection of me and my inner world, of the things I’ve left there, put off tending to and witnessing while growing up, raising kids and making a living. This time of life that I find myself in is not so much about doing (which can be a placating distraction) as it is about being and being with. We slow down for a reason.  It takes bravery and honesty to ripen fully. I want to learn from it and let it change me. – More from this 2013 post Dear Dread HERE. 

13. Dancing is my idea of therapy. Check out what is also “Right Up My Alley” HERE.

___________Thirteen Thursday