Carol Lynn Rivera

Life. In Many, Many Words.

Let’s Do This Thing

Gratitude And Goals: January 2019

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I set myself a few goals this year. Nothing grandiose, more like tasks, really. Things I could do and then look at and say yup, did that.

One of the things I decided to do this year is gratitude journaling. I’ve been journaling since I was 13, though back in the day it was called writing in your diary. I have decades-worth of lined notebooks with the entire history of every boy I liked, every grade I got in school, every pair of jeans that never fit.

This year I decided to graduate to gratitude. I set myself the goal of writing one thing that I’m grateful for each day. And now that January has concluded itself, I’m happy to say that I’m one-twelfth of the way to my goal.

It was never meant as a public activity. These are random words I wrote in a document on my computer along with many more words, no longer about boys and grades but still about jeans and also clients and grocery shopping.

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The Good, The Bad And The Calories: A 2016 Retrospective

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muffins

You know those yearly “newsletters” people send out with their Christmas cards?

They usually tell you about how amazing little Jimmy is doing with the trombone and how he just got a scholarship to the Trombone Playing School. And big Jim, well he just made an amazing career shift and now he’s devoting himself to curing hunger and will receive his Curing Hunger Award from the president next month. And the whole family had such an amazing time at Disney last spring!

Maybe it’s more mundane. Maybe little Jimmy just took his first amazing trombone lesson and is enthusiastically entertaining everyone at dinnertime. And big Jim, well he just got an amazing promotion so now instead of counting widgets, he’s putting them in boxes, which is amazing because they’ll be able to save enough money for a Disney trip this spring!

Everything is always amazing and the family represented by said newsletter is always tremendously blessed, and inevitably a trip to Disney is involved.

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Tethered

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sky and cloudsI started to hate my house for a lot of reasons.

Two and a half years ago I watched my cat gasp her last breath and die in the middle of the hallway in front of me. It was hard to walk down that hallway afterwards, and hard not to walk down that hallway.

For the next two years I watched her brother die by degrees until there were no cats left in my house.

No cats sprawled in front of the fireplace or curled up on my pillow. No cats drinking out of my dinner glass or eating my unattended pumpkin cupcake.

There was just a house. And it’s hard to love just a house.

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A Dishtowel Made Me Cry

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A Dishtowel Made Me CryWhen I got married I had about a hundred dishtowels. That’s not even an exaggeration. I had dishtowels with watermelons and dishtowels with lemons. I had dishtowels with sunflowers and stripes and bears and hearts.

I had so many dishtowels that I started giving them away because I didn’t think it was possible for a human to ever need that many dishtowels in a lifetime.

I kept one of each design for variety but pared my collection down to just a few.

Besides, none of them ever worked. They looked like dishtowels, which might have implied that they would dry dishes, but all they ever did was push the water around until it was acceptably thinned enough that I could stack damp dishes in the cabinet.

The only dishtowels I really liked were these ultra thin white towels that my grandmother said she used in her shop – where my grandparents manufactured artificial flowers and arrangements for a living.

Every dishtowel I ever owned came from my grandmother. She stocked me up good. But the industrial towels, those special white ones from the shop, were the only ones that actually worked to absorb water.

She gave me about a dozen of those and I kept every one. [Read more…]

In Which We Are Reminded That The Universe Is Indifferent

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Bingo lying on her matWe had plans for the holiday.

We were going to spend Christmas Eve with my parents and brothers and their significant others – something we haven’t been able to do for ten years. We were going to spend Christmas Day on a blogging streak and then prep early with cake and popcorn for the Doctor Who special.

We were planning two weeks of alternating between super intensive get-stuff-done time and super intensive do-nothing-and-have-a-beer time.

Alas.

The universe didn’t care.

I was tempted just then to write, “The universe had different plans,” but the universe has no plans. It just is.

Indifferent to all things we want and expect and hope for, it keeps doing what universes do.

On a good day I find that comforting. I like the idea of existence just because. Things that happen, not for a good reason or for a bad reason, but just because that’s the way they are. If you stop worrying about whys and judgments and stop waiting for explanations, it can be very peaceful.

This year I found no comfort in that as I sat in the emergency room of the veterinary hospital at midnight on Christmas Eve, waiting to find out if my cat would live or die. Knowing I was going to miss Christmas with my family – the presents, the cookies, the oversized tree – because I was sitting in a veterinary hospital waiting for my cat to live or die. [Read more…]