Changes of Heart

by Patricia Ryan

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  A FULL DAY

  She had slept well. She must have. There were dreams. And then nothing until she was in the world again.

  The diffused morning light seeping through the blue blinds gave the room a sense of being underwater in the clear shallows of a Caribbean sea.

  She stretched out in this watery pool of light that was her bedroom, and felt the temporary protest of spine, shoulder and neck muscles.

  The stretching was good but she didn’t want it to undo the sweet air of sleep, of safety, of hope, of snuggling down under the covers into the familiar mattress.

  She wanted to stay dreamy until coffee.

  This desire did not have as much to do with coffee itself, as with the ritual of simply staring, and letting the day come to her. Allowing it to show itself, and in its peaceful unfolding take away the hum of primitive panic that accompanied waking into a world too big to handle.

  By the last long sip, she was ready.

  A breakfast sundae of cereal, yogurt, nuts, milk, and fruit gave her the energy to tackle the news on TV and, after clearing up in the kitchen, a shower.

  Out of habit she looked at the clock. But now it wasn’t necessary to keep an eye on time.

  Under the shower, she rejoiced in this and all the things she no longer had to do. She no longer had to wear a bra. Or pantyhose. Or earrings. Or keep up a trendy hair-do. She had stepped away from the world and its useless responsibilities.

  Since all days were now her own, she didn’t have to worry about the outside world’s agenda. She could choose to avoid the President coming to town. Or the Pope. She didn’t have to drive, or take a train, a bus, a plane. Unless she wanted to. She didn’t want to.

  Her new happiness was not doing all the things she didn’t want to.

  She rushed the fluffy bath towel around her skin to quickly soak up the water that turned chilly out of the shower, and asked herself:

  What was there to want? Everything she needed or wanted was right where she was.

  She unconsciously shook her head in agreement, remembering she had already traveled the globe and was often amazed at how much of her former life was portrayed as an example of what a good life should be.

  As the appealing commercial flickered with young couples frolicking at the shore she would know that she had been there. Had been bounced around by the sharp, salty, sunny surf. Had dived to the undersea coral where complete silence and surprise colors removed her from every thing else she had known.

  There had been beaches. Lots of beaches. And hot, therapeutic sand. And good air.

  There had been wide, calm lakes with silky water. And the call of loons at twilight. Screened porches in deep woods, swaying pines and quaking aspen.

  Life had not been stingy about taking her out into the natural world.

  And now she had to go out food shopping. Although easy enough, this seemed to be an endless dance, a discordant choreography of never-completed supplies, always something that needed refilling while other things were still half or completely full: no comforting conclusion of all items ready at once.

  She acknowledged that at least she did not have to hunt and gather. That this was better than living in a tribal village growing, harvesting, and trudging heavy loads back from the fields on her head. She didn’t have to carry the milk home in a pail like her father did.

  Not to worry, she thought. The day would also offer an invigorating stop in the bright new public library’s drama section where she would pick out a suitable scene for her Acting for Non-Actors class.

  And like everything else, there was time: another week to memorize the lines that would take her into the deliciously painful process of twisting, like a snake, out of her own protective skin into the unfamiliar confusion of being in another’s life, chillingly amazed to be there. It made her delirious. And the few times that it worked, she loved it.

  But before she could leave the house, she checked her bank balance by phone and prepared to pay the few bills she would mail while she was out. Paying bills made her feel like a teenager again: old enough to do as she pleased, yet young enough so that someone else took care of the finances. Food, shelter, even fun had just seemed to materialize. Now, thanks to Social Security and her pension, once again this small financial freedom was one of her pleasures.

  As she left the house, she was immediately conscious of the light and air outside. A soft, gray day, strangely welcoming with its gentle moistness. It was great walk-along-the-shore weather, slightly spitting with mist and spray, both warm and cool. It was good to breathe in, like a spa. No indifferent blue sky for all day. This air felt personal.

  On the way to market, she could see the large patch of sky once blocked by what was now gone, its absence an attack on happiness.

  The idea of happiness.

  Away from truth, New York felt like a city of choice, of freedom, a churning cauldron of happiness. That day there was also the happiness of hands wrapped around cups of anticipatory hot coffee while striding under a perfect blue sky, of greeting colleagues, of being young.

  Then the very nature of this general, collective, city-style happiness broke for her and all who had lived with those urban mountains as part of their personal cityscape.

  The city reverted to an innocent child who had been brutalized at play, and with quivering lower lip asked the stranger, “What did you do that for?” Regardless, now she, like others, was forced to carve out whatever muted joy made a full day, even if her new brand of happiness had a flavor different from before.

  Along these now scarred streets, it helped that long ago she had devised a personal escape. By talking to George Washington.

  It just happened one day when she said to herself, as many Americans probably did when they became upset with a version of the country that was not their own: “I wonder what George Washington would think ?”

  Over the years this private State of the Union debate evolved into long conversations with the historic General explaining what things meant now, and how they got that way.

  Because this game made her think more deeply about these things, she began to notice how every small change in the world is taken in stride, drip by drip until it becomes the ordinary and mostly unnoticed marvel that it is.

  But mainly the game was not so much to dwell on Washington’s past compared with her present. Instead, it was a jumping off point to figure out what the future would be like in 300 years, by analyzing how the last 300 evolved. Should she return three hundred years from now, it would probably be the unimaginable strangeness of ordinary things that would send her over the edge.

  Never mind: these inner conversations were interesting, intriguing, exhausting. And great fun. They satisfied her almost as much going to dinner with smart friends.

  But maybe not so easy for an overwhelmed George, she thought. “Poor George, I should give him a break and send him back.”

  Fortunately she had ways to help him. There were anchors in the city even now that he could hold onto and keep a sense of his own time as he knew it. New York was remarkably full of his old life. If things got too bad for him in modern New York he could go and surround himself with these sturdy old landmarks as though it were yesterday.

  Would there be anything of her present life that she would be able to hold onto like that 300 years from now, she wondered.

  Never mind: it was always the same dance with different music.

  But she didn’t have time to play with George today. Today, when she finally returned to the house, she would have to decide whether to tackle things that needed doing, or things she wanted to do. There was a hierarchy of pleasures even now.

  In any case, she loved her lists. She loved crossing items off, of getting it done, of bringing order to chaos. If that were her pleasure, there certainly was enough there for her.

  She could:

  - check the free cello concert in the local church (pleasure)

  - call the cable company
about a movie she didn’t watch (chore)

  - buy citrus body wash (pleasure)

  - replace smoke alarm batteries (chore)

  - water plants (pleasure)

  - study manual for new microwave (chore)

  - get windows washed (chore/pleasure)

  - arrange to fix broken closet door (chore)

  - prepare laundry (chore)

  - get a haircut (pleasure)

  The list contained a perpetual Gorgon’s head of renewable snakes called household chores; get rid of one and another grows back. Yet each line crossed through a completed task brought self-congratulation for her cherished and necessary sense of competence.

  She was not kind to incompetence in herself. Or in others. Yet surely she would run into a lot of that, as always, before she got home today. In the shops, on the street, on the phone. She could accept mistakes, grand and ruthless. But not incompetence that was chronic and self-satisfied.

  Not that she didn’t make mistakes herself. She had time now to realize what she had done wrong, see clearly past mistakes which ranged from those that felt monumental even as she remembered them --- although in real life they probably had been merely embarrassing and stupid---to life-changing decisions she considered tragic. She acknowledged now her own part in losing lifetime partners in the best of men. Or letting them go. Yet she was saved from too much regret by understanding that for herself, even with the best men, some part of staying would have been wrong for some part of her.

  Of course by now, that was neither here nor there.

  The weather suddenly turned. What had been a gentle grayness now gathered a damp sharpness from somewhere. It was too early for snow, but it foretold the dreary New York winter to come.

  The city was not kind to nature. For one thing there were not enough trees. She longed for trees. Not the here and there straggly, random placement of one at a time city trees along the sidewalks of some lucky block, but thick clusters of trees, dense groves, overhead canopies, all tight and bunched together. She wanted to be encircled by trees.

  That would be hard to come by these days. There were no more rides in the fall to farms and country houses. No more weekends in the woods with long-proven friends, lolling around in front of a fire, with enough time for the chatty casualness that brings information and connection. Now every day there was a constant low-level shock just under her consciousness at how the forces that decimate life took away most of her tribe. Was it possible that so many of those she counted on and loved, and who swam effortlessly through her days and nights, were gone? Swallowed up in what seemed to be one large gulp, one right after another, although it might have only been nature’s mathematics.

  Now her remaining, revitalized, or newly-gained human comfort was By Appointment Only. To meet for dinner. To sit by the river. To celebrate a birthday. Nevertheless, she knew enough to be grateful. And to look forward to these appointments marked on her calendar, measuring the weeks of the month by them.

  She was eager to get home. She had gotten everything she needed from the market and had even picked up some crème-filled vanilla cookies to have with tea, a rare treat but appropriate today to compensate for the dreary rain. Today she would also forgo the library and the little park now wet in drizzle. Nor would she stay out and explore the neighborhood that was always changing: shops open, shops closed, new buildings that morphed from empty steel skeletons to finished new citizens in the cityscape. And not just because of the turn in the weather. Or the mobs of distracted, rushing people on the narrow neighborhood streets. Many days she wondered why she went out at all. Her apartment with its big windows open to the sky was so full of light and air, it felt more like being out than being out.

  And now as the day dimmed, it would soon be time to curl up in the recliner and watch the cranky TV judge, who shared her own punisher side, that part of her which strenuously objected to all the pushy people in the city who had things to do that were not her things.

  But for her, going home was not leaving the world; it was a rescue. She would become a refugee from the city and enter the several worlds of her own life. No mere shelter, her apartment was an ecological sanctuary densely packed with purposeful functionality and aesthetic.

  Like an exhibit of countries at Disneyworld, she could travel into each room and find a different place for body, mind, or spirit. Surround herself in the many moods of both survival and pleasure.

  There was no need to yearn, as once was the case, for the excitement of the city outside. At home, now that she had time, even the quiet, settled, cozy act of reading could leave her reeling and bedazzled.

  These were her anticipatory thoughts on the way back inside where she would become her own best companion. She summoned them frequently to help keep a perspective on the rushing head-long changes in her life.

  In spite of trying to resist these changes by retreating into old memories, her former life now seemed to belong to someone else, abandoning her in unfamiliar territory.

  As it turned out, it was a safe land. Safe from the tyranny of her former self.

  Safe from the frenzied overlord of her previous ambitions, the driving force for the old fierceness of her self deluded vices: temper, distain, impatience, snap judgments, cold heartedness, indifference, irritability and a crucial lack of perception of other people’s story, seeing no story but her own.

  But she was quiet now, rich in time and clarity. She could choose her stresses and was conscious of how good it felt to feel good, to be part of the lovely landscape of a low-key life, the gentle here and now.

  She was willing to be newly old.

  At home she made dinner, did the dishes, watched a little TV and then took one last look at what was on tomorrow’s calendar before she snuggled back into bed.

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  THE END

  (more)

  Dear Reader:

  Thank you for sharing these short works. Please feel free to comment on these stories by sending an email to: poetpatsy@gmail.com

  You may also go to website www.poemshareandmore.blogspot.com to download links to free full-length romance novel SKYLARK, set in 1960’s Rome and New York. On the website you will also find free links to the complete poetry collection STAR ON FIRE, and a chapbook LIVING WITH THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE.

  Thank you and I hope you will enjoy.

  Patricia Ryan