Ten Years After

The ten-year anniversary of the Little Store’s demise falls sometime around now.

Funny how little I think about the Little Store given that it was such an important part of my life for seven years.

It was such a miserable time in my life. Struggling, struggling, struggling to keep the family afloat. Absolutely no one who had my back in any way.

Dealing with Ben… In retrospect, it’s clear to see that Ben abused me. Not physically. Emotionally.

I couldn’t see it at the time. Or maybe I could see it but figured I deserved it because I was so unlovable.

Funny.

I’m almost certainly much less lovable now. Harder. Which translates to less lovable, right?

You don’t like me? You don’t approve of me? Go fuck yourself, I think.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more content.

###

In October, I drove Ben somewhere while he told me all about how Sarolta had been beaten up by her second husband. The second husband had broken her ribs. He’d cracked her jaw. He’d slammed her head into a wall

As a sensitive new-age male, a foot soldier in the battle against cis privilege, this filled Ben with disgust and righteous anger. And despair over fellow testosterone secretors who were not as enlightened as he was.

I thought three things.

Number one: Oh, she’s perfect for you! She’s needy and vulnerable!

Number two: Hmmmm. Not so sure she’d get behind you spilling her deepest, darkest secrets to a relative stranger just to make yourself look more sensitive and new age-y.

Number 3: I guess you don’t realize that 17 years of gas-lighting, lying, forging my checks, refusing to get any kind of a job etc, etc makes you an abuser, too, huh?

Something cracked. I am done with this person, I realized.

Well.

At least as done as one can be with someone by whom one has a child.

###

Hewitt runs a tight ship but a merry ship, so TaxBwana-ing yesterday was loads of fun. I did a return for a former psychiatric nurse who in her retirement has become a compulsive gambler and actually won a $30,000 Lotto payoff last year—which entitled her to write off $30,000 worth of gambling losses, thereby reducing her tax liability to $5,000 or so (which I thought was pretty spectacular given that her income was $118,000.)

She had an affable Go fuck yourself demeanor, which I found invigorating.

Also did taxes for a guy who was outraged by the fact that he still had to pay taxes on the $600 the State of New York was taking out of his salary every month for child support. “That just isn’t fair,” he kept snarling as if I personally was responsible for the diminishment of income that would otherwise go to cigarette, liquor and automobile purchases.

I was tired when I got home, but it was so-o-o beautiful that I forced myself to go running.

The trails were soggy but incredibly pretty:

Here is a photo of ice on the lake. Details of its reflections are in the pic above:



Here is the moon, hiding like Icarus’s legs in Bruegel’s famous Death of Icarus (immortalized in Auden’s poem, Musee des Beaux Arts):



Here is the setting sun, trapped in a tree:



Today, I’m gonna play with Chapter 4 of the Work in Progress.

Henry and June get married!

First, though, June’s father dies.

June has an affectionate relationship with her father, and I’m kind of stymied writing about it: My own father abandoned me when I was three months old, so I don’t really have any experience with affectionate relationships with fathers.

June and her father have to have a couple of poignant flashback conversations. I don’t have a clue how to write them.

What do girls talk about with their fathers?

Already wrote the sitting shiva section, but of course, I’m not an Orthodox Jew—in fact, you could probably call me the most unorthodox of Jews—so I probably got all the details wrong.