Early Monday morning at the radio station, and I am listening to someone on the phone describe a trailer hitch they found on the road as blood runs down my arm. ” Yeah, I found it around 6th and Kiseno streets, and so then I put it on a tree stump, in case they come back for it..” The caller proceeds to describe the tree stump, and I wonder how the person who lost the hitch would ever know to look for it there, but mostly wondering why the hell in 53 years I have not been able to learn NOT to run for a ringing phone.
“How did you manage to hurt yourself during Morning Edition?” my coworkers laugh. Well, it was an unexpected encounter with a large pile of metal debris in the hall at full speed, slicing open the knuckles of my right hand.
It was not just any pile of metal junk. This equipment represents the first Board I learned to use back in 1982, now heading for the dump. I have been reading the weather and news on KFSK for a long time. Making coffee in the back kitchen as the sun rises over the Coast Range since I was in my twenties. Now I am in my fifties and I hold the weight of the intervening years in my mind.
Shouldn’t I be calmer after all these years? More measured in my approach? I am still running around like my hair is on fire, although now it is more like smouldering instead of flaming. Still rushing to complete my lists of tasks, racing to respond to any request.
One of the phone calls this week came from my friend Chris, who used to be the Morning Edition Host here before me. She called from the Sitka station, where she is once again being the Morning Host. As usual, I had just run for the phone, from an interview in progress, on my way to a newscast in two minutes..answered her question tersely and then hung up. The I recognized her voice, remembered she had moved back to Sitka, and called her back. We had not spoken in probably 20 years..
“Yeah, I thought I recognized your frantic voice” she said. That comment unsettled me. It made me think long and hard about what it means to live in relationship to my work, and what I think of as my responsibilities. It made me think of the weight of years, and all that had happened since she and I had seen each other. We still are waiting for six minutes past the hour to break into national programming with the local weather forecast.
It is the juxtaposition of sameness and change that boggles my mind.
I left my knuckles uncovered as a reminder this week. They are a foolish stigmata, representing a self-destructive impulse to drive myself too hard, to move too fast. To react with unthinking speed to every request, every task on the list with no regard to my own needs.
This is not my singular fault though. I know many other women who find no place for themselves on their personal “TO DO” list. Maybe you do this too, and find yourself wrung out by the demands of your life or your family. It calls for a measure of self-regard. this week my goal is to try and live at a more sane pace, and see where that leads me.
Another beautifully written post. You’re a good story teller.
The thing about being at every one else’s beck and call is that there is no incentive for those other people to change their behavior. They are getting what they want from their relationship from you, so in their opinion, the relationship is “working”. You can’t blame them. (I’m thinking of a friend of mine who wonders why her 23-year old son won’t move out from the basement in her parents’ house. Well, as long as he’s got that roof over his head and his mother feels responsible when he complains that there’s nothing good to eat in the refrigerator when he gets up at noon, why should he??)
The trick to making any of these soul-sucking relationships “work” for YOU is to be more cat-like in your priorities. And the surprizing thing is, (and I should know; I’m quite the metaphorical Siamese) that there isn’t any moral fall-out in doing so. Really.
You don’t need permission, and you don’t need for everyone to be OK with it. You don’t need approval and you don’t need a concensus.
You do, however, need a back bone. Which every cat knows how to use to her advantage.
I, too, had one of those phone calls with Chris in the past year or so. It was awesome. A voice I had not heard for so long, and yet a voice right there inside my head, all this time. Space and time not applicable.
As to the picture in your post… I recognize each and every piece of equipment there. I guess this is what happens when one man’s just-in-case stash becomes someone else’s burden, when you pour your dreams into static and inanimate objects but don’t quite get to brining them back to life.
So much potential there, all piled up. Sorry you gashed your knuckles on the vapors of my scheming. But at least you gave them some life, pulling them into your ongoing poetry, before they all got gone.
Matt