Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Incommunicado

I've been off the posting grid for a few days. My stay with Melvin and his son Bob (I'm not making this up) kept me on the move and intellectually busy with not a lot of computer time.

They were so kind to me, beginning with a repair to Grace. She has very low ground clearance, somewhere in the neighborhood of the thickness of a piece of paper. When P and I were in Taos I backed up in a driveway that looked to have the slope of that same piece of paper. It did not, apparently, because we heard a scraping sound when I pulled out. A nasty, mean, expensive sound which turned out to be a broken water line to one of the fresh water tanks, meaning there is a second tank so it wasn't a fatal error but one that had to be fixed eventually.

When I got to Tucson and got an oil change I asked the garage to take a look. The mechanic came into the waiting area with the look of a surgeon delivering bad news. Not only was one thing broken, another thing was also broken. Don't ask me to get technical. I just know things were broken. When I got to Melvin's he gave me the name of an RV repair place which told me they were booked until the end of May, as was probably every other place around. Oh, grand. How the heck was I supposed to get this thing fixed? Melvin and Bob to the rescue. Bob kept running back and forth to the garage for this fitting or that tool. Melvin spent at least a couple of hours in the Tucson sun on his side under the van, repairing the water line. I don't want to harp on his age but if I'm as spry and sharp as he is when I get there I'm going to start buying lottery tickets because I'll be living with magnificent luck. Grace is now fixed and they saved me at least a couple of hundred dollars. I love these guys. They're on my list of favorite things. 

Melvin chauffeured me around in his Chevy Volt, an electric car that gets about 627 miles to the gallon when it has to run on gas. We went to the Desert Museum, Saguaro National Park, and Bisbee, AZ, a cute, quirky little town near the Mexico border. We talked for hours about everything, which made me realize how much I'd missed in my life by not having meaningful conversations about anything with the person who'd been so important to me. It was very hard to unfoist myself from them but I didn't want to get to the stinky fish stage so I did and headed to Mesa, AZ.


I'm now at the home of the woman who shared a hospital room with me when our first sons were born. Judy and her husband Pete moved from Michigan to Lake Havasu, AZ not long after we moved from Detroit to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. We haven't seen each other since 1979, lost touch somewhere in the 80s, and reconnected via Facebook. 

It's poignant to see the love they have for each other. Just like my long conversations with Melvin and Bob, the laughter and instant friendship among us, seeing the deep affection Judy and Pete have for each other makes me kind of sad. They were telling me a story about something last night and one of them jumped in to correct the other. This may seem a nonstarter to you, but had I done that to the ex-husband it would have resulted in instant shut down that would have persisted for some time. When it happened between them last night it was nothing to them; the other just picked up the story and on it went. I've missed so much in my life and never really realized it, but my eyes are open now.

=======
Thought of the day:

Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option. (Attributed to Mark Twain but I'm not convinced)