The Blob

The blob is my day. My week. My year. The blob is me.

I suffer from blob-itis, a condition of acute shapelessness that struck me when my thirty-year marriage ended at pretty much the same moment that my well-feathered nest launched its last fledgling. After decades of running, tending, and attending the clock wound down and the calendar emptied out. Oh, there was plenty to do, but nothing as regular as seeing a kid off to school or putting breakfast on the table or waiting for the sound of the garage door opening. The band was still playing, but no one was keeping time. I made appointments and forgot them even though I wrote them down because the days felt interchangeable. The things I did seemed  non-essential--things that someone else could do just as well or even better.

I'm still struggling with trying to construct a regular schedule. In this fantasy of attacking the blob, I harbor secret desires to meet the same friend every Sunday for tea and yet another friend on Mondays for Margaritas. The first Thursday of the month? Well, that must be my writer's group. The last Tuesday? Knitting circle. Sunday? Well, what should I make for the potluck? None of these regular engagements are real, but in the calendar of my dreams, they are inscribed in big block letters and I relish their approach calendar page after calendar page. And of course, the largest portion of my day would be hugely important. To someone or something.

I sometimes wonder if I might have been a good nun or a soldier or a school teacher. Instead my days dissolve without the sounding of a single bell to mark their passing. The fact of the matter is that everyone I know is busier than I am. They have husbands and jobs and meetings and kids or grandkids or elderly parents that live nearby. They have people who are counting on them to do whatever it is that they do.

But the battle of the blob continues. Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays, I will walk dogs for the San Gabriel Humane Society--dogs kenneled for days at a time--like the ones I walked this past weekend.




On Thursdays I hope to do some kind of something (notice how this is already crumbling?) at the DWC while I wait to see if they have room in their schedule for a writing workshop. One weekend a month I will drive 400 miles to see my son and his family. One weekend a month I will fly to Baltimore to see my mother. Quick, if you want to schedule a regular anything, now's the time. I'm gonna harness my life into some sort of shape.

photo credit: vintageadbrowser.com