Bummer Dude (clarity edit)

About 40 minutes before I was going to leave to drive the 30 miles (which takes almost an hour) to see "my" client, the company called and cancelled it. I’m not going to get many hours this week after all. They did set up a meeting on Monday with a new client; the whole team will meet him. I’ll be the Direct Support Professional, working the directly with the boy, and maybe this will lead into a regular gig. Seems like they are slow getting this program started.

***

I’m still going to complete the steps I need to for the On-Call job I interviewed for yesterday on Friday. K* pointed out that I am more employable now, that I have "got my foot in the door" of this circle and have been and will be trained in the specifics of this line of work. She said I’ve done the hardest part, getting in the door.

I needed some perspective.

{Friday edit: cup filled, tests taken and it’s in the hands of the gods now.}

She called to check out how to pay me with a check made out to her – some over-payment from her bank that she wants to give to me. Since we’re both Wells Fargo customers, it’ll work out; we’ve done it before, so many years ago. She’s also sending a Travelers Check, denominated in Euros, which means I have to go downtown to the main branch. ‘Ah", she said, knowing my dislike for downtown traffic, "I’m sorry."

I told her that I don’t mind going there, that I’ve made friends with the woman who runs the foreign exchange desk, who thinks well of me, for doing these kind of jobs.

It has social value, a good thing.

not much monetary value, but that’s kind of beside the point.

She’s sending me a little more money, in Travelers Checks (which no one sells any more) that I have to take to the Foreign Currency desk at the main office downtown because one is in Euros and my local branch won’t handle it.

. It is my nature to , oh, I dunno, flirt with women (it does rhyme with my name) and I’ve had fun with the same woman every time I’ve had to go there.

K* said "tell the woman your friend heard about her and wanted you to see her again and sent another Euro TC". "Friend" who is my ex-wife, I said. I had to explain why both our names are on the TC but I always say "good things about you".

She has kept my last name as an identity and as a way to garner credit as an English Teacher in Japan. She asked me 18 years ago if I minded if she kept using her married name, which was hyphenated, cuz we were 80s newlyweds and that was popular then. "Sure" I said, knowing the truth that she spoke; it IS easier to get English teaching jobs with a foreign name.

I was kind of flattered too, ya know? I was not going to be erased, in a way, and she’d always be hearing or seeing my name, in an official way.

Imagine a dark chuckle.

I guess I’m playing "the long game".

***

32 years since we met, as of last week. I had no idea it would turn out this way, then, but, on the whole, I am not displeased.

Being good friends with your former spouse has value too, and not just to us. It looks good for me, although I’m not sure if any guys would be happy that the woman they want to see is friends with her ex… but things are different in Japan, and K* is different than your average Japanese person, and it has been 18 years since the divorce, a lifetime for some people.

There are adults living today to whom The Cold War and the Soviet Union are ancient history, incredibly, because that was part of our lives for 30 years. She went to the Soviet Union in 81 or 82, with artists from her school, to meet Soviet artists. I was a sailor in The Cold War.  The Soviets were The Enemy.

"Who?" some of the kids on my buses said.  First 30 years of my life, and it’s all ancient history to some now.

It has been an interesting life.

(I wished that for us when we got married, that we’d have an interesting life, and that’s a promise I have kept and we have had interesting lives during interesting times)

(She asked me to make a different wish:  for a quiet, boring life, a few years ago, and I’ve been working on it)

I think we are fortunate. Maybe that’s looking for the bright spot in a cloudy sky – we’d be still married, ideally, maybe – but it is finding good things in our past, that we aren’t split up so much as in a changed relationship.

Like what we did when we got married:  we changed the nature of our relationship, for legal reasons.  It did change us – I guess we both played a part in the marriage that we thought we were supposed to, as Mr. and Mrs., but we are better friends than we really were husband and wife.  Then too I called it a change in the nature of our relationship, as was the divorce.  A change in the nature of our relationship, not an end to it.

***

I am a guy though, and I do wish we still…. you know. And, it’s been interesting to see how we’ve aged; she’s known me since I was 19 and she was 20, and we’re 51 and 52 now, and it has not been a horrible thing, growing older, sort of together, separated as we are by 5,000 miles, and officially divorced, not married anymore, but still friends who KNOW each other.

Gravity doesn’t seem to be affecting her.

It could be worse.

***

Ok. So, that title. It’s a bummer that work-time was cancelled today, but I found something to write about and be happy about anyway. The fact that we have remained friends matters to both of us. It’s a bummer that the marriage didn’t work out, yeah, but it could be so much worse. We could be locked into hate and revenge fantasies, saying and thinking bad things about each other, as I have seen happen. We aren’t doing that.

***

So. Onwards. Who really knows what’s going to happen?

<p style="text-align: center;”>(I’m still going to wish for a quiet, boring life though)

 

*****