Back To School

Today my children returned to school. There is a quiet in the house, a peace for just a little while until, Dana, their mother returns home and pierces it with the TV or the computer. She, more than myself, is more than happy to rush them of to school this morning. It's difficult for Dana to be with her own children for more than a day and the summer vacation can be a pure hell for her.

I don't know why, but for some reason, Dana has difficulty dealing with her own children. Perhaps it's because she's a full time stay at home wife and mother or perhaps it's her own up bringing or perhaps it's that perfectly normal part of growing up in which teenage daughters naturally butt heads with their mothers? I don't know, I do know I spend a lot of time outside in my garage and I do not get to watch much TV or work on the computer or relax in my own house unless Dana and the girls are gone.

Back to school time for me is time to spend with Dana alone for a few hours. We may go to a book store or the movies or out to eat or just stay home and fuck, but it's time together and alone and it's valued. She won't get physical such as riding a bicycle or go for a run or lift weights or work out in the yard or garage and that's what I want her to do with me. Now she'll go back to her routine, drop the the girls off at school, come back and read the paper, have a cup of coffee, rot in front of the TV until she has to get them at 1430. She may get some house work done or go to the library or a bookstore; but, unless we do something together, this is her routine.

As for myself, it's life as usual. I'm used to her routine and to what she values. I'm used to her and that's what can actually be a bit scary. I can almost predict the way of her day. I get up in the morning, or the afternoon if I have to work, and I am on God's good graces. Not that Dana isn't, but it seems we each have to make our own self and our own happiness and it has to come from within. A really nice trick is to balance it all out with the ones we love. If we can, if we're able.

In other news, my brother has moved away to Jasper, Texas with his girlfriend Kaylie. She and her daughter are also starting school today. The most important men in my life are all going away it seems. My father moved out to New Mexico a year or so after my grandparents passed on, my maternal grandfather in a nursing home in Pasadena because Mary, his wife, can't care for him, and now my brother out in east Texas. Yesterday, before he left we shut off the electricity and the water and turned off the gas at the valves and now the house is truly empty.

It's a different emptiness from what I remember after my grandparents had passed 8 years ago this year. The emptiness then was more inside of me because I knew the house would be filled again by my brother. This emptiness is different, there's no one to fill it and the house actually seems dead. No life there except for my memories. It's an empty shell next door housing my brothers things and he says he'll be back in a couple of weeks or a month but I know better.

He's gone for a good long while and it's up to me to cut the grass and to keep the place until he returns. He says he'll pay his own taxes and bills and I hope and pray he does because owning your own home is important. I don't want him to lose it to the tax man or to let it go or to sell it. I hope he knows what he's doing. He even took the cat.
The cat is old, at least 12 maybe even 16, and he or she has been an outdoor fixture of the house and that property for as long as I can recall. Since before my grandparents died. When my brother would go on trips or away for more than a day or two I'd go over and feed it and check on the house and make sure that everything was ok. Now there is no reason to go over. The cat is gone, Mark is gone and I am left with an empty feeling. So I cut the grass for him and parked my truck there so it looks like someone lives there still and maybe to leave just a hint of life.