Quibbles

To "quibble" is to carp, grouse, find fault, or draw hairs of distinction in others arguments. This is not that kind of quibble. I give you a new definition of quibble, my own. Quibble (verb) irrevant discussions of the trivial or mundane to the startling, earth shaking discoveries of the mind. All meant to give the writer something to be poetic about in the future. In other words, "Quibble Notes," the true title this record.

LESSON IN LIFE'S BREVITY

I'm just back from an evening out to dinner with friends. One is an 86 year old man with a heart that's ready to fail him, and his wife of 40 years, a once spry, energetic lady with a sharp tongue and quick wit, who is kind for all of that, now reduced to a shadow of herself in the early phases of Alzheimer's disease.

The third member of the party is my estranged wife of 20 years. She abandoned me, age 66, to meagre ways nine months ago. A once talkative and fun little woman of 66 who faced the end of her life six years ago and never recovered. She survived surgery for pancreatic cancer, but the died inside with all the organs taken out or curtailed. Somewhere she lost her love of life, and any she had for me. In three months she will divorce me, and I look forward to that day. A no-fault decree under our state law. She fled to Florida to park on her surgeon's doorstep. The state she loves, not mine; which is in the mountains that I love where my spirit roams free. Also where a year after moving, I became ill, and have been a virtual shut-in.

Myself, ailing, yet a would-be novelist, a sometimes poet, who may well be in the early phases of Parkinson's disease. It seems ot's closing fast on me. I have lived six years with a living corpse and will be glad to bury her in my mind at last. A cruel attitude, I know, but my wife has pulled me down too long. I am ready to be free. Even if it means not free at all but institutionalized as a pauper too sick to live alone and too broke to afford to. As long as I can have a computer outfitted so that I can write, voice recognition software, whatever, I will CONTINUE WITH LIFE.

Why did my wife decide to visit me now. I don't know yet. The daughter she lives closest to, she doesn't know what my wife's secrets are. We only know that she is not well. She is here, she tells me, to help me. Yet she is, and can be, of little help. Instead, she is argumentative and defensive with me to the point of paranoia, hers. It is as it was before she left me the first time. Nothing has changed. I look for love and the health I might find in whatever future I might yet have. It is my way of things. It is how I fight my fight. In whatever way, I want to be free of my wife, yet felt bound to her, to care for her, and to love her as best as I could. Maybe this is her way to love me, to remind me that she left me so I could be free. IT'S A THOUGHT.

MY POINT: Regardless of each of our circumstances, brevity of life each of us face, how much we do like to talk about ourselves, or would like to; but all three of us are shut out be the eldest of us, and we let him talk, as if he can't get enough of his life's story told. I love this man, and will gladly spend any evening that I can listening to him tell the same stories over in a little different way. My life is on hold anyway, and it is the future that I want to talk about, not my past. I have a novel to write that is all about that. So, I'm a listener, gladly and completely, just for the company. THAT'S MY POINT.