Reading was my main reprieve. I escaped into novels such as The Eiger Sanction by Trevanian and The Guns of Naverone by Alister MacLean. Somewhere in those stories, I read about a zen monk who had patiently raked up a huge heap of leaves, it had taken him hours, when an easterly wind sprang up and in an instant scattered the leaves to the four corners of the monastery garden. It was at that moment, that the monk became enlightened.
This story stayed with me for years. I thought of it in moments of desperation when all my best efforts seemed to come to naught. The becoming enlightened part was not really part of the mix.
It was in the first three months of marriage, back in the early seventies when I got my first inkling of the much bantered around word - "Karma" - what goes around, comes around. My new husband had a choice to make - whether to attend his Grandfather's funeral in Pittsburgh where we lived or to attend his friend's wedding in St. Louis where he'd been asked to be the best man. He chose the later.
Didn't matter that his grandfather was a pillar of the Jewish community, that he'd been a decent guy into his nineties, didn't seem to matter.
We set out for St Louis in our brown VW wagon on the Thursday morning of Thanksgiving. I had a job teaching seventh graders on the South Side and I was more than ready for some down time. I remember taking along my sewing basket and some material, patterns and pins.
Arriving in St. Louis, we were greeted and fed a snack - We would save the Thanksgiving feast for Friday when we could all sit down and enjoy it together. That evening, I heard a tip-tapping sound coming from the kitchen; it was the unmistakeable sound of cockroaches tip-tapping on the tin foil which covered the turkey left on the stove.
Back home, as I was unpacking, I noticed that a couple roaches boldly waltzed out of my sewing basket. They colonized. Our apartment became infested with them. Our red haired landlady refused to pay for an exterminator. Somehow we learned to live with them.
One Sunday afternoon, I was cleaning the apartment. Orderliness was important to me, not so to him. My new husband often took himself off on trips with his friend, Bill. They chased trains all over the state, shot photos of them coming around a bend.
On the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet, we had stashed away the plastic bride and groom from off top the wedding cake. Giving the top shelf a cleaning swipe of the rag that day, I managed to scatter a half dozen roaches from the folds of the plastic bride and groom.
I stayed in that marriage for nineteen long years.
