Living Alone

  Living alone sounds exciting to some and distasteful to others. It just depends mostly on your personality and perspective. My own circumstances are well known to most of you, and I now find myself living alone. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far. It’s quite lonely. Well, that’s obvious you might say. But have you ever lived completely alone for any extended period of time? I haven’t really. I grew up in a family with six of us kids in a two bedroom house in Port Arthur, Tx.  My four brothers and I slept in one bedroom and my parents in the other. My sister slept on a hide-away-bed in the living room. It was not the best situation in the world for her, and I often felt sorry for the poor girl. But it was crowded to say the least. And don’t even get me started on the one bathroom routine in the mornings. It was extremely hard in those circumstances to have a moment’s peace. Privacy was something you could only dream about. And I did…a lot! I also escaped into books which was the only place I could ignore the hubbub of my surroundings. I read about Henry David Thoreau and started making plans to find my own Walden Pond.  I used to beg my mother to admit that I was adopted and send me back to the family I was supposed to be with…you know the one with maybe one other kid and a bedroom for each of us. But it was to no avail. Mom claimed me no matter what. And I guess that was a good thing in the long run as I ended up living with her a couple or three times when I suddenly found myself homeless due to failed marriages or relationships. Good ole’ mom always kept me from landing on the streets when my rollercoaster life dumped me unceremoniously on my keester.

  When I graduated from High School, I joined the Army. Not because that’s what I had in mind to do, but because my good old Uncle Sam didn’t want me to be lonely, and he insisted I be all I could be. Growing up in my kind of family was good training for the Army Life.  In basic training I got to share a room with three other guys, a latrine with two hundred, and a mess  hall with several hundred. In advanced training, and the first year in The Republic of Panama, I shared a barracks with fifty to two hundred other guys. Privacy was out the window. Being a shy, reserved, and very modest kind of guy back then made those times traumatic for me I assure you. But I adapted. And I survived. It was a blessing when I came home on leave and got married to the love of my life. When my darling wife joined me in Panama City, it was just the two of us. Those were blissful days. It was hot, steamy, and our apartment didn’t have air conditioning, but still just two people sharing all that space…I thought I was in heaven. It wasn’t long though before the kids came to join us and privacy was again something you gave up bit by bit.

  Now I live alone. The quiet times can be good for a while. It gives you time to really think about things. Time to think about things can also be a curse when you don’t want to. In the mornings I go out and sit on the deck to drink my coffee. It is peaceful around here in the morning. Birds singing and an occasional dog barking in the distance are the only things that might keep it from being totally silent. In today’s modern world, total silence is not something that most of us tolerate for very long. We turn on the radio in the car, the TV in the house, the stereo headsets while we’re walking or jogging. Quite time is a foreign concept to most people these days. But not to me. When I’m driving alone in my car, I don’t turn on the radio. I prefer to let my mind wander and see where my thoughts might take me. I’m not bored with my self as my only company as most folks are. Many of you, through this blog or my works of fiction, have seen that my mind can be very fertile territory with enough going on there to keep me entertained. But here’s a few things that I’ve noticed that are different now that I live alone.

  First of all, I talk to my pets a lot these days. I didn’t before. My wife often talked to them using baby talk. I always thought that was amusing…like talking in baby talk would help them understand what she was saying better. I don’t baby talk, but I do talk to them from time to time. They don’t seem to mind. In fact their tails really start to wag when I do.  When I’m outside in the evenings watering all the plants, fruit trees, and my garden, I often talk to the plants now. I know…crazy right? They seem to not mind either. Today, I went out to eat lunch, and it was the first time I left the house all week. I didn’t have to guess where I would eat or argue about it. I just stopped at the first place that sounded good. I went to Wal-Mart afterwards, but I was only in there for about 10 minutes. Got what I needed and got the hell out. That's way different. I stay up as late as I want to these days and get up in the morning when I feel like it, or when the cats really get to meowing outside wanting to be fed and will not be ignored any longer. I don’t have a daily routine, other than the previously mentioned coffee ceremony first thing in the morning. I don’t have a Honey-Do list. I do the chores around here when I feel like it and when I don’t … I don’t. Just to be clear, this is not the way I like it. I loved the way my wife and I did things together. I liked going shopping with her and watching her "grazing" over everything available. Her enthusiasm for life was infectious. It infected me. Her way of doing things was different from my way. I liked her way. I miss her way. My way is boring and always has been. That's what I found so irresistible about her. She was never boring.  

  I've had many guys tell me lately that my present situation sounds pretty darn close to Nirvana. Most guys say they would love being left the hell alone. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. They’re lying. I don’t do alone very well. I always liked being married. And I liked having the kids around. Single guys are used to at least having a few of their good buddies around a good bit of the time and spend many of their nights in crowded places with lots of other single people around. I don’t have good buddies anywhere close to me. I’m too old for the night life.  So it’s just me here. Living alone, talking to the dogs, cats, gold fish, plants, and anyone else (you guys) that will listen and trying to make the best of it. The prospect of living this way for many years to come frightens me half to death. The prospect of not living this way and including someone else frightens me even more. So I will continue to live alone. And I will pray that the rest of you out there don’t have to.