We started the evening having dinner with my son's girl friend. They (my son and she) have been squabbling and Stew has been fretting, since he does not share his son's equivocation regarding matters of the heart. He (Stew) is madly in love with this girl. She understands him; she values him; she hugs and kisses him, multiple times, every visit. (Hard not to love, right?) After dinner the three of us sat on the porch talking our deep thoughts and crying together over the difficulties of life and love. Stew manfully tried to put in good words for his son. It was alternately satisfying and heartbreaking to watch him struggle to use language to convince this girl to keep reaching, to keep trying.
After she left, we watched some TV and he turned to me and said, "So are the boys coming tomorrow, you know, in the yard?" I replied, "Yes, the man is coming to cut our grass." "Where do we get our money?" was his response. I tried to explain banks and pensions and he stopped me and said, "Are there other houses here?" After I talked about the simple answer that we lived in a subdivision and what that meant, he asked again about where else we had lived. I spent the rest of the evening going through the history of our lives--both singly and together. He listened with more attention and interest than he has EVER listened to me in our life together. He thoroughly enjoyed all of it and asked lots of questions. We decided together to continue to do the oral history as often as he felt confused about it. He thanked me profusely and told me that my hair was very pretty and that I looked a lot like his friend Genie's best friend.
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