#296

Nights in bars, other stuff

I had a very long week last week, and I am tired in my bones. There were errands, there was cleaning, there were home repairs, there were multiple medical appointments, there was Family Time, there were job interviews, there were vet appointments. It was A Lot.

One of the family time things was my sister-in-law’s birthday, which was dinner out and drinks after. I dressed up and we took an Uber, you may recognize this as the 50+ version of X-tremely Ready To Partayyyyy (i.e., have more than one drink and get home after 10 pm). The drinks portion of the evening was at a bar I have been visiting for more than 20 years, though not for the last several years and not since it changed ownership.

This bar used to be in a nowhere neighborhood, where you’d not want to park your car too far away or walk alone after dark. Now it is surrounded by half-million dollar condos and the streets are clean and well-lit. It’s not bad but it is different.

Twenty years ago the bar had a private, members-only back room. The owner was a mysterious older gentleman who ran a tight ship (no big hair, no white zinfandel, no stretch limos according to a small sign out front) and the bar was completely closed on St Patrick’s Day and New Years Eve. Back when you could smoke in bars, $9 got you a pack of Dunhills on a silver tray, one cigarette already pulled halfway out, alongside a box of wooden matches. The cocktails were outstanding and cost $15, which is of course quite typical now but at the time was mind-boggling.

I first went there with my best friend, and variously with dates and boyfriends and once with a guy I very definitely should not have had anything to do with, and then finally with my now-husband. By the time we were dating, the smoking ban was in effect and the Dunhills were a thing of the past and you had to smoke your own cigarettes in a not-unpleasant alleyway between the bar and an old, possibly abandoned or at least minimally occupied industrial building. That building is now full of one-bedroom apartments going for about $2,000 a month.

Anyway, none of that is terribly interesting at face value, but when I texted my friend that I was at the bar we had a brief conversation about how nostalgia is often really grief, and what are we mourning exactly? The passing of time? No, because being alive is good. Not being young anymore? Maybe, but there are things about my 20s and 30s that I am fine with saying goodbye to. What I really wanted was to feel exactly what it felt like – not just remember what it felt like – to park my crappy car and run across a crumbling street in my high heels and my weird little outfit to have an adventure…but also to know how good I had it and how glorious it was to just exist in that moment. To have awareness of how you will one day look at your husband across a table and say, without using words or even really moving your face, I’m tired and ready to go home, where once you would have stayed out all night trying to read some man’s mind.

And you both will and won’t miss the old times, in ways that are (clearly) impossible to accurately describe, and a lot of the details will get lost to time and everything will soften around the edges. You will forget driving home on a quarter tank of gas you can’t refill yet because you just spent $50 on cocktails, you will forget the guys that never called again, you will not forget some of the bad decisions. And the only people that really know what it was like are the ones who were there with you, which is why you spend so much time texting and also writing about it on your Substack.

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This week I have to go to the dentist and I’m pretty annoyed about it, not because I mind the dentist so much but because it is the appointment where they take all the x-rays and for some reason, this always feels like it takes forever. In reality it is probably six or eight x-rays but it seems like 1,200. I usually leave the office blinking in the bright outdoor light like I’ve been in a cave for ten days. It’s disorienting.

On the plus side, spring weather seems to finally have gotten its teeth into northeast Ohio (despite a slight dusting of snow that arrived late last night). Paired with the “extra” hour of daylight, this has been a big bonus to my circadian rhythm and general outlook on life. Landscapers came by the house a couple of weeks ago and trimmed back all the trees and flowering things, so they should be heavy with blooms this spring and summer, and I can’t wait.

I feel like I should have more plans, or at least more concepts of a plan, for myself these days, but I can’t manage to think more than 48 hours ahead. This has made preparing for an upcoming vacation very difficult, because being without a job has distorted my sense of time. What day is it? How many days until we leave, and how many of those days can I reasonably spend in sensory deprivation, distancing myself from everything that’s stressing me out? REPLY HAZY, says my internal Magic 8 Ball. ASK AGAIN LATER, OR MAYBE DON'T BECAUSE I WON’T KNOW THEN, EITHER.

My husband is the type of person, e.g. a functioning adult, who makes a list of things that we need and want to do to the house each year. He divides these up by quarter and prioritizes them by must-do and nice-to-have. He is the one who puts all of this stuff in motion and gets multiple quotes and I am very glad, because I would definitely already be in my Grey Gardens era if left to my own devices.

However, when he talks about things like a bathroom remodel, I start to initiate a brain shutdown sequence because in my current state of disorientation I cannot conceive of such things. Tear apart…a bathroom? Have people in the house, coming and going, asking questions, needing us to make decisions? This is paralyzing to me, sorry! We can use the ugly bathroom with the nonfunctioning sinks forever! (Don’t worry, we’re getting the sinks fixed next week. The vision of Grey Gardens recedes, for now.)