REDISCOVERING MICE AND MEN

John Steinbeck

Tuesdays, I sometimes go to Value Village, a thrift store that offers a thirty percent discount to senior citizens on Tuesdays.  I have six grandchildren to find newish toys and clothes for, and I have discovered valuable antiques and art there on occasion.  But what I really like to snoop through are the books.  I'm eternally looking for great illustrations, first editions and quirky stuff in general.  Today, I found a sixties paperback of Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men."  It was too torn up to buy, but I stood there for an unknown period of time, reading through it, super fast.  Then, slower.  OMG, that writing of his.  It always gets to the through-and-through of me, like clouds over a mountain. 

When I read "Of Mice and Men" in high school, and maybe again in college, I thought the book was about loneliness.  And it is -- Curley, Candy, the old man and the dog, George and Lennie -- everybody's busy playing solitaire and being lonely.  When I stood there in Value Village, reading it again, I couldn't stop thinking about how out of hope everyone was.  Farmhands back then were all stuck.  Everyone during that era who worked on a California ranch didn't have anywhere to go next that wasn't more of the same.  I read the part about different men over a long time, coming and going, lighting fires over the ashes of previous fires that others had made.  There was no future for any of the characters in Steinbeck's book.  No future is the deepest despair. 

I remember being a widow, fresh.  I had no more future.  I sure didn't want one, if it wasn't with Ted.  We were a duo, as so many long-married and still in love people are.  The kids referred to us as the Ted and Bridget show, because we were predictable and the curtain on our show was always up.  We were...We.  Now, there was no more we.  So, there was nothingness for me.

To a new widow, I can tell you that this sense of having no future without him goes on for an indeterminate period of time.  There is no such thing as snapping out, bucking up, getting a hold of yourself.  It goes on and on, until you look back as I am now, after more than seven years, and you see that somehow you started making plans again.  I started thinking about the fact of a possible future, then I started thinking about the actual future, and then I started creating my future.  This isn't something I decided to do....it just happened.  I don't know how long it will take you to start thinking ahead about your life.  I am still tossing around different ways my own story may go.

I stood in the checkout line at Value Village for a while, and thumbed through a chapbook of quick Rumi quotes that was in a stack by the register.  I snapped a few pictures with my I-phone of the poems I liked.  I put this one on my Facebook page:  "Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with their heart and soul there is no such thing as separation."  I liked it.  I thought it was true.

The next one took my breath for a second, and I suddenly felt the whole world was not outside myself.  I felt revealed, known, and exposed.  It read:

"How would it be if you appeared in this open window?
  It would be as though my hands and feet
  were suddenly untied, and life was pouring back in."

"Jesus, Rumi."  That's what I wanted to blurt.  Instead, I managed to smile, then smile pretty big.  It's a wonderful thing to not be lonely in 2016 because a thirteenth century poet knows exactly how I feel.  Rumi's little poem reassured me that feeling hopeless is the worst kind of lonely there is.  Having no future, that's even worse than loneliness. Ah...but life has a way of pouring back in.