In the park, they’ve had a team working to raise the height of the path at the little stone bridge because it has a tendency to flood and joggers get their expensive trainers wet.
This annoyed me and I wasted a good deal of emotional energy complaining to my sister about it at the weekend, just before I tested positive for covid.
“I like walking through the flood with the dogs. It gets them excited and they run around like lunatics. It makes me happy.”
I fell into a covid haze after that and spent several days unable to function.
In the middle of the week, it was my son’s birthday.
Feeling a bit brighter, I agreed to drive myself to the coast so that we could walk the dogs vaguely together but safely apart.
Two years ago to the day we were celebrating his birthday with dinner at home and pondering the news about lockdown one.
“I reckon it will last until around May,” one of us had said.
Sometimes it’s best not to know what’s around the corner.
I’m glad I’ve made the effort to come but my patience is thin and my energy thinner still.
The family sits on a bench eating fish and chips while I skulk some 20 metres away perching on a groyne. It must look for all the world as if I am the world’s oldest sulky teenager unwilling to sit with his parents.
Daisy doesn’t help matters when she decides to take more than a passing interest in a man cooking sausages on a disposable barbecue.
When I arrive home I read a message from Jim thanking people for their kind words about his recently departed wife, Bev.
A line in what he writes hits me like a bus.
“What happy days we’ve all had.”
He’s right. We’ve been so lucky.
I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness that so many of those times are in the past combined with similarly powerful gratitude that I got to live through them in the first place.
The next day my son is being taken to Cambridge for a couple of days by his girlfriend which was the place I took his mother on our first date.
I don’t remember a lot about that day but I do remember her getting drunk and me getting annoyed that she was drunk, although I can’t really remember why.
We must have made up though because I also remember holding her hand all the way down the M11 with my other hand steadying the steering wheel. I was happy.
“What happy days we’ve all had.”
It’s Mothering Sunday today and the thing I feel most grateful to my mother for is that she gave birth to me.
So many people worry about “what happens after we die?” But I’d say we’re better off realising that the fact we were ever born at all is the only miracle we needed. The chances of it happening were virtually zero.
Collecting these memories that hang onto us like limpets through the years is surely one of the most important tasks of living, and perhaps a way of mitigating frustration and irritation about things that don’t really matter.
In the park, they’ve finished work on the bridge and it’s actually really nice.
I reckon it will still flood and even if it doesn’t we’ll just get into the water anyway, me and the dogs, and make our own memories.
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