It has been a terribly long time since I've written. I blame partly that blogger.com would not accept my email and password even though I knew they were correct. So I let it be for a while. I've been busy living anyway.
Life has not slowed down. Poppop was in rare form the other day when I told him I was driving down to Virginia where my boyfriend lived.
"Oh, you two are dating again?" We had just ended a 4 month break and were back to being a brand new shiny couple, and as we were never a real "hey, we're a couple" couple before, we were covering new ground every day.
"Yep," I said.
"Well, long distance relationships don't work out anyway." I was floored. I should expect my grandfather to say the wrong thing at the wrong time by now, but it still floors me. Still. How does he pick the exact thing to not say to me? We had separated partly because we weren't sure we could make it after I moved back to Delaware, and just a couple of days after we decide to try it again, my grandfather's throwing that sentence in my face. But I am getting better at recovering from the kick to the gut fast enough to retort.
"So I should just give up, huh?" I never said my retorts were good ones. One step at a time.
"No, I'm saying that he should move here. Why is he still down there?"
'Because he is still in school." We met in the same program, and I was a year ahead of him, so he's just a few months away from graduation.
"He's still in school? Well, is he going to get a job after he graduates?"
"He's not sure yet. He'll either look for a job or apply to grad school for a PhD."
"And then he'll still be in school? Doesn't that take a long time? You can't get married when you're in school." When did this turn to marriage? And why does education automatically exclude marriage? Then he asked, "are you two going to get married?" I swear to you, if he wasn't an 86 year old man I would have punched him. I had sworn that I would punch the next person who asked me when I was getting married. I am the only child left in my immediate family not married. And I'm the eldest. Society dictates, then, that I am an anomaly. The eldest always gets married first. Or at the very least second. Not me. I'm the third to go, and I'm in no rush. For me, marriage is the step after I've settled into my career and I can support myself. But I'm still young. I have plenty of time. But I digress....
"Married? I don't know. That hasn't really been..."
"Well when marriage is concerned, the woman should go to where the man is!" What? Did anybody else just feel the time warp back to the 1950's? And that's when I knew there was no point in arguing. One minute he wants my boyfriend to move to Delaware, and the next he says I'll never marry him because he might continue his schooling, and then finally he declares that I should move to him when I marry him. There's nothing to argue, nothing to discuss; he's having a discussion with himself in front of me. And so, I nod, think about biting comments that involve me asking him if I could scrub his socks by hand, and then head back to my room where I can close the door and shut out the insanity.
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