Otterbein

Most of my yesterday was spent on guard, trotting outside as necessary to walk with Jeff as he strode purposefully down the street, on a hunt for the “New Otterbein Street.” The house Jeff built from the ground up, and which we lived in for our first two years of marriage (as he completed it around us...a theme was to recur in our lives,) was on Otterbein St, in Baltimore. But I can’t tell you precisely what this “New Otterbein” was meant to be, and I’m sure that even in his head it was little more than a waking dream, believable to him, but connected to reality only by the most tangential of threads. I can tell you that there was, apparently, a sign in virtually every yard we passed telling him that this one was the “Old Otterbein.” A distracting dish of ice cream bought me a few minutes, but mostly, yesterday, I stood guard.

I could tell it was destined to be a tricky day when he first asked me about Otterbein Street, and I told him that Gordon still owned it. “Which Gordon?” he asked. Which Gordon? This would be his brother and business partner to whom we sold the house at Otterbein (which was serving as a rental at the time,) when Jeff’s powers began to fail.

2012, the year of change. Maybe that’s all the Mayans meant. That 2012 would be the year Jeff lost any grip on reality or the ability to be remotely re-oriented to the world as we know it. Fortunately, I am able to find life funny, ridiculous, and sad all at the same time as I remind myself how much, in 2011, I was wishing for an end to the “doldrums.” So, okay...thanks? I believe I will have to be buying my way back into life soon. I hope Jeff will adapt.