Attachments

Things seem very busy all of a sudden. I think that’s good. My Dad will be moving down to Maryland in less than a month, and I have to do a walk-through of his new apartment to make sure it is all set up correctly. That will be this coming week. Once Dad moves down, in September, he has a couple of appointments I need to do with him. One is a medical thing, and there is also a social thing that he’d like me to attend as his “plus one.”

Max and I are meeting up today for dinner with an old college friend of mine, Inga, who is in the area with her family to attend a funeral. They want to go to the Parkway Deli in Silver Spring. I’ve known Inga since I was 19, when we stayed with different members of a big French family in Nantes for the summer. I lived with the parents and she and another student lived with the grown-up daughter. We used to see each other at Sunday dinner and for disco nights out and beach trips with the daughter. And for classes of course.

It seems funny to think that now Inga is one of my lifelong friends. She’s an assiduous letter writer and she’s also our college class alumni coordinator so she keeps in touch with everyone. So I hear from her regularly. After a couple of years of her letters sort of annoying me, I started to write her back. We’ve been corresponding for years now and I look forward to it.

I’m not sure what is striking to me about this. Just, I guess, the fact that our acquaintance in France seemed sort of forced, maybe even a little annoying at the time. I wanted to immerse myself in French family life and the French language. But now she seems like such a dear person. We grow used to people, form attachments. It’s so funny how that happens.

Max and I are also starting Weight Watchers tomorrow to try to lose a few pounds. It’s good that we’re doing it together. We’ll go grocery shopping today and tomorrow we’ll weigh in on our digital scale. So I’ll probably be doing more cooking. Finally, I signed up for volunteer hours at our local soup kitchen/homeless resource center. We’ll see how that goes. We haven’t heard anything back from Kennedy-Krieger about being foster parents. We discussed it on the trip and I was feeling a little negative but Max still wants to do it. Probably it would be good for us.

My attachment to Sarah feels a little less scary right now. Like I can untether the cord just a little bit, let her be her own person. Let me be my own person. Have a little sanity.