Well, life goes on in Youngstown. Emil, Sr., is weakening, from all reports, but his amazing strength has me in awe. I've decided that I would like to go see him one last time.

In the meantime, I'm up here, functionally alone, and dealing with a difficult teenager.

This is such a bizarre situation. I have been alone for the past week, and this is longer than I have ever been alone; I moved in with Emil when I was 21, and had never been alone. I am learning a million things a day about myself; without another person to create the shape of my life, my life is assuming the shape it would have if it were just me. I think this is making me stronger and more self-assured, and I think it is basically a Good Thing. But here's just a fraction of what I didn't know, or didn't acknowledge, about myself:

• My taste in movies. There's so much competition for the remote around here that I usually recuse myself. But now that I can have the tv whenever I want, I've learned that I like Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune (I guess I knew that before, really), and that the chief attraction of hockey games is snuggling while I watch them; absent my husband, they really don't hold my interest. I checked out a disk of Queer as Folk from the library, and found it unspeakably vulgar. (I cherish my sense of vulgar. My mother, who was not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, had a well-defined sense of vulgar, which she seems to have passed on to me. Thanks, Mom.) On the other hand, I went to see Curse of the Were-Rabbit tonight and I was enthralled. (One great moment: Gromit has put Wallace on a vegetable diet, and after sending Gromit on an errand, Wallace goes into his study to indulge his love of cheese. Two titles on his bookshelf: East of Edam and Fromage to Eternity. I laughed out loud. The whole film was full of literary jokes, and authentic English countryside. I loved it.)
  
• My predilection for silence, or music. The television really hasn't been on if I haven't turned it on, and the peace and quiet has reinforced for me what a disruptive noise I find TV to be. Left alone, I sit in silence (as I am now), or I listen to classical music.
  
• My eating habits. I find that I want a big, blowout dinner about every three days, and the rest of the time, I prefer to graze. There's so much food in the house at the moment, I don't know how I'll ever eat it, and it's not like I've done excessive shopping; the fridge looks relatively bare. But there's about a pint of chicken soup that needs to be eaten, along with way too much meat, and chili, and cheese . . . Maybe I'll ask Em to throw a dinner party to use it all up.
  
• How I structure my days. Since I'm teaching online, and since I told my department I'd be in Youngstown now, I don't have specific time commitments on any particular day. Everything is fungible. I get up in the morning, and have to decide what will happen. I have to work at imposing some kind of discipline, but [a] I've been running a lot and [b] the dog has been getting a lot of walks and [c] I've been taking in more of Ann Arbor's copious cultural offerings than I have before.
  
• I fix things. I've already called the locksmith once, to get keys for the door (long story; the tumbler is so worn that several trips to get keys from Ace didn't do it). Since then, the front door lock has broken and I'm about to call the locksmith again. I took the dog to the vet because he had an infection in his eye that wasn't clearing up. I've been applying drain cleaner, and replacing light bulbs, and putting plastic on windows to reduce the heating bill . . . I am reminded of my father, who had a pegboard with the outline of every tool he owned. A place for everything, and everything in its place. I am that man's daughter.
  

All in all, it's a weird and wonderful experience to discover, at the age of 48, who I am when I am on my own . . .