Tender Grace Read Online Free Page A

grace we have all received one blessing after another.”
    My bronze Indian gets that.
    I wish I did. When you’re emotionally dead, you don’t see. You don’t want. You don’t need. You don’t care. I wish I could see and embrace and rejoice in the blessings instead of hating this post-Tom existence.
    Post-Tom!
    Delete that compound modifier! It appalls me. It irritates me. It grieves me.
    “Class, post-Tom is just the sort of modifier we want to cut from our papers,” I’d say, ambling down two rows of desks. “ Ruthlessly cut,” I’d add with a two-handed machete move.
    (Teaching high school language arts has contributed to my madness.)
    But how dishonest it would be to malign those two words. They’re perfectly good descriptive words. If I’m going to grieve a word, perhaps it should be the word hating .

    I found a Law and Order episode to watch before I got on the Internet and started planning tomorrow. The one thing I’m sure I won’t be doing is the zoo. I’ve been to one too many zoos in the last five years. Three summers ago, Tom and I were horrified at a bear’s behavior when we visited him in his very nice habitat. With gasps (actually I gasped, Tom laughed) we turned the boys’ strollers toward the big cat section and called the little girls away from the iron fence enclosing the uninhibited grizzly. “Hurry, girls,” we said, “the tigers want to see you!”
    As zoos go, few could beat the St. Louis Zoo anyway, the bear notwithstanding. There is a botanical garden here I might visit. I’ve always considered botanical gardens quite enjoyable. They used to have the power to both enchant and calm me. There’s a modern art museum as well. I could try to stretch myself and embrace modern art, instead of sitting insatiably before Renoirs and Monets. Maybe another time.
    If Tom were here, we might take in the National Softball Hall of Fame. He had loved going to Cooperstown to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. New York was our destination for our thirtieth anniversary, our last anniversary. We had a week in the city and a week in the countryside, together with our friends John and Rita, the trip culminating with Niagara Falls. We didn’t mean, we had told each other, to plan anything so obviously romantic. We weren’t the type. But the falls were phenomenal, like all such places, beyond what any picture or painting can express. Rita apparently does not believe this. It was she, leaning too far over a rail to get a better picture of this natural wonder than any postcard has rendered, who took the edge off romantic. And John too. Shocked by her uncharacteristic daring, and probably frightened as well, he called her stupid. Of course, we all knew he didn’t mean it.
    Actually, I might have sent my husband off to see the Softball Hall of Fame by himself. “Let’s meet at such and such restaurant on the river walk for lunch,” I’d say, confident there would always be a later when we could be together.
    I’m going to the memorial tomorrow. I’ll see what seems good after that.
    August 12
    Tom always drove on any trips we took, short or long. The only exception was when he decided to drive home nonstop from Southern California, a destination that had been both conference and vacation. He admitted he needed a few hours’ sleep when we hit Albuquerque and agreed to let me take over for six hours. I told him that navigating from Southern California to Springfield is not rocket science: There’s I-40 and there’s I-44. You’d have to work at getting lost. Somehow he relaxed enough to sleep, and he awoke refreshed, eager to take back the wheel and get us to Springfield. When I unfolded myself out of the passenger seat at the end of the twenty-five-hour marathon, I told him I hoped he enjoyed that little challenge, because I planned never again to ride in a car more than ten hours on any one day, preferably eight.
    Surely there are roses to smell, Tom!
    In fairness, he was destination oriented.