Self Entertaining
My small-town life has closed in around me once again. The party is over. The kids are off to their lives. Friends off to theirs. It’s me and the house and the cats, and the latter is company of the vaguest sort. It’s times like this when, if you had a partner and lost them, you miss them once again because there would be a recap to ease the transition. But that’s definitely water under the bridge, although not that much. In three weeks, it will be six years since my wife died. Sometimes it feels like forever and sometimes it feels like yesterday.
I suppose this is where having learned to entertain myself as a child pays dividends. I can watch the hummingbirds feed on the Turks Caps out the kitchen window and see a Painted Bunting come to eat mesquite beans from the back. I have a small library full of books, a tuned guitar, and a garden with blooming plants. In a word, or several, I have things to do and see that I enjoy, and that is how one entertains oneself.
I’ve also learned over the years that company is relatively easy to find if you simply take the time to reach out. It’s a deadly trap to sit and wait for calls as if to think you’re so important that you’re on everyone’s mind and wonder why you’re not when the calls don’t come. In the end, it’s that old lesson that happiness, contentment, and joy are all within our purview, a thing of our own making. It’s a lesson I learned late in life, but it truly is better late than never.