Nothing's Cold as Ashes

Where I work has lots of different people sharing floor space, with many different tasks being successfully accomplished with only measured amounts of casual conversation between and among people. I get confused when I read articles about some employer being named as a happy place to work. I don't pretend I'm clubbing when I come to work. I have no illusions or aspirations of someday going shoe-shopping with my co-workers. Each day we face the mountain, climb it (or try to), dust ourselves off at the end of the day and go elsewhere, or home, to our real lives. Probably like you.

I don't have friends at work (I don't do the friendship thing well). I'm better at building alliances of convenience to get things done. I've never been good at small talk, since it's almost always some kind of code for bigger and darker issues. I struggle to decipher it only to realize the lull in the conversation is because the person talking to me is now waiting for my response to whatever they said. Usually, it turns I was tuned to just above the police calls and missed it. If awkward silence were in the Pictionary, it'd have glasses and grey hair (and a bald spot).

Not everyone, everywhere, has the human communication issues challenges I do (I majored in Human Communications at Rutgers, and the deliciousness of that irony isn't lost on me) but I'm hoping I can set a trend. Yesterday morning I accidentally eavesdropped on a conversation two people in the 'outer office' were having before the business of the day overtook us. Actually, it wasn't a conversation-it was a soliloquy with the man recounting in loud and graphic detail an ongoing unhappy and angry discussion he is having with his former spouse about visiting their daughter (who, as I understood it, lives with her mom, his former wife) with the other person in the office doing a lot of 'uh-huhing' and 'yeahing'.

I sat as if nailed to my chair while all of this went on about twenty feet from my open office door since I knew there was no way I could get up and close the door without calling attention to the fact I had been an earwitness to this. Talk about my right to NOT know being ignored. I hate finding out information I neither want nor need. Being married for 31 years to the person with whom I fell in love, has, it seems, rendered me less capable of understanding what happens to people in relationships that causes them to fall OUT of love.

From what I could hear, and intending no judgment (as I have few, if any, facts), the relationship was tumultuous for some length of time before the couple went their separate ways. Amicable didn't sound like an appropriate word to describe the dissolution. My lack of frame of reference precludes me from imagining how you transform from a loved and beloved in a relationship to a stranger, actually to beyond a stranger, to an enemy. I'm old enough to recognize, intellectually, that there far too many things between heaven and earth I cannot begin to understand most especially the dynamics of the human heart. Seems to be equal parts commotion and emotion, passion and pain, shadow and light. "And there's nothin' cold as ashes, After the fire is gone."
-bill kenny