free at last

A low key MLK day. BBN like almost all the companies I've worked for didn't have a holiday, but other people's holidays, school closings s and the resulting absences of parents doing childcare, combined with a bit of snow contributed to making the it feel a little more casual than usual -- starting with the lack of morning and evening traffic. I spent the day frittering over the application to Eliot house, which I completed but can't send until tomorrow because of the postal holiday, and responses to my two Jdate correspondents. The older one is as reserved as the younger is forthright. Julie B. We talked for about an hour, about family, relationships, her kids, Jdate, finally getting to the key hump that as she said always brings a moment of silence, when she described her separated husbands' suicide. He was a physician, who had too easy access to drugs (and I got the impression abused them in other ways other than fatally). I liked how she said she explained it to her kids: daddy loved you more than anything, but he didn't love himself enough. He had gone down into a place where he didn't seen anyway out. Her mother was divorced when she was 10, she grew up in Chicago with a step father -- is she close to him? I didn't ask. Her own marriage seems to have been difficult; it seems to have taken her a long time to decide to get out of it, but "how many rounds of couple's therapy can you take?" The 3 year relationship she had after that with a divorced man with one son seems to have ended because of his ambivalence over whether he was ready to commit, and whether she thought it was worth waiting (she decided not, not unwisely I'm sure). She has two kids, one 12 one 14 I think, both going to public school, both apparently content with the small but close community where they have grown up, each having a rather distinct character -- the older confident but not very interested in work, the younger studious but in need of some coaching and reassurance (I hope I got that right).