Arthur (formerly Penny): Lonnie & Della

I'm doing better now.  I do not like this thing where I need to get up and pee at 3:30AM seemingly every day, because it seems specifically designed so that I can't get a few more proper hours before Lonnie wakes up while also being way too early to talk to any of my East Coast friends, but I'm trying to adapt.  Get a little writing done while it's quiet and I won't be interrupted by calls, spend a little time making Lonnie a good lunch, occasionally boot up the Playstation.  I haven't gamed a lot the past few years, and the only place Germy's taste and mine really overlaps is sports games (would I like shooters more if I'd been a man at any point during the past 20 years?), but there are worse ways to make an hour or two disappear. 

Then Lonnie wakes up, and I don't know if I love him yet, but I'm getting fond of the little guy. 

I'm trying not to look at him and try to see signs that he's my kid, the way the whole last year kicked off because I sometimes worried that Millie was as much Nell's daughter as mine.  He likes books and Legos and doesn't much enjoy gym class the way I didn't before becoming Penny, but that's a lot of kids.  He's got a whole bunch of Pokémon memorized but didn't really know the Looney Tunes when we went to see Coyote vs Acme the other weekend.  He asks a lot more questions than Millie did at that age, and a lot of them have to do with Mommy coming back or going to see Grandma. 

That's a tricky one to navigate, because while I'm not religious, really - having been through the Inn experience makes it clear there is more going on in the world than we understand, it doesn't seem to match up with any specific belief system - his grandmother Della has apparently moved in that direction lately, and will tell Lonnie that Mommy's in Heaven . I don't know how the past few years she's had would lead one to believe in a benevolent God more, but maybe she needs it.  Things with her are shaky enough that I don't want to contradict her in the moment, and she's not pestering us about going to church, but it kind of feels like things are in flux.

I suspect I'd like Della under other circumstances, though.  She's mad about the A's being in Sacramento but doesn't want me to raise Lonnie to be a Giants fan.  She phone banks for Democrats and is always caught by surprise when I agree with her on something, as if she remembered Germy having bad opinions and was looking for a fight.  She's good at Scrabble and doesn't see why anyone needs more games in the house beyond that, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, and Yahtzee, but her daughter enjoyed them and every once in a while something she helped crowdfunded shows up in the mail and Della tries to get the other seniors in the complex to try it out with her.

I'm kind of not sure how to tell her that I'm mostly looking for jobs in the Northeast, because it's clearly the highlight of the week for both her and Lonnie when we visit every weekend.  It's a little work; her complex is in the suburbs of Monterey, so there's no getting there other than driving, and sometimes it's hard to recall that I grew up in California for how much I've relied on the T living in Boston.  For about a month, Lonnie whined when I said we were taking the bus or the BART to get somewhere rather than the car, and I do sometimes feel like I should just give in, but lately he's started memorizing bus schedules the way he does Pokémon.

It's funny, sort of, that if not for Ray and Millie, I do think I could eventually be happy with this life, as opposed to feeling guilty every time it keeps me too busy to dwell on being apart from them or actively working to find a way back. 

- Arthur/Penny/Arthur