I still own nothing: not Jim or Pam, or The Office, or anything to do with TV. Or even a purple stuffed bunny. No copyright infringement intended.
I used to have a lot of time to fill at work. Hours of time, a staggering amount of time, looking back on it. Days every week, at least. Condensed, I could have probably effectively done my job in two and a half days rather than five.
I remember those long hours. I remember filling them wonderfully with Jim, the only real tangible piece of my life at Dunder-Mifflin that remains, thank God for that. He was and is and will always be the best part of my days as a receptionist.
There was a time when I regretted every other minute of that existence, when I snorted with derision just to recall it, when I shook my head in disbelief at my own folly. Why? Why had I stayed so long? Why had I frittered my days sending faxes and playing online solitaire and finding ways to entertain myself by naming fake diseases and pranking Dwight?
But I was still young, even in the scoffing days. Newly thirty, and heady with the power of that age, with the automatic maturity and wisdom and insight I thought it brought me. It didn't. Because if it had, I would have understood about my years at Dunder-Mifflin what I do now: I needed those years of empty time, of quiet introspection, to hammer out who I had been, and who I was, and who I was going to become. Other twenty-somethings lived their way through it, rushing headlong from one experience to another, planning or not planning, but always experiencing. But not me. I needed that thinking time, those years of stagnation, because for so long I had let others make the decisions for me, out of fear, and I had to figure my way out of that fear. Much easier for me to do that, in those days, than to jump in and then deal with the chaos that ensued.
Because I worked at Dunder Mifflin, I learned the routine of life at a much younger age than most people do. By my early twenties I knew that most of our hours and days and weeks and months and even years follow predictable paths. I learned that lesson too young, and it almost cost me dearly. It almost cost me my everything, my Jim, because I almost settled for the mundanity I thought, mistakenly, was the fate of us all. I mistook mundanity for routine, and they are not the same.
At Dunder-Mifflin I learned the slow building of things even through that routine; that the change comes not usually suddenly, but quietly, until you're right in the middle of it before you even know how it began. That's how I fell in love with Jim, moment by quiet moment so that I didn't realize it until he was gone, taking the best part of every one of my days with him.
But that's another story for another day.
This story is being written for my granddaughter, and that's why I'm reminiscing this morning. It's some school project, some kind of community service thing where the children are supposed to learn something from us old folks. Which is very nice; I don't mean to sound derisive about it. She called me a couple of weeks ago to warn me about it, and the wheels already started spinning. I'm supposed to write about “a moment that changed my life”. When I consider all my thoughts above, the years I spent with the notable lack of “BIG” moments, but just small ones tumbled one over the other, this is not an easy thing for me to write. And it's for my dear granddaughter's seventh grade class to hear and probably analyze, so I have to be careful if I'm going to tell the story of Jim and I. I don't even want it to be about the birth of my children, because there's details there no girl facing her first period should ever hear about. It could be about my artwork, I know that's what my artistic granddaughter is hoping for. But my art isn't even my biggest moments.
My biggest moments are always with Jim, or having something to do with him and the family we created.
The one with the purple stuffed crazed bunny. That's it, a big moment for sure. And simple, easy for her to understand. I think. We'll see how it turns out. I boot up the computer, start typing it out.
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© 2006-2023 More Than That | Skin created by Kali
© 2006-2023 More Than That | Skin created by Kali