God Can Wait
Chapter 7
Griselda Unchained

As it turns out, the handsome Mr. Breithaupt of Ontario, Canada was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, while his English mother and father were living and working there. 

It was the kind of mini mystery Griselda just had to have the answer to as she was now in full gaga, giggly, teenager in love mode. It was true; my inner teenage girl was now running my life.

For the next four weeks, at the tender age of 64, I bounced and flitted about Palm Springs like a freshman high school girl who’d just been kissed by the captain of the football team. My sense of anticipation was as apparent to those around me as the mountains that ring Palm Springs.

Bradley, the insurance agent I worked part time for, was completely taken aback by the transformation, so much so it took him more than a week to point out the fact that I was hardly getting any work done at all.

“Any day now,” he said in a surprisingly supportive tone of voice, “I expect to come in here and find you drawing hearts and flowers on the office walls. I’m very happy for you, but we do need to get some work done around here.”

Point taken and Brain and I did make a concerted effort to at least put on the appearance of being a late, late, middle-aged adult.

“We’re not a senior citizen until we reach 65, are we?” I asked Brain.

“That’s what Wikipedia says,” he replied.

That weekend I took a look around my apartment and realized I needed to do something about the appearance of the place, which was hovering somewhere between county morgue and city dump.

I was still very much in the throes of not really giving a fuck about my life and the time I had left when I signed the lease for the one bedroom flat I now occupied.

Even after weeks of shedding and donating massive amounts of my portion of the junk my ex and I had managed to amass over twenty years of living together, I still had far more stuff than my new apartment could hold and not be mistaken for a warehouse.

A dyed in the wool Christmas Fairy—I referred to my decorating style as “tastefully ostentatious,” my ex said I’d turned our home into what he could only describe as a whorehouse at the North Pole…

The large double closet in the bedroom was stuffed with boxes of books and all manner of junk from what was once my home office. A dyed in the wool Christmas Fairy—I referred to my decorating style as “tastefully ostentatious,” my ex said I’d turned our home into what he could only describe as a whorehouse at the North Pole—I still had a dozen or more of those plastic storage bins full of holiday decorations stacked on the small balcony at the front of the apartment. To make matters worse one of the dozens of feral cats that infested the dilapidated block of apartments I’d moved into squirmed in between the tubs and had kittens and the whole clan of them began using my balcony as a litter box, sans litter.

The walls of the flat were bare as I had yet to unpack any of the artwork or pictures I’d brought with me to the desert. The large shipping boxes they were sealed in still sat in the living room in all their cardboard glory.

Neither Brain or Griselda, nor I wanted to entertain anyone, much less Jonny Bear, in a dump like this.

The excess boxes and Christmas stuff got hauled off to a storage locker, thereby raising my monthly living expenses another fifty bucks a month.

The balcony was swept, scrubbed, and disinfected.

The balcony was swept, scrubbed, and disinfected. At Lowes, one of the two big box home and hardware retailers here in town, I found a great bargain on a patio cocktail table with two chairs, each with cushions, a matching outdoor area rug, and a propane grill complete with propane tank. Balcony done.

The artwork and pictures were unpacked and hung. I even swept and mopped the tile floors and bulldozed the bathroom and kitchen, a first since moving in five months earlier. Like I said I really wasn’t into making this housing unit a home.

Griselda was in her element and one evening while enjoying a glass of wine on my newly decorated balcony and watching the sun set behind Mt San Jacinto, she surprised Brain and I by making a sound and quite reasonable proposal. Sound and reasonable in as much as in the old days, once free of Brain’s logic and reasoning, she would have just gone out and done whatever she damn well pleased to keep the flames of passion burning under our collective feet.

“This man,” not Jonny Bear, I thought to myself as she began, “by making us all feel very special in ways we’ve never felt before, has brought us back from the brink of despair.” She had us there.

“I want us to do everything we can to make him feel as special as he’s made us feel.”

As Brain had noted earlier, it was the logic of a child presented as innocently and unpretentiously as only a child could and yet neither Brain nor I could find any fault with it.

“I think you’re right,” I listened in astonishment as my own logical mind said to my heart in all sincerity, “he needs to know that he is someone very special both to us and in life.”

Griselda was off like a shot.

“Cry happiness!” she exclaimed. “And, let slip the cherubs of joy!”

I must confess the memory of the following three and a half weeks is pretty much a blur.

Before I knew it the apartment, and especially my bedroom, was awash in a sea of very realistic, battery operated, LED, candles. My bed had a new three inch thick tempered foam topper, “to make it easier for Jonny” who is indeed quite large and powerful, “to sleep on his side or any way he likes.”

Brain, who had always prided himself on a wry sense of humor, that he swore no one ever gave him credit for, had found a couple of the funnier pictures Jonny had sent me over the course of the preceding weeks.

The first was a response to my teasing him about his self-image. He’d taken a picture of himself with a fierce expression on his face while flexing a very substantially muscled right arm. With the help of my friend Eddie, who owns Bearded Shirts and makes custom T-shirts, we screened a picture of a moose in the background, and a drawing of the picture of Jon posing and grimacing above the phrase “Got Moose?” on three t-shirts, one for me, one for Brodie and, of course, one for Jon.

The second image was a picture Jon had sent following a text chat we were having during a study break for a particularly difficult project he had to turn in for one of his certification classes. In the picture he’s looking down at the camera with his eyes crossed, sticking out his tongue, and holding a sharpened pencil at the side of his head.

This I had printed poster size, and while I had only intended to mount it on poster board for temporary hanging, I got such a deal on frames for some of my other artwork that the price of a full glass frame for the poster was cut to about the same price as the cost of mounting it to poster board alone. I hung it in the bedroom opposite the side of the bed Jonny would be using. The stage was set.

I stocked the kitchen with foods he’d mentioned he liked and tracked down a particular craft ale he enjoyed called Moose Drool, of all things. Strangely enough, it’s not Canadian as I had first assumed but from Montana.

Under Griselda’s obsessively controlling guidance, I even asked Brodie if Jon had a favorite brand of protein bar he liked to keep handy for snacking. It meant a third unscheduled trip out to the Palm Desert Costco, but I managed to track them down as well.

The stage was set. Now all I had to do was to wait for Jonny’s arrival.

Well almost all I had to do.

Next Up: X Marks The Rating

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