Robyn and her new boyfriend and I drove out to the Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals, way out on the edge of Hillsboro. I had never been there, and was pleasantly surprised by how impressive and extensive their collection is. The Rices converted their ranch home into a facility to display the specimens they'd spent decades collecting, then died shortly after it opened to the public. The place is bursting with stones and crystals of every color imaginable, swirling abstracts more vivid than any painting, and more petrified wood than I've ever seen in one place. Everything was really nicely displayed and labeled, with lots of information about the formation of the various kinds of rocks. They even had some dinosaur bones. And there's a room called the Fool's Room, filled with examples of fool's gold and other examples of misleading or artificially made treasures.
It was great to visit a different museum than the one I work at, and one not in the grips of turmoil. We've plunged headlong into the huge renovation project they've been planning for years. We're remaining open, but the majority of the galleries will be closed for a while. Every week another chunk of the collection is taken down and packed away. Many of these objects will return, eventually, but it's hard to say goodbye to friends I've spent nearly 19 years with. And I'm not confident I'll be around to see them when and if they do come back. It's extremely depressing. The project is slated to take two years, though most of us assume it's going to be much longer than that.
I've tried to write about the situation at work many times over the past months, but I'm much too paranoid to share any of it here. Maybe I'll be able to tell the story someday, but in the meantime, suffice it to say there have been a lot of changes, and what was once a pleasant, fairly easy job has become incredibly stressful. Whether it's realistic or not, I expect to be let go at any moment, and maybe that would be for the best, but I'm fifty years old and don't have any real useful job skills. Plus, I continue to have issues with my foot, and every doctor I've talked to tells me I can expect to lose it at some point. I've really backed myself into a corner and I don't seem to be able to find a way out. I've spent years just barely skirting disaster, getting by on dumb luck, even as my body weakens and the world shrinks. The people I love keep vanishing like the paintings I've grown so attached to in the galleries, except that their faces aren't just being put into storage, they're fucking gone, and someday I will be too, and that knowledge and the pressure of all this loss is agonizing.
In the meantime, the unusually cold spring is finally starting to warm up, though it feels like too little too late. I sit on the balcony and feel the golden sunlight on my face but the warmth doesn't penetrate the surface, inside I'm jagged and hard and cold. I have vacation coming up, and I'm looking forward to getting away, but I'm already dreading coming back to the daily misery of this lonely life I've created for myself. I wish I saw some way out, but I am paralyzed with fear, expecting disaster to hit any minute as I sit here, still as a stone.
