The Honest Courtesan

Longtime readers may remember that Memorial Day is generally bad for me emotionally due to some very bad memories associated with the day.  But since I moved to Sunset full-time, it hasn’t been nearly as sharp.  Part of it is probably just time working its magic; it’s been almost thirty years now, and though the feelings stayed intense until beyond the 20-year mark, the trauma seems to have receded far enough into the past now for the feelings associated with its anniversary to be more manageable.  Another part is that living here keeps me a lot busier than living in Seattle did, and having a more rigid schedule than was possible when I was still working full-time provides me with a sort of fence that helps to keep memory monsters out of the yard of my conscious attention.  And then there are aggravating factors; I think in the past, other stressors tended to hitch rides with the bad memories, creating one big bandwagon of unpleasantness every last weekend of May.  But in the past few years I’ve managed to cultivate a better emotional state in general, so those other bugaboos are neither as noisy nor as active as they once were.  I’m not going to tell you that this past weekend was perfectly peachy and funk-free, because it wasn’t (as evidenced by the fact that I thought about it enough to write this column); however, neither was it as bad as such weekends have mostly been in the past.  And that is definitely something to be thankful for.