:: Claire laughing at her sometimes totally wrong conception of word usage that could, if said to the wrong person get her in serious trouble as she never knew that complacent could mean smug satisfaction. Luckily, it's not a word she's bandied about. ::
Once, I referred to my ex's tears as crocodile tears, thinking that since crocodiles are big and rather heartless, their tears would be exceptionally meaningful and heart rending when the saying actually means quite the reverse. For the equally uninformed, crocodile tears, according to the dictionary on my Mac's dashboard, are "tears or expressions of sorrow that are insincere... said to be so named because it was believed that crocodiles wept while devouring their prey." I couldn't have used a more inappropriate phrase to convey empathy. Thank goodness my partner confronted me and believed my ignorance. It's not true; ignorance is not bliss. In fact, it has the potential of making your life a nightmare... if only for a bit.
According to the online Thesaurus at Thesaurus.com one synonym for complacency is well being. And that phrase more clearly conveys what I was attempting to say... that my ability to feel an overall sense of well being is legion. Or at least powerful enough to override evidence in my environment that should have me feeling otherwise. In other words, I can be pretty obtuse.
When I first moved to the small city where I live, I moved into one of the only neighborhoods I could afford while I searched for employment. And even that was a stretch. At a $50 bump down, the most attractive apartment available to me was filthy, unpainted, and had interior walls that didn't completely reach the ceiling (the gap appeared to be up to two feet in some places). Essentially, the apartment's main living space was connected to the hall leading to the other apartments.
I met my ex-X in front of my duplex on her birthday, I was walking from my car to my front door when she stopped me to offer me cake. My ex-X lived two doors down, was a grad student at the local university, and was a font of information about English literature, art history, history, and the role of economics in history. Plus she was loads of laughs and simply adorable. So you'll have to trust me when I say that my memories of the place are fond (and most probably contain stories for another time).
Eventually, my ex-X and her dog, a black lab, moved in with me and my dog, a beagle. (First, her dog moved in and two months later she followed. Yeah, I know, that sounds weird, but I'm sure we had a good reason.) And our next door neighbor, the person who shared our duplex, was a young man who had a rather large white German shepherd, which has some bearing on today's story.
Suffice it to say, this was not the safest of neighborhoods.
The huge home on one corner was a place of transients, the sort of place your parents would warn you about, telling you to stay clear of. Once, on the other corner, I saw a drug deal go down, just 50 feet from my front door, at 2 am under the street lamp. I was driving home and drove right past them; the two making the change couldn't have been more, er, complacent with their ability to strike drug deals in plain sight. Did I mention that there was a crack house located directly behind our unit? It was a very small place that rented by the room, and it lay less than 40 feet behind us and a stand of white pines. A couple years after I moved in (I lived there for four years), I discovered a bullet hole in the siding at the back of our half of the duplex just inches from the sliding glass door and nearly directly in line with where someone would be sitting on our couch had the bullet moved a half of foot to the right. It had not come with the apartment.
But for whatever reason I felt relatively safe there. When I first moved in, I even slept with my windows wide open in an effort to remove any residual paint smells. (Yes, unlike the places I'd seen before snagging this little gem, my landlord painted between renters. And miracles of miracles, he held the apartment open for me for a full month to accommodate my chemical sensitivities--a too frequent comorbidity of ME/CFS and also Fibromyalgia--, allowing the apartment to off gas, and he did not ask me to pay that month's rent! Unheard of! And it was such an incredible display of much needed understanding and grace that I will never forget it or him.)
I felt even safer when I noticed my neighbor's large German shepherd patrolling the property surrounding the unit and saw the people who frequented the crack house giving the property wide birth as a result. His dog, one who seemed to make no human connection and would charge without attacking unless told to do so, had also been taught to stay on the property, unchained unless released by his human companion. So other than having to get used to being charged by a frighteningly large dog until he finally realized that, yeah, I too shared the property--a realization that had to be learned over time and in both the front and back yards, I think his fearsome furriness contributed to my uncritical satisfaction with not too bad digs for cheap in a not so great neighborhood.
Then, one night, as my ex-X and I lay fast asleep, we awoke to a great sound, an explosion really. Jumping to our bedroom window, we discovered that the crack house had gone up in flames not long after the police had barricaded the only entrance to the alley on which it was situated in an effort to control to volume of car traffic to the house. The place had been fire bombed. Reportedly one room was rented to a suspected snitch. Thankfully, there were no injuries.
It took two months before it occurred to my ex and me to look for another place in a safer neighborhood, something we could have afforded years before because we were both working. I don't know why the firebombing was nothing more than yet another neighborhood incident to us or why it took two months to sink in.
Perhaps, in the same way a frog gets used to water if the heat is turned up slowly to the point of boiling, resulting in the frog being boiled alive without once considering making a leap for safety, my ex and I had gotten used to our neighborhood. And while I'm certainly no frog, as I mentioned, I am relatively obtuse and not subject to frequent distress (or perhaps more accurately over reaction or even reaction). Whatever the case, looking for a place when we did ended up being a good thing because we bumped into the opportunity to rent one half of one of the nicest Victorians in town before it eventually ended up being converted into a law office.
You're not a frog either (at least I can reasonably assume that there are no frogs reading this essay), and perhaps you too have had similar experiences. Experiences where a place, a job, a relationship turned up (or turned down) the heat slowly, where your life was so busy with other stuff that you barely noticed that you ought not have been satisfied with your uncritical satisfaction. And perhaps when you saw the light, it opened up vistas of opportunity for you as well.
Although I like the song, an anthem of my youth (speaking collectively mind you), I can't rightly say, given my nature, that "I can't get no satisfaction." Mostly because life can be a cornucopia of riches even in the poorest of neighborhoods. Oh yeah, I'm definitely smug about the cornucopia that life offers.
Despite the cornucopia of riches, that's the home where I learned to draw the line at fire bombing.
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