What is old?

 I keep waiting to feel old. 

I'm not talking about my physical body. That's been aching and creaking, and dysfunctional since my early 50's. Between osteo-arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, bursitis, type two diabetes, asthma and obesity my health has been rocky for some time. 

But my spirit, my being doesn't feel old. I thought maybe when I reached 65 and got on Medicare I'd feel old. Nope. Or when I retired a few years after that, but no. Nor do I expect turning 70 in less than two weeks will make me feel old either. 

I spent most of my life working with young people, college students (most, but not all, younger than myself). I always felt more akin to the students than the "grownups" I saw around me. Took me some time to realize that many of those "grownups" really were not, any more than I was. There were some faculty, almost always men, who seem to have completely lost touch with what it was like to be 19 or 20 and in college. Who were always grumbling about "what's wrong with kids these days." So maybe some people do feel old, and lose touch with their young selves. 

But I think that maybe I'm never going to feel old, never really going to feel like a "grownup," and never really going to know for sure what I'm going to be when I grow up. 

Beautiful, Useful Things

            My father made beautiful, useful things with his hands and his tools. As far back as I can remember he had a well-equipped workshop in the garage which included a 1949 Shopsmith, an amazing multiple purpose woodworking tool that could saw, drill, sand, and best of all be a lathe on which he turned many intricate smooth objects like the posts and spindles on my brothers’ bunk beds, table legs, chair legs, candlesticks, and other decorative but useful items for our home.  I liked spending time with him while he worked, especially when he turned some blocky 4 x 4 post into a smoothly rounded, fluted, curving piece of beauty. I loved the smell of sawdust mingled with oil and the faint burning smell as his chisel cut into the swiftly turning block of wood.  I enjoyed the task of using fine sandpaper to further smooth the objects he turned on his lathe, luxuriating in the feel of the wood.

            After thirty years of knowing my father, I should have realized when I asked him drill 9 holes in a block of wood as a makeshift Chanukkiah* for my first Chanukah that he would not pay attention to my instructions, but instead create something incredibly beautiful that violated all traditional Jewish rules for a Chanukkiah.  A Baptist turned Methodist by marriage, my father knew nothing about my adopted religion. I think he wanted me to know that he supported me as I made this major change in my life, unlike my mother who took my conversion as a rejection of her and my childhood.

            I sent my dad (in California) a sketch of a plain, flat, block of wood with nine holes in a row. A few weeks later, I received (in Kentucky) a large box in return. Carefully wrapped in layers of tissue paper and newspaper was a work of art.

My first discovery was that he had chosen to use some of his precious chestnut wood instead of a scrap as I had suggested. The wood had been scavenged in the late 1970’s from his childhood home in Virginia. In the late 19th century before the blight destroyed most of the American chestnut trees, my grandfather had built the family home with chestnut paneling, stairs, railings, doors, molding, and other adornments.

Within the box was a block of wood, but unlike my sketch it had been carefully laminated in half inch layers of decreasing size, creating a double staircase effect with four steps on each side and a ninth platform at the top.  There were nine holes drilled, one in each step.  However, those holes were not for candles, for in the box, individually wrapped were nine perfect wooden cups, each with a stem to sit in the stair-stepped holes. Each cup had been turned separately on the lathe to perfect smoothness. They were all the same size, same diameter, same depth. The bottom of each cup had been curved like fat brandy snifters.  Each of those little wooden cups had to be turned on the lathe separately; checked and rechecked to make sure they were the same diameter, the same height, the same, length stem, so that when set in the stair-step block they would form a perfectly graduated holder for candles rising on both sides to a point in the middle.  I lifted each cup, turned them in my hands feeling the smoothness of the fine wood grain and placed them in the block one by one.

My father had carefully cut green felt and glued it to the bottom of the main block of wood, so that the bottom of it would not scratch or scar any surface it was place on. Then in the center of the bottom, he had left an opening in the felt, and in it he had burnt the words:  To SUE/from DAD/DEC 1981.

Thirty-seven Chanukahs have come and gone. Sometimes I consider getting a “proper” Chanukkiah. Jewish law and tradition say that all the candles in a Menorah or a Chanukkiah should be at the same height, because no day, and no person is more important than another. Also, Jewish law and tradition call for a new candles every night or a total of 44 candles, so most Chanukkiah are designed for small candles less than ¼ inch in diameter and only about 4 inches high. My father designed his candle holder for regular sized candle tapers - 2/3 of an inch in diameter and eight to ten inches in height. The cost of 44 regular sized candles is getting to be a little prohibitive these days even at Walmart.

But in the end, every year I use this cherished gift from my father. It may not meet the standards of Jewish law, but it is still beautiful and a product of love.

______________

*Most people refer to these as Menorahs. However, a Menorah is a seven branched candle stick used in synagogues and homes on the Sabbath. A Chanukkiah is a nine branched or holed candle holders used only for the eight days of Chanukah.

Giving myself a C+ on Retirement

2017-12-27

I wake up in the middle of the night and start thinking about things, things that seem important to me and that I wish I could write down – instead of just thinking around in circles about them – but to get up and go to the computer would probably disrupt the dogs and that would mean that John’s sleep would be disrupted so I just lie there and think and think and think. Then I wake up in the morning and I can’t remember anything that I thought about.  I suspect that those thoughts I have in the middle of the night are not as deep or relevant or worthy as I imagine them to be at 3 AM.

I am not doing as well with retirement as I am telling everyone. I tell everyone that I love retirement – and that is true, but it is not the whole story. I think I’ve been suffering from some depression – especially since the weather turned colder and I haven’t wanted to go outside as much.

 I have no desire to go back to work. Retiring was absolutely the right decision. I do not miss the anxiety, fear, and stress that were a part of my work life for the past three or four years. After B__ A___ retired as president of the college, things just went to hell-in-a-handbasket. But truthfully things had started going downhill even before that. The budgetary situation and the enrollment declines made things iffy. I never knew for certain that I would have enough students to make a full-load, and I was always anxious about what would happen if I didn’t. It always worked out, but not necessarily easily – often with a great deal of extra work for me. The lack of proper leadership on assessment was always a stressor.

My personal situation with my weight and my health (rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes 2, asthma) needed more time and attention than I had to give while teaching full-time (and often overloads). It’s very hard to be properly active when your work requires 10 hours a day at a computer. Even when it didn’t require 10 hours a day, the stress was such that instead of getting up and doing something active when I took a break I just slid into Facebook and online games. I am so happy to be rid of the stress and anxiety. 

My life feels so much more peaceful and calm. During the last four years, it felt like I was angry all the time. Fear makes me react with anger. I didn’t like the person that I was becoming: someone who was hateful and suspicious and fearful and angry.

Most of that is gone, just a few anxieties now about money, but nothing really bad. I had a moment of sheer panic this morning when it seemed that my husband’s health insurance had not been properly processed for 2018. But things seem to have worked out and the knot in my stomach went away pretty quickly. Anxiety and tension are no longer my default setting like it was for the last few years. I feel so much more relaxed and comfortable and actually happy most of the time. It shows up in the photos that people have taken of me in the last six months – I’m smiling like an idiot in all of them, because well – life is pretty good on a personal level. I also find myself singing – something I did all the time when I was younger but hadn’t done in years. Of course, on a not so personal level, on the level of my community, my state, my country, my planet life is shit and getting shittier with each passing day. But that is a post for a different day.

My problem is that I’m still spending a lot of time killing time on Facebook and with computer games, and not doing all the creative things that I’ve waited years to be able to do. Yes, I did one painting – which I’m less than satisfied with, so I can’t seem to move on to a new painting. Also while the weather was still nice (in late September and October) I started doing ink sketches outdoors. But I really haven’t done any writing: a smattering of letters, little journaling, fewer blog posts, no poetry, I’ve not touched the novels, nor started any short stories, and as for the academic writing, it sits languishing unattended. You can’t be a writer if you don’t write. This is my beginning on that. I have to stop waiting until I have something really significant to say and just start writing. I may never have anything significant to say, but not writing gives is like having soul constipation. I need to write to keep the spirit flowing.

Another area where my retirement is not going the way I had hoped is with exercise and activity, diet and other healthy behaviors. I was doing much better with exercise and activity, moving more, walking more, and taking yoga class – until cold weather started. I can’t even get myself to get in the car and go to the gym to walk on the track when the outside temperature never gets about 25 degrees all day. Not sure what that is about because I can make myself go outdoors to take the trash, recycling or garbage out. Of course, sitting in a car waiting for it to warm up is a little different. My eating behavior is not the worst it’s ever been, but it is far from the best I can do.

At this point, I would give myself a C+ or maybe B- on retirement activity. I know this is really weird – people don’t earn grades on life. But I’m this achievement-oriented person and I somehow feel I owe the world more than I’m giving it. That I owe myself more than I’m doing. There are so many people that need to retire but cannot afford to do so. I feel like having had a career that allowed me to save adequately for retirement means that I have responsibilities to the universe to do more with my retirement than wash dishes, feed the animals, do housework and grocery shopping, pay bills, play Candy Crush Jelly on Facebook and watch Netflix. But so far I’m having trouble getting a handle on how to do that.

My plan is to write my way out of this. Writing has always worked in the past, so here’s hoping it will help me now. 

The best moment of the year

It's the middle of May in eastern Kentucky and white blossoms are everywhere. Wild roses (rosa multiflora) and blackberries spill from banks and hillsides perfuming the warm air, while field daisies and daisy fleabane (erigeron strigosus) march gaily along the roadsides and adorn the unmown yards and meadows.

Driving this week car windows down to smell the roses and blackberries, I found myself saying "now is my favorite moment of the year." Then I laughed to remember that just four weeks ago, when the purple redbud and lacy dogwood were in bloom, I had said the same thing: "my favorite moment of the year."  Moreover, a few weeks before that in mid-March I was sighing over the splashes of yellow daffodils, and exuberant forsythia everywhere, also thinking "best moment of the year."

Not long from now in June I'll be thinking the same thing when the first local blueberries come to the Letcher County Farmer's Market and the day lilies turn my hillside orange. The thought will come again in July when my first tomatoes get ripe and I eat them warm off the vine. I will also be thinking it when the jewel weed blooms its millions of tiny orange flowers that attract the hummingbirds to sup in September - also the moment when the Virgin's bower vines burst into delicate white blooms.

Then comes October and all the maples go scarlet and rose. Once again, I'm thinking "my favorite moment of the year."  One might think that was the end of it, but in November when all the leaves are gone the stately majesty of white limbed sycamores stand tall as the guardians of the winter forest causing me to once again think "this is it."

So it turns out that every moment in the mountains of eastern Kentucky is the best moment of the year.

Old Dogs (and Humans) Learn New Tricks

Eight years ago today (February 23, 2009)  I posted the following "25 Random Things About Myself" on Facebook:

In the last two days I've seen the 25 random things lists of two very different people (a fellow baby boomer poet and a 19 year old college student) which got me inspired to try. I'll bet I'd come up with 25 very different things a week from now.

25 random things about me: 

1. The best portrait I ever drew was of my best college friend’s dad, George Porter – it was a tiny sketch that looked so perfectly like him it was almost as if some outside force had worked through my hands. 


I hate asparagus – if I even attempt to eat them I start gagging. 
The most thrilling experience I ever had was riding as a passenger on pilot check rides, where the pilots did touch and go landings at Half Moon Bay airport. Once at sunset, a pilot made the sun “set” and then “rise” by swooping down and then up above the fog bank. 
My favorite city to visit is Boston – I love the MBTA and I always had the right change to get back off. The best hot fudge sundae I ever had was at Bailey’s in Boston (long since gone out of business). 
I never spent a night alone in the house I grew up in until I was 19 years old, and found I was unable to sleep listening for every little noise. 
My favorite book in childhood was Little Women, and my favorite character in the book was “Beth” – the one who dies before adulthood. My favorite book in adulthood is Beauty by Sherri Tepper in which she blends fantasy and science fiction in a moral tale about the destruction of beauty in the world, and really made me think about the choices we make. 
As long as I have a nice warm house and no place I have to drive, the best weather is what I can see out my window right now – deep fluffy snow. The world simplifies down to the stark basics of white and black. 
The person I enjoy talking to most in the whole world is my husband, John. 
I love Cinderella stories. My favorites are Eleanor Farjeon’s book The Glass Slipper and the movie Ever After with Drew Barrymore, but I’m also found of the movie The Glass Slipper with Leslie Caron, the Rogers and Hammerstein television version from the 1960’s with Leslie Ann Warren (and her crooked smile), and movie musical The Slipper and the Rose from 1976 with Richard Chamberlain as the Prince. But I will read and watch any version of the story at least once.
I cannot go to sleep unless I read first. My preferred bedtime reading is mysteries, especially police procedurals, detective fiction, and legal thrillers. 
I’m not sure I was really “in love” with my first husband, although I certainly loved him. 
Until I was in high school and was earning my own money, I had only three “store bought” dresses. All my clothes were hand me downs from older cousins, from rummage sales, and thrift shops or hand made by one of my aunts. I learned to sew at age 10 in self-defense and made most of the dresses I wore from fifth grade on. By the time I was in my twenties I was an excellent tailor, and made the wool suits that I did my job interviewing. 
I haven’t sewn a dress or skirt or blouse since 1988 when I discovered credit cards and catalogs. 
I never went on a date in high school. My best friend wanted me to come to the junior prom with her and her boyfriend, so she set me up with an old friend from junior high school (who went to a different school). I was so anxious about the date, that I worked myself into illness (supposedly strep throat but I don’t think that was diagnosed by a doctor) and cancelled out on the whole event. I never finished sewing the evening gown for the event. 
My first kiss was at 16 from a college boy who was a counselor at a day camp where I volunteered. I was so terrified by the sexual feelings that were evoked that I actually blanked out the experience completely for more than twenty years. If you’d asked me at age 20, I would have said my first kiss came in college at age 18. 
I hate grading essays. It’s the one thing that I really dislike about being a college professor. But nonetheless I think that students learn more from having to synthesize ideas from various sources into an essay, so I persist on assigning multiple essays in every class, every semester. 
The only thing that makes being “pre-diabetic” tolerable is Russell Stover sugar free mint patties in dark chocolate. The thought that I might never be able to eat another box of See’s Candies dark Bordeaux chocolates is almost unbearable.
I have not made any new close friends in fifteen years – a fact that I very much regret, but don’t quite know how to over come, as everyone I know locally these days has their life sewn up with children, grandchildren and other family ties. 
Most of my interaction with people (other than my husband), including students is over the Internet or by long distance telephone, which I value but still miss the face-to-face connections. 
In the winter, I’m obsessed with looking for sycamore trees, with their white limbs standing out against the brown of the forest. In the spring, my obsession is daffodils. In college, we could buy huge bunches of daffodils for 50 cents at the local grocery store. In graduate school, unable to find any to buy I would go out at night during spring break and steal daffodils from Fraternity row. 
Currently my favorite color for clothing, flowers, and household stuff is yellow. But giving me a bright fire engine red car any day. 
I don’t know which I regret more, the things I did do that I should not have, or the things I did not do that I should have. What I do know is that I try not to spend too much time regretting either thing – it detracts from living.
People’s faces I can draw with ease, but I can’t draw a cat worth a darn. Their bodies always seemed distorted and too long and narrow. I’ve never tried drawing my dog. 
During my senior year in high school, while working in the city library, I saw a girl I’d never seen before on the far side of the library’s main floor – more than 100 feet away, and knew instantly without a doubt that her name was the same as mine. I walked across the room, and asked her “are you Sue Greer?” and she said “yes.” So I said “hi, my name is Sue Greer, too.” She went to a different high school at the other end of the city, and was two years behind me. We were not related in any way. The only way I could have know who she was, was some form of extrasensory perception.
I love television. I love sitcoms, dramas, movies, soap operas, 24 hour news channels, home improvement shows, the Weather Channel, even commercials, although I don’t watch as much as I once did. Nonetheless, my evening doesn’t seem quite complete if I don’t watch some TV.

What I find fascinating is that quite unexpectedly a number of those have changed in just 8 years.
#2 I've actually eaten and loved locally grown asparagus, turns out it all depends upon the quality of the food and the cooking!
#7 I have become much more active out of necessity to stay healthy and now don't much care for snow or cold weather (which mess with my asthma), now my favorite weather is anything above 50 degrees where I can be outside and moving - doesn't matter if its sunny or drizzly as long as I can walk, I'm happy.
#13 I've been doing more sewing in recent years, including making a skirt this past fall.
#17 Turns out sugarless candies give me gas. I did develop diabetes - now well under control - and it turns out I didn't have to give up See's dark bordeaux chocolates completely. What I did have to give up was being a couch potato and that is more of a gain than a loss.
#23 Gotten a lot better at drawing cats, and have done drawings of dogs.
#25 I don't care for television as much now that I am more active, and there are now many days during that the television does not get turned on at all. When I do watch it something specific that I share with my husband.

What is Romantic?

Apparently two years ago, my Valentine's Day must have been similar to yesterday, because I began this blog post exactly two years ago - and here I am wanting to write about the exact same thing. 

I have a wonderful husband.  He is kind and considerate, loving and caring. He cleans up after himself and after the cats and dogs and me at times. He does dishes, scoops kitty litter boxes, does laundry, does grocery shopping. But the best thing about him is that he is a wonderful conversational partner. Talking to John is the greatest thing in my life. He's knowledgeable and interested in the world, and very funny. We share many interests and points of view from our career paths (we're both sociologists and college instructors) to our social and political views. He is from my point of view just about perfect in every way.  

In fact the only flaw I see in him is that he absolutely refuses to accept that he is wonderful, and persists in believing that some how he is inadequate, and that I "deserve" someone "better." 

When I was a child my ideas of love and romance were influenced by what I saw happening between my parents and all the schmaltzy romantic movies that my mother loved and shared with me.  My parents had a pretty typical 1950's style marriage. My dad went to work everyday, earned a paycheck, brought it home, kissed my mom, ate dinner, watched TV and did yard work and worked on stuff in the garage. My mom did everything else. My father always remembered her birthday, Valentine's Day and their anniversary with flowers, cards, candy, and sometimes  sexy nightgowns. Each night they slept together in a cozy double bed. However, my father was also a petty tyrant who at times treated both my mother and us children as his subjects to be bullied and belittled. 

I grew up thinking that a husband had to do all those things to show his affection. And I have to admit that it took me a while to let go of all that external symbolic stuff. But let it go I did, because I'd far rather have the true romance of shared life and companionable equality, than a "romantic" tyrant. 

What happens when...

I do not think that the complex, capitalist, industrial society in which we Americans now live is sustainable - neither environmentally, nor socially. Moreover, I believe that it will not be sustained, and that it is already in the process of collapsing (I have been documenting elements of that collapse in my blog Sociological Stew under the heading "Zombie America" for several years). I do not know how long it will take, whether I will live to see a total breakdown in political and economic systems, or whether those will occur more than 25 years from now.

These ideas of decline and collapse form the backdrop to my life these days, and I often find myself worrying about little things;  such as how will we take temperatures of our ill when all the batteries have run down and there are no more factories to make the compact batteries in digital thermometers?  I wonder if anyone have preserved some glass and mercury thermometers somewhere that can be distributed to healers? Will the knowledge of how to make glass and fluid thermometers be retained somewhere.

I understand why people might prefer digital thermometers (less ambiguous to interpret, less risk of breakage and poisoning), but it makes me nervous that one can no longer find mercury and glass thermometers in the stores in my area. It's a technology that, if protected from breakage, can last and continue to be accurate for decades without any energy input.

It's often the smallest things that matter in the long run...

When Did Kindness Come to Be for Special Occasions Only?

A dear old childhood friend (reconnected with on Facebook in recent years) posted a link to an idea for children leading up to the holidays: a calendar with suggested random acts of kindness.  This friend is a person who embodies kindness every day in every moment with everyone she meets; an exemplar of the cheerful goodness to which I aspire but only approximate on my best days.  She is the kind of person that does not need such a calendar to remind her to bestow kindness on those she meets. 

http://www.coffeecupsandcrayons.com/random-acts-christmas-kindness-printable-advent-calendar/

The heading on the graphic does not say that this is for children, but that is the intended audience. There are many admirable ideas on this calendar, that would be good for adults to follow through on as well: donating books to a public library or hospital, doing yard work for a neighbor, donating toys to a charity, calling a distant relative, donating food to a local food pantry, paying for a stranger's coffee, taking supplies to the local animal shelter, taking cookies to the fire station. 

What concerns me is some of the other suggestions, things that I think should be happening many times a day every day, 365 days of the year with both adults and children: like smiling at everyone, giving compliments, picking up litter, feeding the birds.  

I am reminded of another occasion, a year or so ago when someone else I know (sadly no longer on my Facebook friends list), when given the task of engaging in a daily single random act of kindness, proudly announced on day one that she had smiled at someone she did not know well, and on day two that she had opened the door for someone else.  Two behaviors that I practice multiple times a day, every day and have since childhood.

I thought at that time, as I think today on seeing this list of ideas, how has it become that behaviors like smiling, being polite, being helpful, that should be part of every one's normal every day behavior, are now being treated as special events that have to have a special holiday designation or done as some random kindness project.  

It seems that kindness like grades has become inflated, one gets more credit than one is due for what should be common daily behavior. 

confessions of a former optimist

I have always been an optimist. Or perhaps I should say I was always an optimist until the last few years. This has little or nothing to do with my personal life experiences. I maintained an optimistic outlook during unemployment, poverty, cancer, divorce, and many other personal trials, and recent years have been kind to my husband and I in many ways. 

Moreover, my optimism had was not based on ignorance of the worlds problems and issues. My parents brought me up to be highly aware of the dire circumstance of poverty, war, brutality, pain and suffering that others in the world suffered. I was brought up to care about and fight for equality, freedom, and opportunity for others. I was a realist optimist. 

I can remember reading Linda Goodman's Sun Signs in high school and she had this very apt description of Aquarius that fit me to a "T": 

"Lots of people like rainbows. Children make wishes on them, artists paint them, dreamers chase them, but the Aquarian is ahead of everybody. He lives on one. What’s more, he’s taken it apart and examined it, piece by piece, color by color, and he still believes in it. It isn’t easy to believe in something after you know what it’s really like, but the Aquarian is essentially a realist, even though his address is tomorrow, with a wild-blue-yonder zip code." 
Goodman, Linda (2011-02-23). Linda Goodman's Sun Signs: Aquarius (Linda Goodman's Sun Signs Set) (Kindle Locations 175-178). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition. 

Later few years later in college I read Yevegeny Yevtushenko's A Precocious Autobiography  and identified strongly with this passage: 

"My optimism which had been all pink, now had all the colours of the spectrum in it, including black, this is what made it valid and genuine." 

I made my career in sociology a discipline focused on understanding the realities of social life; and I focused on topics of inequality (wealth and poverty), economic and political power (its uses and misuses), and environmental problems. I became more and more versed in what was wrong with human societies, and still I retained optimism that if people properly understood the sources of those problems they could struggle together to make a better world. 

But some where in the past decade, perhaps just the past five years I lost my way. I have come to believe that many of the problems the world is facing can not be fixed, at least not in a way that allows human societies to move forward from where we are now. The inequalities have become so huge, the gaps in power so large, and the many of the environmental problems irreversible without immediate, dramatic reversals in energy, transportation, and food policies that I know will not happen because of those overwhelming inequalities and power differences. 

It feels to me on a daily basis as if those in control of the multinational corporations and the worlds' wealth are deliberately driving humanity towards the edge of destruction, because they believe that there is more profit and more power in creating impoverished and powerless masses, and that the accumulation of vast wealth will some how exempt them from the disasters to come....and who knows, enormous wealth provides a lot of cushion against catastrophe so perhaps they are right. Whether they are right or wrong they are acting as if they, and their children and grandchildren will be immune. 

I do not believe humans are headed to extinction - even as we drive many other species to extinction - but I do believe that we are headed to a lot of hunger, disease and death, and the break down of much of modern industrial society.  

I also believe that within that disaster lies the possibility for vibrant, localized, lower tech, sustainable communities to come out from the other side of the disaster - perhaps many decades on the other side. I also believe that there are people around the world who are doing enormously good things to build social capital, make connections, create local food webs, advance new forms of spirituality  and environmental awareness, and to create support networks that may be the tenuous bridges that we will need to reach that sustainable future on the other side of disaster. 

I know some of those people doing good work and dreaming good dreams. Most of them are far away from me and I only have contact with them through Facebook. It is this lack of direct connection that I think has given birth to my despair.  I want to be part of the bridge building, but no longer know how to make the connections.  I know longer feel it in my soul the way I once did. I feel weighted down by the presence of so many whose response to the uncertainty and fear that they feel in their bones is to cling to a mythical past that never existed and demand that nothing change or that changes should be to a more restrictive, narrower, meaner, less inclusive future. 

Ups and Downs of Everyday Life

It seems to me these days, as my mind is no longer able to handle all the things it should. 

Yesterday was a day that I forgot to test my blood sugar, ate breakfast way to late to keep that blood sugar balanced, forgot lunch, entirely forgot  my morning arthritis medicines so I could barely walk by mid-afternoon, couldn't seem to find time for a shower and stayed in my night clothes and robe until 3 PM. But on the other hand, I managed to sit down first thing in the morning and handle three student crises through a multitude of detailed e-mails, grade exams for two classes, update discussion for another, and check blogs of a fourth class, thus managing to cross off half the things on my work to-do list. 

By comparison today, I tested the blood sugar, got breakfast, took medications, dressed, did housework and laundry, put clothes away, dealt with dishes and animals, spent some time outside with the dogs (beautiful day by the way), but at 3:30 PM I still haven't checked my work college e-mail, or done even one thing from the other half of the work to-do-list.  I can't account for my time though I know that some of it has been spent at the computer following bunny trails from Facebook to other Internet locations, reading stories, watching videos. 

Time just seems to vanish, and there is always something essential that does not get done. 

The questions of HONY

One of my daily addictions these days, along with millions of other people around the world is "Humans of New York" (fondly known among fans as HONY) the photography and interview project of Brandon Stanton. Brandon is a genius at capturing people both visually and through their words. You can view his work on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork or his blog at http://www.humansofnewyork.com/. Brandon also has a top selling book of his photographs interviews available everywhere. 

Brandon has developed a series of stock questions that he has found help unlock the interesting stories of people's lives. Among them are:

"What was the happiest moment of your life?"
"What was the saddest moment of your life?"
"What was the most frightened you've ever been?"
"What's your greatest struggle right now?"
and finally "If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people what would it be?"

Spending time reading the life stories that Brandon elicits, has gotten me to thinking about my own answers to those questions. I woke up this morning about 4:30 AM and spent the next ninety minutes thinking about those questions. Here's what I concluded:

"What was the happiest moment of your life?"

The summer of 2009 when I got to paint a mural for my college. Everything about my life was good, my parents were still alive, my husband and I were happy and healthy, and I got to spent an entire summer rediscovering the art that I loved so much (and getting paid!). It had been years since I'd done any painting, but it all came back to me, and I created something of beauty that will endure for years and be appreciated by many. 

"What was the saddest moment of your life?"

March 2012 when my mother and my dog Rosie died exactly one week apart. My mother was 89, had severe dementia and she frequently expressed the wish to die, so there was some sense of relief but still of course sadness, then when our beautiful, young dog suddenly became very ill two days later and died exactly a week after my mom the sadness simply overwhelmed me for weeks. 

"What was the most frightened you've ever been?" 

This is actually a toss up between two things. The first was in May 1982 on a Tuesday morning when I was told I had melanoma and that I had to report to the emergency room for surgery within two hours. The trauma of the diagnosis and immediate surgery was multiplied by the emergency room setting, where while I was being operated on with a local anesthesia an older woman in cardiac arrest was brought in to the cot next to mine, and I was totally aware of the doctors' unsuccessful efforts to revive her; she was declared dead and removed all while I was still being operated on. I was never more aware of my own mortality.

The second was probably a more sustained terror. In May 1980 in fear of my life, I had to move out of my apartment in the middle of the night (with the full cooperation of my landlords) to escape an alcoholic boyfriend who had suddenly turned violent. For several weeks I lived in fear that he would find my new apartment. He never did and life settled down.

"What's your greatest struggle right now?"

This is the easiest answer: making the changes in diet and activity to get a handle on my diabetes and improve my health so that I can look forward to enjoying the rest of my life and actually do all the things I've been planning for my retirement. 

and finally "If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people what would it be?"

It's the same advice I give myself every single day: Each day is a gift, even the most difficult days. Do not pray for the day to end, do not wish your life away. Pray instead for the strength, patience and wisdom to live fully in each moment." 

 So now, even though its unlikely I'll be going to New York City any time soon, or even less likely encountering Brandon Stanton, I have my answers ready!

In Praise of Winter

At work today, a young woman making casual conversation asked me if I was "ready for summer." I hesitated, because it was one of those things that people say on a cold, grey day expecting only a pro-forma agreement, but then I said the truth "no, I'm not ready to let winter go yet." My response startled her, but she was working and needed to move on, so she just nodded and said bye.  

I am no longer as fond of cold weather as I was when I was younger. Winter weather exacerbates both my arthritis and my asthma. I dislike having to take all the additional medicines necessary to allow me to function when it is cold. I am also less confident of my ability to drive in sleet and snow as I once was. 

But I still love winter. I love how the forest becomes naked and the bones of the world show through - the rocks and crevasses, the bare forest floor. Every drive to work or store is a treasure hunt for the stark white fingers of sycamore trees. I love the lace of brown branches edging the mountains against the pale sky. I love the way the wind rattles the dry leaves and rubs the bare branches together. 

But most of all I love how winter makes spring possible. Until you have lived in a place (like California) where the transition from winter to spring is scarcely noticeable, where roses bloom all year round, you cannot truly appreciate how winter gives birth to spring.  So, no I am not pining for summer, nor waiting for spring, but living with joy in winter.

fragility

I'm participating in a month long a January Mindful Writing project from Writing Our Way Home (http://writingourwayhome.com). The idea is to get people to slow down and pay more attention to the world (especially the natural world) around them by writing about it. 

The project is conceived to allow those people who rush to and fro from work to shopping to home without looking up and outward to pay more attention to the world passing by. I am not one of those people.  I'm the kind of person who need to be told to look at the traffic and my instrument panel instead constantly scanning the hillsides and skies for trees, flowers, birds, etc.  I've been known to stop my car on the side of the road five or six times during my commute to take a picture of some lovely moment. 

Slowing down and paying attention to the natural world has not never really been a problem for me, however, making the effort to put those observations in writing has been. So my month long project is less one of paying attention than it is of turning my normal level of observation and attentiveness into words. 

Today my attention was captured by something different...my attention was captured by "the water" (see my earlier post this week "This is Water"). "The water" is our advanced industrial civilization, the medium through which we float taking so much for granted. 

I have spent the day noticing that the electricity has stayed on without fail all day, and that due to that electricity my house, this little box of wood and siding, has maintained a constant temperature of 64 degrees, all the time that the wind has blown, snow has fallen and swirled and outside temperatures slid from 18 degrees at seven this morning to 3 degrees twelve hours later. The heat pump has continue to cycle on and off, the compressor to work, the fan to blow. The lights have remained steady and cheerful. My computer and internet have continued to function normally.

We know from experience that this does not always happen, heavy snow, ice and cold have on multiple occasions over the years resulted in downed power lines and darkness. I know (because I do have TV and internet today) that else where in North America there are people who do not have electricity, and must struggle to find warmth and light to survive the cold. 

Such disruptions seem, anecdotally to have become more common, not just here but across the country.  I have an increasing sense of the fragility of industrial electricity based civilization. 

Musings on the Changing Nature of Friendship in My Life

This evening the Facebook page Humans of New York (HONY) https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork had a picture of a man about my age, sitting on a stoop and the quote was the following:

"Back in Greece, your circle of friends grows larger and larger as you go through life. In America, the circle mostly shrinks or stays the same size."
"Why do you think that is?"
"Time. Nobody has time here. It seems that every time you make a new friend, another friend has grown too busy or moved away."

I always like HONY's pictures and quotes (if you haven't discovered this young man's incredible portraits in photo and words, you really should); all of them speak to me in some way, but this particular quote hit very close to home. I know that I am ultimately responsible for the lack of friends in my daily life, but I'm not entirely sure how to change the situation after all these years.

When I was a teenager I spent my time outside of school alone. I had good friends at school, some of whom I am still in touch with today (especially thanks to tools like Facebook). In high school most of my friends lived miles away; I had no car, neither did they, so our interactions generally ended with the school day. I was lonely, but also liked having space and time to read, write, draw and paint, dream and sing on my own.

College was amazing to me. There were people to talk to, to do things with any time of the day or night. People with whom to sit and listen to music, to go to a movie, have a meal or drink, to discuss the nature of reality or plan the revolution. Graduate school was more of the same: there was always someone with whom to talk, to share things, to laugh or cry. Even my first college teaching job involved intense friendship networks. The college faculty was mostly very young, and mostly a long ways from their family and kin networks, so there were Wednesday "seminars" at local watering holes where intellectual and political ideas could be debated, frequent potluck parties, and other singles with whom to have meals, go to movies, shopping, or just hanging out.  

During those decades from college to first teaching job I tried very hard to make and keep friends. I reached out to others, gave parties, made an effort, because as much as I loved the intensity and the wide ranging nature of the friendships of those years, I am at heart an introvert who loves people, not an extrovert. I still needed plenty of alone time for recharging.

When I failed to get tenure at my first teaching job, and had to leave that intense friendship network, I found it difficult to put energy into a whole new set of friendship ties. The whole process was made so much more difficult because my second job (like my current one) was at a school where almost everyone on the faculty and staff was local and most were older; they all ready had extensive networks of family, kin and friends.  They were friendly and pleasant, but few people invited me to their home, or had social events at which I could get to know my colleagues the way I had known those at my first job. What I should have done was make more of an effort, not less of one. But as the new person I didn't know how to reach out to those already in place.

A few years later when a large new crop of faculty were hired at one time, I saw it as an opportunity.  I volunteered to be on the welcoming committee. I reached out in dozens of ways: providing both  a young married couple and a single mom with a large family with temporary beds, bedding and other furnishings while they waited for their own to arrive, doing the apartment hunting for another incoming colleague, and even offering my guest room to one new faculty who was having difficulty finding a place to live. I did my best to mentor the new people in a way that I had not been mentored. Well you know what they say, "no good deed goes unpunished." A new female faculty member decided that I was a controlling, dominating bitch that had to go if she was going to rise in power and position (she literally said that if I got tenure she would be forced to leave...I didn't get tenure and she left anyway). A new male faculty member decided that my offers of assistance (as part of an official new faculty welcoming committee) were sexual harassment and that I was responsible for all his difficulties with students in the classroom.

I made a couple of friends among colleagues, one of them my husband, John.  Getting married changed the dynamics of my life and provided for the first time a best friend who was available all the time.

Failing to get tenure again, I found a new job at a community college, where people were even more tightly integrated into family, kin and community networks. They were kind and welcoming, but had their own lives, and I was afraid to invest too much energy into building friendships - my last efforts having backfired so badly.  There are people here that I care very much about, whose parents I've met and whose children I know (many of whom end up in my classroom). But our friendships end at the edge of the campus (with the exception of Facebook in recent years).  I have only once been to the home of some one from work and that meant so much to me to be invited. 

I know that I'm responsible for my lack of friendship ties.  I have not invited anyone to my home (while I love my cats and dogs I am somewhat embarrassed by the constant chaos and smell). I have not made a point of issuing any invitations of my own, to dinner or movies or a "night out with the girls." First blogging and then Facebook have come along to fill some of the spaces and needs that local friendships used to meet.  The Internet has introduced me to some wonderful new people, especially women my age who are talented and interested in similar issues (thank you, Deb, Chris, Beth, Geraldine, and Mimi) and to some young women who've helped me understand the next generation (thanks, Susan and Gwen); the Internet has also brought me back in daily touch with the friends of my adolescence and childhood, and the occasional friend from college, grad school and earlier jobs. My life seems overwhelmingly busy between work, house work, caring for animals, Facebook, writing, and I don't even seem to have enough time to spend with my wonderful husband...yet I miss the face-to-face and voice-to-voice friendships of colleagues - women especially. 

So I wonder how do I go about changing things, and do I still have the energy to do so?

Winter Meditations

I have always liked winter. When I was a child in California, winter was when the rains came and the hills turned green instead of brown. I liked wearing sweaters and wool more than I liked sundresses.

The thing that I have come to love best about winter is the bareness of the trees. In winter the architecture of the world is easier to perceive. I have always seen a parallel between the world in winter and human life in times of stress and difficulty.

I did not always take comfort in that revelation. When I was young I focused on frailty, on loss.

For the winds are bitterly iced
between trees that,
having lost their summer leaves,
are no longer seen as intertwined,
but only tenuously touching a few brittle twigs
here and there;
solitary in a gray world that prevents
even the insubtantial companionship
of a shadow.
December 11, 1972

As a young person I perceived (often falsely) the failure of friendships to survive stress. I mistook temporary solitariness for abandonment.

Over the years, however, I have come to cherish winter as a time of bareness and spareness. Living as I have now for many years with woods and forest all around, winter is a time when the world opens up, when secrets are revealed. Having seen more of human life,  and where once I saw bleakness and abandonment, today  I see strength, resiliance and people reaching out. It is in the hard and cold times that people draw together, offer each other support.

In winter
nature drops her disguises,
forest opens to sky,
rock cliffs are bared,
sheltering leaves fall away,
wind whistles through
tenuously touching twigs.

Walking the forest floor
one sees further, more clearly,
steps more surely
among rocks and fissures.
November 2, 2008

It is interesting to me that I used the phrase "tenuously touching" in both poems - an unconscious echoing. But there is a tenuous drawing away and a tenuous reaching outward. It is the latter I perceive today.

 

Don't wish your life away...

Recently I have come to recognize how all of us, at some time or another, engage in wishing our life away.  If you've ever said to yourself, "I just wish this day was over," then you too are guilty of wishing your life a way.

Sometimes when things are particularly awful in our lives, we wish away whole weeks, months, or even years - "I just wish the holidays would get here."

The impulse to get past difficulty, pain and sorrow is understandable. We all have it. But when we focus on just "getting past" stuff, we may be losing out on the ordinary and even wonderful moments that come in the midst of trouble.

What is even more pernicious, however, is the wishing away of perfectly good ordinary days when we are too focused on achieving some future goal. If all our energy is tied up with thinking about what we'll do when  "I lose 30 more pounds," or "finish my degree," or "get that promotion," then we are not really appreciating the moment in which we are currently located.

Kittens become Cats

The original "popcorn kittens" from 2009

Like many other people I am entranced by the antics of kittens. Unlike many people, I do enjoy the company of adult cats as well. The delight that people take in kittens and their antipathy towards adult cats contributes to the problem of cat over-population in our area, and the failure of people to neuter and spay.

They have little incentive to do so, they like seeing tiny kittens gamboling around in the summer sunshine so why would they want to shut off the supply of those kittens? Many give little thought, little food and less shelter, to the cats those kitten become by winter time. In a rural area like this even with food and shelter outdoor, feral cats fall prey to coyotes and other wild menaces (including automobiles). Even with the attrition, by spring there are still enough cats to produce plenty of new litters of kittens to amuse folks, and the cycle repeats.

There are too many kitten lovers, and not enough cat lovers, like myself, willing to make the effort to capture and spay or neuter the adults, provide them with basic veterinary care (like rabies shots), and provide food and shelter. The cost of which is overwhelming to private individuals like myself.

the corruption of power

I like to remind myself at times like these that there are and have been wonderful, decent, honest, men of integrity who have been U.S. Congressmen.

My freshman year at Oberlin College in Ohio, I got to know personally U.S. Congressman Don Pease because he and his wife (with their 5 year old daughter) were the dorm "parents" in my dormitory. Over the next ten years I interacted frequently with the Pease family. While I was a student at Oberlin, I was their daughter's primary babysitter, and I worked on two of Don's Congressional campaigns. After college I remained in touch and visited as often as I could.

The Peases were not rich, or even particularly affluent. They lived in modest rental housing both during his years in Congress and after he retired. Don was a staunch advocate of education, energy, environment and public transportation issues. The only "perk" I ever knew him to take from all his years of public service other than the legally defined salary, benefits and pension, was occasional passes on Amtrak, a government agency that he worked hard to promote. Don Pease was a quiet, gentle man who was beloved as both a husband and father.

So I know first hand that some office holders are not corrupted by the power of their positions. Unfortunately that cannot be said of all.

I am not one of Anthony Weiner's constituents; I've never contributed money to his campaigns; I'm not a friend or family member. But nonetheless I feel betrayed by his actions and especially by the week of lies that he told about his actions.

My sense of betrayal comes because Weiner was a vocal proponent for issues about which I passionately care. He was an eloquent, feisty, acerbic, witty, and even at times belligerent voice in Congress that said things that I would like to say, about the abuses of money, greed and power. I know now that I will never have the same level of comfort or satisfaction with Weiner's public pronouncements. When I see and hear Weiner, from now on I will always know that he is capable of bald-faced lies and deception, and wonder.

In the film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Jimmy Stewart has an emotional, histrionic breakdown in front of the Senate. We accept this in the context of the movie because we have been shown that this is a man who always tells the truth, a man of integrity. Take away the integrity, and all you have is noise, bluster and showmanship.

I am sad and angry both. We don't take well to finding out our heroes are liars.

small regrets

I am delighted with my new house, and getting hooked up to the electrical grid was a necessary step in the process. But I have some regret for the sacrifices of trees made for that to happen.

All the trees in the foreground of this picture -- from the multi-trunked sycamore on the left to the brilliant hued dogwood in the center, to the diagonally growing trees -- were cut down in order to create a new right of way for electric lines and a new pole (right about where the dogwood stood).

Their loss is not so noticeable in the stark black and white world of snowy January, but I know that I will miss these familiar friends come October.

fear

Every day at seven PM I call my mother. It is four PM her time on the California coast, but despite that time difference we are both generally at about the same place in our day -- dinner time. Most days the call lasts for ten minutes. Some days when we both have a lot of say, it can last half an hour.

Every day at seven PM I am witness to my mother's decline into dementia.  Her doctor and health care workers use the term Alzheimer's, but because I am not there I cannot ask them more detailed questions. I know from reading that not all dementia is Alzheimer's, and what is happening to her does not fit the way I have seen Alzheimer's described or depicted in the ubiquitous commercials for drugs and products. But then I know very little, and the disease progresses differently in different people I am told.

The most obvious symptom to me through our daily phone calls is the aphasia. She loses words. She knows what things are and what they do and what they are for, but she can no longer retrieve the names for them. Common everyday objects, events and actions escape her. She is acutely aware of this problem and struggles. Sometimes I will try to supply a word here and there, but mostly she seems to prefer to just provide round about descriptions (such as "that nosy box with pictures in the living room" for TV). She has also forgotten how to do things, like all but the most simple cooking, and can only write a check with substantial assistance from someone. Numbers and arithmetic are almost completely beyond her. She never learned to use a calculator and certainly will not now.

The biggest crisis in my mother's life at this particular point in time is that the company that provides municipal garbage and recycling pickup for her California suburb, has suddenly decided to entirely change the rules. They have delivered three big huge wheeled containers, one green, one blue and one black, and detailed written instructions on what can and cannot go in each one. My mother is utterly bewildered by this.

She has daily assistance, and I imagine that Jennifer has a much firmer grasp on what is required for properly filling these new containers. But my mother wants to be able to understand this herself, and she simply cannot get her mind around how they will store and dispose of the various types of recyclables, trash and garbage.

I feel for my mother, and her pain and anxiety. But am comforted by the knowledge that Jennifer and my brother Charlie are there to take care of the actual logistics of this particular crisis.

There is however, my own growing fear that I too am slipping down the long slippery slope to cognitive disorder.  My mother is 86, and I am only 59, but I believe I see the signs and symptoms in myself. 

I have had problems with word loss for more than 15 years, and it has been getting worse. Nothing like my mother. But  a couple of times a week, I will be lecturing in class or talking to my husband, and suddenly will be unable to capture the right word -- not every day nouns and verbs like my mother now has difficulty with, but everyday, routine concepts of my discipline and the social sciences in general, and with descriptive adjectives and adverbs. Some weeks, when I am tired or stressed, are worse than others.

The other thing that frightens me, is my reaction to new and novel situations or the disruption of routines. I become mentally flustered, and sometimes panicked, and have the unfortunate tendency to lash out angrily at those around me (primarily my wonderful, patient husband, who deserves far better than he's gotten of late). Within moments of my outburst, I feel remorse, but the damage is already done.

If there is time to think about some thing new, figure out what is going on, what needs to be done, and then act, I'm fine. It's the situations that require an immediate response that throw me. Yet, everything I read tells me that what I need is more novelty.  I need to get out of my ruts, challenge myself with new tasks, meet new people, try new places and activities -- especially physical activities -- to stimulate my mental "muscles."

Unfortunately my actual physical muscles -- or more specifically my joints -- are undermining efforts in that direction. The RA seems to be progressing. After two years, my medications no longer seem to prevent the end of the day exhaustion. Daily housework chores like dishes and feeding cats overwhelm me.  Weekly chores like house cleaning and laundry -- well, it's been a long time since those were actually done on a weekly basis.  It seems clear to me that it will not be long before I will need to have more help around the house than John can provide, even if he were to provide more than he already does.

How long do I have before I become like my mother? How long before I can read the words but no longer make sense of the content? How long before I can no longer remember how to work my computer, send e-mail? How long before I can no longer have a normal conversation?

What do I need to do to provide security for myself and John before that day comes? What things is it essential for me to do and say before that day comes? What legacy do I still have to leave before I can no longer communicate with the world in a meaningful fashion?