Thanksgiving

 

Yesterday I received a diagnosis of invasive lobular cancer in my right breast. Suddenly a lot of disparate things about the last year fell into place and made sense. The odd pains in my breast, the fatigue that I just couldn't seem to shake, the lack of interest in food (even chocolate!), the slow and unplanned (but not unwelcome) loss of weight, weird blood test results that no one thought were particularly alarming except me, and the general sense of something being wrong or off. 

There had been other things to blame: I have rheumatoid arthritis and we've been messing around trying different biologics this year. I have diabetes and chronic kidney disease, and severe asthma.  I was sick twice for a month at a time, first with cold/bronchitis/asthma complications, and second time with Covid (my first time I think)/asthma complications. We lost our beloved dog Bob this year. We lost yet another elderly cat. My husband lost one of his two jobs and we had to rethink our family budget. Of course, there was always the bad stuff in the outer world to add to my sense of gloom: global warming, regional natural disasters, the total dumpster fire of American politics. 

Having a diagnosis of cancer is actually a relief. I knew something was wrong, I just didn't know what and couldn't get anyone to figure it out with me, until now. So on Thanksgiving, I am actually grateful for my diagnosis. I am also enormously grateful for my loving husband, who stands by me through everything. Grateful for all the friends that I have around the country who care about what is happening to me, and the kind and helpful neighbors I have nearby, who are always ready to give a helping hand. Grateful that we have the resources and the health care to take care of my cancer. 

Christmas/Holiday Cards

 Well I did it. I set out to send a Christmas/Chanukah/holiday card to every single person in my address book before December 15. I completed that task yesterday (December 8) and put the last batch of cards in the Jenkins, KY post office. Now oddly I'm feeling a loose ends.

When I retired I thought that I would have the time to get back to keeping up with correspondence, like I did in my twenties and thirties. Back then I wrote letters every month, had dozens of people that I corresponded with regularly. These days there's only two people that I correspond with regularly, and they (my brother and an old college chum) vastly prefer to use e-mail so that what I do for them. There are two or three others who e-mail a couple of times a year. My oldest friend from junior high prefers Skyping for communication, so we do that at least once a month. One sweet college friend is very good with cards and notes on all the major Jewish holidays. But no one writes letters like we used to do. 

So it all comes down to Christmas/holiday cards, which I had gotten lax about for the last decade or so of work life. But it turns out that having plenty of time in retirement, does not translate into have "wherewithal". I have struggled most of the past five years to just simply reply to everyone who sent me a card. So I made this promise to myself, and back in October ordered two types of cards, matching stickers and address labels, and set to work on the first of December writing cards. 

I've gotten to an age where I don't know if all the friends and family whose addresses I have are still alive. Most are in their 70's or older. The ones who spend time on Facebook I know are still there, but with some of the others our only contact is holiday cards. 

Facebook gives us an illusion that we know what is going on with each other. But I know I don't post much about what is actually happening in my life, and I suspect that most people leave lots of stuff out of their social media. All the details of life that we used to share face-to-face, or even in letters, gets washed over. 

I may never do this again, at least not at this level. It was expensive, and it took almost two weeks of working on it for several hours a day. At least I can say I did it once. 

My brief life as a farm worker Part 3

What was most important to me about working at Yoder Brothers during the summers of 1970 and 1971 was my fellow workers. It is also the hardest thing to write about. One reason for that is that 50 years later I recognize how self-absorbed I was at 19 and as a result I did not learn very much about the women with whom I worked, nor did I do much to keep in touch with them when I went back to college. Yet those women touched my life and my ways of thinking much more deeply than I realized at the time. It was their fellowship that brought me back to the job for a second summer, not the $1.30 that we earned per hour.  

This is something I haven’t mentioned yet. Minimum wage in 1970 was $1.65.  At college working as a waitress and in the cafeteria, I earned federal minimum wage.  I knew what it was. When I applied for the job, I was told we’d be paid minimum wage; when the first paycheck came, I was flabbergasted. We were being paid $1.30 an hour. My first thought was that this was illegal, that they were taking advantage of the fact that most of the workers were immigrants who only spoke Spanish and could not really advocate for themselves. I called the same Cooperative Extension agent that had told me about the job in the first place, and he explained reality to me. There was a separate, lower, minimum wage that applied to farm workers.  Therefore $1.30 was completely legal, but my view that it was exploitive and taking advantage of immigrant workers was also true.  I learned later that the men who worked there earned $1.65 because they had more options as to jobs and would have left to work somewhere else if paid less than non-farm minimum wage.

The First Summer

 When I started work there in June 1970 all of the other women who worked there were Hispanic in that they were all native Spanish speakers – despite significant differences in dialect. They came from several countries. The largest number were from Mexico, but there were women from both Central America and South America, the four countries that I am sure about are Guatemala, El Salvador, Columbia, and Peru. All but one of the women had come to the United States as either teens or adults. That one woman, Conchita, had come to the U.S. as a very small child with her parents and had attended school entirely in the U.S. While she had grown up speaking Spanish at home with her parents, she was truly bi-lingual and spoke unaccented, colloquial English like anyone person who went to school here.

Connie as she was called, was my life-line in the beginning, helping me get up-to-speed in my Spanish. Like most kids growing up in California in the 1950's and 1960's I learned some Spanish vocabulary in grade school, and by middle school was taking formal classes in Spanish every year.  I studied Spanish in school for 4 and a half years (middle school, high school, and a semester in college) and earned mostly A's (except in college) but really wasn't fluent until working at Yoder Brothers. Connie helped me with the work specific vocabulary, that hadn’t been covered in my classes. She also helped ease me into the social network by inviting me to her home for dinner twice, where I got to meet her mother, husband, and six-year-old son – and have my first truly authentic Mexican cuisine! Yoder Brothers was a temporary stop for Connie who with a high school diploma and other skills soon found a less physical office job somewhere else.

It was harder to be part of the group after Connie left since everyone else spoke only Spanish, but nothing teaches a language faster than necessity and total emersion. I soon made my best friend at Yoder Brothers, Gloria. Gloria had come to the U.S. because her brother suffered from a congenital illness than could at that time only be treated properly in the U.S. Like the vast majority of immigrants, she had not really understood how difficult it would be for her to find skilled work like she had in Mexico, especially lacking English language skills. She was having difficulty saving up enough money to bring her brother to the U.S. working as a field hand.

Gloria was breathtakingly beautiful. She looked like the fairy tale description of snow white: ivory pale skin, ruby lips, shining dark hair. One of the things that I was quick to observe at Yoder Brothers was that “Hispanic” covers a very wide range of racial and ethnic groups. Gloria looked like she would have been at home on the streets of Madrid. By comparison the oldest, most senior worker at the plant, Irene from Peru had the deep bronze skin and high cheekbones that we Americans associate with native Americans. The rest of the women ranged somewhere in between those two poles, representing a wide mix of indigenous people and European invaders.

In many of their home countries these differences in racial and ethnic heritage mattered a great deal, social status and opportunity varied based on a person’s degree of European heritage. Here in the United States those differences were largely obliterated; from the point of view of the larger society and employers they were all Hispanic immigrants, they could not speak English, and they were vulnerable to deportation, even documented immigrants though the undocumented were especially so. Here tenure in the U.S. and knowledge of how the system worked were the primary forms of status, not racial and ethnic differences within the group.

Sitting and talking with Gloria before work, at lunch, and after work really pushed my Spanish fluency. Unlike the other women whose conversations revolved around their families or their relationships, food and clothing, Gloria wanted to talk about music, politics, and religion or perhaps more properly about beliefs. She wanted to tell me about her life in Mexico and her family and learn about my life and my family. We explored our similarities and differences and we taught each other songs.  I can only remember one of the many songs she taught me, because I have sung it often over the years to cheer myself up.

Ven a contar conmigo,

Si tristes estas.

Cuando te sientes deprimido

Ven a contar conmigo

Y el sol saldra.  

Translation: Come sing with me if you are sad. When you are feeling depressed sing with me and the sun will come out.

One of the funniest things that happened to me that first summer was due to an odd lacuna in my Spanish vocabulary. Gloria lived in an apartment with Bonita another one of the Yoder Brothers workers, about a mile and a half from the Yoder Brothers plant.  It was walkable, there were sidewalks the entire distance. But there was heavy traffic and in the summer it was hot. So early on, I suggested that I at least give them a ride home at the end of the day.  It was on my way and not at all inconvenient.  Our first ride was quite comical.  Neither Gloria nor Bonita knew the name of the major cross street where I would need to turn, so I told them to let me know before we reached the intersection. So I’m driving along, and the first major intersection is coming up so I ask izquierda [left] or derecha [right],  they replied “derecho” which I took to mean I should turn right, so I started to signal and make the turn and they started yelling “no, no, no” and pointing straight ahead.  We went through this two more times. Finally, I stopped the car and looked at them and gestured to the left saying “izquierda?” they nodded, then I gestured right and said “derecha?” they nodded. Then they pointed straight ahead and said “derecho!” In all my years of studying Spanish I had learned left and right, but I had never learned that “straight ahead” is derecho.  For days afterwards this was the subject of much discussion and laugher at lunch time.

In addition to providing Gloria and Bonita rides every day, I several times invited them to come to my parents’ house (where I lived) for meals, providing transportation to and from. At least once they both came, but two other times only Gloria came. They would invite me to eat with them, and I would accept their hospitality as to do otherwise would have been rude and insulting, but I would try to eat very little because they had so little. I felt very close to Gloria and I think she also felt close to me despite all our differences.

fairy stone crystal

At the end of the summer of 1970 when it was time for me to go back to school, Gloria and I exchanged lots of hugs and tears.  She also gave me an amazing gift one that I felt terribly guilty about accepting but knew that to refuse it would hurt her immeasurably. We had talked a lot about our religious beliefs, and one of the difficulties that I encountered in doing so was that for Gloria, a Spanish speaking Catholic, no distinction in her conversation was made between Jesus and God, she referred to both indistinguishably as “Dios.” As a consequence, I had been unable to explain to her satisfactorily how while I had a deep and abiding faith in God, I was not a Christian. This was probably made more difficult because I wore a necklace that had a small locket and a fairy stone cross on it.  I wore the fairy stone not because it was a cross, but because it was given me by my favorite Aunt and reminded me of trips on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I was overwhelmed when at parting she gave me the exquisite gold crucifix that she wore all the time when not at work. It had been a gift to her from her deceased mother.

At that point in my life I was pretty sure I wanted to be a Jew even though I was still ten years away from formal conversion to Judaism, I would have felt sacrilegious wearing a traditional Catholic crucifix with a tiny Jesus impaled upon it.  In response I removed my own necklace, removed the small locket, and gave her my fairy stone cross, explaining how it was a natural mineral that grew in the shape of a cross, and who had given it to me.  I kept Gloria’s crucifix close to me for the next 12 years, never wearing it, but holding it often and thinking about her. In 1975 my first graduate school roommate was a physician from Belgium, Arlette Lepot.  Arlette’s primary language was French, but she was fluent in Spanish and German. We discovered quickly that I was marginally more fluent in Spanish than she was in English, so we sometimes spoke Spanish together rather than English. For a variety of reasons Arlette reminded me of Gloria and I ended up telling her the story of Gloria’s crucifix and gave it to her, because she would wear it and honor it.

Gloria was the only woman at Yoder Brothers that I kept in touch with after I went back to college. We wrote letters to each other in Spanish. Mine were pretty simplistic. So I learned that after I left that she and Bonita had been able to get better paying (but still very hard, hot and miserable) jobs at a laundry. Then the letters stopped and my last letter was returned. I lost touch with her and it was not until the next summer that I was able to learn why. Both Gloria and Bonita were undocumented so an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) raid on the laundry where she worked, caused her to go underground and leave the area. I’ve always wondered what happened to her after that.

My brief life as a farm worker Part 2

During the summers of 1970 and 1971 between years of college I worked at Yoder Brothers commercial horticultural plant in Redwood City, California as a farm worker. 

Women's Work in the Greenhouses

As I wrote in my previous post the primary work that we women did at Yoder Brothers was take cuttings of 2 and 1/2 inch shoots from chrysanthemum plants that were then shipped to other Yoder Brothers plants to be rooted. This constituted about 80 percent of our work load. 

But before the plants could grow to a point to have their shoots harvested, it was necessary to plant them. Planting was also a job that women did. The beds were prepared by the men. Preparation included sterilization of the beds. Each bed was tightly covered in plastic and scalding steam was piped under the plastic. Fertilizer, fresh top soil and other chemicals were applied to the sterilized beds by the men.  Then the women went to work. 

Taking cuttings was a job that could be done standing up, but planting could only be done kneeling. The beds were about a foot and a half high, so that even kneeling we sometimes had to lean over to work in the soil.  The packed dirt isles between beds were about 3 feet wide, which was enough to comfortably kneel perpendicular to the edge of the raised bed. We were given thick rubber cushions to strap over our knees, however, the isles were always dusty and often muddy so the bottoms of my pants, my socks and the tops of my shoes were usually filthy after a day of planting. 

Of course, I did seem to get dirtier than everyone else. Probably because I didn't mind getting dirty, because I was luckier than most of my work mates for whom this job was the difference between survival and starvation or homelessness. I had a home with my parents and was earning money to pay for college. Also I could afford to have clothes (even if only old ragged jeans and work shirts) that I only wore for work in the greenhouses. When I got home I could dump my clothes into the washer and put on something fresh. Many of my fellow workers could not afford separate sets of work clothes and home clothes; a lot of them would cover up at least their tops with old, worn, over-sized men's shirts to prevent staining. Some of it was a matter of choice - the young women did not want their novios or husbands to see them in dirty work clothes. I on the other hand had no one to impress with my femininity at that point in my life. Also many of them lived in apartments where they had to pay for laundry while I did my laundry for free in my parents' washer. Note that I did do my own laundry and did not leave it for my mother to do. I was often teased about getting so dirty. They said I was like their niños, who loved playing in the dirt. 

While the beds as a whole was three feet wide, thick wooden sides left the planting surface was about 30 inches. The surface of the bed was marked off in 5 inch squares by wire, so there were six squares across the width of each bed. We were given huge plastic trays of seedlings, each in it's little square of soil similar to the tomato or pepper seedlings at your local greenhouse or Lowe's in the spring. We had to make sure that the wooden stake labeling our tray of chrysanthemum seedlings had the same type name and number  to the wooden stakes labeling the bed we were planting in.  Rarely two women worked together on the same bed, one to a side facing each other, but most often we worked alone doing first one side and then the other. 

The soil was soft so we used no tools, only our fingers and hands. There was always dirt under my finger nails during those summers. We began with the square closest to the middle (the third square in from the side), so that we would not crush plants closer to the edge as we leaned out to reach the middle. Three seedlings were planted in each square in a triangle, the apex of the triangle pointing away from us.  I would gently pull a little seedling with its attached soil out of the tray with my left hand, while I simultaneously created a thumb sized hole in the bed with my right. I would plop the seedling in, and use my thumb and fingers to pinch the soil of the bed around it. Then reach for the next seedling and poke the next hole. I would usually do all of the third row squares I could comfortably reach from one kneeling location first, then the second row, and finally the first row, before "walking" on my knees to the next location. The pressure to be productive meant that there really wasn't time to stand up and straighten out between each location, just scooting on our knees. 

Physically planting was far more difficult than taking cuttings. Even with the thick rubber pads being on my knees for hours hurt. I'd get cramps in my calf or my thigh sometimes. In the early mornings there was greater risk of burning oneself on the heating pipe running around the bottom of the bed. But mostly it hurt my back to lean out over the bed to reach the middle rows.  And yet, I actually liked planting more than cutting. 

When you were cutting even though the job was really repetitive and boring you always had to pay close attention because you had to be counting the number of cuttings. The quality control was really strict, your 200 cuttings per box had to be exactly 200, not 199 or 201. If you let your mind wander while taking cuttings and lost count, you would have to stop and carefully count every cutting in your hand to make sure you knew where you were. Of course, stopping to recount cost time and that cut into your production which you couldn't afford to do if you wanted to keep your job. 

But planting required almost no thought at all, it was a purely mechanical process. So my mind could wander wherever I wished. Sometimes I sang softly to myself. Sometimes I composed letters or stories in my head. One could just simply daydream while planting, so time spent planting generally passed far more quickly than the hours spent taking cuttings. On those uncommon occasions that two women were working across from each other on the same bed one could actually have conversations, something not at all possible while you are counting cuttings. Too bad that planting was such a small part of the job during the summer months. The permanent workers did much more planting, being responsible for getting all the beds started in the late winter and early spring. 

Taking cuttings was the biggest part of the job, next in frequency and importance was planting, and finally when the productivity of plants had ended, we had to rip dead plants out and clean up the beds so the men could come in and prepare them for the next round of planting and harvesting of cuttings.  This was the only job that was truly social. It was always done by at least two women at a time, and sometimes a whole crew of women might be assigned to work on cleaning up an entire greenhouse. Since all we were doing was yanking plants out of the ground and piling them in huge piles there was plenty of opportunity for conversation, joking and singing. It was working on ripping crews that taught me all my best Spanish curse words, most of which are unfit for publication. 

Most of the time ripping out and cleaning up was a very short lived task centered on a few beds in an otherwise active greenhouse with many other rows of green, growing plants being actively harvested for cuttings. I have very vivid memories, however, of one afternoon in my second summer (1971) a crew of six of us were set the task of ripping beds in a greenhouse where everything was dried, brown and dead or dying.  This was a large task that was going to take the six of us the entire afternoon to complete. 

In an active greenhouse full of green, growing plants it was very humid and the high temperatures were usually in the high eighties or low nineties. That's not particularly pleasant, but its bearable and one becomes adjusted to the heat.  This particular greenhouse we were sent to work in was dry as a bone, and the temperature in that greenhouse when we started was 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It would reach 124 degrees before we were finished. We knew this because there were thermometers hanging from the overhead pipes. It was awful!  As the heat rose and it because harder and harder to work, I had a sudden inspiration. I stood up on one of the beds and turned on the faucet of the overhead water pipe and stood under it. I soaked myself completely my hair and clothes were dripping wet. Most of the others followed my example. We could then work in reasonable comfort for a period of time enjoying the coolness of the evaporating water. Within about 20 minutes I would be dry again, and need to soak myself once more. This tactic allowed us to complete the task without anyone succumbing to heat stroke or heat exhaustion. The only downside was that all the dust and dry leaves stuck to us and we were totally filthy from head to toe by the time the work day ended. 

We were required to be on the job site by 6:45 AM, but could not clock in until a minute or two before 7 AM. We were luckier than most open field workers in that there was a toilet with running water on the property, but we were only suppose to use it before we clocked in, during the 10 minute morning break, and during the 30 minute unpaid lunch period we were given. Most of us found ways to slide into the bathroom when nature demanded, especially when moving from one greenhouse to another without getting into trouble. The end of the day came at 3:30 PM. 

The Yoder Brothers and Scientific Horticulture

The job was hard, hot, dirty and mostly tedious, but Yoder Brothers (now Aris Horticulture, Inc) as a whole was a fascinating business. Begun in 1920 by two Mennonite brothers Menno and Ira Yoder of Barberton, Ohio, Yoder Brothers had grown by the 1970's to dominate the chrysanthemum market in the US.  Some eighty percent of all chrysanthemums blooming in the U.S. in the 1970's had begun their life in one of Yoder Brothers' greenhouses. Even in 1997 the greenhouse in Letcher County, Kentucky where I got my autumn mums bought their chrysanthemum seedlings from Yoder Brothers. 

One of the reasons I think that the plant manager hired me was that he wanted someone he could talk to. He was proud of the organization and its "scientific" techniques and found me a willing listener.  So I learned many details about the Yoder Brothers corporation and its operations that the other workers knew nothing about. 

Yoder Brothers was engaged in plant research, and had developed a highly systematized, rationalized, program to maximize chrysanthemum output and quality. They collected extensive data from each of their plants on temperature, moisture, and production, then developed complex formulas and programs to predict the most efficient and efficacious was to produce chrysanthemums. Each week the plant in Redwood City California received computer printouts mailed from the company headquarters in Ohio. The printout dictated precisely which beds in which greenhouses would be targeted for harvesting that week, which beds would be uprooted and cleaned out, which would be sterilized and treated for new planting, and which would be planted with new varieties.

We greenhouse workers often made fun of these printouts as they frequently dictated harvesting from beds that were producing almost no new shoots, while telling us to tear up beds that still had days if not weeks of production left in them. However, it appeared over the two summers that I worked there that on the average the computer program optimized their production.

Each day, at the end of shift, the precise number of boxes (each with 200 cuttings) of each variety of mum and each bed in each house, would be tallied on a sheet.  Because the first summer I was the only employee other than the manager for whom English was a first language, I was tapped to report each day's production to the home office.  I had to make a long distance call to Ohio and recite pages and pages of variety names, location identifiers, and numbers of boxes. These numbers would then be fed into the computer program that determined what the activities for each bed would be the next week. For some reason the need for concentration and accuracy on this task would trigger a yawning reflex in me. Halfway through the task I would start to yawn, which would make me struggle to continue reading the numbers.  Just writing about this has triggered a bout of yawning for me. 

Towards the end of my first summer, the home office sent a huge teletype machine to California to be used for reporting the production information. The plant manager (who spoke little Spanish) trained me how to use the teletype, and then it was my responsibility to teach the process of typing the report to my fellow worker and friend Gloria, an immigrant from Mexico who had been a executive secretary in a large corporation in Mexico and could type much faster and more accurately than I could, but who had no English at all. At that point I spoke Spanish fluently but my vocabulary was limited in odd ways: I knew the word for push, but not the word for button! But Gloria was smart and a quick learner and she filled in the gaps.  I was glad to give up the job of reading all those numbers every day and the weird yawning fits that it brought on. 

Stay tuned for part 3, where I will talk more about the women I worked with, made friends with, and cared about. Also I'll talk more about the Hispanic immigrant community at that time in that place. And at one funny story about speaking Spanish. 

In Memory of Friends Long Gone

Twice in the week I've had reason to think a former student and long time friend Bradford Clay Jones who died twenty years ago this spring. First when the Supreme Court announced their decision on same sex marriage last Friday and  then again on Monday when I learned that the community college system that I serve (KCTCS) had nominated me for a state-wide teaching award (my academic dean says I've "won" it, but officially I've only been nominated, and I like to hold off celebration until things are official).  Both times when I heard the news I thought of Clay and wished that he had lived to see it. 

Clay was a student in my SOC 101 Introductory Sociology course at the University of Kentucky in the spring term of 1981. Clay had come to UK from Russellville, Kentucky a small farming community in the western part of the state. He came with his best friend, a red headed freckled young farmer, whose name I sadly can no longer remember although I can see his face as clear as it was yesterday. They joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity together, took their general education classes together including sociology, but had different majors and different career/life paths. Clay was brilliant, articulate, wild, crazy, daring, fun, charming. He was clearly a leader among his fraternity brothers.   Clay got his degree in education from the University of Kentucky's department of Kinesiology and Health Promotion.

After graduation Clay entered the Air Force  as a 1st Lieutenant and began corresponding regularly with me. He wrote long chatty letters about work and life. He loved serving his country and was posted on first at Dover, Delaware and then near Kansas City. His job involved providing healthy exercise and activity programs for people stationed at the AF Bases. 

Clay also had an active personal life outside work. He participated with local community theater groups in the communities near the AF bases where he was stationed. I remember how much fun he had with a production of Oklahoma! Although Clay had explored and experimented with his sexual identity in college, it was not until more than a year after graduation that Clay finally "came out" to himself and to friends and family, but not of course to the USAF. This was well before "Don't ask, Don't tell."

While stationed near Kansas City, Clay met the love of his life Gene and entered into a committed relationship. A local minister officiated at Clay and Gene's vows which they considered just as binding as if they had been legal. Rather than face being separated from Gene by the Air Force posting him outside the U.S. Clay allowed the Air Force to learn of his sexual orientation and discharge him in 1984. 

Clay entered the Master of Public Administration in Nonprofit Management at the University Missouri, Kansas City and received his MPA in 1986.  In 1989 he became the Executive director Kansas division American Cancer Society.

Diagnosed as HIV positive in the late 1980's Clay maintained his health for a number of years.  He advocated for AIDS research as a board member of the Kansas City AIDS Research Consortium. In the early 1990's his HIV infection became full-blown AIDS. He suffered among other things from a histoplasmosis infection that spread from his lungs throughout his body. In June of 1995 I received the sad news from Clay's spouse Gene that AIDS had taken its toll and Clay died May 1, 1995. 

I wish that Clay had lived to see same sex marriage legalized across the nation; for him and Gene to have had the full legal rights of married couples. They were married for a decade before Clay's death and yet Gene received none of the benefits a married person should have on the death of his spouse. 

I also wish that Clay could have lived to see me receive this state-wide teaching award for "inspiring" Kentucky students to become contributing members of society. Clay was one of the earliest and most enthusiastic supporters of my teaching career.  I met him while I was still an "apprentice" graduate student instructor, and his friendship over the next 14 years was very influential in my development as a teacher.  By no means the last student to become a life-long friend, Clay was the first. 

Thanks for the memories, Clay. 

No regrets, no do-overs...

I am who I am today because of the all the choices I have made, all the actions I have taken, all the feelings I have had. Every moment, good and bad, wise and foolish, caring and uncaring, silly and serious, creates the unique pattern of my life. To regret even one action, to wish to undo even one choice is tantamount to saying I do not wish to be me, as I am today. 

Two things I've seen recently center around this theme of the inseparable threads of a person's life:  the movie "Wild" which we saw in the theater yesterday and one of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes (Season 6, episode 15 "Tapestry") viewed again just a few weeks ago.  Both carry this same message, that we are all a sum of every event, every second of our lives, and even the tiniest change would make us someone quite different. 

Some years ago I chanced to re-read a journal from my junior year in college and was disturbed by words I read. [I have learned from such re-readings that I was exceptionally  accurate in  chronicling events - like the sociologist/ethnologist I  later became, I  captured verbatim conversations, and the details of action and gesture of others within hours of their occurrence - even when I was unable to fully understand their meaning at that time.] 
It was painfully clear from the journal account that my younger self was blithely unaware that these actions caused pain and sadness to someone else. A budding relationship was ruptured and faltered because I unwittingly betrayed a trust I did not know I had.  

For some years I have obsessed over the hurt I had unknowingly caused. Until one day not long ago I finally asked myself the right question: If I could go back and change the past, would I do so? And the answer is no.  I regret the hurt I caused, I feel bad about causing pain, and I know that I cut short a very promising potential relationship.  However, my actions brought me some of the sweetest, most joy-filled memories I have from my college years of singing in the snow, laughter and tender kisses, and launched a different life-long friendship that brought many other good memories over the years. Moreover, had the relationship I short-circuited happened, my life almost certainly would have taken a very different path and I would be a very different person. 

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. 

Live Each Day

Dropped in on Facebook this morning to find a lot of my younger friends were wishing their lives away:  "How I wish this day were over;" "If only this day would end;" "Pray for this day to be over."  I thought, how sad this is.  When you get to my age time moves so swiftly...reminds me of a song lyric from Eric Anderson in the 1970's "Time like a freight train..." Days, weeks, months, even years are gone before I realize it.

Whether one is faced with the problem of moments that drag or moments that vanish to quickly the solution is the same: work on being in the moment, noticing and experiencing life as it is happening to you. Not that this is at all easy. But it does not mean working all the time or being "on" all the time. Some times the best way to be in the moment is to relax, practice deep breathing, a quiet moment of reflection, a brief walk to the window or door, even take a nap (albeit few people have the luxury to nap at work).

{time out for a stroll to the mail box and a lawn mowing break and the sweet, sweet smell of morning grass, mixed with the pungent odor of gasoline from the mower; unaccustomed muscle use, sweat, and heart rate elevation!}

 I wanted to extend this thought to several people I know in a gentle non-judgmental way. I know their work is not always full-filling, their days often tiresome. I've noticed that people often respond to what I call "bumper stickers" on Facebook--images with meaningful statements on them--much more readily than direct advice. So I crafted the message above and floated it out into Facebook land.  I'm happy that it seemed to reverberate with a number of people, and has been "shared" repeatedly. I know I've going to post it prominently somewhere to remind myself of one of my better thoughts and try to put it into practice more often.

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?

Confluence

One of the things that I most like about Facebook is how my very diverse group of friends bring such varied items to my attention - which often in serendipitous fashion form some type of gestalt.

This morning my attention was called to an interesting article in Mother Jones "The Problem with Men Explaining Things," by Rebecca Solnit. Solnit was complaining about the phenomenon of having to listen to men explain some technical or historical facts to her - men who knew little or nothing about the subject on which she was a recognized, published expert.

The article itself was very interesting, but as is often the case the comments had more to reveal than the article itself. A lengthy argument had broken out in the comments over whether or not women were equally guilty of "explaining things" to men as the reverse. Tempers flared, names got called. Little light was shed.

I have to say all my personal experiences of having sociological, technological and scientific things on which I have expertise "explained" to me by someone with less expertise have come from men. However, later this morning also on Facebook, I happened across some comments left by some female friends on a post I made yesterday, and realized that women do engage in a different type of "explaining" related to emotions.

My experience with women, beginning with my mother, is that many women presume to be experts not only on their own emotions, but on yours. When they hear or read the emotional statements of someone else, they translate them into their own emotional matrix, and then "explain" your feelings back to you. The intent is well-meaning. They are trying to be kind, sympathetic, and supportive, but since they have translated what you have said into their own emotional matrix, their interpretation of the meaning is often 180 degrees off - because not everyone feels the same things.

While it is pleasant to know that I am viewed by some as kind and nurturing, I do not feel any sense of loss for not having been a mother, and do not need to be reassured that I am "really" a mothers for having cared for others.

letting go

Yesterday, on one of my breaks from the computer screen and the research/writing project that is absorbing much of my time, I went over to the old house to sort through file drawers.

We have three metal file cabinets, all of which are so badly rusted from decades of cats peeing on them, that we do not want to move them into the new house. We are replacing them with sturdy modular plastic files. But first I have to go through everything and make the appropriate disposition into "keep," "throw away," and "burn/shred" (for old financial documents, an option that was unnecessary before the age of identity theft).

Some of the decisions are easy. Financial records older than seven years get put in the "burn/shred" pile, those more recent get kept. Warranties and instructions for appliances and gadgets we no longer possess go into "throw away," those that are still relevant go in the "keep" pile.

Other decisions are agonizing. What should I do with the many drawers full of research articles, government documents, interviews, newspaper clippings, and other materials that are the raw data for the dissertation that was the primary focus of my life from 1980 to 1984? Or the later research I did on the National Environmental Policy Act in 1990-1992?

I kept everything, because I always assumed that someday I'd come back to that research, up-date it, extend it, publish it. But it's been twenty years since I've done work in the field of state theory. For twenty years, that field has passed me by. For twenty years, I've hauled all this pile of paper around with me, from one house to another.

The time to throw it away has finally come. If the day comes that I have more time for writing, I would rather spend my time writing fiction, essays and poetry, not trying to rebuild an academic writing career.

So yesterday, drawers of paper went into the big dumpster outside. Given that there was six inches of water standing in the bottom of the dumpster, and heavy rains this morning, that decision to trash all that material is now irrevocable.

An even harder decision centered around letters. I have drawers of folders, each labeled with a friends name, holding letters and cards going back forty-five years. Should I keep them? Throw them out?

There is, of course, the pull of sentiment. Every correspondent was at one time or still is, a loved one, friend, relative, lover. Moreover, as a person who has depending upon saved correspondence for sociological and historical research, I am sensitive to the possibility that some future historian might be looking for descriptive data about everyday life; descriptions at which some of my correspondents over the years have excelled, with humor and insight. On the other hand, I've seen the burden that a life of collecting stuff imposes on children, family and relatives when a person dies.

How to balance those two concerns and the tug of sentiment? Finally I compromised, going through each file, keeping only lengthy descriptive letters and photos, and throwing out all the years of accumulated brief notes, birthday and Christmas cards. Into the dumpster those bags of paper went as well. Also now irrevocable.

Life moves on. Some things have to be let go.

pivotal people

I love Facebook. I know that not everyone does, but I do. I love that I have been able to build new ties and bonds with people I've met strictly through the Internet (initially by blogging). I also love that I have a richer connection with the people that I work with and the students that I teach, learning more about their families, their interests, their hopes and fears. But I especially love that I am able to reconnect with people from my past, all the way back to grade school.

Today, I received a friend request from a former student, from my years in Johnstown, Pennsylvania - my first full-time teaching position. We had not lost all touch, corresponding at irregularly for the past 24 years. But now I will finally get to see photos of her husband, her children, her cats, and share more frequently everyday thoughts. Eve mentioned telling her son - now almost college age himself - about me as a pivotal person at a pivotal time in her life. People often speak of teachers and advisers as pivotal, or influential. But as I think about Eve, I realized that she was a pivotal influence in my life at a pivotal time for me.

I was trying to figure out what kind of professor I was, what kind of teacher, what kind of advisor. Eve let me into her life in a way that influenced my ideas about myself as a person and as a professor. She made me feel like I was doing something valuable, because she let me know that I was helping her in her life and career path.

Eve is not the only student to have touched me and influenced me, but there has always been something special about her. Maybe it's because we shared a love of cats (she used to come to my house to visit with my Maine Coon cat Melvin), or because of how courageously she dealt with the internship from hell, or just because she's a wonderful, smart, caring, fun person. I'm so glad that Facebook is allowing us to reconnect on a more regular basis.

Valentine memories

In 1955, my family moved into the home where my mother still lives. It was at that time a working class, blue collar neighborhood almost entirely composed of young families with small children (the products of the Baby Boom). My mother would have been the only college educated woman in the neighborhood, a former school teacher. Unlike the other mothers who wanted their children out of the house so that they could clean and watch soaps, my mother encouraged the neighborhood children to gather at our (never very clean) house.

She taught all the children of the neighborhood games to play (Red Rover, Simon Says, Red light/Green light, Poor Pussy, Duck-Duck-Goose) and supervised the play; she encouraged arts and crafts and allowed children to run in and out of the house at will. At the time, I thought these were games she'd played growing up. It wasn't until decades later that I realized these were things she'd learned in her teaching courses in college or read about in novels, and that her own childhood had very few games (or other children) in it.

Our first year in the neighborhood, my mother started a Valentine's day tradition of exchanging Valentine's within the neighborhood, with children scurrying about before light, hiding from each other, to drop cards at each others front doors.

She did this by inviting the other children into our home for valentine-making craft activities, providing cut paper doilies, and red construction paper. While we cut and pasted she told about Valentine's traditions, which now I realize she had never practiced, only read about.

From 1956 to 1963 all the children in the neighborhood, exchanged Valentine's in this way. By 1964 the older girls in the neighborhood had reached high school, and were too "grown up" for the practice so it died out.

grace



Like the gentle rain now falling on our dry autumn forest, the grace of friendship renewed my life this morning.

I turned on the computer to find heartfelt comments from former students and other Facebook friends to my previous post "fear."  For a while the waterworks inside rivaled those outside. This momentarily dismayed my husband, who like most men, just doesn't understand that women cry when they are happy as much or more than when they are sad.

Moreover, I was reminded once again, by the comments here on the blog and on Facebook, of the grace of others with much greater burdens to bear than I have, who take the time to support a friend.

singing the truth together

I recently I discovered a very early book, After Long Silence, by my favorite science fiction writer Sheri Tepper. In the story, humans have settled on a world they view as devoid of sentience, but which is inhabited by at least two sentient races--one huge crystalline entities, and the other small, furry, mammalian creatures called "viggy" by the humans. Through the viggy, Tepper critiques certain aspects of humanity by posing a more attractive alternative. Here is an extended quote, that I think says something extraordinarily valuable about communication and truth, and the error of human ways:

"Memory is a strange thing. A viggy would experience a thing and remember it. Another viggy would experience the same happening and remember it as well. And yet the two memories would not be the same. On a night of shadow and wind, one viggy might sing that he had seen the spirit of his own giligee [nanny], beckoning from beside a Jubal tree. Another viggy might sing he had seen only the wind, moving a veil of dried fronds. What had they seen, a ghost or the fronds? Where was the truth in memory? Somewhere between the spirit and the wind...

When the troupe traveled down a tortuous slope, one would remember pain, another joy. After a mating, one would remember giving, another would remember loss. No one view would tell the truth of what occurred, for truth always lay at the center of many possibilities.

Many views yield the truth...This was the first commandment of the Prime Song. Only when a happening had been sung by the troupe, sung in all its various forms and perceptions, could the truth be arrived at. Then dichotomy could be harmonized, opposition softened, varying views brought into alignment with one another so that all aspects of truth were sung."

One of the benefits of blogging (and Facebook) for me has been not just singing my song of my life, but having others who were present sing their song back to me, and I come to see how limited my own perspective was then and continues to be. Often just the fact of writing things down, has opened my eyes to not just the possibility of other perspectives, but of the great likelihood that my perspective was seriously flawed, limited and self-absorbed. Having high school and college friends respond with their own memories has enriched my understanding in ways I never anticipated.

I don't think that this search for truth together means that all perspectives are equally valid. For example, there are always those students who insist "I don't care what the statistics say, divorce HAS to be increasing." [It's not by the way, it has been declining since 1981, and is lower today than it was in 1967]. But it is worth us trying to discover together what it is about their life experience that makes them feel as if the divorce rate were increasing.

We appear to be at a juncture in our social and political history, when the lessons of the viggy might be good ones to remember.

my life as a ghost

When I was a teenager and a young woman, indeed until I married in my mid-thirties, I had delusions of insignificance. In those days I viewed my impact on others as like that of a ghost.

Perhaps you remember the movie Ghost (Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze), in which the dead (Swazye) require enormous effort and concentration in order to have even the smallest impact on the physical world and to attract the attention of the living.

I believed that to have friends, to have people care about me, required enormous, constant effort on my part. The idea that people would like me, just because I was me never crossed my mind. I had friends, but I believed that was only because I worked so hard at being a good friend.

Friendship was hard enough, but the idea that I might be noticed by men and loved for myself was utterly beyond my world view. I was convinced of my inherent unlovableness. I imagined that if I were to try hard enough, if I baked enough cookies and brownies, wrote enough poems, spent enough time listening to his stories and jokes, gave him enough flowers and unique presents, painted his portrait, devoted enough direct attention to him, then like Patrick Swayze in the movie, I might move the penny just enough to penetrate his awareness. Then if I could penetrate his awareness, I might, with sufficient effort, gain some small measure of affection. However, I was realistic, after all I was not “the kind of girl men fall in love with” – a mantra I repeated often to myself.


Because I thought of myself as a ghost, who could only make an impression on others with great effort, I was unable to conceive of my actions as having any impact on others. Since I believed that it took concerted concentration for me to even begin to dent the awareness of others – especially men – the thought that action or inaction by me could wound someone else never floated into the realm of possibility.

In college when I dated two men who were roommates, it never occurred to me that they would even notice, much less be hurt in any way by my actions. When I made out with one young man one weekend, and his close friend the next, it was to me as if my actions were invisible, cloaked by my ghostliness, occurring in separate, discrete, universes. Even if it had occurred to me that either young man noticed my behavior, it would not have occurred to me that there could be any hurt feelings. After all, how could some one who was a ghost impact on another’s feelings.

My deeply held conviction of unlovableness made it necessary for me to be oblivious to any signs of real affection from young men. Some men I was able to tune out altogether (and learn of their affections years later). Those were the lucky ones. The unlucky young men were the ones in I was interested in, the ones who perhaps might have been interested in return, but for whom, I set ever higher and higher obstacles or tests of their affections.

I would think “if he holds my hand” then perhaps he cares. Then he would hold my hand, and it would not be enough. So I would think “if he kisses me” then perhaps he cares. So he would kiss me and it was not enough. The tests would be come more and more unreasonable, so that it would not take long before whoever he was, he would fail, and I would be reaffirmed in my unlovableness. The saddest part is that there were one or two young men who must have cared a great deal, because they kept coming back, kept passing then failing my "tests" over years, and kept getting hurt.

My ghostly existence was finally penetrated in my mid-thirties by some one who was able to convince me of my lovableness by marrying me, and by a wonderful group of friends who were my friends even though I didn’t do any of the work I thought was necessary to create friends, and by a very wise and insightful therapist.

Twenty-five years later I’m still trying to understand what made me into a ghost girl, and to guard against falling into old habits of imagining my actions do not affect others. Delusions of insignificance can be attractive and reassuring. If we are insignificant it we do not have to be careful of the feelings of others, or of our impact on the world.

Painting, acrylic on canvas "The Oberlin Condition" by S. Greer, copyright 1973.

a prayer for the good people

I am blessed to know so many good people. I'm married to one of them. I have many friends, old friends, new friends, work friends, Internet friends who are good people.

The good people I know rarely know that they are good people. They think they are bad. They feel every mistake they ever make. Their mistakes can eat them up sometimes. Because they are good people, they care about doing right, about helping and not hurting. So when they screw up, which we all do (good and bad) because we are after all...[wait for it]...human, they ache for the pain that they, unintentionally, caused others.

My prayer for all the good people in my life, is not that they stop feeling sorrow for their mistakes, after all that is what makes them good people, but that they avoid allowing that sorrow to engulf and drown them.

Be well happy and peaceful my friends. Shalom and namaste.

owning our choices

Earlier this afternoon I enjoyed a long phone conversation with one of my two best friends. She reads my blog sometimes, so my apologies dear, for appropriating a piece of your life to make a point about my own.

My friend has what I would consider (and I think she also considers) the workplace from hell. It is not her own position per se which is so dreadful, but the larger conditions of the institution for which she labors that are so problematic. It is an institution that appears to be run by the worst assemblage of leaders, managers, and administrators of which I've ever heard. Every few months my friend regales me with fascinating stories of venal, callous, petty, and sometimes even Machiavellian machinations on the part of the decision-makers at her workplace.

My friend who is now past full retirement age and already receiving social security, has been talking about retirement for sometime. So each time we connect I ask if she's notified those above her that she is retiring. And each time we talk she has a different, well thought out, reasonable explanation why it is just not yet the right time to announce her retirement.

We've had nearly the same conversation now every few months for more than a year. But this time, as I listened to her, I realized that as dreadful as this institution is, as many horror stories as she has told about it, there is a deeply embedded part of her that loves working there. In that toxic environment someone who is a compassionate, carrying, principled and decent as my friend makes an enormous difference. She is a bastion of integrity, a protector of the weak and defenseless. This gives her work and her life meaning in a way it would not have in a more benign environment.

Just because it seems to me as a caring friend that she would have a more pleasant life away from that cesspool, does not mean that she should leave. If this is where she finds purpose then perhaps it is not time yet for retirement. I'm sure that there are many other ways that she could and would contribute if she did retire, but there's no reason to retire if she's full-filled where she is.

It is easier to have insights about other people's lives than it is about our own. My friend does not seem to realize how much value this workplace has in her life, and does not understand why she is so reluctant to leave it, having spent so much time over the past few years complaining about the conditions there.

As I drove to the store reflecting upon my friends situation, I began to realize that I too spend a great deal of time complaining about the very things that give my work and life meaning. My favorite phrase is "too much work, too little time." Yet I'm always accepting new assignments, choosing to take on additional projects.

Being "too busy" is what makes me feel needed and necessary, gives my life a sense of purpose and value. It makes me feel important to complain about how busy I am. It gives me an excuse not to do things I don't want to do, because "work comes first." Although that's not really true -- I find time for the things I really value, like talking to my husband, reading mysteries, taking care of my animals.

I think from now on, I won't complain about "too much work" but rather brag about it -- that's what I've really been doing after all. I won't be "too busy" but rather "wonderfully busy," or "blissfully busy."

fare-thee-well, tigger

It's been a long time since my cat Tigger was he of the "bouncy, bouncy tail." He's suffered from a diseased pancreas for several years, but for the last six months its been clear that continuing to live was a daily battle for our indomitable Tigger. We had to feed him four or five times a day to make sure that he got even a tiny amount of nutrition. He'd often sit on the kitchen counter waiting for the next meal. Even with all he ate, he continued to loose weight -- he weighed less than three pounds, all skin and bones literally. But he continued to be interesting in life, in cuddling up with humans and other cats, with exploring boxes and investigating corners.

This morning he decided that the struggle was too much, and he stopped eating and lay down. So together Tigger and I made a last trip over the mountain to our friends at Pound Veterinary Hospital. When I came home, John and I dug another small grave at the corner of our yard under the pine trees, and placed Tigger to rest with the other beloved pets who have gone before.



Sleep well, Tigger.

Remember, Betti?

Columbus Day

Fog mingles with rain, and snags
in the tops of the redwoods,
not reaching the road where
the trees close in densely.

Morning paper amuses, informs
while the wind shakes the metal shell
around us and blurs the boundaries
between grey waves and grey rain.

We race the shifting sun and clouds
and chase the rainbow
up the coast highway
past orange pumpkin fields and green hills
before turning city-ward again.

S. Greer
October 26, 1973

Photo is this past Saturday in Kentucky, but it reminded me of our day-off adventure, all those years ago.