To Think or Not To Think

I’m not thinking about being an atheist.

I’m not thinking about eating.

I’m not thinking about my ex-husband.

I’m not thinking about grocery shopping.

I’m not thinking about tea.

I’m not thinking about being old.

I’m not thinking about the sunshine.

I’m not thinking about my daughter in Norfolk.

Yes, I am, and my grandson who is going to Afghanistan in a week.

I’m not thinking about the danger.

I’m not thinking about clean floors or dirty laundry.

I’m not thinking about my brother and mother as this moment.

I’m not thinking about kayaking or canoeing or swimming.

I am thinking about coffee, caffeinated.

I am thinking about my granddaughters and hoping to visit them this week.

I am thinking about a lawyer I don’t like and what to do about her.

I am thinking about exotic travel, to places green, lush, warm, wild.

I am thinking about what it will be like when my husband retires in 4 short months.

I am thinking about exercising more.

I am thinking of walking to get the paper today and needing a raincoat.

I am thinking about rain, and wet, and damp chill.

I am thinking about slugs.

I am thinking about how good the peach/blueberry cobbler smells.

I am thinking about war.

I am thinking about youth and risk.

I am thinking about friends and reading books together.

I am thinking about reading.

I am thinking about that I love to write.

I am thinking about George Clooney and a new movie.

I am thinking about our 8^th wedding anniversary and Elvis Presley.

I am thinking that marriage is complicated and hard and sometimes easy.

I am thinking that love is baffling.

I am thinking that there are hundreds of kinds of love.

I am thinking how much I love peanut butter.

I am thinking about my son who will soon experience Southeast India.

I am thinking about giving gifts.

I am thinking that I love giving gifts almost as much as peanut butter.

I am thinking that my back hurts a little and that I need to stretch.

I am thinking about parenting and that I didn’t realize how difficult it was to know the right way while I was doing it.

I am thinking about my children as parents.

I am thinking about how good this coffee tastes.

I am thinking of starting a new religion—Coffeetarian.

Air Heads

Never know what you're going to see when you take a trip to Seattle.

Toys

Cowgirl Chris and her Gun

Toy Story III was recently released to great anticipation and reviews.  I don’t know a soul who hasn’t enjoyed the Toy Story movies, probably because of the memories it brings back of the toys we used to play with and the imaginary worlds we entered when we played with them.

My favorite toys were dolls to begin with.  The plastic doll with a diaper and her own bottle that I filled with water, fed to her and then to my delight, she immediately wet her tiny pink diaper.  The wooden doll with the cloth body, which I loved better than any other doll and that my brother dunked in a bucket of water, which permanently removed the paint on her face.  Neither of these dolls had hair, in fact, I don’t remember any of my dolls having hair.  They didn’t have extra clothes either.  And there were no Barbies then, or Bratz dolls.  I think there were dolls that “walked”, had joints of some kind, but I didn’t have any of those.

I loved paper dolls, too, the kind that were hard cardboard with a book full of clothes you had to cut out with the little tabs for hanging the clothes on the doll.  I had several of these, one or two of movie stars, and I played with them endlessly, changing their clothes.  Trouble with these is that they didn’t bend! It was hard to get them to sit at the imaginary table, but they were better at going to bed.

I liked playing “cars”, too, but these were the days before Matchbox cars and so, oh poor kid, I played with rocks!  I’d make roads in the dirt and drive my rock cars around on the streets in my “town”.  (I know my brother had some cars but he wouldn't share.) And, of course, like all girls, I had a doll’s house.  Mine was made of tin, with painted rugs and walls and plastic furniture, and I spent hours moving the furniture around.  My paper dolls were too tall for the rooms in the house but they could walk around outside of it.

We may not have had Matchbox cars or talking dolls, but in those politically incorrect good old days we had guns and cowboy hats, so we played Cowboys and Indians.  Being the oldest, I got to be Roy Rogers, my best friend, Linda, was Dale Evans, and my brother and her brother traded places being The Sheriff and The Bad Guy/Indian.  We had a large lot with fruit trees so we had plenty of paths and bushes and trees to stand in for mountains and mesas and hideouts.  Our laundry porch was the jail.  I can still make the horse galloping sound with my mouth and tongue clicking against each other.  When I make that sound it takes me right back to those days of trotting around searching for the bad guy and heading him off at the pass.

My most specific and happiest memory of playing with “toys” was recreating school in my bedroom.  I loved clean paper and notebooks, large and small.  I would line up my dolls and give them assignments and then put grades in a tiny notebook.  I don’t recall disciplining anybody, just teaching them.  I used my children’s books as texts and I taught them how to read.  I might have taught them arithmetic, too, because I liked it.

When I got a little older I made my bedroom into an office and I became a secretary--another way to use clean paper and notebooks.  I must have seen an office on television or heard about it on the radio, otherwise I can’t imagine how I would have known about such things.  My Dad either upholstered or was a civil servant at the Navy Yard or Keyport, no offices or secretaries, and my Mom didn't work outside the home.

There were the “physical” toys, too.  The hula hoop, which I got pretty good at, and my bicycle, which I rode around Tracyton endlessly, pretending it was a car.  I wrote previously about how quiet our neighborhood was and I don’t remember ever having to worry about cars while I was riding.  Tracyton had wide roads, some of them still dirt, and a kid could ride up and down the blocks safely.  And in Winter we had a sled that our Dad made us and we had a steep hill that started up by Grant’s Store and leveled out perfectly so that we didn’t slide all the way down to the bay.  

And pick-up sticks and Jacks, the games Darlene Murphy and I used to play at her house, on the kitchen floor.  I loved the challenge of Jacks--I think we used to play it at grade school, too, when we weren’t jumping rope or playing Hop-Scotch.  Which makes me remember the board games--Sorry, Monopoly, Operation.

We played and imagined a lot when we were kids.  We had no electronics except for the radio we listened to most of my childhood because we didn’t have a TV set yet--ours came in 1954, when I was 10, but until that point I imagined Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and The Shadow and The Whistler.  I will never forget the theme song to The Whistler, so mysterious, so scary.  

I feel lucky that I lived in a simpler time, that I played outdoors a lot and that my imagination was percolating all the time.

Soul Food

The lamb, some mushrooms, Eliza and Paniotis (cousins)

For years now I have listed my “favorite meal of the year” on my New Year’s Paper, so it’s not usual for me to think about meals I have had.  The writing assignment from The Daily Writer for February 13 was “Begin writing a series of soul-food dining moments”.  It has been pretty easy for me to find some good highlights as food, the cooking of it, and the eating of it, and the smell of it, and the look of it, have always been a significant part of my life.

The first meal I thought of was the Easter meal in Greece that we were honored to attend in the Spring of 2008.  This was a big Greek, loud family deal.  All the brothers, sisters, cousins, Aunts and Uncles were there in the tiny yard of my husband’s Aunt Eleni.  I knew there would be a lamb on a spit--I had seen old pictures from Michael’s albums of the spit being hand-cranked, uncles taking turns, the lamb roasting for hours in the open air, the smell of the lamb floating up into the house.  However the lamb wasn’t being hand-cranked this year as my husband had expected--someone had rigged an electric motor to turn the spit and so the uncles got to relax.  With the exception of Eleni’s husband, Lefteris, they are all in their 80s after all.  Cooking was taking place in the house, too, women peeling potatoes, squeezing lemons, chopping garlic, going out to take a look at the lamb.  A big roasting pan was being filled with the potatoes, lemon squeezed on top, olive oil drizzled over it  and then a flat piece of lamb with garlic in the fat pockets, then more garlic around the potatoes, then shortening dotted op top and more olive oil on the lamb and freshly ground pepper, and this would bake in a very slow oven for a couple of hours while more lamb roasted outside on the spit.

It was a long wait for the dinner and when it was finally done the living and dining rooms were full with relatives--we younger ones (youth being relative) all ate at a couple of card tables, the octogenarians at the dining table, drinking wine, laughing, speaking Greek, telling stories, remembering other Easters.  There were the traditional red Easter eggs, which each of us would wish on and then crack together, the one with the shell that didn’t break would get his wish.

The Oldsters (Uncle Lefteris is pouring Retsina, which was made by a guy across the street.)

The Youngsters (Me, Lambrose, Cousin Mihali and Cousin Mary)

I’ve been trying to duplicate those potatoes ever since and can’t seem to get it just right.  I have to go back to Greece again, probably next year if they stop striking over their anger about the economic cutbacks, and ask Eleni to show me exactly how she makes them.  And then again, it might just be the potatoes, lemons and garlic that are different in Greece or maybe, really probably, it was just the company.

The yummy lemon potatoes with a hunk of lamb on top

A Poetic and Sentimental Dad

This was written by my Dad when I was small, but old enough to smile. I rediscoverd it recently.

(I know there has to be a way to turn this so that it can be read, but I can't find one, so I'm going to type the text here.)
 
Just a Sweet little thing
With a cute little smile--
She's pretty, that's plainly seen.
She wins many hearts
With her wondrous beguile,
This shy little girl
Christine.

Up in heaven I'm sure,
No angel could be
Sweeter than this one on earth.
With her dark pretty hair
And her lovely blue eyes
No price is too great for her worth.

Gardening When Wet

I was writing in my head on Friday, while I was in my garden, and doing pretty well, so I thought I’d better start getting it down before all those words disappeared.  

As anyone who lived in the Pacific Northwest knows, we have had a wet and cold Spring, what feels like an extension of winter.  The Jet Stream chose to give us a mild winter, no snow to speak of, temperatures mostly in the forties, but the Jet Stream seems also to have chosen to continue it’s influences on our Spring, which has seen more rainy days in a row than I can ever remember at this time of year and temperatures in the 50s during the day and often down to the 30s at night.  In my memory, which admittedly is viewed through rose-colored glasses, May was a month that could often be described as summery.  My son was born in May of 1977 and I distinctly remember his tiny little body in only a diaper and a t-shirt because it was so warm.

But this year, our warm Spring days could probably be counted on one hand.  I have found myself on so many days standing at the window, staring out at the wet patio, the dripping apple trees, the wet soil in my new raised beds.  At the beginning of April I planted lettuce and beet seeds.  They germinated pretty quickly and I was excited by the 1/4 inch tall seedlings.  But then the weather changed back to seriously cold at night, in the 30s, and my little seedlings stopped growing.  A few weeks later, I planted more lettuce and beet seeds.  Only a few of them sprouted.  Two weeks ago I did a third planting.  No little seedling has dared to show it’s face yet--those tiny seeds are obviously shivering below the surface of the soil, afraid to pop their heads out for fear of freezing or being drowned by giant drops of rain--glub, glub. The first seedlings have now shriveled, totally giving up and who can blame them?  

Friday I had had it with the rain.  I had considered drowning (you see how much I am thinking of copious amounts of liquid?) my sorrows in margaritas but I thought I’d try a more positive approach and try rain drowning first.  So I put on my blue and black raincoat, the hooded one everyone in the Northwest owns that we all bought at the big warehouse store, and I put on what I think of as my clonker shoes, big, ugly navy blue ones that I bought through the catalog from the store with the letters and the legume name and I got my nitrile gardening gloves and my 5-gallon white bucket and I went out the door into the rain, shaking my fist at the sky:  “You won’t win”, I yelled at the black clouds.  “I will  not be stopped!”

While I was staring out my windows one of the plants in my garden that had caught my ambitious attention was a large white rhododendron that had flowered profusely at the beginning of the month.  The blossoms had been huge, luminescent, attracting bees, proving why we gardeners plant rhody’s here in the Northwest.  But after days of rain the blooms were dragging on the ground, had become brown and slimy, the weight of the rain on the spent blooms threatening to break the skinny limbs.  This would be the target of my rebellion against the constant rain.

Dead-heading a rhododendron is not my favorite garden chore.  The old flowers stamens are sticky, they are hard to grasp with gloved fingers and even harder to be precise with the removal of the entire flower clump.  I usually use surgical gloves because this kind of work requires care, but Friday the rain was cold and I wanted my hands to stay warm while I rebelled against the unseasonable wet. 

I grasped and broke off the dead heads, throwing them in my bucket, while my increasingly wet hood slid down over my face, blocking my view of the bush.  I pushed into the shrub to get at those old flowers that had hidden inside it, in the process drenching my jacket and my pants with the rain the leaves had been collecting.  My clonkers were getting soaked, my nose was cold, my hair, that I had carefully blown dry earlier, never expecting that I would be leaving the house for any reason, had turned limp, my back was aching, not used to this level of gardening yet.  But I looked up at the sky and cursed again, and kept at it, dead head after dead head.  

I heard no dogs barking, no neighbors calling to each other, not a car or UPS truck, no birds singing--it was deadly quiet except for the sound of the rain on the cobblestones and the rhododendrons.  Just as I was deciding that not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse, except for crazed me, I heard the distinctive calls of the raven couple who nest near our yard and every day take a cruise over their “territory”.  A big raven, maybe male, flew overhead followed noisily by either a female or a juvenile learning to fly, grocking and complaining.  Another small raven brought  up the rear, equally loudly.  I wasn’t alone after all, in my desire to be doing something productive despite the weather.  I felt a little better to know that I had company.

I forged on, almost done, then finding one more spent bloom, slimy with wet, under a dripping leaf, then one more and one more, until finally I was done, my bucket 3/4 full.  I was able to stand back and be happy about what I had accomplished.  I stood dripping from head to toe, not nearly as glorious looking as the rhododendron bush, which, as soaking wet as me, was now clean and lovely, her dark green gown glistening with pearls of rain. Standing next to her was another rhody just now beginning to bloom, which in a week or two would begin shedding its flowers and making a mess, probably a soggy one if the trend continued.  But for now, all was well, all was serene, the rain was not my enemy anymore, but a benevolent entity bathing my garden, nourishing and gentle. Me and the rain, the only ones besides the ravens, both triumphant.....and wet.

What to do about loud neighbors......

Just a little addition to the "neighbors" conversation..........

Neighbors

Painting by Terry Ananny

Here’s a book I’m going to read:  In The Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time, by Peter Lovenheim.  The thing is, this guy lives in a neighborhood where a murder-suicide took place in 2000.  He wondered how that could happen in a neighborhood, with apparently no warning, where nobody saw any signs, or noticed any signs.  He realized he knew few of his neighbors and they didn’t know each other. He wanted to get to know them and he set out to do it, by inviting himself to spend 24 hours with each of them, sleeping over, having dinner and breakfast with them.

I’ve been thinking about the neighborhoods I’ve lived in over the years.  Being nearly 66, I’ve lived in several, and they’ve all been here in Kitsap, a relatively quiet and seemingly safe place.  I grew up in Tracyton in the 50s.  Tracyton is still nearly as small as it was when we lived there.  The streets are wide, perfect for a bicycle or walking, the traffic is sparse, it’s pretty, green, flowery.  As a kid it was a perfect place to grow up.  Neighbors were close by, but not too close, their doors always seemed to be open to whoever dropped by, even if it was the 9 year-old daughter of an upholsterer and a housewife. I rode my bike all over the little town, down to the bay, up to the store, over to the Methodist Church, over to the vacant lot where my brother once fell in a hole and broke his leg.  I visited a house in which a woman lived who liked to knit.  There was no greater honor for me than to hold her yarn across my two arms while she wound it into a bigger and bigger ball.  I don’t remember the name of this woman, I only remember the yarn and the winding and the fact that I was always welcome.  I visited the house behind our house, a run-down place with a huge garbage pile in the yard.  There were kids in that house that I liked playing with and there was also a scary looking strap hung up on the wall of the kitchen, a strap used for spankings, I was told.  I went next door to the Curia’s house, an Italian family who had moved to Washington from Brooklyn, New York, had Franco American spaghetti in big white bowls every day for lunch and who had a pantry in their house, something I had never seen before.  Linda and David Curia’s dad, a milkman, was born in Sicily, they all had accents from New York, they were dark-skinned and exotic and their house smelled like empty cottage cheese cartons.  I went to see my friend, Darlene, whose family had a television long before we had one.  Her mother was always ready to have a friend of Darlene’s over, feeding me lunch, allowing me to sit in front of their television and watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1952.  I wandered all over Tracyton as a kid visiting this neighbor or that one, staying as long as they’d let me.  My mother didn’t mind and my brother and I would keep our ears open for the police whistle she blew that would call us home for dinner.

We moved to Chico, to my Dad’s boyhood house, when I was 13.  Maybe it was because I was 13 and involved in Junior High and new friends at school that I didn’t know our neighbors very well in the new neighborhood.  Nancy Kvinsland lived down the street and I babysat for some people across the street and our bus driver, Mrs. Ajax, lived directly across from us, but that was about the extent of neighbors I was aware of.  The street in front of our house was very busy, this was before the freeway went in, so there wasn’t a lot of walking or bicycling on it. By this time my little brother was 2 years old and my Mom was busy with him so she wasn’t out making friends, either.

We were still living at Chico when I graduated from high school. I went off to UPS for one semester and while there eloped with Jim Shrefler.  Our first house was on South Montgomery in West Bremerton and the only neighbor we had was the Navy Yard.  We didn’t live there long, it was a tiny place, tiny living room, tiny kitchen, tiny bedroom, tiny bathroom, tiny mice birthed in a kitchen drawer.  When I got pregnant we moved to North Callow to a better house in a better area, with grass and other houses around us.  We made friends with one couple who lived within 100 yards of our house and who were also starting a family.  We spent a lot of time together, playing cards, making dinner for each other, and when our babies arrived within months of each other our friendship grew even deeper.  The only other neighbor I was aware of was an “older woman” who lived across the street.  I’d see her during the summer, coming out to lay on a lawn chair in her bathing suit, tanning.  She probably was 30 and I remember thinking that she was “well preserved”, but I never knew her name.

Next stop was Audrey Street in what we used to call Navy Yard City.  Is it still called that?  Because my daughter was walking and playing outside by then I was much more aware of my neighbors.  Marco Handley lived across the street, collected clocks and antiques, made his own beeswax candles and gave my daughter a sweet old rocking chair.  Next door were the grandparents of Mitchell, my daughter’s first childhood friend and to the South, Miss Strange (her real name), who was true to her name and collected dogs.  Down the street was a young entrepreneur who sold frozen chocolate covered bananas from a motorized cart in the summer.

We moved to Olsen Road on Bucklin Hill in Silverdale when our land was bought by the State to build the Hiway 3 freeway.  Again it was my daughters (2 by now) who dictated which neighbors we knew.  Treena’s family lived across the road, Andrea’s down the street and the Morman family lived down the hill.  We stayed only 1 year at this location, renovating and moving to a house on the grounds of the Unitarian Fellowship on Sylvan Way.  There were no neighbors close by at all, but every Sunday and Wednesday there was sufficient social life for the whole family to be engaged.  

In 1974 Jim and I divorced and in 1976 I moved with my new husband to a small house North of Poulsbo, on the highway towards the Hood Canal Bridge.  This place’s memories included the day the landlord/neighbors slaughtered cows right outside my kitchen window.  I was 7 months pregnant and didn’t appreciate that they hadn’t warned me.  They were our only neighbors and though they were very religious they weren’t welcoming.  My girls were ensconced in school then and their friends lived further away than ever.

Soon after the cow executions we moved nearer to Poulsbo, into the biggest house I’d ever lived in, but still with only one neighbor.  We had a view of the slough and a lot of land around us.  My girls caught the school bus at the top of the driveway along with the neighbor kids, boys who eventually stole things out of our cars.  The neighbor experiences were deteriorating.

We lived in this big house until our baby boy was 3 and then we moved to Kingston, into a house my husband’s parents had built and lived in for several years.  They had moved closer to Kingston and we didn’t have enough money to buy, so we rented from them.  Neighbors at this place consisted of my husband’s aunt and uncle, the family of a little girl that my son became friends with when he started Kindergarten, a family across the road and up the hill who I’d met when he was in pre-school.  It was a rural road with houses far apart and lots of empty fields, people were separated by space and woods.  We became pretty close to the family up the hill and our youngest children played together while we drank tea and talked about our lives.  It was the first real “good neighbor” experience since my first daughter was little and it lasted for almost 8 years--until my husband and I broke up and my son and I moved to the Viking Crest Apartments back in Poulsbo.

I loved living at the apartments because of the extraordinary view and the location so close to town.  My son already had friends in Poulsbo, kids that he’d befriended in grade school and were now in Middle School.  He made a couple of friends who lived in other apartments, but I didn’t.  It’s an usual thing, I think, to live in apartments but to have your neighbors unknown to you.  Living so close you would think that some kind of camaraderie would develop, but it wasn’t that way.  I could hear the man downstairs snoring at night, through the floor of my bedroom, but I never met him, couldn't have picked him out in a line-up.  I went to the pool in the summer and used the sauna often, but nobody ever approached me and I was too shy to approach them.  I made one friend while I was there for the three years that we lived there and it was a man who I tried a relationship with, which failed.  Even at Halloween, when bags and bags of candy were distributed through our opening doors, we didn’t exchange hellos.  Maybe it was that physical closeness that was too much for people--what if you made a friend and there was a falling out?  They’d be right there, under your nose, impossible to avoid.  It still seems strange to me though. 

Now I live in another rural neighborhood.  Each house is on 2 1/2 acres and sits back away from our common road with a buffer of trees between each house and the road.  I know more neighbors here than I have since my daughters were little.  We have a yearly meeting because we have dues and covenants, so we see each other then.  We have a yearly road and yard cleanup and many of us participate and eat together afterwards.  One couple asks us to feed their birds and watch their house while they are gone.  We ask the same of them.  Over the years a relationship with them has evolved, but still, we don’t have coffee or tea or beers together, or play cards or have a daily or even weekly friendship.  Most of us are retired, we sometimes see each other at the mailbox or driving in or out.  There are a couple of families with young children who live in the neighborhood but we never see the kids outside of their yards or playing with each other.  It seems the days of kids visiting other families in their neighborhoods is over.  The days of coffee klatches are over.  I suppose the kids in our neighborhood go to daycare, their mothers and fathers both work.  They may be home only in the evening.

Just what to make of all this?  When I first started writing I expected that I would be able to make some kind of sociological statement about the loss of neighborliness or something of the sort.  But as I wrote I realized it was me that had changed more than neighborhoods and our parts in them.  I enjoy knowing some of my neighbors, it’s a feeling of safety to know that you have a phone number to call, a familiar face in case of need, but I savor my alone time so much, for writing, reading, gardening and other solitary pursuits, that I don’t encourage visitors.  We live rather far apart, it is true, but all are within a short walk.  It isn’t because they aren’t friendly or at home--it’s me.  When I had kids I suppose neighbors were a lifeline, society for a young mother, company.  Work was that way, too; people to exchange greetings with, share a day with, commiserate over life’s troubles.  But since I’ve retired I don’t seem to feel the need for company as much, so neighbors aren’t tempting, being neighborly (what would that mean, anyway? tea? gossiping?) isn’t something I strive for, nor is it something I actively ignore.  I just keep to myself, do my thing, engage with neighbors when they happen by or at meetings or on cleanup days.

I do think fewer people are at home these days--parents are working, kids are at daycare before and after school, making friends there and in school, rather than next door.  Maybe there is a little less trust.  Retired people are energetic and out doing things, not sitting on their porches waiting for someone to come by.  But as for my experiences as they pertain to neighbors, it’s all my own doing, or not doing, as the case may be.

The Land of the Worried

I feel as though I’ve been underground, or in a cave, or under the bed, I’ve been away somewhere.  I’ve been in The Land of the Worried.  I have been focused on worry, I’ve been looking at it as through a microscope, zeroing in on it, magnifying it, making it big, making it almost my life.  I’ve been doing this intensely for about 2 weeks, maybe more, worry makes you lose track of time.  It makes you lose track.  It wipes out everything else. It becomes a horrible drug, without which you cannot function.  But the thing is, you can’t function when the worry is there, either.  Worry takes you to lands that aren’t pretty--lands like depression, sadness, anger, lands where you are lost.  Worry takes over, worry won’t let go, worry rules.

What me?  Worry?  Oh, yes.  I have everything there is in life to have--I have a good husband, great friends, a nice, comfortable house, enough money, children who’ve never been in real trouble, a mother still alive and spry at 88, a brother with mental illness, yes, but who doesn’t flagrantly break the law or do harm to others, beautiful grandchildren.  So what does someone like me have to worry about?

No matter who we are, no matter how blessed we are, if we are worry-prone, we will find something to worry about.  And I am one of those--one who thinks that worry will somehow get me prepared for the worst, will somehow help me solve a problem, will in the end show me the solution.  But that is not the case.  The only thing worry does is manufacture more worry, build upon itself, until there is a very high mountain where there once was a tiny molehill.  Worry digs a deep hole under that mountain and buries you in it.

So what was I worrying about for the past 2 or more weeks?  My itchy, flaking scalp, which got so bad I finally had to go to the doctor, my home remedies not working.  My mother and her increasingly failing memory, who had to have cataract surgery and then had to live with me for a week while I administered her eyedrops four times a day.  My 19-year-old granddaughter, Alecia, who woke up one morning deaf in one ear.  My brother’s inability to be responsible for significantly  helping to care for our mother.  A pain in my upper back that I’d had for over a year and put off going to the doctor about.  A myxoid cyst on my finger that keeps returning.  A broken heat pump which resulted in my having to build fires for the entire week my Mom was here to heat the house until it could be fixed.  The dread of my 21 year-old grandson being sent to Iraq in August.  And some other family developments that I don’t want to put into a blog post.

When I list those items I can see it’s no wonder that I was stressed.  It was what is so often called lately “a perfect storm” of circumstances, all of them coming at once, any one of them enough to make me worry a little, to turn things over in my head at night when trying to sleep.  With all of these incidences coming at once, there was nothing I could think about at night, waiting for the float into sleep--I would start to think about my grandchildren and Alecia and what she will have to do in her life now that one of her ears refuses to hear would cross my mind and I would begin to worry about it.  Or I would begin to think about the dangers of my mother’s short, short memory, potential horrifying scenarios playing out in my poor itchy head.  I managed to shy away from thinking about my grandson going to Iraq, but I was not successful with the other more immediate concerns.  There seemed no place for my brain to land that wasn’t full of pitfalls.  So I read novels before sleep, but only novels that provided deep escape--vampires, werewolves, different centuries, different countries and cultures, never anything that could remind me of present situations.  When I laid down to sleep I would try to go to those places rather than staying here in the place I found myself.

Though I thought keeping my Mom in my house for a week, and making sure her eyedrops made it into her eyes as often as they were supposed to, would be a good thing, maybe a little different schedule, the TV on most of the time, I did not realize that having her here would make me worry about her more.  When she took 3 sleeping pills one day and tried to take way too many allergy pills on another, I realized that her lack of memory was getting dangerous and I couldn’t hide the fact from myself anymore.  I lay awake at night, my head slathered with steroid ointment under my plastic shower cap, listening for her movements downstairs, hoping she wouldn’t fall or take too many pills.  After she was back home, the worry continued because now she wasn’t here where I could keep an eye on her.  I began to panic, crying to my husband that there was nobody to help, why couldn’t my brother help, my future looked awful, it couldn’t possibly get better.

But I am back now--how did I find that road back?  I’m not sure, I wish I knew so that I could make it back easier next time.  I did some things--I vented to my husband and a couple of old friends, to a daughter, pouring it out regardless of the possible consequences--friends running away, husband not listening, daughter not taking it seriously.  Those things didn’t happen--my husband was consoling, offering words of love and advice, my friends were supportive offering their ears and one friend even helped me find a place in town that I might find caregiving help.  My daughter and her husband both offered compassion and advice.  I went to a doctor to check out the pain in my back and my scalp started to get better.  I guess I moved forward, that’s all I can attribute the new outlook to, the climb up out of that hole.

I can sleep again, even though I am still treating my scalp and wearing my little shower cap to bed.  I have graduated to reading whatever strikes my fancy, rather than books that I can crawl into and put behind me everything in the real world, the pain in my back is a little less.  It helped most to have the friends, my husband, daughter and son-in-law included in that category, to talk to, to say it was okay to feel the way I was feeling.  It helped, too, to read this phrase in an article in Sun Magazine about Buddhist teachings:  “The Buddhist teachings....encourage us to relax gradually and wholeheartedly into the ordinary and obvious truth of change.  What it means is that we’re not the only one who can’t keep it all together.  We no longer believe that there are people who have managed to avoid uncertainty.”

A Beer-y Nice Day

Was it the good dark beer I drank at lunch that caused the glow I felt during and after our Alumni lunch in Mt. Vernon yesterday, or did the glow come from something else? Since I've felt this before after one of our lunches, even without beer, I think it must have been something else. I was pooped when I got home. It had been a day that began at 7:45 a.m. when I left for Jack's house and didn't end until I got home at 5:30, kind of like work hours, but so much more pleasurable. As I collapsed on the couch, watching tapes of the Olympics and eating toast with peanut butter and jam for dinner, I thought back over the day, trying to collect the memories in a place that I could get at them later. That's not always such an easy thing these days.

Lavonna Rubens Allen, Karen Archer and Jack Archer

We started out at Jack's, seven of us, drinking coffee and muffins, before splitting up into two cars to begin our journey. I got to ride in Jack's Humvee, a smooth-riding behemoth, with Lavonna and Joyia, while Ralph rode in Gary's car with Jim. We met inside the Kingston ferry and began a conversation that would last the rest of the day, the characters participating and the topics of the conversation changing as the day went by. I haven't talked and listened so much in a long time. I talked with Jim Peterson about cruising the Panama Canal, with Gary about beer and mentally disturbed siblings, with both about health and attitude. I rode with Gary and Jim to the Farm House Restaurant while Ralph switched seats with me in the Hummer, so he could direct Jack to our destination.

Lavonna, Joyia Mentor, Jack and Our Mail Guy on the Kingston ferry

At the restaurant the first person I saw was Jeanette Youngs Longstreth and then Bruce Johnson. I'd been thinking about Bruce lately because I always do when the Winter Olympics are on. I remember a party of teens at Bruce's house gathered to watch the 1960 Olympic Games on television. Bruce tells me it is still a tradition to have people over to watch the events. Then I saw Marilyn Richardson Lovlien and Greg--was it Greg that got his growth after we graduated or am I confusing him with someone else? I didn't get a chance to ask. At the table I talked to Mike Cooper who insisted on telling me what a rascal he was when we were kids in Tracyton. There was the Alumni Game we always play: Do you remember? We talked about Danny Coulter and the Sackmans and Toni Agnesani and Dick Witte and the Lent's pasture. Who lived where? Does anybody know where they are now? Mike also told me about his time in the service, his 3 months in Thailand where he was involved in building what he called The Freedom Road. He said he barely made it out of the service before Viet Nam became a place some of our classmates had to serve their time. Earlier Jim Peterson told me he'd barely escaped Viet Nam himself.

Greg Lovlein, Ralph and Mike Cooper

One of the frustrations of these lunches for me is that, if I want to have a nice long conversation with someone, it means there will be people I don’t get to talk to at all. At this lunch I missed talking to Greg and Marilyn and Bob Forbes and Florence Voltin. I did finally get to talk to Linc David, after several lunches where I saw him but missed a conversation. There is much more to know about Linc and his life, but this time he told me about two trips he’s taken to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota. He said his wife road on the back of his Harley both times, but after the last one she said she wasn’t going to do it again. They’ll go again, but next time it will be in a motor home with the bike towed behind it. We all have to make some adjustments as we grow older, don’t we?

Jim Peterson, Linc David, Jeanette Youngs Longstreth, Randy Flowers, Marilyn and Greg Lovlein

Bruce Johnson’s wife, Ellen, had left him off at the lunch to go swimming. While she was gone he told me she is a talented singer and wants to travel in the Smokey Mountains and the Crooked Road in Virginia and study their heritage music. Bruce was retiring the next day and wasn’t quite sure what he planned to do, but didn’t seem concerned about it. I had a short conversation with Randy Flowers about his retirement and his ambivalence about it. He has been retired for two years but hasn’t quite figured it out. Retirement when you are working looks like a golden time, the light at the end of the tunnel, nirvana. But it is a complex transition, more complicated for some than for others. It took me a full two years to realize that I couldn’t do every single thing on the list I’d been keeping for several years—things I didn’t have time to do when I was working. I found I had to cut some things out, or at least postpone them, in order to give my energy to some priorities. It’s an exciting time, but for some it can be a source of angst. I was used to having lots of people around to visit with or bounce ideas off of, and after retirement I missed that. I’ve had to create some regular social time with old friends in order to fill that void. And now we have these alumni lunches which are a wonderful form of connection. I guess it all depends on what we are searching for and if we are still searching. Another alumni friend asked me what I wanted to find, meaning or happiness? For me it is happiness. Writing, reading, gardening, taking photographs, meeting with friends, visiting my grandchildren, makes me happy.

Bruce and Ellen Johnson (Jeanette's Picture)

Randy Flowers (Jeanette's Picture)

At some of our lunches we have had “attendees by phone” and at this lunch we had three. Gary Rivers talked to us several times from Portland. He had hoped to come to the lunch but had to be a chauffeur for his daughter that day, so he called us while he was watching Olympic curling. I commented that it sounded a little boring and he assured me that since it was Women’s Curling it was not boring at all. We heard from Sally Burt Forcier, who was calling from her patio in Yuma, Arizona, sipping ice water in the 82 degree weather. Mike Traverso called, too. Hopefully, all of our callers will make it to our 50th reunion, only 2 years away.

Gary Parker and Jeanette Youngs Longstreth (Jeanette's Picture)

I titled this post A Beer-y Nice Day because the day started out with Gary Parker giving the seven of us beer from his Iron Horse Brewery. He had some new recipes he wanted us to try. At lunch the beer drinkers in the crowd tried the dark beer that the Farm House had on tap and as the party was breaking up Gary had his trunk open again and bestowed armloads of beer to eager takers. Later, when we were back at Jack’s house, I was lucky enough to be the beneficiary of some more of Jack’s own personally formulated and bottled Captain Jack’s Dark Ale. But the one glass of beer I had at the restaurant couldn’t explain the afterglow that I felt even days after our lunch. I’ll drink a toast in beer to many more days like this one.

New Security

Sorry faithful readers.  I have had to add word verification to the comments section of my blog.  For some reason an old post from 2006, about Nasal Irrigation, has attracted comment spammers and I've just deleted 7 comments from that one, so I've decided in order to cut down on maintenance I will add this new level of security.  I know it's a pain, but it seems necessary.

Brains and Science Fiction

Happy Mom on her 88th Birthday

Have just finished reading My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. I read this now because a young friend's husband had the same type of stroke recently and I wanted to understand how it happens and what Taylor's experience was. She was only 37 and for anyone in another field it must be terrifying, but she is a neuroanatomist, who studies brain function and so to her it was fascinating what was happening to her brain and how it recovered. As a scientist she studied carefully what she was losing and what was left (or right, actually). Her hemorrhagic stroke shut down the left side of her brain, leaving her with the right side, no word processing or mathematic or logical thinking processes, but a fantastic feeling of euphoria, oneness with the universe, bliss. She wanted to keep those feelings and knew that as her left brain functions started to come back that she would have to fight the negative emotions that left brains are so good at stirring up, to retain her feeling of well-being.





Of course, she wanted what her left brain could give her--language, organization skill, common sense, memory--what she didn't want was the looping of fear thought or judgmental thought or worry or anger that the left side of the brain can bring. She wanted to remain, as much as possible, in the here and now. She actually has been able to do this to a large extent and at the end of her book tries to help the rest of us, who haven't experienced her dramatic route to enlightenment, with some techniques to shut down those emotions that we may want to acknowledge, but not encourage.






What really struck me, though, was Taylor's description of someone who is right brain prominent. It sounded so much like my mother! I am often frustrated with my mother's apparent lack of common sense or organizational skills; I am like the left brain censuring the right brain. My Mom, however, lives in a happy world. She doesn't judge, she sees life positively, she is trusting, enthusiastic, grateful for her health, she has childlike curiosity. She doesn't dwell on her age or think about death, either hers or the deaths of her husband, son and friends. She is sad for a short time and then she is done being sad. She is rarely angry. Part of this is that her memory is failing--and memory is a function of our left brain. It could be said that as she gets older and her left brain becomes less active, her right brain, which has always been stronger, is stronger still. And though this manifests itself in losing her purse, or forgetting appointments, or not remembering what I told her 30 minutes before or not being able to find her way to church, the result is also that she is a very happy and contented person. When she broke her shoulder and cracked her kneecap a year or so ago, she often asked me what had happened to her shoulder, how had she fallen, had she really been in a nursing home for 6 days. As she healed she would even forget that anything had happened at all. I think this forgetting helped her heal and to regain the use of her arm more thoroughly than the doctor had ever expected. She didn't fret or moan about her pain, she viewed the physical therapy as a social event, and for the most part she simply forgot that she had been injured. Her right brain, full of happiness, dominates, and it is restorative.






My mother has not always been this way, although, being an artist and singer she was always more right than left brained. She used to get angry, yell, rail at her husband and children, bemoan the responsibilities of being a woman in charge of a home. She was often frustrated by a husband who was egotistical and controlling. It is only in these latter years, as she slowly loses some of her faculties, that she has come to this state of peaceful happiness. I will try to remember that losing one's memory may not be all bad. It may be the bliss we are looking for.





And on to something completely different: science fiction Academy Award nominated movies. Last weekend we went to see Avatar, in the actual movie theater, a very unusual event for us. It was in 3-D, with new, improved 3-D glasses, plastic instead of paper, not irritating as the old ones were and the 3-D really did pop off the screen. But what I loved about this movie was the beauty and color of it. James Cameron created a gorgeous world with beautiful creatures who had a deep and lovely connection to their world. We earthlings were ugly and aggresive of course, but in the end there was a satisfying conclusion. You will think of what the U.S. did to the American Indians. All I could say when we left the theater was WOW. And I'm still saying WOW.





The very next day we watched District 9, another earthlings versus aliens movie. The contrast in the two movies was extraordinary. Where Avatar was dazzling in it's beauty and high tech, District 9 was ugly in the extreme. The aliens looked like bugs rather than gods, they clicked rather than speaking, they lived in a dirty slum. The violence was more graphic, these aliens had arrived here on earth rather than the aliens in Avatar whose planet was discovered by us. But in both stories the earthlings were the aggressors and oppresors--roles I would not put past us.
In both movies we earthlings are redeemed by one of two "good" people, who see what is happening and try to change the course of events. And in this case, you will be reminded of Apartheid. Man's inhumanity to man is translated into our inhumanity to aliens.

See both movies--it is interesting to see how two different writers and directors deal with a similar subject.

Writing Assignment

#1

I got a book today called The Daily Writer, with subjects or areas of writing concentration to do every day of the year. Today’s task is to write about the senses and the first thing I encountered after reading the prompt was my onions.

I chopped onions for a White Chili. I chopped them small and while the knife sliced through the apple-crisp bulb the smell was overpowering, a smell I’ve always thought was like underarm odor--thank goodness perspiration doesn’t usually make your eyes water or make you want to leave the room (unless it’s a teenage boy’s). I also noted the stiff papery outer covering of the onion--so substantial that a person could probably use it to write on if paper was scarce but onions were plentiful.

Now the onions are in the hot pan, with olive oil and garlic, sizzling and turning transparent and the smell has transformed into something appealing, rather than appalling. And when I add the coriander, the cloves, the oregano and the cumin the smell becomes exotic as a spice bizarre.

#2

I am processing oregano. This oregano began in my garden, growing to stems of 2 to 3 feet. “Cut it when it flowers”, my Greek mother-in-law advises, “it will be stronger then”. I cut it and hang it in bunches in the garage, up high where it won’t get in the way. I dry it for all the months since summer and then I climb a ladder to get one of the bunches down, bring it in the house and strip the leaves and flowers off the stems. I spend 2 days stripping for one bunch. I watch the season premier of Lost, including the catch-up hour, while doing this. My fingers get tired and a little sore from breaking the flowers off the ends of the stems--they don’t strip off the stems easily like the leaves do. I am doing this in our bedroom because that’s where I’ve recorded the program and the whole room smells like an Italian kitchen by the time I’m done. Will we dream of Italy tonight?

Now I am taking the next step, grinding the herb that I’ve stripped from the stem. I tried putting it in the food processor but it was so light that it merely whirled around and around, it didn’t chop or break down at all. The oregano was mocking me, saying, So you think there’s going to be a shortcut? Get over it. So I’m doing it the way I’ve done it before, with mortar and pestle. I have a big brass mortar and pestle that we scoured the Plaka for in Greece on one of our trips. My half-Greek husband wanted one like his Yaya had and we finally found one in one of the little shops that looked like all the other little shops, filled with alabaster owls and marble Greek god statues and many-colored sets of worry beads. It is a heavy piece of manual equipment and could be used as a weapon in a pinch. Each piece has such heft that if dropped on a foot or finger there would be damage to the appendage, not the brass. The weight of it does a lot of the work for me.

At the rate of about 1/2 cup of leaves and flowers at a time, I pound and grind, up and down, round and round, until I have a much broken down result that more resembles what comes in a jar. The aroma is heady, I dream of spaghetti while pounding, a spicy bubbling red sauce flavored with this fresh, garden-grown, hand ground herb. My hand gets tired with all this pounding and round and round motion and so I have to rest after 5 or 6 batches, do something more hand soothing, but still I can smell the results of my work all over the house. Later I will pour out the ground product on a cookie sheet and pick out any tiny stems that are left, reminding me of the days when my husband used to pick out the stems of another popular herb of the day, preparing it for smoking. I think I could get high on the smell of my oregano as it moves from garden to kitchen to stew pot. Sometimes I wonder if all this effort is worth it, the result of one big bunch of stems will barely be 1 1/2 cups of the herb, but when I bring the jar from the shelf and dump a tablespoon of it’s green and fragrant contents into my Sunday vegetable soup, or into the white chili or the burritos or whatever recipe cries out for it, I’m glad for time I took.

#3

I don’t suppose itching is a sense, really, although maybe the sense of touch is involved. I have an itchy head. Over the years I have struggled with seborrhea, which I guess is just a fancy word for dandruff. Sometimes it is located only at the nape of my neck under the hairline, but sometimes, like now, it is all over my head. And it itches. And I scratch it. And the flakes are big and they fall all over my shirt--dare not wear black or dark colors--and I am ashamed to say that I not only scratch that itch, I pick at it and pull away pieces of skin. There is something horribly satisfying about this. Scratching doesn’t really relieve the itch as it might if you had an itchy place on your back. It is more likely to make the itch worse, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying it. I try, try, try to stop myself, even yelling STOP IT! to myself. I am trying to put something else in my hand, like a set of worry beads I have. The other day I noted that even with the worry beads in my hand, my arm still moved to my head and my fingers, though they were wrapped in the beads, still managed to scratch and pick. I grabbed my arm like Dr. Strangelove, and held it down, but later it went right back up there.

It must be kind of like biting your fingernails, which I’ve never done. They are right there, and so tempting. They’re portable--they travel with you. It’s not a habit like drinking where you have to be somewhere where there’s booze, you have to have a bottle, a glass. Your fingernails and your head go with you wherever you go. You can bite or scratch in the car, in the bathroom, in bed, at the post office, at the mall--anywhere.

That little pile of dandruff on the wooden end of the couch is somehow satisfying, but it stares at me and taunts me and says, “You idiot woman! What are you doing? See how you can’t stop? Don’t you have any control?” And I answer, “I’m trying but no, I don’t have any control!” The only thing that remotely works is to have something in both hands, like my ITouch. I have to grasp it in my left hand while my right hand works on a word puzzle or a Falling Gems screen. But I can’t do that all day.

I’m using the proper shampoo, washing my hair with it every day, working on the “build-up” as the bottle calls it, so I’m doing the right thing in that sense, but I long for sunshine, which is the best cure of all. And it’s only February, the sunshine months are still far away. I look out my window at the gray, the damp, the steady rain and I scratch and pick. There may be more blog posts as a result of this lack of control, because I have to use both hands to type. The silver lining.

If my old friend, Jim Morgan, was still alive, he would be disgusted at my writing about this, but hey, full disclosure is what I’m all about.

Quick Bits

Did you know that the word Hobo is a shortening of Homeward Bound? Then I think that means we are all Hobos in this life, especially those of a certain age, those of us who are enjoying getting to know our old classmates again. Going home to our roots, appreciating where we came from, remembering our youth and thinking about all that has ensued over the years, good and bad.

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From USA Today's Tuesday paper:

Study: Beer may have a bone benefit

"Beer may help keep bones strong because it's a rich source of dietary silicon, which contributes to bone mineral density, researchers report.....beers containing high levels of malted barley and hops are richest in silicon. Wheat contains less silicon than barley because it is the husk of the barley that is rich in this element". Dang! I knew beer was good for me!

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My Mom celebrates her 88th birthday on Friday, along with Abe Lincoln. Mom's cousin, Ellen Hope and Mom nicknamed each other Abe, because of Lincoln and Mom sharing the same birthday. My Mom has had 3 nicknames: Lu (short for Lucretia), Chickie (Mom made this one up, too) and Abe. She is quite sure she will be around for 90 and beyond--I'm sure she will, too. Happy Birthday, Mom.

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It's American Idol time again, just barely begun if you don't count the silly auditions, which I don't. Will there be some clear wow performers right away, or will we whittle away singer after singer until we end up with 10 "good enoughs"? Only time will tell. I love the journey. I always wonder, if we'd had an American Idol show when I was in high school, would I have had the guts to audition? It would have been the early 60s--they'd have been looking for a new Barbara Streisand, Annette Funicello or Bobby Darrin, maybe--we'd have been singing standards or songs from musicals. Who would the judges have been? It's fun to think about.