Dancing for Obama

I love what can be done with Photo Shop, don't you?

For a real assessment of the election, or a poetic view, or a personal view, or a world view, go over to Bookworm's blog.  Here is the address:  http://clearcreekgirl.blogpsot.com

As for me, I am glad it is almost over.  It's been two years and it's been wearing and lately it's been ugly.  I'm done and I've voted and I've given away almost all of my 45 buttons in only a week and it's looking good.  Bookwork wants us to celebrate now and in the way she puts it, yes, let's celebrate now, but I'm still afraid that those who tipped those polls to the Obama side and who have made even the Sunday morning pundits speak as if it is already a done deal, I'm afraid they will think they don't need to vote.  I heard someone on the radio this morning say, "Obama doesn't need my vote to win".  Yikes!  If too many people say that to themselves......

So VOTE, VOTE, VOTE.  And get your sticker and wear it proudly and make sure all your friends and relatives have voted, no matter which side they are on, after all, voting is the only way we have any say at all, no matter how small our voice might be.  Get rid of all the ones you think aren't doing the right thing for you and put in the ones you hope will do what you need.  I wish "they" would send one of those little I've Voted stickers out with our absentee ballots.  I'll just keep wearing my buttons, all of them, between now and Tuesday and let everyone know where I stand, just in case it matters to anyone.  I have given my buttons to grocery store clerks, physical therapists, nurses, certification experts, receptionists, a college student, a person who leases senior apartments.  All were thrilled to get a button.  I am hoping that means something.

I don't envy Obama if he does win this election.  My husband says, "Everyone will be watching and waiting for him to change things".  I expect it was that way with John Kennedy, too.  We had so much hope then--we loved his family, we loved how he seemed, elegant, smart, a savior.  It's the same now.  As Bookworm says, it's time.  The whole country, the whole world, knows it's time.  I didn't get to vote for Kennedy--I was only 16 when he ran for President.  I didn't get to vote for Bobby Kennedy.  I got to vote for many others, but it wasn't like now.  I didn't feel the magic. I didn't feel the urgency.  So this vote means everything. It means hope, it means my grandchildren's future, it means the future of our air and our climate, it means the future of young men in Iraq, it means the image of our country to the world. 

I'm sorry to any of the people who read this blog that don't feel the same way I do.  My husband doesn't either, so I don't live in an isolated world of only left-leaning people.  If the other guy wins, then I hope he can do all those things I want--fix the climate, give us more efficient cars, make our medical system work better, make other countries like us again,  bring those young men home.  I will be pulling for him if he wins.  It is time for everything to change and I think the other guy knows that, too, and Lord help us, he better not die while he's in office, if he gets in office!  Or we'll get mavericky!

  

How's Your Mom?

Mom in physical therapy with Kiley.

Many people, including those not in Blogville, have been asking about how my Mom is doing. She is doing amazingly well, thank you. I wish she knew all the people who are concerned about her, because it would make her feel better about the whole process of getting over her two broken bones, but she doesn’t appear to need to know how many are rooting for her. She has an ability to heal from her wounds that younger ones would envy. Recently her doctor said she was way “ahead of the game” as far as knitting and getting movement back.

We have been going to physical therapy sessions at the Silverdale Harrison for several weeks now and we have been assigned another one of those lovely angel girls to help Mom get her range of motion and strength back in her arm and her leg. This new angel is named Kiley. She is small and lithe, smart, interesting and gentle. When she spied my Obama button she knew she could talk to me about politics and we’ve been at it ever since. Each time we come in the second question, after asking after Mom’s progress, is “what did you think of the latest McCain statement, or the Palin pronouncement or the last debate?” We’ve been having fun dissecting the political scene while she massages Mom’s bicep muscle. Recently she was gone for awhile traveling to the Midwest for the Chicago marathon. While she was gone another tall, agile young woman took her place. Laura, too, took note of my Obama button and struck up a conversation about it. I think the therapists like to talk politics if they can and they really aren’t supposed to bring the subject up, but when they see a blatant sign, they jump on it. Laura liked calling my Mom Lou and watching her foot-o-meter, as I dubbed her pain reaction that showed up in her tensed feet. Mom doesn’t feel much pain, but occasionally when her arm is moved to a place it hasn’t been for 9 weeks, her feet flinch. She tries to be brave but her feet give it away every time.

We have been going to physical therapy sessions at the Silverdale Harrison for several weeks now and we have been assigned another one of those lovely angel girls to help Mom get her range of motion and strength back in her arm and her leg. This new angel is named Kiley. She is small and lithe, smart, interesting and gentle. When she spied my Obama button she knew she could talk to me about politics and we’ve been at it ever since. Each time we come in the second question, after asking after Mom’s progress, is “what did you think of the latest McCain statement, or the Palin pronouncement or the last debate?” We’ve been having fun dissecting the political scene while she massages Mom’s bicep muscle. Recently she was gone for awhile traveling to the Midwest for the Chicago marathon. While she was gone another tall, agile young woman took her place. Laura, too, took note of my Obama button and struck up a conversation about it. I think the therapists like to talk politics if they can and they really aren’t supposed to bring the subject up, but when they see a blatant sign, they jump on it. Laura liked calling my Mom Lou and watching her foot-o-meter, as I dubbed her pain reaction that showed up in her tensed feet. Mom doesn’t feel much pain, but occasionally when her arm is moved to a place it hasn’t been for 9 weeks, her feet flinch. She tries to be brave but her feet give it away every time.

Monday of this week Mom got to take off her leg brace, the huge black foam, plastic and Velcro monstrosity that has been keeping her leg straight since she cracked her kneecap on the evening of August 20th. The dang thing was made for someone much taller than her 5 feet. The bottom several inches of this thigh to ankle brace were cut off with scissors in the emergency room, but it has never fit properly and as Mom’s leg got thinner underneath it, it kept sliding down until it was resting on the top of her foot. I’d unstrap it, move it back up, restrap it and within minutes it would have slid down again. Both physician’s assistant and physical therapists noticed that after several weeks it was no longer keeping her leg stick-straight, but they let it slide and considered the fact she could bend her knee slightly inside of it to be a form of therapy. The day the brace came off was a day of celebration. I had authorized the removal of the arm immobilizer the previous week, it having been in place for 7 weeks, a week longer than the PA had ordered. We couldn’t reach him for his approval, so I made a command decision. I got a phone call from his office that afternoon verifying that it was okay, but I would have done it anyway. It was time to get that arm moving.

This Wednesday Mom went to choir practice, the first time since that night when she fell in her driveway on the way to get in Aunt Billie’s car to go to choir and this Sunday she will go back to her church. She is beginning to feel like a “human being” again.

This healing process, from that first stormy and scary night in the emergency room, through the six days in the nursing home that seemed interminable, through the immobile days at home while I tried to make it all work and now during the physical therapy part of the recovery, has been good for my Mom and me. I would not have predicted how it has affected our relationship.

Mom and I have not been close in the way some mothers and daughters are. I was never one to phone daily like some daughters I have known or to visit more than once a week. My weekly visits didn’t start until it was clear I had to take on the financial responsibilities for my Mom a year after my Dad died and I found the checking account and credit situation in shambles. Before that it was holidays and birthdays. In our family it was me, as first child, who became Mom’s rescuer, even as a kid. The story I tell to illustrate this is that one day I came home from school in the 7th grade, to find my Mom cradling my little brother in her arms, waiting for me to help her clean up a wound he had sustained on his leg. She didn’t want to handle it. But as a 7th grader, I took it on. Certain situations scared her and I was the one, if Dad wasn’t available, who stepped in and took over. It is odd because Mom has survived many physical hardships very well, as she has this one. A pot of boiling water spilled on her leg when she was three years old, leaving a big scar. She spent nearly a year in bed with Rheumatic Fever when she was 17. She fell in the well next to our house in Tracyton and clung to the pipe, hanging chest-deep in water for two hours until she was discovered by the local minister and the volunteers from the fire department fished her out. She had a stillborn baby. She lost her sister to cancer. She lost her husband in 2001 and her son in 2003 and in 2004 she broke her ankle in several places and healed well enough to take a trip to Scotland with me and my daughter after only 12 weeks of recovery.

She is a trooper and a survivor, but she has never been the advice-giving, warm, cookie-baking, house-cleaning, soothing mother that I had expected. What she has been is plucky, colorful, artistic, musical, lover of movie stars, reader of mysteries and celebrity biographies, appreciator of beauty and nature. She has never been a hugger or someone who expressed tenderness or told me she loved me. She pats rather than strokes. She has barely cried over the deaths of my Dad or my brother. I could tell she liked me and thought I was smart and sensible, but I also knew she didn’t understand what I was anymore than I understood who she was and why she operated the way she did.

But because we have been together so much in these last months, and because I have wanted so much to make her recovery as pleasant as it could be, we have come to know each other at a much deeper level. During my weekly visits I used to ask, “So how are things going Mom?” and she would answer, “Well, they’re about the same”. Now, of course, we have many more things to talk about. “How is your arm feeling? Do you have anything you need to have me do? Have you called your friend, Jay, yet? Can I get you a drink of water, a cookie, a piece of fruit? Can I help you with those buttons?” During our journeys to doctor’s appointments and physical therapy sessions the conversations have turned to the beauty of the Fall days, art, marriages, divorces, friendships, husbands, raising children, age, illness. As I listen to my mother expressing her views and and telling her stories, I find that I am more like her than I had thought. I see that my philosophy of life is very close to hers, that my opinions have, of course, been influenced by her, that my love of nature and life comes directly from her. I am a bit overly interested in celebrities, I love color, I am fascinated by faces, I am intrigued with discussing people’s motives, just as she is. Her artistic nature is in my love of photography and beauty. We disagree on religion, but neither of us really believes there is a Heaven or Hell. I am much more serious about politics, but she is interested, not apathetic. She is as fascinated in finding out how other people think as I am. She loves to watch people as I do. She writes, reads, works crossword puzzles, loves movies and TV and so do I.

We differ in how much emotion we display, I cry weekly, she rarely cries and never seems to get angry; in how serious we are, I read literary novels and non-fiction books about philosophy or politics and she reads celebrity biographies, I value friends more than she does, but we are both cheerful gregarious types, like to look nice, can chat with strangers, are friendly to those we are working with. Mom didn’t ever work outside her home. She tried but was intimidated by cash registers, making change and invoices. I worked from the time my kids went to school. The Mom I most idealized was Nancy Kvinsland’s Mom, who worked, kept a perfectly clean house, made fabulous meals, had a wicked sense of humor (and had her daughter ironing sheets and her older brother’s boxer shorts, incidentally). I’m not so sure I really would have enjoyed being her daughter, but I thought she was the cat’s pajamas when I was a teenager. Do we ever get the mother’s we think we want? I doubt it. I’ve asked many daughters about their mothers and almost without exception they wish their Moms had been different.

I still wish my Mom had been more demonstrative—it is hard for me to say "I Love You" to those I love—nobody said that in my house and hugs were not common. I wish she had been different with my brothers in some way that would have given them ambition, so that they could have gone out and had jobs and families, to provide cousins for my kids and so that we could have had lots of relatives and big family get-togethers. But that’s not how it was or is. Mom has given me half of what I am and I thank her for that because I like who I am. I can learn to say the love words and I can learn hugging and I have learned to accept what my brothers became. And now, at this late date, I have come to know my Mother in a way I never thought would be possible. And she has said more than once in the last 2 months, "Love ya, Chris". I can’t say that I would ever have wished such injuries to happen, but because of them we have become closer and that is a very good thing—a silver lining entirely unforeseen.

Mornings

Intended to: In September, 2007, after I retired from 9 to 5 work, I planned to get up early, put the coffee on, walk to the newspaper box 1/4 mile up the road, get the paper, come back, have coffee, read the paper.

Reality then: After a few days of cold morning walks to get the paper with no caffeine yet to fortify me, I gave up the notion of getting the paper before having coffee. I read the paper from the day before or sometimes went to get it. I did the crossword puzzles every day, except Saturday (too hard!). I often didn't actively exercise.

Reality now: After almost a year of the Kitsap Sun and its crosswords every morning I became dissatisfied with the Sun and now subscribe to the USA Today. I only do the Kitsap Sun Sunday crossword now, during the week, and get behind on my USA Todays because there is so much content I want to read every page of it, except for the Sports section. I am still drinking 2 to 2 1/2 cups of coffee while I read, still enjoying the KZOK radio in the background (The Bob Rivers Show), but now I start some days exercising with the guys of the Pentagon channel (Fit for Duty), Lt. Jason and others who lead me in Pilates or aerobics or kick boxing. I like them because they are no-nonsense types who tell you to get down on the deck now and give them 5 push-ups.

Interesting how things change. Who would have guessed a year ago that I'd be spending two days a week taking my Mom to physical therapy? I knew I'd be spending more time with her, but not this kind of time. And I thought I'd be visiting my old friends at work--I've been back exactly twice. Life is full. Time flies. There are not enough hours in the day. All those cliches apply.

Beautiful Fall

Here are some photos I've been taking this Fall.

I think it's a particularly spectacular year for Fall foliage.

Yellow Jacket Day

Trude "Junior" Gillman Now and Then

You know those days in the Fall when it’s warm enough to think about eating out on your deck or at the picnic table at work? And if you do, you are invariably bothered during your meal by a yellow-jacket looking for protein because he’s about to hibernate and he needs the calories. And the light is slanting low and golden as a glass of good bourbon and you’re reminiscing about Octobers in the past when you were picking out pumpkins for your kids to carve. And you can feel Winter right around the corner but there is time, just a little bit more time, before the cold comes. Yesterday was a day like that in Keyport, at the Whiskey Creek Cafe. I wish you could all have been there.

I was too early. I left my house way too soon, anxious to get to our CK Alumni lunch, the third I had attended since that wonderful 45th class reunion last summer. As I came down off the freeway, heading toward Keyport, I decided, in order not to look too anxious, I’d take a left turn at Scandia and see if there were any pumpkins in the fields, maybe take some pictures. There was a nice field at Scandia Farms and I drove in and almost drove into a passel of kids about the age of my next to youngest granddaughter, Alison, who were being toured around the farm, looking at the sheep and goats and, probably, the pumpkins. They were in no hurry to move out of my way so that I could park, so I watched the wonder and curiosity on their faces as they looked at the animals that were eating the grain laid down for them inches from their feet. Kids, just starting out in life, no more than four years old, with all of it still ahead of them. 12 years further on they would be in high school and 45 years after that they would be attending reunion lunches like I was going to do after I had parked and taken some Fall pictures of old stumps, that pumpkin field and a Halloween scarecrow against a tree.

After 15 minutes of snapping pictures I felt it was now the appropriate time to make my way into Keyport. To my surprise there were ten or more high school chums already milling around outside the cafe. I wasn’t the only one who was ready to start the delicious process of getting back in touch with old classmates. The first person I spied as I made my way to the group at the door was Joan Aaro. Immediately I was sped back to one of the most memorable vacations of my teenage years. It would be called a “stay-cation” now, because we went no further than Holly. Our family of 5 rented a cabin at Holly, right on the beach of Dabob Bay (?) for a week. This seemed the height of luxury to a 13 year old, about to start junior high school in the Fall. I had no idea what I was going to do that whole week, past bringing 4 or 5 books with me and intending to get a tan. I soon realized that there was a good-looking blond boy, my age or slightly older, staying with his family in a cabin just North toward the pier. My little brother, Stanley, was 2 years old and had started walking and he was my responsibility for part of each day. I brazenly used him to meet this boy, sending him up the beach as if he was running away from me, and then running to fetch him right when he got to where this blond boy was sitting. The blond boy was Bud Smart who lived in Seattle. He was glamorous in that “privileged and more sophisticated than me” sort of way and we had a short summer romance that week. But more important than Bud Smart was who I met because of Bud. Bud was Colin McGinnis’s cousin. Colin was another blond boy who in September would become one of my classmates in junior high. Because of that meeting in the summer at Holly, Colin and I began to “see” each other when school started that Fall and Bud had become a distant memory. And Joan, who I also met that summer, and who lived next door to Colin in Holly, became the person who passed notes to Colin for me. When you were in junior high in the 50s you did not date. You walked or stood in the halls together and you wrote notes to each other. That was about the extent of it. So Joan was our go-between. After Colin was no longer my boyfriend, Joan remained my friend. I enjoyed her down-to-earth sense of humor and it was great to see her, fundamentally unchanged, at the lunch in Keyport. In conversation yesterday, I found out that Joan bowls with my Aunt Billie, in her 90s and still slinging a bowling ball, at All Star Lanes. It is a very small world.

The rooms at the front of Whiskey Creek Cafe are dark with wood paneling, but the room we were in yesterday was called the Sunshine Room and it was bright with that rare Autumn sunlight we were lucky to be getting. The sunny room filled up fast with folks I’d seen at the first and second lunches, Linda Greaves, Vicki A.Holt, Linc David, Ralph Erickson, Dean Johnson, Joyia Mentor, Lavonna Rubens, Junior Gillman, Terry Scatena, Jim Peterson. One of the first newcomers who spotted me was my old friend from Madrigals and, after high school, The New World Chorale, Fred Graeff. Will anyone ever forget Fred’s classic car from the forties that he drove to cruise Graham’s Drive-in? Or his deep bass voice in choir? Or his crooked smile? It was terrific to see him and his pretty wife, Penny. I had sung next to Fred for so many years--it didn’t seem like it was that long ago since we had been learning and performing songs with Jack Unger and the other singers we grew so close to in those years. Fred and Penny told me about recent trips they had been taking to England, where Fred actually drove a car on the English side of the road. I had no idea he was that brave! We agreed that Jack (Mr. Unger!) had spoiled us for choral music and though we had both been in small groups since the chorale broke up in the late seventies, we had never found any group as satisfying.

Even though the majority of the people at the lunch had been at previous lunches, there were still some new/old faces. Several times I was asked and I asked, too, who that person was across the room or at the end of that table. One of those mystery faces belonged to Bob Lauck, now with a thick mane of silver hair, who told me he’d worked for many years with my Dad at Keyport, in Planning and Estimating. He remarked that he was surprised I’d “turned out so well” with a Dad like that. Apparently he’d had some experience with my Dad’s temper both at work and on the golf course. I assured him that Dad mellowed out a bit after he retired from work. I’d speculate that we’ve all mellowed out a little since we’ve retired.

Another face that wasn’t immediately recognizable belonged to Terrie Baughman, who is a tall, attractive woman who has left her gangliness behind and has that height and elegance all of us short women admire. She told me she’d been reading my blog and wasn’t the first to ask how my Mom was doing. One woman I have to look up in the old Echo is Dewene Buffet. I remember her name but I never could find the classmate face in the face I saw yesterday. She has silver hair like most of the rest of us, a bright, sunny face and a cheerful manner and she left before I got a picture of her or got to talk to her. I hope she comes to the next lunch so I can find out who she is now. Right behind Terrie came Sharon Briggs, who looked just the same to me. I can’t wait until the next lunch to find out what it’s like to get up at 12:15 a.m. to go to work in the bakery at Fred Meyer.

A pesky, hungry yellow-jacket intruded on our golden day, buzzing around Sharon Briggs’ head as if he knew that she was allergic to bees. Joan Aaro had been telling me about the salsa she cans in large quantities every summer but beat feet when she saw that bee. She, too, is allergic. But the bee let us enjoy ourselves for several hours before he intruded and after all, bees have to eat, too.

This lunch was different than the first for me in the sense that I didn’t have to figure out who all those not quite strangers were. It wasn’t a puzzle that needed solving. It was a joy to see those I’d seen at the previous lunches and a surprise to see the new faces. These lunches are rapidly becoming one of my favorite things to do.

At the end of the Presidential Debate on Tuesday night Tom Brokaw prefaced the last question with, “This is a bit of a Zen question from an email we received”. He continued with the question: “What don’t you know, and how are you going to learn it?” Neither one of the candidates answered that question very well, but I’ll take a stab. What I don’t know is how Lavonna Rubens has stayed married to the same man for 45 years. I don’t know how Ralph Erickson keeps up with all the email he’s been getting from all of us. I don’t know if John Sleasman is as happy as his perpetual grin indicates. I don’t know when Linc David started riding a Harley. There is so much I don’t know about these people and I want to know all about them. How am I going to learn? I’m going to go to every lunch I can and I’m going to ask! I hope you’ll be there.