The Lovely Part

The Petersen's View in South Keyport

                           Abovet:  Jim's Chevy, Linda Greaves and Nancy Roi Goit

Top:  Linda, Terry Scatina's eye and John Sleasman's legs

Two views of Jim's Incredible Garage

Bonnie Petersen's Quilt Craft Room

Pete, Fred, Bruce and Fred's Wife

Jim's cola bottle collection on the shelf above.

Pete Batcheller, Roger Cole and Trude Gilman

I am listening to Ellen Johnson’s CD, “Warming February”, http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/EllenJohnson1, which I bought from proud husband, Bruce Johnson, at the CK Alumni lunch at Jim and Bonnie Peterson’s home last week.  She’s singing right now about bees, a metaphor for love and I’ve just been out watering plants in my yard, where I see the bees already starting their all-day work of getting every last speck of pollen out of the big lavender plant.  This morning I used the container for iced tea that Vickie C. Holt brought to the lunch for me, having offered it to me a year ago.  And I’m thinking about the pact I made with David Frazier to get serious about writing, to make a schedule, to try to keep to it, to notice how we are procrastinating and to ask ourselves why.  I don’t think that procrastination bit was in the pact we shook on—that came later when I was talking to Ralph and we talked about doing what we want to do—“we make time for what we want to do” he said, and I said something about procrastination being what we want to do, sometimes, to avoid something we DO want to do but that we’re scared of-–and that goes for writing and letting others read it.

And I’m remembering the story Pete Batcheller told me about how his mom died—a story of wishes ignored.   We need to talk to each other, the alumni, to let others know how we want our end days to be.  We can help each other.

And I’m looking at the pictures I took of Jim Peterson’s incredible garage, the dream garage of any man who loves cars and is there a man who doesn’t?  It’s more a showroom for his beautiful 50’s era Chevy sedan and truck and the Model A Ford that he and Gary Parker and Gary’s stepson are restoring.  I nearly fell on the floor laughing when I saw the “leg lamp” in his tiny office—have you seen “The Christmas Story” movie that has now become a classic?  If you have, then you’ll understand the laughter.  But most of the time I was blown away by the collecting Jim has done and the beautiful way he has displayed the antique finds he has made or kept for decades.  All of us were awed that he still had the water skis from his youth and the poster of a ski competition from the 60s.  He also had the trophy from a car show our class had in 1962.  Jim’s trophy was for The Cleanest Car and we could give him the 2010 trophy for The Cleanest Garage.

I’m re-savoring the taste of Gary Parker’s terrific beer—especially the High Five Hefe, which I hadn’t tasted before.  I knew I liked his Irish Death Porter, but the Hefeweizen has a delicious taste and a rich, deep amber color, too, like a liquid semi-precious stone.  And when it hits your taste buds and slides down to your belly, it’s a warming brew as sweet as Ellen Johnson’s voice.

I’m going to have to ask Ralph for the proportions of mayonnaise and mustard he uses in his potato salad, the best I’d tasted in a long time.  And I’d love to know who made the tabouleh salad because it was lovely.  As were the other dishes and desserts that were brought.  Everybody did a super job of feeding us well.

We were honored to have Jackie Aldrich come to eat and talk with us—she is looking for members of her class (1963) and I hope we helped her out.  I won’t soon forget how many offered to help me back out of the precarious parking spot I was in.  They probably didn’t see it as a difficult place to park, but I am not a confident driver and I’m a worse backer-upper.  As it turned out, I was having so much fun talking with Pete, David, Nancy Roi Goit, Linda Greaves Philpott  and Janet Dore’ that I stayed late and it was easy to get my car out.  Next time we have lunch at a house I’ll have to show up a little earlier and get a prime spot, as Pricilla Preus did with her tiny, yellow mini. 

Fred Graeff and his wife, Penny, came to lunch this time and it was great to see them looking fit as always and I got to get more details of Fred Just’s Seabeck cemetery work and the book he is writing about Seabeck and has been researching extensively.  His wife is equally involved and I could tell it is a love affair, not only between the two of them, but with the project as well.

Speaking of wives, Wayne Swenson brought his wife, too, and Jim Peterson’s wife Bonnie was everywhere, cleaning up after us, making coffee, and showing her beautiful quilt craft room and the results of her meticulous stitching on beds and walls.  Jim has his cars (and his cola bottle collection), Bonnie has her quilts and they have a beautiful home that we were extremely lucky to be able to borrow for our August lunch.  The ambience was warm and welcoming even if the day was cool, breezy and Fall-like.

Ellen Johnson has another song on her cd called The Middle Part of Love, that I like lots.  In it she describes our everyday lives with our mates, the “middle part”, not the beginning dizzying part or the possible ending part, the sad falling out of love.  The middle part we often trudge through, raise our kids in, get through, nearly ignore, the unglamorous part, which, really, is where the memories are made.  Ellen doesn’t go into the old age part, but I think about it.  Whether you feel you are in the middle part of love, or the ending part, or even the beginning part if life has thrown you a curve, I do hope you are enjoying the Lovely Part, which in my opinion is the continuation of our lunches and our getting to know each other all over again, and maybe with a few, for the first time.

PS:  David, it took me a lot longer to get this onto the blog than I thought it would.  Best laid plans and all that.  So even when I'm trying to be disciplined, life gets in the way.

Dreams, Cruises and Automobiles

I’m driving a little car.  I’m not familiar with the car, its instruments are odd, my seat is too far back from the pedals.  Not only that, the morning is frigid and the road I am traveling on is icy and I’m not in any neighborhood I’ve ever been before.  I am trying to reach the pedals and shaking, a headache is coming on as my neck tightens and my jaws clamp in tension.  I can feel the slide coming and slowly begin to glide off the road, in slow motion, frantically turning the wheel in the direction I’ve been taught, into the slide, into the slide, but nothing works and I end up in the ditch.  That’s when I wake up.

Nightmares are rare for me.  I have recurring unpleasant dreams, dreams that are not happy, fun, uplifting, but they aren’t terrifying.  Instead they tend to be mildly disturbing, causing me to wonder what is going on inside my head, what has caused me to create a troubling scenario that I’ve never encountered this intensely in reality; what did I eat at dinner that got into my guts and made so much turmoil that I had to have this mid-night angst?  The dreams are easy to interpret.  If Freud or Jung were at my bedside they might insist I go deeper, to find more hidden meaning, but the meaning I have found for them seems to suit my slothful psyche.

The dreams, starting decades ago, were about cars and me.  The car would be different in each dream, and the dreams were months apart sometimes, but the theme was the same.  I am driving a car.  The car is on a road.  The road is icy.  Or the road is muddy or bumpy.  Or the road is full of holes.  Or the road is steep.  Only occasionally was the road easy to navigate, a joy to drive on, with lovely scenery outside my window.  No, the road was horrid, the weather similarly awful, the conditions unhappy.  I was struggling to keep the car on the road, or pushing on the gas to get it through the deep mud, or pushing harder on the gas pedal to get it up the vertical hill.  The car wouldn’t cooperate, would slide off the road, would stall on the incline and move backwards.  The end result was not positive.  I was exhausted, afraid, without solutions.

After several of these same types of dreams, different only in the conditions of the road or perhaps the state of the car, I began to see that the car, the driver (me) and the road symbolized the problems I was struggling with in my life—an icy road was the precariousness of a marriage on the brink of disaster, slogging through mud a metaphor for trying to get to a solution about money issues, the hill the difficult climb up out of trouble.  There was never anybody in that car except me.  I was the one in charge of trying to keep the car on the road, trying to find the address, attempting to conquer the hill.  Eventually, after a series of these uncomfortable dreams, there would come one in which the car worked magnificently, the road was dry and clear, the hills were gentle.  It was clear that the problems I had were being solved; I was feeling serene again.

Then my husband and I went on a cruise to Mexico, just a short four-day cruise.  We had a wonderful time, we both loved the freedom of leaving our luggage in a room and not having to move it in order to see a new town, we relished the gourmet meals, the level of service made us feel like royalty.  We took cruise number two a couple of years later and that’s when my car dreams changed into cruise dreams, even though the second cruise was as lovely as the first.

In my dreams I was on a cruise, sometimes with my husband, sometimes with people from work, occasionally with people I’d never seen before.  I wasn’t driving (or piloting) the ship, of course.  I didn’t have that kind of control.  I was a passenger who had to do something and I had to do it quickly.  Most of the time it was packing.  If you’ve been on a cruise you know that you have to pack your bags the night before and leave them outside your cabin door, where they are collected and taken off the boat as soon as it docks.  The people who belong to the bags don’t get to disembark until several hours later. 

Lots of my dreams involved me getting the bags packed on time and out to the hallway.  In those dreams I was behind the 8-ball, late, scrambling, the boat was about to leave on another cruise, I was supposed to get off.  I couldn’t find all my clothes, the suitcase wouldn’t open or it wouldn’t close.  Anxiety!!!  Other cruise dreams involved not being able to find my room in the labyrinth of the ship (a real possibility if you have a bad sense of direction).  I wandered up and down the ship, from one level to another, confident people around me , laughing, eating, talking about their excursions, having a lovely time, knowing how to get back to their rooms—those dreams reminded me of the ones I used to have about not being able to find a classroom in high school, not having the Social Studies book, and realizing a test that would determine the quarter grade was in a half hour.

A couple of days ago I told my mother about these dreams. She thought changing to dreams about cruises meant I had “moved up in the world”.  While this is a nice idea, I see them more as meaning that the events bothering me now are more out of my control, like a huge boat—I’m not the captain.  That is in line with my “aging mom” responsibilities.  I have much less control over what happens—life is the captain of this ship and it will go where it wants to go.  In these dreams I never get to have the delicious meals, or the afternoon tea, or get to tour a new town.  I am packing, trying to get organized, be on time, or I am searching for my room—and maybe in that room there will be safety, at the very least I will know where I am.

I don’t mind having dreams like this—it shows me what is on my mind that I might not be looking at—they aren’t so disjointed and strange that I could never interpret them without the help of a professional.  There probably are more profound meanings to be found, but the ones I’ve found serve me well.  I can zero in on real-life problems.  If they are showing up in my dreams then they need to be addressed with more energy than I am giving them.  If I’m in denial about something, my dreams will not let me look away.  Pay attention!  A cruise ship is bearing down on you!  A car is sliding off the road!  You are lost!

I am happy that I haven’t had a car or cruise ship dream in a long time.  It doesn’t mean I don’t have stresses—they are still there, particularly the aging mom stress.  No “transportation” dreams must mean that I am finding solutions, working through difficult things.  What would be really cool is if I could ask my brain to give me Star Trek dreams on the USS Enterprise—I could be a crewman, beaming down to a new planet, finding problems to solve, worlds to explore, alien species to study.  That would be more fun than driving a car on a dangerous road or trying to find my room in a huge ship and I could still have distress, if my dreaming brain insisted.  I’d much rather be yelling, “Beam me up, Scotty!” than asking a steward where room #4006 is.

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.