The finest morning

It is so easy to envision myself doing things I haven't done in ages.  I see myself the way I looked forty years ago, tall thin, long hair tied back, dashing across the court, tennis racket in hand.

I lean into some shots, hold my breath for others, I am the supreme critic, oohing and ahhing, wincing and nodding wisely after every play. 

Then reality sets in and I realize that I am only sitting up in the stands watching.  I might be able to hit the ball, but I have no finesse left, no real power.  I am not even a tennis has been.  I was never that good.

But the memories are!

Today I get to relive a bit of that while gazing down on the court on one side of the fence and the gorgeous crepe myrtle trees that flank the river on the other side. 

The people on the court are sweating, panting, playing hard.  I am basking in the breeze and sitting in the shade of Louisiana's finest morning.

Abundance

I find it hard to believe that the universe can be more creative than I am.  I  know that sounds egotistic, but most of us think we need to orchestrate things or they will fall short of the best.

Poor planning may have been the demise of many events, but not my life.

The best parts of my life have seemingly appeared out of nowhere.  I have learned to do those things I love then sit back and let the universe take over.   It doesn't mean I am careless.  I do pay the bills, clean the house, put gas in the car.

After the basics are taken care of I am free to let go and dream and daring to dream the most outrageous things has turned out to be an amazingly wonderful way to live. 

Instead of moving into a preplanned and dismal old age I have dived into the fountain of youth and found freedom.  My life is a fairy tale.

And I am so grateful.

The queue starts here

I am always amazed at how primitive seemingly sophisticated and educated people can be.

History is full of man's inhumanity to man.  We measure time with one holocaust after another.  Sometimes we give them pretty names, but the gist is still the same.  The Wars of the Roses, The Crusades, Culloden, World War I, the Vietnam War Era, we are a violent species.

We make decisions like children with a box of crayons.  Pink is good.  Brown is bad.  Then we twist the facts to support our feelings.

We even try to control the ultimate creator sullying it with our own attributes and feelings, then using it to support the terrible things we do.  For some reason we still want validation even in our most heinous moments.

So yesterday I was actually moved to tears by a friend's call that says the Supreme Court allows us to marry the people we love.  Perhaps we are moving in the right direction at last.
 

Lifeline

The world is changing.  And as always there are people who are afraid to jump on the wagon and try out the newest wheels.  Caution is a good thing, but it is not everything.  Lines have been drawn in the dust by every group of people who eventually decided to jump over most of them.

A desire to keep track of things and tell our stories led us to draw pictures and invent writing.  Wandering humans needed a way to communicate over distances.  Writing on rock walls moved onto other more portable tablets.

Messengers, mail men, pony express, telegraph, telephone, television, computers, every year there are new ways to keep in touch.  We are pack animals.  Orphans die from lack of attention, so do older people.

Gone is the day when Grandma sat in the fireplace corner holding babies and mumbling to herself because she craved adult conversation.  In the past we accepted the fact that the elderly, the shut ins, anyone with a disability that kept them from being out in the mainstream world paid the price of loneliness or inane noise that was really not geared to their personal needs.

People need to communicate to feel alive and communication means at least two people going back and forth in some kind of meaningful way.

One of the newest ways of doing this is texting.  It is easy to scoff and say that texting is something teenage girls do to waste time and avoid paying attention to other things, but that is only a caricature.  All new things were treated this way at some point.

Texting offers people a chance to communicate as briefly as they choose, or as deeply as they want.  You can watch a movie with your best friend and talk about it without bothering any of the other patients in the room.  You can eat breakfast with your son while he files a brief in Timbuktoo.  You can talk about how many angels dance on the head of a pin if you feel like it, but however you use it, texting allows people to remain engaged in ways that were not possible before.

Texting offers the possibility of transcending loneliness.

And that is a lifeline not to be thrown away.

Simplicity!

My great grandmother had to drag her rugs outside and beat them with a rug beater.  Pump water into a container in her sink and heat it on her cook stove if she wanted to do dishes.  Chandeliers were gas.  Central heating meant stoking the furnace with coal and carrying out the clinkers.  Washing was done with a tub and a stick and a centrifuge that rocked the house if it wasn't bolted down.  Food was kept cool in a new fangled icebox that required the iceman to come almost daily.  An operator connected her by phone with friends and she had a scratchy wireless or wind up Victrola for entertainment.

Her great grandmother mother didn't have to deal with most of those aggravations.  Life was simpler, smaller, much more basic.  You were born and you worked as hard as you could until you died.  You tied the babies to their cradles, or trees while you worked so they wouldn't wander off into the woods, or walk into the eternal fires that were necessary for washing, cooking and heat.  Sometimes you just tied them to your apron strings, but then they might dig up the seeds you were planting, or eat the plants you were weeding. 

Children were seen and not heard because they too were working as hard as they could from the moment they were old enough to watch the baby under them and no one had time to tend crying children.  They were too busy just trying to keep them alive.

Simplicity is highly over rated sometimes.

The right place

Everything I need is already inside of me, so life is sort of a treasure hunt!

All the old stories take place again and again. The force really is with me!

The secret is not to give my power away to nay sayers and evil doers. 

Anyone who says you need to say magic words or perform secret rites doesn't get it.

If there are any magic words or rites they are only there to help me tap into myself, to find my own power, my own beauty, my own love.  Once I learn to do that everything else falls into place.  Then I am in my right place.

Loving that, accepting it, utilizing it only for good brings a life into full fruition.  Trying to manipulate other people is the truest form of evil.  It sucks life out like the vampires of old.

That doesn't mean life will be what I expect or want.  There is a natural balance, a time to begin and a time to end, but the ride sure will be a lot richer and a lot more satisfying.

Solitude

Solitude can be the most sacred of space.

Here nothing comes between me and the universe except my own thoughts.

That can be the most beautiful moment in the world, or the most terrifying, depending on how honest I can stand to be with myself.

The more honest I am, the more sacred it becomes.

Solidarity!

Working together, wanting the best for each other, being cognizant that everyone has needs and wants that may not be exactly my own.  These are the things that bridge the difference between tolerance and love.

One thing at a time

Everything in its own time.

That sounds like an easy concept, but it is one of the hardest to live by.

There is always the tendency to feel a sense of urgency about what is next and it is that feeling that destroys the beauty of now.

Giving up some of this moment into worrying about any other moment takes away a bit of energy.

Unless safety is an issue I am better off letting go of everything else and allowing myself to concentrate on and do my best with what I am doing right now.

I tend to be a control freak, but even I can only do so much and do it right.

One thing at a time!  It really is all I can do.

GPS

Listen, do the work, turn it in.  These are the basics.  Teachers hope students begin this way and test them on their knowledge along the way, but a good teacher is so much more than a test giver.

Memorizing that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 is good.  Knowing that absolute zero is -273.15 degrees Celsius is nice, but knowing how to find out these things if I forget is invaluable.

Figuring out the process of how to get  from point A to point B creates a foundation for life long learning and living.

The same thing is true about working with others.  In spite of all the television shows and movies that show a genius can be oblique and hard to get along with and even downright rude, it really is necessary to develop people skills.  Because that genius probably isn't going to get funding for his pet project if he steps on too many toes or refuses to make a few compromises.  Not to mention how invaluable team work can be when brainstorming and investigating unknown subjects.

Billy may make straight A's and be a flop at living, which is really why you want a good education, so you can do something with it that might improve your life and the lives of others.

A good teacher takes curiosity and turns it into a GPS for life long learning.

Wake up!

I have just about reached the saturation point.

I would like to hope that I am just getting older, that every generation before me hit this place with similar thoughts and the world will go on the way it always has -- with nuts, but basically still sane.

I am back to reading library books for entertainment.  There is absolutely nothing on television except cheap reality shows, (screaming) talk shows, violence for the sake of violence, fake manipulative news and talent shows.

Politicians look like snake oil salesmen in B movies and what's even worse is that people are taking them seriously and continuing to vote for them.  We have become a nation of buffoons.

Everyone has a cause. We are so wrapped up in causes that people are becoming inured to them.  Maybe that's why the crazies are coming out of the woodwork.  No one is really paying any attention, so if they sway a few more crazies with their nonsense they come out ahead.

Say anything, don't check the facts, believe anything.  Let freedom ring, or reign, or do whatever it is that people enslaved by greed do.

Behind all the grandstanding are a group of people who know exactly what they are doing and they are succeeding.   The Pied Piper of Greed and Big Business is leading all us sign carrying, sobbing, emoting lambs straight into their banks where they empty our pockets, strip us of any real thought provoking intelligence and pat us on the head before sending us back out to do it all again.

Me, myself, and I

I remember leaving the house as a child.  My mother always seemed to lick her finger and wipe something I had no idea was there, off my face.  Then she would follow me to the door exhorting me to be careful, watch out for cars and be good.

She never said, "Don't worry about the dogs.  They won't hurt you."  That was usually my main concern, loose dogs that would charge out at me barking. Tails wagging or not they terrified me and I was known for walking blocks out of my way to avoid them.

While I was walking those extra blocks I would ponder how I was going to be good.  It seemed there were different expectations depending on where I was going.

Sometimes I thought I was supposed to look smart.  Smarter than I really thought I was so that was a strain.  Other times I thought I should look pretty and that was something I was fairly confident I was not, so that was an even bigger concern.  A few places I needed to exhibit some kind of skill like piano playing, or reading out loud, or knowing the Girl Scout Laws, those were the worst.

One constant was that I could never just be me.  I knew I had to put on some kind of facade to make myself acceptable.

I was just a bunch of veneers glued together to please other people.

This has been such a normal part of my life that it came as a shock when I realized I will soon be going on a trip where I don't have to worry about who I am.  I will just be myself, the person I live with day in and day out.  The person who would rather live alone than face the strain of trying to please others all the time.

I am so excited.

And a little scared.

The Good Old Days

I hear someone now feels that working women are destroying America.  They want to go back to the good old days.

Working women allow some families to have both food on the table and money to pay the doctor.  Working women allow men who want to be caretakers an opportunity to do so.  Working women mean that widows don't necessarily go on the dole.  Working women mean lots of good things.  Even more good things when those women make the same wages as men doing the same job.

Assuming we could go back to the good old days I wonder which ones people would choose?

The forties when children were still being paralyzed by polio and Rosey the riveter was "helping out" at home so GI Joe could fight wars over seas?

The thirties when people were standing in bread lines and dust was infiltrating the lungs of everyone in the dust bowl?

Maybe back in the 1890's when coal dust coated everything in the city and boys grew up with bent backs from crawling through the mines all day every day.

Or back even further when raw sewage lay in the gutters and children were whipped and tied to their looms for twelve hours a day in factories that were fire traps.

These are the good old days.

Fathers

Fathers are natures way of keeping the species going.  First of all it has to be fun and it is!  The rest is a little more difficult.  Making babies is one thing.  Feeding them and cleaning them and teaching them how to survive takes a lot longer and is a lot more work!

That is how Daddies and Papas and Das came into being.  That is why Father becomes a word of endearment that melts hearts and warms hearths.  No longer just a little boy playing around, creating copies of himself for fun and pleasure, raising them to carry on the family profession, teaching them so they will be around to care for him in his old age, fathering is now a labor of love.

A selfless investment of time and patience, caring and striving to provide whatever it takes to create little people who will grow up happy and healthy, filled with a zest for life and a love of living.

Watching my sons with their children,  I see fathers at their best.

A Ghost Story

I moved into the old house in February.  Snow spotted the ground.  Cornfields were bare black squares covering up the earth in a patchwork quilt older than time and I was transported back to days when life began at sunrise and ended in small puddles of light shortly before bed.

Downstairs there was a kitchen, living room and long narrow bedroom with five hooks on the wall for clothes. Up a solid oak staircase, enclosed between thick walls and separated from the downstairs by a heavy oak door, were two other rooms.  Rooms that had been a boys' bedroom and girls' bedroom.  Rooms with two big windows each and three hooks each.

I rose every day to drink my coffee and write until mid morning.  Then I mowed the huge grassy yard, populated by blue birds and finches and cardinals...and the inevitable snake in the garden. I planted a labyrinth of sunflowers circling into the center of my thoughts and life was almost idyllic.

One day I heard a crowd.  It sounded like people at a football game and I went outside to see where this miracle came from in the isolation of my world.  Snow geese and Canadian geese filled the sky!  Thousands of them, some flying so low I felt the wind beneath their wings move my hair.  They passed over me for nearly twenty minutes and I remained there in awe.  I have never seen so many of one kind of animal at one time.  Ever!

Then in July I decided to wash the windows.  Inside and out, there was a need to remove fifty years of accumulated grime, to brighten my world, to start nesting.

I began downstairs using a step stool and finally moved to the upstairs with my old extension ladder.  I washed the inside and then climbed up to wash the outside.  Looking in at my things arranged around the old room in a sort of chic antique way I marveled at the homeliness of it all.

Reaching down I picked up the bottle to spray the window and when I glanced back up she was staring out at me!  Her eyes were dark, her hair pulled up.  She seemed to be wearing a high necked white blouse and I might be able to tell you more but the shock caused me to fall backwards off the ladder!.

I wasn't hurt by my tumble to the ground, but I was terrified.

I could not go back in the house.  I could not climb back up the ladder.  I moved away shortly after that.

It may have been my reflection.  It probably was.  I hope it was.

In the good old summer time

Yesterday I walked 5K, worked on a birthday present I am making and then walked another half mile (round trip) to listen to the band concert at a nearby park! 

It's the first concert of the summer and I hope I don't miss many of them.

I carried my old folding chair, but I think it is shot.  The bag ripped when I tried to repack it and I felt like I was sitting downhill all evening.

Still the music was fun.  Sousa marches, Spanish marches, a stirring John Williams piece that took me through Jaws, ET, Star Wars and more!  The park was full of people, probably close to two hundred if you count the children swinging, the people at the ice cream social, those who came on bicycles and a bus load from Luther Oaks Retirement Community.

This is summer at its finest.

The seven fold way

I am always hearing people ask what are your goals?  Where do you want to be five years from now?  I know that sounds wise.  Goals lead people in the right directions.

Or do they?

Five years ago I could never have dreamed I would be where I am, doing what I do.  Five years ago, having given up on my most cherished dreams, I thought I was doing what was expected of a woman my age and in my situation.  Nothing could have been further from the truth. 

I saw myself as the people around me saw me, an unattractive woman in her late fifties who was just killing time until it killed her.

Thank goodness I failed at that, or rather the situation failed me and what seemed tragic was, in fact, a great boost in the right direction.  Not right away mind you.  I had to make one more logistical error before I started on a journey of mythical proportions.

Indulging myself by doing something I love I discovered that it is truly the road to contentment, even happiness, which is worth more than money in my book. 

Now, if you asked me how my life is I could tell you with absolute honesty that it is nearly perfect!

And the words absolute honesty are key here!  I am finally doing the very things I have loved since I was old enough to read and write and I am doing them both without any baggage and with great joy!

Learning to be myself and love me for who that is has increased the quality of my life seven fold.  Everything else just seems to fall in place when I do that.

I just had a conversation that spanned Sesame Street, Gothic horror and editing a book!  That is me in a nutshell.

A walk in the park

I take a deep breath and I am filled with the heady smell of roses and lilacs and all the other spring flowers that surround the park.  If it is this heavy now imagine what it will be like in August when everything starts to pile up and ferment.

By August I am beginning to weary of the smell and the heat, but right now it reminds me of what I believe the hanging gardens of Babylon must have been like.

Looking up through the treetops, through the sweet smelling pine needles and the ancient sycamores, I see the world the way it has always been.  Before men began building their little human hills everywhere and chewing away at the land.

I feel very connected to the earth today, but I also realize I have begun to establish walking acquaintances.  People who appear in spite of the rotating semesters with students coming and going.  The squat little man with his squat little dog.  The tall lanky Dutchman and his wooly red retriever.  The elderly lady with two hiking sticks and the dog who brings his people with him everyday so they can throw his Frisbee.  We all nod and smile as we pass each other in the park.

Today I treated myself to looking at my new car on the last two quarters of every round while listening to the crows on that side of the park.  They have a whole language, an incredibly diverse set of calls and caws and sometimes I wish I spoke crow.

The squirrels are like silent little mimes unless they are making more little squirrels.  Then they are very vocal too!  They are cute and cuddly looking, although I really wouldn't want to try cuddling them.

In my head, even without my earphones or phone, I hear the music that accompanies my life.  The sound track of me played and sung by my other self.

Life really can be a walk in the park!

The truth

Nothing is more frustrating than feeling that the person I am talking to is lying to me.

I have a sixth sense about things like this.  It's really hard to fool me.  Even when I want to be fooled.

What you are doing may seem wrong to me, but that is a matter of opinion.  Either one of us might be right, but evading me, or making up stories to avoid the truth is mealy mouthed.

It makes me angry.

Reality

Our culture is not as advanced and reasonable as we might like to think.

Trees drop their seeds into the wind.  Animals breed in the spring.  Rocks split into a million pieces of gravel if they fall far enough or hard enough.  Everything in the world seems set up to recreate itself in some way.

It seems natural enough -- until it comes to people.  We are so conflicted it is astounding, or perhaps we are just so greedy for power and control that it all gets lost in an intricate charade that is acceptable because that is the way we think it always has been.

Love is reduced from the reflection of all that is good and powerful to something that is for producing children and children are good only if they come from the union of a man and woman who have signed the proper papers and gone through the standard rituals.

Gender roles are designed to promote this if they are going to be universally acceptable in our culture.  We have definite requirements for the length of hair, the sort of clothing worn, the amount of submissiveness, who should or should not be working outside the home.

We pretend that sex is a dirty word and then use it to sell everything from frozen food to houses.  Even god gets used because there is nothing more powerful than saying, "God says."

Instead of basing our actual way of living on a quality existence, enough food, health care, and comfort, for everyone and everything we make up one rule after another until our credibility is truly lost.

Rules will never replace reality.

Evasion

I am tired of being responsible.

The not so fun part of being an adult is making good decisions.  Both for myself and those around me.

The tendency to take the easy road and just do things that make everyone feel good really isn't always the best decision.

Yet, feeling bad isn't a sure fire indicator that a decision is good or bad either.

I am faced with a million decisions every single day from the time I become aware of myself in the morning till the time I lose that awareness at night.  The nagging feeling that my well being and that of others hinge on what those decisions are sometimes keep me up and wear me out.

Some decisions are huge though.  They could make my life a financial nightmare. And some are small, but collectively they could do the same.

So today I chose to take a nice long nap.

Customer service

If something seems too complicated I find my interest drops off quickly.

Instead of just scanning my purchase with the cash register, a clerk at Penney's laboriously typed it into her little handheld machine.  It didn't come up at the price I remembered seeing on the shelf so she walked over there with me and I showed her.  Then she took both items back and began typing them into her machine and had trouble because it kept coming up at the incorrect higher price.  All of this was after I waited nearly five minutes for her to take care of the customer before me.

I finally realized I didn't want to wait any more.  I had someplace else to be.  I thanked her kindly and told her I had just changed my mind.  Suddenly she sped up and said, "I can just scan it on this machine."  She was pointing to the cash register!  If she could do that I wondered why she hadn't done it in the first place, but I didn't ask.  I realized that I really didn't want that item anymore, not even if she gave it to me.  It was just too complicated.  I've dealt with her before and I don't know why she does things the way she does.  She is plenty old enough to have done it a million times.

The same thing happened at Target.  All I wanted to buy was a bottle of soda, but they had associates lined up at the machines and the crowd was so big I decided not to buy anything.

At Sears I found something I had spent all day looking for yesterday.  The price was great.  Everything was perfect except that I couldn't find anyone who worked in the store to buy it from.  I finally found one cash register on the other side of the store with two people.  Both were dealing with one woman in line in front of me, but one finally came and sold me what I wanted.  I wanted it very badly, so I waited.

Perhaps retail stores would not be in such dire straits if customer service became a real priority.

Choices

My son sequesters himself for a few days of creativity.  I understand that need for solitude, it doesn't surprise me at all.  What does surprise me is that he took one of my poems off the Internet and made a song out of it!

My niece asks me to drive her to Louisiana and what she sees as a favor becomes an opportunity for me too.

My grandchildren are busy people, working, playing, living their own lives and whenever those lives touch mine in any way I find myself immeasurably enriched.  Their smiles, their artwork, their choices contantly amaze me.

I turn on the television and am instantly assaulted by a draining drama backed up by music chosen for its emotional impact depicting animals whose lives are filled with suffering because of us, people.  Another show is about screaming burn patients whose skin is being peeled away as a nurse dabs something under her nose to dull the smell.  That was yesterday and I am still reeling from the five minutes the tube was on.

There is a time to do good work and a time to enjoy life, but when the enjoyment becomes real horror I have a choice and I choose not to dwell on the horror, especially for recreation.

The shorter set

Imagine being less than thirty inches tall and so chocked full of energy and love and happiness that you are literally bouncing with joy!

The world becomes a dangerous place.  A place where tables leap up to smack you in the chin just when you least expect it and anything with a straw is so tall you have to sit it on your lap if you even hope to reach it with your mouth!

You can never let your guard down because those straws snuffle up ice cold smoothies faster than you can blink an eye and surprise you in a million different ways.

Cups and glasses weigh a ton when filled up and sneaky little drops of condensation make them as slippery as eels.

If you cry people want to pick you up and snuggle you even if what you need is for someone to smack that table back!

If you sing people smile and nod -- for a while.  Then you get the feeling they are really trying to shush you up!

Life is complicated for the shorter set.

Good people in impossible situations.

Intelligence is a anomaly. One might think it would simplify life, but it seldom does.

We are not only intelligent creatures we are also emotional ones and we feed both sides of our beliefs.

In fact, the more intelligent we are the easier it becomes to find reason in unreasonable things.

Whole cultures, whole lifestyles, whole lives can be built around something that appears to be total nonsense to others.

Who is right and who is wrong becomes a moot point because if the belief is big enough change is impossible.  Then the choices become heart rendingly difficult.

Perhaps even impossible.

Is it possible to overlook things when they appear to threaten the very being of those you love?

From both sides?

Is there a difference between the down side of up and the upside of down?

I've been thinking about that.

One seems a little more positive than the other, but neither one is particularly great.

So many choices end up changing at the last minute.

Wilbur Wright won the right to be the first man to fly their airplane in a coin toss, but he only flew three seconds before the plane was damaged, so Orville, who lost the toss, was the first man to really fly and even he only made it 120 feet.

There are very few dead ends in life, just a lot of little winding detours.  

Company Gee

Joe Shmoe got a six million dollar increase cause he's the head of Company Gee. 

Of course all the people who work for his company, the ones who actually sew the shoes and pound the pavement, lost their bonuses for the year.  They also received a cut in hours and the money those hours generate.

That money was parceled out to those other people at the top, the ones who send their children to private schools and vacation in the Bahamas with twenty of their best friends.

I suppose it is hard to see the little people from the heights of our American aristocracy, but one of them put it nicely when he said, "When you cut my hours you cut my pay twenty percent.  I suppose that means I will be able to buy less food for my family but maybe that is a good thing because my son will not grow fast enough to out grow the shoes I can no longer afford."

Perspective is important people!