Prince Charming

My thots tonight go back fifty two years to my first date.

It all began when I was eight years old.

I went next door to the people I called Aunt Jo and Uncle Ralph.  They had company.  I walked into the living room and there was a man with the whitest hair, the brightest eyes and pinkest skin I had ever seen.  He was gorgeous by my childish standards and his smile lit up my whole world.

I was in love!  I called him Uncle Mack and we had a pact.  When I turned twelve he promised to take me to dinner and dancing.  In the meantime, although his visits were few and far between he always brought me some little trinket like a dollar bill folded into a ring. Those were the treasures of my childhood.

Finally the day came when I was twelve.  By then I was self conscious and aware that he was a very handsome grown up and I was an awkward little girl.  He wasn't there long, but he did take me to dinner and it was magical.  I don't even remember what I wore, except for my first heels.  They were tiny inch and a half spikes.  But I do remember his eyes sparkling in the candlelight, the beautiful way he made me feel.

I didn't see him again until my wedding day eight years later when he gave me his mother's silverware and disappeared forever more.  The only picture I have ever had of him was taken that day.  He is the man sitting in the back of the room with his head turned away from the camera.

Years later I learned he worked for the CIA.  He was supposedly retired when his daughter disappeared and he went undercover to find her.  He never reappeared.  His visits were always so far apart that I didn't notice until it was way too late to even think about finding him, but I suppose that might have been impossible anyway.

He was the real Prince Charming of my childhood.

I'd like to teach the world to sing . . .

A man gets up and speaks to a huge room full of people.  He speaks carefully in heavily accented English, but I can understand him perfectly.  He tells how he brought his family here from the Congo.  He tells everyone that they were educated there -- in French.  Here, in the United States, it was difficult for his children. 

His words are simple, but the message is clear.  Unity does amazing work helping children assimilate into their community.  It doesn't matter whether the hurdles are language, school work, or finding useful interests, Unity helps children become the leaders of tomorrow instead of latch key kids lost in a confusing world.

Unity is what happens when a community is willing to work together.  A few qualified paid employees work with a whole town full of volunteers and everyone begins to sing  --  in tune.

If you'd like to read more about it, here is a link:
http://web.extension.illinois.edu/lmw/unity/991.html

Hibernation

I like my life simple and linear.

That is not possible right now.  I find myself dealing with many over lapping obligations and some very poor planning on the part of others.

The pen pal program that I am part of pairs retired volunteers with school children.  The deadline for my return letter was yesterday.  The first problem?  I have not received my pen pal's letter yet.  The second problem?  I will be leaving town and unable to receive it as of Thanksgiving.  They are having a Thanksgiving dinner for all of us tonight so they must have been aware that a holiday was coming up.

Packing for two different week long trips, back to back, is awkward.

I need to make sure I have enough of my prescriptions to get me through a very long time period. 

I will have a short time period to do laundry between these trips, Christmas cards need to go out in the not too distant future, and garbage goes out for the last time tonight.  Whatever I neglect to put out will be here a long time.

There are other little details to coordinate too.

My response?

Hibernation comes to mind.

♫ Now I'm 64 ♫♪

1967.  The Beatles release a song that will haunt me for the next 46 years!

It was written by Paul when he was sixteen, recorded in 1966 when I was sixteen and released in 1967, the year I graduated from high school.

Every time I heard it, and it came up more often than you might think, I wondered if the love of my life would still find me lovable when I was 64.

What I didn't understand during most of those years is that growing older leaves room for love to expand.  

What seemed like an exclusive little pond in the beginning becomes an ocean over time.

I guess that's the difference between 16 and 64.

Lifestyles

No one wants to be unhappy.  Right?  I used to believe that, but I am not so sure anymore.

Every so often I find myself feeling very frustrated and even angry when confronted by the lifestyle choices of others, going out of their way to create the very situations they moan about.

Every conversation goes back to the injustice, the terrible situations, the absolutely unbearable conditions they live under.  It is as if their identity relies on being used and put upon in order to impress upon the world that they can survive, even thrive, when life is so hard others might cave in.

If life improves, they sabotage themselves by going out of their way to recreate the old situations.  Then resume their old position of "poor me."

I want to help them, to show them that the energy it takes to retain the old ways could be turned around and used to make life better--even good!  They appear to understand, but soon they are fully immersed in the way it was.

Maybe I am the one with the problem.  Perhaps there is something full bodied and satisfying about savoring the dark side.

I prefer something different.

Life of me

This morning I woke up and there was no sinus dripping down my throat, no pounding headache hovering behind my eyes, no wheezing pumping out of my lungs! The allergic rashes are gone!  The diarrhea has disappeared!  My blood pressure is within human range!

It looks like I will survive.  The life of me will continue on.

One of the hardest parts of getting sick is the treacherous route through the doctor's office where, in the name of doing no harm, they force me down paths seldom traveled by a simple bacterial infection.

A bad reaction to the antibiotic was bad enough.  My Achilles tendons are still recovering, but the nuclear stress test was unbelievable.  Thanks to three weeks of unremitting coughing my muscles were aching, so over zealous nurse practitioners hustled me off to the emergency room where they kept me prisoner for six hours of ekgs, cat-scans of my head, x-rays, and ivs while the doctor ambled in and out looking at my blood pressure stats.  She shook her head and asked, "Are you feeling tense?"

This Thanksgiving I am grateful my doctor finally put me back on the medicine that works and quit trying to find something better. 

Six weeks of misery almost obliterated the light at the end of the tunnel.  There were times when I forgot how it all even started.  I began to think of myself as a heart patient, as an invalid, as someone who would go in for blood tests every ten days for the rest of my short and unhappy life.

But today I emerged from the valley of the shadow of modern medicine.  The life of me will go on.

Close your eyes: : http://locustsofegypt.bandcamp.com/track/close-your-eyes

I grew up thinking old age was people slowly fading away as their life became quieter and quieter.  My grandmother might have been the exception.  She started a new business very late in her life and perhaps I just don't know what was really going on in other people's lives.

My life seems to be growing more intense as I grow older.

It is not just that I am trying to cram as much as possible into what is left as much as the feelings that overwhelm me as I move through it all.  I wanted drama and emotion when I was eighteen.  Now I have it.

I met my best friend and soul mate in a winter spring relationship that has been one of the richest experiences anyone could ever imagine.  He brings out the best in me and offers me opportunities to do those things I always dreamed of but thought were lost.

Music floods my life as those I love write and sing the songs that melt my heart and bring tears to my eyes.

My love of reading and writing become dreams come true when I am able to assist someone whose writing turns into books read and valued by academia.

And I am able to give back in ways that are soul satisfyingly wonderful by working with young children in literacy programs nearby.

Each time I have had to give up something I thought I could not live without, another "something" has come along to carry me away on a wave of living that might appear to be contrived if it were a play -- except it isn't.  It is real.

Long apron strings

I am not perfect.  I have made so many mistakes in my life that counting them would be impossible, but my children are not one of them.

I like who they are, the adults they have grown into, and when they do something especially good I like to think I planted the seeds for it when they were still small.

Then there are the other things, the things I cannot believe they chose, or  do differently.  When this happens I search for the reasons.  What did I do, or not do that might have led to this?

I realize that their whole world does not revolve around me and my thoughts. I made choices both because and in spite of my mother.

Still, there is a tendency on my part to believe that a lot of who they are comes from what I taught them, so I cannot seek absolution just because they choose to do something I would prefer they not do now.

The hardest part of being a mother is letting go of those adorable babies who once sat on my lap and depended on me for everything, but their autonomy makes me proud.

I don't really want them tied to my apron strings forever, but I do wish I could reel them in for a hug a little more often.

Somebody's child

I have always believed that if the world were run by women it would be a more peaceful place.  Then I realized that women, like men, can do what I consider unbelievable things, irrational things, unkind, mean things.

In today's world where fathers change diapers, prepare meals, bathe their babies I have had some new thoughts.

The hands on experience creates a bond stronger than anyone who has never experienced it could ever understand.  Once you have held a life in your arms, soothed it, dealt with its fits and tears, taught it what you believe, you have had a taste of being a god.  It alters you.

I think the world needs to remember that feeling.  Elected officials who don't have that kind of background might be missing the most important truth of all.

Everyone is somebody's child.

Alphabet soup

 A set of symptoms defines an illness. 

If I have a, b, and c, then it must be this.  If I had d, e, f, it would be something else.

I have alphabet soup so they don't know where to start anymore.

The problem with this is that the medicine they give me to combat the guess of the moment often causes more problems.

Today I don't know if I am sick or just not dealing well with the medicine I took all last week.  It sure feels like sick either way, so this afternoon I go for more tests.

It seems to fill up all my creative space and leave me nothing to really write about.

Angels among us

There is nothing worse than living with someone who hates you.

There is nothing better than being truly loved.

Both redefine life in ways you cannot imagine unless you have experienced them first hand.

The worst relationships can drag on for years in spite of envy, jealousy, greed and just pure meanness.

The best relationships can feel surreal in a world where rational thinking, stability, and acceptance are relatively rare. 

Coming out of the dark ages into the light of someone who always goes the extra mile in both life and love takes some getting used to.  At first there is an incredulous doubt about their authenticity.  Later there is a great deal of doubt about having earned the right to be in their world.

But the truth seems to be that once you have found them they are as constant as the sun and the moon, always rising to the occasion, rewriting the old stories with bright new endings, creating new ones that are the stuff of dreams.

Perhaps these are the type of people who brought about the stories of angels among us.

Desperate times

Everything is an issue right now.

I remember when my children were small.  There were times when it seemed everything was an issue then.  I had to choose my battles.  Sometimes you just can't sweat the small stuff because if you do the big things get lost in the jumble.

Right now our country is a mess.  People can't find jobs.  Businesses who hire people have found ways to coerce them into working in unsafe ways.  Some of our elected officials are down right lunatics (and yet they were elected!) Our country ranks right up there at the top for health care costs and way down at the bottom for health care efficiency.  (That means we pay more for much much less and have for a very long time.)

People are frustrated.

Worse, people are acting out like angry ten year olds, shooting each other, hoarding guns, killing themselves, pointing fingers at everything and anything they can to ease their feelings of powerlessness.  {I heard an interview with a father in a nearby small town right here in the heartland  He boasted that he had over 35 guns in the house and all his daughters knew how to shoot them.  He kept the assault rifles locked up (except when he was teaching his children how to use them) and a hand gun on his bedside table.}  I would be terrified if he were my neighbor.

Desperate times require desperate measures, but consequences can be irreversible.   Those glorified old westerns from the fifties didn't begin to tell it like it really was when vigilantes and cattle barons ran their part of the world.  Most of us really don't want to go there.

I believe that church and state should be two entirely separate things, but I also believe that simply treating other people the way we want them to treat us is a very good idea.

Maybe it is time for this constant barrage of niggling complaints to be replaced by a barrage of positive ideas for change.

The Dream World

I go into the bathroom and my two little brothers are playing in the bathtub with their flip flops on.  I yell, "Mo om, the boys are playing in the bathtub!"

Mom comes in and sees them holding our baby sister by the feet as she giggles and picks up a balloon then drops it.  They are using her like one of those reach and grab sticks advertised on tv and there is water everywhere.

Our dad comes to the door and in order to get to him we have to walk through another bathtub right across the door.  It is half full of water, but everyone just tramps through it and into the hallway.  The boys scamper out and I yell, "John William, you come back in here and get your shoes.  He tries but they are wedged underneath the bottom of a door and he can't get them out.

I go out into the rest of the house and now I am a guest.  It is a Honey Boo Boo type house where the baby throws herself around the floor landing on the balloon and laughing.  The boys are playing with a mongrel dog the size of a pony and dad is sitting on the "throne" in the living room.  I still need to use the bathroom, but the only toilet is the throne in the living room.  It is up on a dais right next to the front door.  There is a wading pool in the middle of the room where the boys frolic when someone knocks on the front door.

It is the neighbor and she has an even bigger dog with a wooden snout almost like an alligator.  I am afraid of it, but the mom tells me it won't hurt me.  I push aside the plastic sheeting that serves as walls between the living room and hallway and the dog growls menacingly. 

I am so terrified I sneak out the back door and look for my bike so I can go home only when I look around I don't know which way home is and there are loose dogs everywhere in a barren landscape of yellowed hills.

Sad but true

A woman's husband is suing the hospital she worked for.  He says they worked her to death with long shifts, no breaks, unreasonable demands.  This is not unbelievable.

It is sad that people who are intelligent and well educated use their gifts to manipulate people into working beyond their physical capabilities and others into accepting less than good care.

Hospitals are not safe places to work and certainly not to be a patient.  Many of them are not much more than a facade for a sweatshop whose main purpose is to squeeze every drop of money possible from the patients and personnel who work there.

What a horrifying and sad situation it is when unemployment is so high and so many qualified people are available, but the people working have to work back to back shifts, or long hours, or miss their breaks in order to keep the place running.  On paper they don't have to do any of these things but in reality they do if they expect to keep their jobs.  Everyone loses -- except the upper echelon whose salaries go up and up.

Our society has made sacred cows out of places that no longer really serve us in the way we want to believe.

A Virtual Life

I woke up this morning after having slept for nine hours for the first time in weeks.  Getting out of bed I was astounded at how much my body hurt.  My ribs, my Achilles tendons, my back, I felt like I had been on the rack!

Still, I was breathing easy and I knew that my heart had passed all the tests.  I am going to live, which sounds like a silly comment, but is good to know.  I took my new blood pressure medicine, which I took an hour before I fell into bed last night and an hour later I was ready for bed again!

Not just ready for bed, I was fit for nothing else.  I cancelled my appointments for the day and sat back.

On the good side I dreamed a whole day in a place that was interesting and with a person I found fascinating, but even in the dream I was sleepy and trying to sleep! 

Sure hope I adjust to this medicine quickly.

Ya gotta have heart

Nothing weighs more than worry. 

Carry it around for a while and it wears me out, raises my blood pressure, blocks the light.

And then I learn there is nothing to worry about and my heart soars.

Suddenly everything feels doable.  I can deal with the rest.

Life is good and I need to get back in shape so I can live!

Better than

I grew up knowing I came from good stock, the best of the best.  Anything one of my ancestors did was above and beyond what other folks did.  My great great great great grandma was not just a Native American.  She was an Indian Princess!

If we were part of it, involved in it, lived in it, thought it, it was exceptional! 

Of course the flip side of this was the scorn we felt when anyone did anything unusual (meaning something not always done for the last two hundred years.)  Violating the status quo brought out the killer instinct in many of the people around me.  Our unsung motto was, "As it was it forever shall be."

I was pretty much grown up before I discovered most people seemed to feel this.  Obviously everyone cannot be this way, so I slid them into the scorn column for a while.

Then I moved away, left the absolutes of small town America and found myself floundering in a world of diversity.

I tried to maintain the comfortable patterns, but the tantalizing alternatives before me slowly pulled me in.  Unlike the hedonistic bedlam I had been led to expect I discovered a world of open minded intelligent people who were much more inclined to accept me for who I was than anything else.  I no longer had to fall within the narrow confines of inflated ancestry or conformance.

I didn't have to be better than.  I just had to be me.

A regular day

I feel so much better than I have in a long time.  My blood pressure is is much better, but I still woke up sneezing and coughing so I decided to super clean my room before shopping for my youngest grandson's birthday.

Nine trips up and down the steps to the basement, where the washer and dryer are, left me much tireder than I thought. I dusted all the furniture, cleaned the floor and went shopping.

I put the clean pillow shams, sheets and bedspread back on the bed, took a shower, washed my hair and ate dinner.

Now I am almost ready for bed. Just a regular day!

It's a beautiful world

I come from a father who loved the finer things in life and a mother who loved nature.  My youngest memories of a vacation were on a lake in Minnesota bailing out a large wooden rowboat stained in deep warm browns and forest green using an old rusty coffee can with my grandmother in the early morning.

Strangely enough I am more like my father.  I am not an outdoorsy person.  I am touched to core by the thunder of Beethoven, the haunting pertinence of Debussy, the sweet order of Mozart.  Yet I find myself enraptured by Johnny Cash and Roger Daltrey.  Pavarotti enthralled me, both the man and his voice.  Old country folk songs wring my heart and nothing touches me like live music, especially if it is played just for me.

The first time I saw an original van Gogh I burst into tears.  Monet's Giverney holds my attention for hours.  The pictures my granddaughter sends me fill me with joy.

Yet, when my children came along I wanted them to see the majesty of a world created by the greatest artist who ever existed.  I wanted to give them the umbilical to nature that has sustained me all my life. We took long, not always fun, vacations to National parks and out of the way places where it snowed in July, or the wind played beautiful music through ancient ruins, places where we experienced the terror of a fresh grizzly kill, or the beauty of sniffing trees that smelled like butterscotch.

When I stand next to a tree, I feel the relevance of my being in the grand scale of things.  Water amazes me.  I wonder if the raindrop touching my face has touched yours in the past, if it washed Monet's hands, or once lay in the river Jordan?  The miracle of the tides rising and falling intrigue me.  The warm brightness of the sun, the cool glow of the moon, the fact that a redwood grows from such a tiny seed -- these are the things that tune me, that bring me into a sustainable relationship with everyone and everything around me.

Stress

It always amazes me how much my emotions manifest as actual physical things.

After weeks of mismanagement and I can't remember how many different tests, everything culminated today in a bunch of big tests.  I have been injected with radioactive isotopes, had  sonograms of my heart and pictures of my arteries.  I met a doctor who looked like Spencer Tracy and lots of technicians who seemed very cheerful and caring and helpful.

My blood pressure plummeted fifty points simply from surviving the day and now I can take my medicine so it should go even lower. 

Things are looking up and I am totally worn out.

This has been the most stressful two weeks of my life.

Be prepared

There is nothing harder than trying to be positive when all the facts point to problems.  And there is nothing more difficult than dealing with arrogant people who think they know what I am thinking, feeling, and saying.  The chances for mistakes rise in ways I am sure I still haven't completely imagined.

For over a month I have been treated for heart problems when I have a respiratory and sinus problem.  I have had bad reactions to the drugs, been prescribed other drugs in error and suffered side effects that leave my Achilles tendons stiff and sore.  I may have heart problems on top of it all, but being sick so long can't be good for that either. Now that I am completely worn down they are going to do a stress test and even that was ordered incorrectly the first time.

If I had five weeks to prepare someone to fail I cannot imagine doing any better than this!

Raison d'etre

I love people who live passionately.  I know they may not be the healthiest, or the nicest, or the "est" of anything, but they are the most interesting.

It is not necessary to use drugs or alcohol, or any other sort of stimulants to get high on life.  It is only necessary to dive in and live!

Do I want to live a hundred years worrying about the bad things that "might" happen, or simply deal with them "if" they happen.

So many people are invested in keeping others alive and safe within the confines of mediocrity and if that is where they derive their joy, if that is their passion, then I wish them the best.

My passion, my joy, my raison d'etre, requires me to push the boundaries.  Without that I become depressed.

I had a depression in my yard in Taylorville.  It was full of slugs.  I really hate slugs.

One best friend is worth a bus load of medicine

A good best friend is worth a thousand times his weight in medicine.

My doctor treats my pneumonia and sinus infection like a heart attack, running tests, changing medicine, leaving me totally depressed and still sick after over a month.  The final straw?  Now they are going to do echo cardiograms and a stress test.  

At least I have finally been given the right medicine to treat my sinus infection, my ear ache, my sore throat -- after a month!  That alone makes me feel better, lowers my blood pressure immediately.

My friend catches all the flack of a super stressful month.

Some people would react with defensive tactics.  It is what I expect after being in a long and unhealthy marriage.  I guess that is how I know I have the best bestest in the world.  He understands immediately what is wrong.  He reaches out with compassion and understanding, offers me a loving ear.

I go from the depths of depression, the terror of the unknown, the self doubts and health doubts to a calm that is amazing.  My blood pressure drops into normal range like magic.  The future looks not only manageable, but even fun.

Modern medicine forgets everyone is different.  I am not a test tube, or middle of the road test case.  I am a complicated biological creature affected as much by my emotions and quality of life as I am by things they can measure on their instruments.

Jenga

Today I realized that I am more like a Jenga game than I ever wanted to believe.

I am that space inside defined by all the little pieces holding up the tower, the illusion of who I think I am.  A dark secret little space that no one thinks exists, fooled into thinking that the pieces surrounding me define me.

But when everyone starts pulling out the little sticks, one at a time, reality strikes.  Eventually the tower will collapse.  Then who will I be?

Hospitals

I wonder how many hospitals inadvertently harm, or even kill, their patients.

The ER cardiologist had my records in hand when she asked me about my blood pressure medicine.  I told her what she said was not what I was taking, but she assured me they were the same thing.  We went through this routine three times while I was there and when I went to the doctor today I found out she prescribed an increase in my dosage based on a drug I was not even taking.  She hadn't paid any attention to what I said at all.  Obviously she had also paid very little attention to my records.  My doctor wanted me off of the new dosage immediately.

When my son was very young he had an asthma attack that left him turning blue.  The ER gave him the epinephrine he needed and then prescribed another drug for me to give him at home.  I had enough experience to question that because it was a different form of a drug he was already taking.  I had been told by both our pediatrician and pharmacist that you never used two forms of this same medicine.  When I questioned the ER doctor he indignantly told me he knew best, but I persisted and he finally went to recheck it.  Had I given my son the dose he had prescribed, he would have died.

I was just scheduled for two heart tests and when I talked to the people at the hospital they brushed me off saying my doctor had requested the exact test I had asked them to avoid.  So, I called the doctor's office who said they only said that test was okay if the first was impossible.  I asked them to call the hospital and clarify that.

Hospitals are set up to make money.  They are not set up to take care of sick people.  Their routines have almost nothing to do with patient comfort or care and evidently good doctors are not the norm anymore.  I am very nervous about going back into that place and allowing them to play with my heart.

Carved in stone

Some things are carved in stone.

It really matters what they are.

Transformation

Nothing lasts forever.

All those happily ever after stories I heard, or read as a little girl, were probably the most misleading things in the world.  Right after that came television where everything was resolved in thirty to sixty minutes (Maybe two hours.) 

Everyone I knew was waiting for some kind of final scene.  Most of them were these euphoric places, but even my mother who lived in fear of Armageddon believed in some kind of end.  No one talked about the "journey" until I was middle aged.

Ultimately I believe the "journey" is the only sure thing, but there is a more beautiful, more calming, sweeter way than even that. 

Take a walk in the woods, go look at the ocean, take a hike in the mountains, work in a garden.  Change is constant and continual.  It is part of living, part of dying.  It is simple transformation.

Things only seem to disappear.  Birds eat seeds.  Trees shed leaves.  Animals eat each other.  But all of these things are recycled through their disappearance into different forms of life that build upon each other and become part of something different, something that is sometimes bigger, or more beautiful, or more peaceful.

Matter is neither created nor destroyed.  I find great comfort in that.  There may be more to it, but that part is measurable.  You will never leave me.  You only move around and change.

Tricks or treatment

Yesterday was Halloween.  I dressed up as a sick person and went to the clinic.

They couldn't decide if I was a heart attack victim or someone with a brain tumor, but I must have been convincing because they hustled me out the back door and into a large black truck!

The truck drove me over to the ER and dropped me off at the door with a handful of papers.

Eventually someone claimed me and took me to a little room where they asked me why I was there.  All day long people asked me my name, my birthday and why I was there.  I was really hoping this was policy and not legitimate questions on their part.

They attached wires to me, poked holes in me, put me in a machine I thought was gonna bite off my head and finally x-rayed me.

I had left my phone in the car and the only number I could remember was my friend who has had the same number for over 43 years!  Thank goodness she lives close because, many hours later, when I was ejected into the cold and rain far from my car, I didn't know what to do.

Her husband came and rescued me, took me back to the clinic, my car, my phone and I was able to come home.

It was the scariest Halloween I've ever had!